From the Editor's Desk
The 15th SAARC Summit cost at least three billion
to the country, but its benefit to this country is highly questionable. It is
true that by holding the conference here the Sri Lanka will hold the chair of
SAARC for the next year and there will be benefits to some who will be appointed
to posts with impressive sounding names. But the question is whether SAARC has
achieved anything for the region or its people. The experience of the past 23
years is that SAARC conferences have been mere talk-shops with nothing to offer
to the people. That is likely to be the case for the foreseeable future.
For an organisation like SAARC to be a success,
the partnership has to be equal, irrespective of the sizes of the countries
involved. With India seeking to play “big brother” and using the
various SAARC meetings to push its agenda of regional hegemony, cooperation
will be reduced to a series of one-sided bilateral relations.
Whatever the prospects are for SAARC, recent
records of the governments of member states show the priority that democracy
enjoys in the member states. The newest member, Afghanistan, is headed by a
US puppet regime at war with its own people. The premier of Nepal should not
have been here, and it was manipulation by a regional power that delayed the
formation of a government in Nepal based on the outcome of the election to its
Constitutional Assembly. The caretaker civilian government of Bangladesh is
controlled by the armed forces and has been actively persecuting the main political
parties and their leaders. The elected government Pakistan is unable to fulfil
the wishes of its people who rejected the dictator Musharraf at the polls and
is under pressure from the US to let him continue as President. The US also
bullies it into doing the dirty work of fighting the Taliban and its sympathisers.
Bhutan has a government elected through a stage-managed election manipulated
by its king who still wields considerable power. The Maldives is still far from
multi-party democracy, and charges of persecution of political opposition have
been there for long. The biggest bourgeois democracy of the planet disgraced
itself only days before the summit by the way its government survived a confidence
vote by reportedly buying MPs from opposing political parties, and its increasingly
unpopular government is keen to sell out the country to the US before its term
expires in a few months.
The host country has distinguished itself with
its record of breach of human rights and freedom of the media. And there is
rampant corruption, a field in which there will of course be powerful challengers
for the top spot from among fellow members. As for merchandising legislators,
Sri Lanka can give lessons for the rest of South Asia as well as a host of corrupt
‘democracies’.
What the rulers of the eight SAARC countries
have in common is willing submission to imperialist globalisation, the very
cause of growing economic backwardness and poverty in each of the countries.
As a recent statement of the Politburo of the New Democratic Party points out,
the SAARC leaders who have declared aloud their opposition to terrorism are
unwilling to examine the causes for what they call terrorism, but show an unprecedented
interest in criminalising mass resistance to corrupt dictatorial regimes by
calling it terrorism.
The summit conference has been conducted against
a background of a rise in the number of cruel mass murders with civilians as
target of attack, on the pretext of fighting terrorism as well as in the name
of retaliation. Attacks on the media are threatening democracy and public protests
are being dealt with in brutal fashion. Where strikes cannot be put down with
help of the law, threats have become the norm.
Demolition of squatters’ dwellings in the
heart of the city of Colombo with no regard for their right to proper shelter
and amenities is an illustration of the callous contempt in which people in
power behold the poor. It is significant that the demolition took place a barely
a fortnight before the Summit. The dwellings were described as a security threat
to the Summit by senior officials of the Urban Development Authority that undertook
the demolition.
These developments are ominous and mean that
not only any section of the population that threatens the existence in power
of the ruling elite, like critical media personnel, strikers and protesters,
but also passive sections of the population may be sacrificed to serve the interests
of a few. The days to come could be increasingly harsh, and the SAARC declaration
against terrorism is symbolic of it.
New Democracy 30
