Foreign Minister Rohitha Bogollagama, during several visits to Southeast Asia to participate in the Shangri-La Dialogue and Asean security-related gatherings, stressed that global terrorism had to be fought globally and needed the support of all nations.
31 July 2008: New Straits Times
SRI Lanka is keeping its fingers crossed, hoping that recent Indo-Pakistan spats over bomb attacks on Indian targets in India and elsewhere will not spill over to the summit of South Asian leaders in Colombo this weekend.
The Colombo summit will be the first face-to-face meeting of leaders of India and Pakistan since the spate of July bombings that began with the attack on the Indian embassy in Kabul, Afghanistan.
India has charged Pakistan with having a role in the attacks, especially on its Kabul embassy, an allegation that Pakistan strongly denies. The strained relationship between India and Pakistan has been compounded by Afghanistan's accusation that Pakistan intelligence was complicit in the bombing of the Kabul embassy, in which an Indian diplomat and their military attaché were among those killed.
Afghanistan is the newest member in the block of eight nations in the South Asian Association for Regional Cooperation (SAARC). Kabul's views on how terrorism will affect the Indo-Pakistan relationship could determine what progress is made in finding common ground on terrorism in the region.
Terrorism was always on the agenda of the meeting, which began at the level of officials earlier this week to set the stage for the summit.
One of the pacts due to be signed by leaders is the SAARC Mutual Agreement on Criminal Matters, which will allow member countries to adopt a common approach against crime and criminals operating in each other's territory.
This is expected to be expanded to include terrorism and terrorist-related activities, as member states have found it necessary to work together to deal effectively with modern terrorism, with its transnational complexion.
The highest-ranking official in India's External Affairs Ministry, Shivshankar Menon, said over a week ago that Pakistan was culpable in the bomb attack on the Indian embassy in Kabul.
"All our information points to elements of Pakistan being behind the blasts," said Foreign Secretary Menon following talks in New Delhi with his Pakistani counterpart as part of Islamabad's peace process to mend fences with its big neighbour.
Menon was careful not to involve the Pakistan government. But to diplomatic observers the Indian smoke signals were clear enough to Islamabad. New Delhi's usual diplomatic language in such situations is to lay the blame on terrorists trained by "foreign powers". This time around, however, there was a clear reference to Pakistan, although accusations against the Pakistan government were at most tangential.
Menon did not elaborate on what information was available to India that indicated Pakistani involvement. But a week earlier, India's National Security Adviser M.K. Narayanan had been more blunt, eschewing the diplomacy of the foreign secretary: "We not only suspect but we have a fair amount of intelligence (on the involvement of Pakistan). In fact intelligence intercepts have been very specific on the ISI (Inter-Services Intelligence) involvement. Even now there is fresh evidence about threats to India's missions in Mazar-e-Sharif and Jalalabad.
"I think we need to pay back in the same coin," Narayanan was quoted as saying.
Earlier, Afghan President Hamid Karzai had hinted that Pakistani intelligence was responsible for the bombing.
With all three players involved in this blame game, Sri Lanka is hoping that efforts to make common cause on the terrorism issue will not be stymied by bad blood among some of its South Asian partners.
Sri Lanka itself faces a separatist conflict that is one of the oldest in Asia. It is well aware, and so is India, that the separatist Liberation Tigers of Tamil Eelam (LTTE) is getting support from some political groups in Tamil Nadu, the Indian southern state.
South Indian police have made several arrests in the last few months of people in Tamil Nadu, including some Sri Lankans, in connection with the stockpiling or ferrying of explosives-manufacturing material to the LTTE in northern Sri Lanka.
While diplomacy and greater surveillance of the waters around Sri Lanka have helped the government curb arms smuggling from Southeast Asia, the LTTE in desperation has turned once more to Tamil Nadu for weapons and war materials from Indian Tamils sympathetic to the Tamil Tigers.
This is one of the reasons that President Mahinda Rajapakse's government is keen to work out a common SAARC approach to terrorism through the Mutual Agreement on Criminal Matters, so as to combat terrorism more effectively.
Foreign Minister Rohitha Bogollagama, during several visits to Southeast Asia to participate in the Shangri-La Dialogue and Asean security-related gatherings, stressed that global terrorism had to be fought globally and needed the support of all nations.
The SAARC summit agenda features a number of critical issues that concern the region, ranging from food security to water resources and alternative energy.
There has been considerable criticism from academics, the media and the people of South Asia - who constitute about 40 per cent of the world's poor - that this regional organisation lags far behind other such groupings such as Asean and the European Union.
Even conceding that SAARC is a late starter, there is some truth in the charge that SAARC has been more filled with rhetoric and good intentions than substance and achievement. A major cause for this niggardly progress is the mutual antagonism at the heart of Indo-Pakistan relations. Mutual suspicions reside at the core of the relationship between neighbours who have fought three wars in the 60 years since their independence.
If this acrimony once again gets in the way of tangible achievements at this 15th SAARC summit, the South Asian region might as well say goodbye to productive regionalism.
The writer is a veteran Sri Lanka journalist based in London
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