Shawdesh Desk:

Sri Lankan diplomat Esala Weerakoon is set to become the next secretary general of the South Asian Association  for Regional Cooperation as all eight member countries have conveyed their concurrence for his appointment in a bureaucratic process.

He is likely to take over the new responsibility at the SAARC headquarters in Kathmandu in early March next year, diplomatic sources said.

Weerakoon, now a senior additional secretary at the President Secretariat, was foreign secretary of Sri Lanka. He was also Lankan high commissioner to India, Sri Lanka and ambassador to Norway.

He would replace incumbent secretary general Amjad Hussian Sial, who took over as SAARC SG on March 1, 2017. Sial was a Pakistani diplomat.

‘It would be a huge challenge for the new SG as the regional body has been suffering from sluggishness due to failure of the political leadership. The member countries collectively failed to meet in the last six years in violation of the commitment the countries jointly made in 2014 to hold a summit ‘every two years or earlier,’ several diplomats in Dhaka, Kathmandu and New Delhi said.

The SAARC Council of Ministers, comprising foreign ministers of the member countries, and the standing committee, comprising foreign secretaries, also did not meet in the last two years in breach of a formal instruction from the heads of the member countries to convene their respective meeting ‘at least once a year.’

The 19th SAARC summit was scheduled to be held in Pakistan’s capital Islamabad in November 9-10, 2016. The summit was postponed as Bangladesh, Afghanistan, Bhutan and India had refrained from participating in the summit when India sought to isolate Pakistan in the wake of an attack on a military base in the disputed region of Kashmir, which killed 18 Indian soldiers.

Sri Lanka and the Maldives are also members, with Nepal being the current SAARC chair for last five years.

Founded in Dhaka on 8 December 1985, SAARC is the only regional body in which both India and Pakistan, the two arch rivals who engaged in armed conflicts in 1965, 1971, 1999 and in January this year, are members.