Chandrika gets Saarc summit send off and dubious honour

President Chandrika Kumar-atunga, 60, will attend the 13th summit of the seven-member South Asian Association of Regional Cooperation (Saarc) in Dhaka as her final foreign outing before the November 17 election here.

Asian diplomats believe Kumaratunga will use the occasion to stage her swan song but for those who have worked closely with her, the scion of the Bandaranaike dynasty is not going to fade away that obediently.

"There is no such thing as a swan song for her," said Jayanath Rajepakse who accompanied Kumaratunga as her international relations advisor to her first Saarc summit in New Delhi in 1995.

"This summit will be an emotional one for her. She will no doubt project it as such."

Sources close to Kumaratunga had speculated that she may take up an international role in a UN agency or may return to parliamentary politics after her second and final term as president ends this month.

She has no Saarc laurels to rest on except the dubious title of having served the longest period as the regional grouping's head because India-Pakistan squabbling prevented the staging of a summit.

Rajepakse said he could not identify anything the regional body had achieved during her term as its chairwoman from 1998 to 2002, the longest time served by a Saarc chief, or since the regional grouping's inception in 1985.

The grouping of Bangladesh, Bhutan, India, Maldives, Nepal, Pakistan and Sri Lanka has had difficulty even in arranging summits and what should have been annual meetings never took place because of bilateral bickering.

Kumaratunga herself has been highly critical of the regional body and she wanted more dynamism injected into a body where the charter precludes discussions of contentious bilateral issues.

During the ninth summit in the Maldives in 1997, she suggested having "off the record" bilateral discussions but the initiative failed to attract widespread support.

Instead, India and Pakistan went on to stage tit-for-tat nuclear tests that cast the threat of weapons of mass destruction over the world's poorest region.