Pakistan team leaves to attend Saarc moot

KARACHI - A fifty-member Pakistani delegation left on Wednesday to take part in three-day South Asian People’s Assembly for the year 2008 taking place in Colombo, Sri Lanka, from tomorrow (18th July), just a week ahead of the official SAARC Summit.
According to the representative of the PILER, Khadam Ali, the delegation comprises of activists from people’s movements, civil society organisations, intellectuals, cultural personalities, parliamentarians and concerned individuals as well as political activists.
They together represent agricultural workers, organised and unorganised workers, women, indigenous groups, ethnic religious and linguistic minorities, youth and numerous other oppressed castes.
Munir A. Malik, Ex-President of Supreme Court Bar Association; Syed Iqbal Haider, Co-Chairman Human Rights Commission of Pakistan; members of the Pakistan National Assembly including Nafisa Shah (PPP), Bushra Gohar (ANP), Sufian Younus (MQM); Ch Manzoor Ahmed (PPP), Senator Dr. Abdul Malik (National Party), Farooq Tariq, Spokesperson for Labour Party of Pakistan and member of the Regional Steering Committee; Karamat Ali, Executive Director of Pakistan Institute of Labour Education and Research (PILER) & member of the Regional Steering Committee; Anusha Alam, member of the Regional Steering Committee of Pakistan; Mohammed Tehseen, Executive Director of South Asian Partnership; Shamimur Rehman, Ex-President Karachi Union of Journalists, Zahida Hina, Younus Iqbal of Anjuman-e-Mazareen-e-Punjab, Ghulam Fareed Awan, General Secretary Pakistan Workers’ Confederation, Sindh; Mian Abdul Qayyum of Power-loom Workers’ Union Faisalabad; Ghulam Fatima of Bonded Labour Liberation Front are also part of the delegation.
Khadim further said that Peoples’ Assembly is a process parallel to the official South Asian Association of Regional Cooperation (SAARC) where the heads of states from South Asia meet annually in a South Asian country under SAARC’s umbrella.
However, SAARC failed to fulfil its aim of a better South Asia. The process of Peoples’ SAARC started in 1993 as a small parallel event which achieved a big success in 2007 when more than 20,000 people participated in Peoples SAARC held in March last year in Kathmandu. It concluded issuing a 31-point Kathmandu Declaration urging all the parties concerned to act together to fight against poverty, injustice, imperialism and discrimination of gender, caste, religion, language and ethnicity.