Bangladesh’s Golam Sarwar appointed next SAARC Secretary General

Dhaka, Jul 13 (PTI) Bangladesh on Thursday announced the appointment of career diplomat Mohammad Golam Sarwar as the Secretary General of the South Asian Association for Regional Cooperation (SAARC).

“He (Sarwar) will be the fifteenth in the list of succession and third Bangladeshi to assume this position of the regional organisation,” Bangladesh’s foreign ministry said in a statement.

A career diplomat, Sarwar is currently serving as Bangladesh’s ambassador to Malaysia. His appointment came in line with the SAARC charter’s rotating system for the position from among the eight member countries with India and Pakistan being the major ones.

He previously served as Bangladesh’s ambassador to Oman and Sweden.
SAARC was founded in 1985 largely under Bangladesh’s initiative for regional cooperation in the economic, technological, social, and cultural arena while heads of governments of the member states are scheduled to meet annually.

The SAARC has not been very effective since 2016 as its biennial summits have not taken place since the last one in Kathmandu in 2014.

The 2016 SAARC Summit was to be held in Islamabad. But after the terrorist attack on an Indian Army camp in Uri in Jammu and Kashmir on September 18 that year, India expressed its inability to participate in the summit due to “prevailing circumstances”.

The summit was called off after Bangladesh, Bhutan and Afghanistan also declined to participate in the Islamabad meet.

The SAARC comprises Afghanistan, Bangladesh, Bhutan, India, the Maldives, Nepal, Pakistan and Sri Lanka.

Several Bangladeshi experts suggested the grouping remained an indispensable and irreplaceable regional grouping while other such forums like BIMSTEC and South Asia Growth Quadrangle (SAGQ) may play a complementary role for SAARC, instead of replacing it.

Some of them said “state-centric” SAARC could be more fruitful if civil society were to take the lead in its revival.