Addressing a two-day regional conference on “SAARC: Towards a meaningful cooperation”, organized by Center for South Asia Studies in cooperation with Konrad Adenauer Stiftung, the experts suggested that each member state appoint a full-time minister to look after the SAARC affairs. [break]
They also urged the members to reinforce the SAARC Secretariat as an action-oriented organization equipped with adequate professionals and backed by financial and technological resources as well as requisite operational tools.
"There is a need of restructuring the SAARC and increasing people to people level engagements, especially, of youths to make the regional body more effective," said Major General (retd.) Dipankar Banerjee.
"The vision statement of the SAARC should include practical measures for effective implementations of the agreements reached in SAARC."
In his keynote address to the function, Banerjee argued that there should be a proper assessment of whether the various 10 regional institutions working under the SAARC are performing well.
"Each member country should appoint a functionally orientated director to the secretariat with enlarged and clear functional responsibilities," he said.
Former Foreign Secretary of Pakistan Samshad Ahmad said a high level SAARC Troika, comprising of the outgoing, the current and the next chairmen of the SAARC as its members, should be institutionalized as political mechanisms to evaluate and facilitate the implementation of major regional projects and decisions.
"A new ministerial body, regional planning council, comprising finance or planning ministers from the member states should be constituted to prepare and coordinate regional plans, and to review the progress in their implementation," he said.
Ahmad suggested forming a Council of Permanent Representatives in Kathmandu with SAARC ambassadors accredited to Nepal to function as permanent coordinating body for overseeing implementation of the SAARC decisions and action plans. "The SAARC will be nothing but a deaf, dumb and blind association unless it deals with the bilateral issues," he added.
Nihal Rodrigo, former SAARC Secretary General and Foreign Secretary of Sri Lanka, argued that cooperation among SAARC member states continues to be affected due to complex bilateral issues. He suggested member states to work toward realizing the South Asian Economic Union by 2020 and ensure practical connectivity in the service sectors and resource management to make the SAARC effective.
While arguing that economic cooperation stands at the core of SAARC objectives, India´s former Ambassador to Germany and to the US, Meera Shankar, pointed out the need to increase regional connectivity. "There is an immediate need to identify strategic transport corridors and bring them into implementation to enhance trade and economic cooperation," she said.
On the occasion, EU Ambassador to Nepal Alexander Spachis said SAARC can learn a lot from the experience of EU. He said that EU operated successfully as it is based on the principle of law and application of law.
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