Commentary

2nd August 1998

SAARC poverty stricken, ASEAN sexy?

By Mervyn de Silva

outh Asian Something No?" was an imagina tive The Sunday Times sub-editor's mischievous headline to a man-in-the-street opinion survey conducted by reporters Ayesha Rafiq and Wathsala Mendis a few days before the curtain on the SAARC Summit rose. Yes, SAARC, poverty-stricken, is hardly exciting like ASEAN, often described as 'sexy' by an impressionable media.

And yet, South Asia is home to a billion, and growing rapidly. If living standards improve, a vast market.... the name of the game as a competitive capitalism, market economics, is hailed as the new God.

And it was President Chandrika Bandaranike Kumaratunga's privilege to preside over the 10th Summit.

It was the media build-up after the recent Indian nuclear test and the Indo-Pakistani war of words that prepared the pre-summit stage, the scene-setting.

Indian President K.R.Narayan rejected the view that New Delhi had decided to "blast" its way into the nuclear club. On the contrary, Indian weapons capability would act as a catalytic agent in the international efforts to eliminate nuclear weapons from the face of the earth. As evidence, he reminded his South Asian audience and critics abroad that India had not conducted nuclear tests for 24 years.

And yet the Indian N-test was too close for comfort. It was certain to change the climate of opinion in the region, and perhaps beyond, in the weeks before the SAARC Summit. The minority Hindu-nationalist BJP administration of Prime Minister Atal Behari Vajpayee was sending a message to the region and the world, certainly to the exclusive club of the countries which belong to that sodality. Was it necessary to call it the "Hindu bomb"?

Ethnic identity, as we all know only too well, has shaped the politics of what was once called the "Indian sub-continent". Kashmir, Nehru's Kashmir, was the generic conflict.

"The nature of conflict in the region has shown stubborn continuity. The main conflict is between India and Pakistan. It has territorial, religious, ideological, ethnic, political and strategic dimensions, making it one of the most obstinate and subborn conflicts in the Third World. Minor territorial disputes do exist between India and Bangladesh, but the sources of conflict here are ethnicity as well as Bangladesh's tilt towards Pakistan since the assassination in August 1975 of Sheikh Mujibar Rahuman, founder of the country, and the installation of military rule. Ethnicity is almost the only cause of sharp differences between India and Sri Lanka which in 1987 came close to a military conflict. India sent a Peace-Keeping Force (IPKF) to Sri Lanka at the explicit request of its then President, Junius Jayewardene; in two years the IPKF grew to nearly 100,000 and got down in an expensive guerrilla war with the militant rebels of the northern province of Jaffna named "Tigers." After his election as President Mr. Ranasinghe Premadasa asked for the immediate withdrawal of the force which was seen by Sri Lankans as an "occupation army" writes Prof. Bhabani Sen Gupta in his contribution to Regional Approaches to Disarmament - security and stability edited by Jayantha Dhanapala who recently made news as a United Nations official assisting UN Secretary-General Kofi Annan in the Iraqi crisis. The book has been published by the UN Institute for Disarmament Research (UNIDIR).

What Prof. Sen Gupta forgot to mention is the vital, all important fact that the secessionist Tamil rebel groups were all trained in special camps in India, by Research and Analysis Wing( RAW), India's CIA. Of course the regional-global environment was radically different. It all happened at the height of the Cold War, and Mrs. Indira Gandhi, Nehru's daughter, had signed an Indo-Soviet treaty despite India's non-alignment. (Nehru, not Tito of Yugoslavia, was the authentic architect of NAM. In the early sixties, Yugoslavia was on the frontline).

But it was not in the defence of non-alignment that Mrs. Gandhi decided to de-stablise Jayewardene's Sri Lanka. Abandoning Prime Minister Sirima Bandaranaike's non-alignment, President Jayewardene not only leaned westwards but made a special effort to cultivate Pakistan then governed by a notoriously pro-US army. Thus the crucial issue of Trincomalee.

British STAR policy

Indira Gandhi may have initiated the Indo-Soviet "special relationship" and yet the oxford-educated" "Empress of India" inherited a decidedly imperial British outlook. President Jayewardene had planned to establish" an oil tank farm" in Trinco, and was negotiating a deal with a US firm, the Singapore-based Coastal Corporation. When Britain took over the Dutch possessions in Ceylon, in 1802, Prime Minister William Pitt infomed Parliament that "the most valuable colonial possessions on the globe," would give our Indian Empire a security it had never enjoyed from its first establishment."

Indira Gandhi's answer was the LTTE et al.

The end of the Cold War has created a new security environment for SAARC. But the unity of SARRC and its capacity for mutual co-operation will be the exclusive enterprise of the South Asian leaders, almost all popularly elected., and their official advisers and supportive elite. Will private enterprise ( market economics) meet the crucial challenge - poverty alleviation? President Kumaratunga has not only emphasised "our common identity" but recognised " the extent of economic and commercial co-operation."

It is time that the region's media - private and state-run - recognises the important role it can assume. The mass media can open the door to people-to-people co-operation. More urgent however is the issue of disarmament , the issue which attracted the most attention and concern in the SAARC region. The Indo-Pak action-and-reaction remains the crucial issue and common challenge.

Other regions have produced institutions, programmes and treaties - the Treaty of Tlatelolco for example - which led to the first "Nuclear Weapon-Free- Zone. Latin American initiatives should be studied by experts, officials and NGOs in South Asia.

In Trincomalee we have the most striking recent example of both types of conflict - strategic and ethnic identity.

Hulftsdorp Hill

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