Terrorism, poverty on top of SAARC agenda

DHAKA—Senior officials from seven South Asian countries Tuesday deliberated here at the Programming Committee meeting to chalk out the agenda of the SAARC Summit, which will begin here Friday.
Official sources said all the seven-member states of the South Asian Association for Regional Cooperation (SAARC) were represented at the meeting. Besides Bangladesh, other members of the grouping are India, Pakistan, Sri Lanka, Maldives, Nepal and Bhutan.
A Foreign Ministry spokesman had said earlier the two-day meeting of the SAARC Programming Committee will review and consider reports of various committees, calendar of activities and budget of the SAARC secretariat for 2006 in preparing recommendations for the standing committee of SAARC Foreign Secretaries to take necessary action.
Tackling terrorism, economic fate of the region would figure in the final agenda for the SAARC summit, the sources said.
Foreign Minister Morshed Khan said coordinated efforts were needed to tackle the problem of terrorism. “We have no force like the UN, but we must coordinate with each other to combat the global problem”.
Meanwhile, the Bangladeshi capital Dhaka was under the tightest ever security in its 35 years history, officials with 30,000 forces deployed.—Agencies