Author: Anshuman Rawat

During the 4th meeting of SAARC Home/Interior Ministers recently in Thimpu, Bhutan, India has proposed regular direct contact among police chiefs of SAARC nations to fight terrorism and other trans-national crime, and formation of a regional organisation on the lines of Interpol, called SAARCPOL.

Underlying that fighting terror and other trans-national crimes in a unified manner was one of the principal agendas of SAARC, India’s Home Secretary R K Singh said that India has proposed exchange of emails between all the police chiefs of the region, to forge a level of personal communication that would aid better coordination between police forces of individual nations.

“Let the chiefs of police forces start talking more often. We already have two desks one on terrorism and one on drug control. Let this desk work properly and then we can talk further”, he further said, before adding that while the proposal has been in circulation for some time, a moratorium on setting up any new organisation by SAARC. “We have a very good system in Interpol. We feel for the need of it. But, you know, sometime back, the SAARC had decided to put a moratorium on new organisation because we already have a lot of organisations and they want these organisations to settle down first before going to set up a new organisation. So that decision stands,” he further added, to complete the life cycle of the idea!

Interestingly (for non South Asians anyway), the issue was taken up in the last meeting in Islamabad as well, but it remained at the ‘conceptual’ stage (euphemism for gossip over a cup of tea and sandwiches, eh?), as most nations stressed on “resolving other issues through a proper mechanism before moving on to this area”.

Get the drift?

SAARC is mired in a history of proposing outlandish programs and organisations while giving precious little attention to the same issues on individual nation-state level. Very typical of South Asian societies, SAARC is big on the ‘Chaupaal’ (public square corner meetings) chatter tradition, but pretty low on action on ground.

It may be noted that it was way back in 1988 – August 22, 1988 to be precise – that SAARC Convention on Suppression of Terrorism had come into effect. Five years later, on November 05, 1993, SAARC Regional Convention on Narcotic Drugs and Psychotropic Substances had come into being. And on January 12 2006, the Additional Protocol to the SAARC Regional Convention on Suppression of Terrorism had come into existence.

That’s not all; Article VII of the SAARC Convention on Suppression of Terrorism deals with mutual assistance and exchange of information. Two desks, namely, the SDOMD and the STOMD, were created in the years 1992 and 1995 respectively to implement the provisions of the SAARC Conventions on Suppression of Terrorism and on Narcotic Drugs and Psychotropic Substances.

It would be interesting to know how many people apart from senior journalists covering the SAARC ‘beat’ and concerned academicians have even heard of those conventions. And yes, I am putting those questions even to senior police officers of the respective nations.

And that despite the fact that so far, nine editions (Colombo, 1996; Malé, 1997; Kathmandu, 2002; Islamabad, 2004; Dhaka, 2006; New Delhi, 2007; Islamabad, 2008; Islamabad, 2010 and Colombo, 2011) of Conference on Cooperation in Police Matters have already been held so far. As per SAARC officials, the Police Conferences have deliberated on a number of important matters relating to Networking arrangements among Police Authorities in the Member States, Concept Paper on the establishment of ‘SAARCPOL’, Prevention of organized crimes, combating corruption, drug abuse, drug trafficking and money laundering and training requirements of police officers and networking among Police authorities.

While all of that was going on, it would pertinent here to go back to the Thimpu meet of this week and note that it was at the 13th SAARC Summit held in Dhaka in November, 2005 that, while condemning terrorist violence in all its forms and manifestations, it was decided that the SAARC Interior/Home Ministers would meet annually, preceded by a meeting of the Interior/Home Secretaries, to strengthen cooperation in this area. The first Meeting of SAARC Interior Ministers was held in Dhaka on May 11, 2006.

Can anyone please present a white paper on the decisions and results of these meets in the last five years?
To get an idea of how the myriad organisations, agencies and platforms within SAARC function, read the following statement from Her Excellency Uz. Fathimath Dhiyana Saeed, Secretary General of SAARC at the Ninth SAARC Conference on Cooperation in Police Matters, Colombo, 5 April 2011:

“At successive Summits, the Leaders of SAARC have reiterated the need to give high priority to the enactment of enabling legislation at the national level to give effect to the two Conventions and the Additional Protocol. In order to meet that end, the Leaders have stressed the need for constant dialogue and interaction among the concerned agencies of SAARC Member States. With this directive in mind, the Meetings of Focal Points of STOMD and SDOMD, followed by the SAARC Conferences on Cooperation in Police Matters, are held on a regular basis.”

So then, how many people and agencies have been talking – ‘on a regular basis’ – for how many years now?

The moot point is, as mentioned in one of earlier columns, the instinctive action in South Asia towards fixing the issue of non-progress by any agency is formation of a couple of more agencies to look into it.

More crucially, why would anyone who is even remotely conversant with the South Asian region ever hope for any concrete results from these never-ending ‘talks on regular basis’, when history-fixated disputes between member nations, especially between India and Pakistan, show absolutely no sign of moving an inch forward, forget getting resolved? The whole circus of police cooperation seminars are exercises in futility, paid by the very hapless populace that longs for the region to move out of the vortex.

Ergo, it is difficult to tell at the moment if SAARCPOL (even with the revised concept paper that was discussed in Colombo in April) would eventually become INTERPOL of South Asia because it is difficult to tell at the moment if SAARCPOL would indeed eventually be.

More than 52.6 million* domestic workers across the world, including South Asians employed in the Gulf Cooperation Council (GCC) region, are set to get more protection through a landmark treaty.

Adopted on June 16, 2011 by the International Labour Organisation (ILO), the ILO Convention on Decent Work for Domestic Workers would ensure domestic workers enjoyed conditions that are no less favorable than other workers. Ensuring weekly days off, limits to hours of work, and a minimum wage for domestic workers, the new convention enlists detailed requirements for governments to regulate private employment agencies, investigate complaints, and prohibit the practice of deducting domestic workers’ salaries to pay recruitment fees. The new standards also oblige governments to protect domestic workers from violence and abuse, and to ensure effective monitoring and enforcement.

But what should be most handy for the expatriate domestic workers in situations of dispute is the convention stipulation that makes it right of the migrant domestic workers to receive a written contract that is enforceable in the country of employment.

Conference delegates adopted the Convention on Domestic Workers (2011) by a vote of 396 to 16, with 63 abstentions and the accompanying Recommendation by a vote of 434 to 8, with 42 abstentions.

The ILO is the only tripartite organization of the UN, and each of its 183 Member States is represented by two government delegates, and one employer and one worker delegate, with an independent vote.

As per an Associated Press (AP) report, the convention will come into effect upon the ratification of two countries. The Philippines and Uruguay have already said they would ratify the accord.

“We are moving the standards system of the ILO into the informal economy for the first time, and this is a breakthrough of great significance,” said Juan Somavia, ILO Director-General. “History is being made.”

“This is a truly major achievement,” said Manuela Tomei, Director of the ILO’s Conditions of Work and Employment Programme, calling the new standards “robust, yet flexible.” Ms. Tomei added that the new standards make clear that “domestic workers are neither servants nor ‘members of the family’, but workers. And after today they can no longer be considered second-class workers.”

Domestic workers in the GCC region have long been at the receiving end of grave abuses and labour exploitation, including excessive working hours without rest, non-payment of wages, forced confinement, physical and sexual abuse.

Welcoming the adoption of the convention, Nisha Varia, senior women’s rights researcher at US-based rights group Human Rights Watch (HRW) said, “Discrimination against women and poor legal protections have allowed abuses against domestic workers to flourish in every corner of the world. This new convention is a long overdue recognition of housekeepers, nannies, and caregivers as workers who deserve respect and equal treatment under the law.”

The ILO is the only tripartite organization of the UN, and each of its 183 Member States is represented by two government delegates, and one employer and one worker delegate, with an independent vote.

In a statement, HRW said members of the Gulf Cooperation Council (Bahrain, Kuwait, Oman, Qatar, Saudi Arabia, and the UAE) reversed early opposition to the convention and expressed support in the latest round of negotiations and final vote.

Swaziland was the only government that did not vote in favour of the convention while El Salvador, Malaysia, Panama, the United Kingdom, Singapore, Sudan, the Czech Republic, and Thailand abstained from the vote.

BACKGROUND:
Kafala, the Modern-Day Slavery System

“There are no suicide-bombers in the U.A.E.; only the weekly suicide of a worker in despair of his salary, his work conditions, his foul dormitory and his future.”

– Shaykh Dr. Abdal Qadir as-Sufi

That sums up the state and fate of most blue-collar migrant worker – domestic and otherwise – that goes for employment in the GCC region under the archaic ‘Kafala’ sponsorship system that the GCC nations have in place.

Kafala, which literally means sponsorship, comes from the root word meaning “to feed.” It is best translated as “foster parenting.” Algerian family law defines the concept thusly: “Kafala, or legal fostering, is the promise to undertake without payment the upkeep, education and protection of a minor, in the same way as a father would do for his son”.

That rather personal term from Islamic scriptures has, unfortunately, come to speak for the status of a migrant (domestic) worker in the GCC region. It not only explains the root of the problem, but also puts into perspective Manuela Tomei’s statement about domestic workers being neither servants, nor family members.

Unfortunately, as the story of Sri Lankan maid L G Ariyawathi proved last year, some employers indeed treat domestic workers as neither servants, nor family members – for, they treat them as flogging meat!

Last August, L.G. Ariyawathi, who was employed in Saudi Arabia, had to return to Colombo after a shocking case of 24 nails and needles being hammered into her body by the couple who had employed her. The nails ranged in length from one to two inches (2.5 to 5 centimeters) while the needles were about one inch (2.5 centimeters).

“They did not allow me even to rest. The woman at the house had heated the nails and then the man inserted them into my body,” Ariyawathi told a local Sri Lankan paper after her operation in Colombo.

Sri Lanka’s Foreign Employment Bureau said Ariyawathi had been too afraid to complain about the abuse to Saudi authorities, fearing that her employers might not let her return home.

And therein lies the foundation of all things wrong with Kafala system: Under the kafala system, changing jobs is exceedingly difficult; those who leave their place of employment, with some exceptions for professionals, must leave the country for a mandated period (in Dubai it is six months) before they can return to take on new employment. So, even in extreme circumstances, if live-in maids attempt to flee their employers, the action is more often than not legally deemed to constitute “absconding” and can amount to a criminal violation of the terms of their visas.

After many years of persistent pressure by groups like HRW, last year, the US State Department urged Gulf countries to scrap their sponsorship system for migrant workers. In a 373-page report, the department said that employers in the Gulf States exploit the widely used kafala system to abuse workers and named Saudi Arabia and Kuwait as the region’s worst offenders. Both the named countries were described by the department as a “destination country for men and women subjected to trafficking in persons, specifically forced labour.”

With South Asians making up the most of the domestic workers’ community in those countries, the ILO Convention acquires even greater significance for the SAARC region.

In its introductory text, the new Convention says that “domestic work continues to be undervalued and invisible and is mainly carried out by women and girls, many of whom are migrants or members of disadvantaged communities and who are particularly vulnerable to discrimination in respect of conditions of employment and work, and to other abuses of human rights.”

The ILO Convention defines domestic work as work performed in or for a household or households. While the new instruments cover all domestic workers, they provide for special measures to protect those workers who, because of their young age or nationality or live-in status, may be exposed to additional risks relative to their peers, among others.

With, for example, 400,000 of the total global Sri Lankan migrant worker strength of 1.5 million work in Saudi Arabia alone, mostly as domestic workers at that, it becomes clear how significant a quantum of South Asian community is set to be addressed by the ILO convention.

Here’s hoping that we never get to hear of another L.G. Ariyawathi.

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* As per recent ILO estimates.

From the days of the massacre of Israeli athletes at the 1972 Munich Olympics to the boycotts of 1980 Moscow and 1984 Los Angeles Olympics by the ‘NATO aligned’ and the ‘Warsaw Pact nations’ respectively, whenever sport has got affected, it has more or less indicated of a conflict larger than that confined to the playing field. For people living in South Asia, where Cricket rules all other sports by a few light years, the earlier boycott of South Africa, the recent shunning of Zimbabwe and the current overlooking of Pakistan by the Cricket world would drive home the point.

Now come the following words by Michael Atherton, former captain of the English cricket team:

“Increasingly, the United Nations’ inaction on the evidence of war crimes [at the end of Sri Lanka’s civil war] looks inexcusable, If that continues, it is likely that questions will be asked about the suitability of England’s tour to Sri Lanka, scheduled for this winter.”

The former England opener, who was a rather conservative batsman himself, further added:

“There seems little to differentiate President Rajapaska’s brutal regime from that of Robert Mugabe’s in Zimbabwe, about whom English consciences were severely pricked.”

He wrote that in his column for The Times, England’s oldest and slightly conservative national daily, subsequent to this week’s broadcast of the following, breathtakingly well-made Channel 4 documentary of mind-numbing import:

Sri Lanka’s Killing Fields

The documentary, presented by Jon Snow, was broadcast in a late evening slot due to the shocking nature of some of the footage. The documentary attracted 700,000 viewers and an 8.3% audience share in its slot, with about another 100,000 watching an hour later on Channel 4 +1.

Earlier, in the first week of June 2011, the Human Rights Council in Geneva had convened to view the special hour-long Channel 4 film featuring ‘video evidence’ of atrocities by both sides at the end of the Sri Lanka civil war.

The documentary report also raises fears about the consequences if the UN fails to act, not only with respect to Sri Lanka but also to future violations of international law.

Giving Atherton company in the British Parliament was the country’s Prime Minister David Cameron himself, who urged the government of Sri Lanka to investigate allegations of war crimes against ethnic Tamils highlighted in a TV documentary screened in Britain.

“The Sri Lankan government does need this to be investigated and the UN needs this to be investigated, and we need to make sure we get to the bottom of what happened and that lessons are learned,” Cameron told parliament in London.

At the same time, Britain’s Foreign Office minister Alistair Burt said he was ‘shocked by the horrific scenes’ which he said contained ‘convincing evidence of violations of international humanitarian and human rights law.’

‘The whole international community will expect the Sri Lankans to give a serious and full response to this evidence,’ said Burt.

The Sri Lankan government, expectedly, was quick to come out with its response through a statement released by the Ministry of External Affairs on June 15, 2011:

The Government of Sri Lanka has noted the statement by the British Foreign Office Minister for South Asia, Alistair Burt on the Channel 4 documentary telecast on 14th June 2011.

This documentary, like the Darusman Report, does no more than put together a sequence of events and images, to justify a conclusion arrived at in advance.  The origins of this footage are yet to be established, and no one has so far taken responsibility for its contents.  It is a mere collection of visuals previously aired through LTTE websites and a miniscule section of the international media, at the behest of parties with vested interests to undermine the present efforts at reconciliation and development taking place in Sri Lanka.  The views expressed in the film are without any guarantee of authenticity.

A U.N. investigator, who reviewed the video frame by frame, together with a team of technical and forensics experts, has said that the footage is genuine.

Christof Heyns, a South African law professor who is also the U.N.’s independent investigator on extrajudicial killings, says the new video shows ‘definitive war crimes’ being committed in the final days of Sri Lanka’s civil war two years ago. “There is a prima facie case and it should now go to the next level,” he told reporters in Geneva this week.

Similarly, Judge Richard Goldstone, the former chief prosecutor for the Yugoslavia and Rwanda tribunals, in a column hailing the arrest of Ratko Mladic, the Bosnian Serb military leader accused of genocide and crimes against humanity, said that it is his hope that the leaders of Sri Lanka and Syria will not be granted immunity for the crimes they are alleged to have committed against civilians.

The U.N.’s High Commissioner for Human Rights, Navi Pillay, told the council at the opening of its three-week meeting that it should “reflect on the new information” and reconsider the resolution. She was referring to the September 2009 resolution by UNHRC that had effectively endorsed the Sri Lankan military’s crushing of the Tamil Tiger rebels after decades of civil war, despite claims of war crimes by human rights groups.

Most of the western countries supported her call. In a statement released by her office, U.S. Ambassador Eileen Chamberlain Donahoe that the Council “must consider the serious abuses that have been documented and brought to our attention by the panel” and that “Sri Lanka must quickly and credibly address allegations of violations of international human rights and humanitarian law during the conflict, no matter which side committed them”.

But what could provide unending comfort to Sri Lanka – apart from the inexplicable and evasive silence of the UNSG – is that the African and Islamic members of the 47-nation Human Rights Council have moved to quash any attempt to reopen the debate on Sri Lanka’s conduct at the end of the war.

Pakistan’s ambassador, Zamir Akram, speaking on behalf of the Organization of the Islamic Conference, which has a powerful presence in the council said, “The international community must support national efforts to win the peace in Sri Lanka”. He further added that UN Report was “primarily based on second-hand information that was never verified.”

The clearest signal of the extent of brinkmanship played by the two sides came when Kshenuka Senewiratne, Sri Lanka’s ambassador to the UN in Geneva, warned council members against appointing any international probe of the alleged abuses, saying that the procedure used to do so could set a (dangerous) precedent.

“It may wrongly be us today and one of you tomorrow,” she warned.

With the U.S., UK, France and majority of western nations on one side and Russia, China and the African and Islamic nations on the other, the fight over the issue of alleged war crimes by Sri Lanka threatens to get fiercer in the coming months. Or, as they say in Cricket, the last ball is yet to be bowled.

One of the key resolutions of 16th SAARC Summit held in Thimpu, Bhutan, in April 2010 was about the establishment of a South Asia Forum (SAF) consisting of diverse stakeholders from all member-countries, to generate ideas to further links. Pioneered by India, which emphasized the need to develop a ‘Vision Statement’, the member states of SAARC had agreed to set up SAF to “serve as a platform for the generation of debate, discussions and exchange of ideas on South Asia and its future development and will bring together eminent personalities from diverse backgrounds from the SAARC region”.

Though giving an impression of being more of the same, SAF is a unique construct, because although Track-II meetings involving SAARC nations have been held in the past, there has been no precedent of a regional forum, which is endorsed by the Heads of State and Government of SAARC Member States with participation from outside the governments.

SAF would be designed to provide inputs, based on a comprehensive understanding, for charting out the future course of SAARC in the medium and long run (the next 25 years, no less!) and recommend necessary improvements required in the existing mechanisms – including that related to the gradual removal of non-tariff barriers (NTBs), expanding the reach of the South Asian Free Trade Agreement (SAFTA) and implementation of related trade policies.

The idea behind the pronouncement clearly seems to be the desire to shake out of limbo a fraternity, which seems to have fallen behind – much behind – its regional counterparts such as the Association of South East Asian Nations (ASEAN) and the Shanghai Cooperation Organisation (SCO). As the SAARC officials themselves said, SAF could eventually be modeled on existing successful initiatives of a similar nature such as the Boao Forum for Asia (BFA) based in China, the World Economic Forum (WEF) based in Davos, Switzerland and the Asia Pacific Roundtable (APR) based in Australia. Most of all, SAF will aim at hastening the fulfillment of SAARC’s cherished goal of a South Asian Economic Union.

Of all the various perspectives, sources say that the most interesting observation about the creation of SAF is that it is expected to put pressure on the inter-governmental process by drawing attention to the present SAARC shortcomings and urge governments to ensure the progression of several regional issues from the declaratory to implementation stage – thereby qualifying the widely accepted truth that SAARC hasn’t exactly been a spectacular success.

The concerned authorities, obviously, wouldn’t agree with that inference.

On 28^th and 29^th of April 2011, the Steering Committee for the establishment of SAF met in New Delhi and finalized the Objectives, Scope and Guidelines for the SAF. The Steering Committee comprises of one representative from government and one representative from outside of government from each Member State of SAARC and was constituted to facilitate and serve as the enabling body for establishing SAF, and to convene the First Meeting of SAF prior to the Seventeenth SAARC Summit scheduled to be held in the Maldives on 10-11 November 2011.

Opening the Steering Committee meeting, Mr. Pema L. Dorji, Director, SAARC Secretariat as Representative of the Secretary General of SAARC, in a statement delivered on behalf of the Secretary General of SAARC, underlined that:

“…unlike the perception in the wider public domain, the accomplishments of the Association are not insignificant when weighed against the limitations found in the SAARC Charter, the structure of the Secretariat, the available resources and the realities within which SAARC has functioned.”

He further stated:

“…the (South Asia) Forum must strive to overcome the limitations that has crippled SAARC and prevented it from achieving the successes that its peers in other regions of the world have achieved.”

And finally:

“… (there is a) need to instill a sense of ‘South Asianness’, understanding the importance of facilitating movement of and interaction among people from all sectors and to continue to pursue ‘open regionalism’ by widening the reach of the Association with external actors.”

South Asia is not an easy region to forge partnerships. It is a region of a million conflicts, many of which often blur the geographical barriers. So, it would have been naïve for anyone to have expected SAARC to do an European Union or ASEAN by now. And yet, for an organisation which was first mooted by Bangladesh in 1977 and was formally established in 1985, it has a pretty poor report card for itself. Economic reports suggest that the intra-regional trade in 2009 was $628.9 billion, which was just five per cent of global trade. In contrast, East Asia’s comparative contribution to global trade was 32 per cent in 2006.

In a bid to address that, perhaps, an official Press Release tells us that the first meeting of SAF will be held in New Delhi on 8-9 September 2011 on the theme “Integration in South Asia: Moving Towards a South Asian Economic Union”. Based on Public-Private Partnership, the cost of which will be borne through corporate sponsorship, the first meeting of SAF would consist of an inaugural session, a stocktaking session, a business and economy session, a session on people-centric issues and a concluding session.

The Federation of Indian Chambers of Commerce and Industry (FICCI) will provide organizational back-up and the outcome of SAF will be reported to the 17th SAARC Summit to be held in Maldives in November.

Each SAARC Member State will nominate 14 participants, comprising high-level dignitaries; eminent personalities of diverse backgrounds from Governments, think tanks and research organizations, Chambers of Commerce & Industry, scholars, academia, civil society, youth, and women. One representative from the media from each Member State will also be invited to participate in the SAF. The Secretary General of SAARC and Heads of Mission of Observers to SAARC based in New Delhi will also be invited to participate in the First SAF.

But, to observers of the SAARC movement, the moot point still remains as to why all of the objectives of SAF can’t be done through SAARC. More importantly, if it could not be done for the last 26 years by SAARC, can the SAF do it?