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| Sunday, 29 August 2004 |
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SAFMA sets 19-point guidelines The South Asian Free Media Association (SAFMA) submitted a comprehensive 19-point-guideline for better South Asian Co-operation to the SAARC secretariat last week. The guidelines focusing on trade and tariff, infrastructure development, investment opportunities, energy sharing, co-operative security and safeguarding human rights, envisages a union of South Asian nations without borders or barriers similar to the European Commission with a common currency and a South Asian Parliament in the future. The three-page guidelines call for greater cooperation among central banks for effective implementation of the SAFTA agreements, public private sector joint ventures for sustaining trading links and a common exchange rate policy that would eventually lead to a common currency, underwritten by a coordination of macro-economic management across the region. It also calls for energy cooperation that could evolve into a common energy grid across the nations with integrated electricity and gas systems; transport cooperation that would lead to an integrated transport infrastructure permitting uninterrupted travel across the region; and the establishment of a South Asia Development Bank that would underwrite investment in any part of the region facilitating investment flows. The guidelines, arrived at after two days of deliberation by senior journalist and experts from India, Pakistan, Bangladesh, Sri Lanka and Nepal at a workshop held in Dhaka on August 20 and 21, also highlights the need to address issues that hamper regional cooperation. Included are the concerns of the less developed and land locked countries, tariff barriers, political hostility and security threats and barriers to cross-border movements that make neither commercial nor logistical sense. On the security front, the guidelines call for cooperative security and urge all states to address longstanding political disputes and move towards human security by placing people and their well-being and rights to a peaceful life at the centre of security concerns. The guidelines also call for revisions to visa policy enabling greater interaction among policy makers, parliamentarians, businessmen, media practitioners, professionals and leaders of civil society, removal of restriction on access to free flow of information across frontiers and urges media to give special attention to coverage of events in SAARC countries. Supporting SAFMA initiatives to convene a Conference of South Asian Parliamentarians in March 2005, the guidelines suggests SAARC should consider the creation of a South Asian Parliament and create a commission to study the modalities for such an institution at the 13th SAARC Summit to be held in Dhaka. It also urges South Asian governments to implement the SAARC Social Charter, giving priority to poverty alleviation and underlines the importance of South Asian countries agreeing to a uniform human rights code under the Paris Principles. -HI |
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