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Saarc

5 nations agree to Feb 7-9 summit

India to respond soon

Staff Correspondent
Five of the seven Saarc member states have endorsed Dhaka's proposal for holding the postponed 13th Saarc summit on February 7-9 with India likely to respond today or tomorrow, Foreign Minister M Morshed Khan said yesterday.
Sri Lanka, Nepal, the Maldives and Bhutan have sent messages endorsing the proposed fresh dates
soon
for the summit. Delhi's response is likely to come today or tomorrow since Saturday and Sunday are weekly holidays in India. Morshed told reporters at his office.
"Pakistan, as being the current Saarc chair, will inform us of the final dates for the summit," Morshed said.
Pakistani Foreign Office spokesman Masood Ahmed Khan told the
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media on Saturday that Foreign Secretary Riaz Khokar had contacted other Saarc foreign secretaries about the fresh dates and Sri Lanka, Nepal and the Maldives approved them.
Bhutan's position is it would accept the dates approved by the other memberstates, Morshcd said.
Pakistan would finally announce the dates for the Saarc (South Asian Association for Regional Cooperation) summit upon India's response to the proposed dates. In case of India's refusal to endorse them, it would continue the process of consultation with the member states, he mentioned.
Meanwhile, Indian Prime Minister Manmohan Singh is now visiting the tsunami-hit Indian territories of Andaman and Nicobar Islands, while External Affairs Minister Natwar Singh has just returned from a world leaders' summit on tsunami crisis in Indonesia.
The Saarc summit earlier sched-
uled for January 9-11 was postponed on December 31 in the wake of the tsunami disaster in India, Sri Lanka and the Maldives.
The Saarc Council of Ministers' meeting is likely to be held on February 5-6 preceding the summit while the dates for the programming andthestandingcommittees' meets would be decided after the summit dates are confirmed, the foreign ministersaid.
The programming committee was earlier scheduled to meet on January 3-4, the standing committee (comprising foreign secretaries) on January 5-6 and the Council of Ministers on January 7-8.
Dhaka had announced earlier that all preparations for the summit were complete and it would need only seven to 10 days to put the summit infrastructure in place.
The Saarc summit preparation cell, headed by Reaz Rahman, is holding meetings every Tuesday and Thursday to keep the preparations up to date, foreign ministry sources said.