Saarc slow in making progress

Speakers at a seminar yesterday said Saarc, the South Asian regional bloc, has been “very slow” in making progress in many areas and would have made faster developments if member states had more confidence in each other.
They also recommended revisiting the Saarc Charter as there is no direction in it for implementing decisions and for strengthening the capability of the Saarc Secretariat.
They made the remarks at the seminar styled “Saarc and its future”, organised by the Bangladesh Institute of International and Strategic Studies (BIISS).
The participants of the seminar said despite having so much potential, the regional body has “miserably failed” to move forward because of the mistrust between member states.
However, they pointed out that in the last 27 years, Saarc has made progress in areas like free trade, environment, fighting terrorism, and said the bloc should revisit its priorities given the unique development challenges the region faces at the moment.Three papers were presented at the seminar by Prof Ainun Nishat, vice-chancellor of Brac University, CM Shafi Sami, former foreign secretary, and Mahfuz Kabir, senior science fellow at BIISS.
Prof Ainun Nishat said Saarc meetings should not be fun but very serious to make the body more effective and dynamic.
CM Shafi Sami stressed the need for easing movement across borders and strengthening people to people connectivity to remove mistrust among the member states.
He said Saarc has high potential and called for exploring those for the benefits of the region's people.
However, Ambassador QAMA Rahim, former secretary general of Saarc, said in the last 27 years, the regional body has made “very substantial progress" in many areas like trade, disaster management, curbing terrorism and people to people contact, and carried out many studies.
"I think we have had considerable degree of success, so it is not true that Saarc has not done anything. But whatever we achieved, we achieved very slowly…miserably slowly because implementing decisions is a major problem in Saarc,” he said.
Stressing the need for revisiting Saarc Charter, he said there is no direction or mechanism of implementing decisions in the Charter.
The Charter also does not say anything about the concrete role of the Saarc secretariet, he added.
Director General of BIISS Major Gen Muhammad Imrul Quayes, among others, addressed the seminar.