Safta meet cancelled
Indo-Asian News Service, Kathmandu
A key meeting on the South Asian Free Trade Area (Safta) pact, which is to come into effect by 2006, has been cancelled close on the heels of the postponement of the 13th Saarc summit.While the Saarc summit, scheduled to have been held in Bangladesh Feb 6-7, was postponed after India pulled out of it citing the security situation in Bangladesh and the developments in Nepal where King Gyanendra dismissed the government, the Safta meet has been cancelled due to Pakistan expressing its inability to attend. The three-day expert level meeting to fine tune the Safta treaty was due to begin Feb 26 in Male, capital city of the Maldives. However, it was cancelled as Pakistan informed the Saarc Secretariat in Kathmandu that its experts on the Safta team would be "otherwise busy during the time" and would not be able to send any expert to the seventh meeting. On Feb 14, the Saarc Secretariat sent a letter to the Maldives' ministry of foreign affairs communicating the postponement of the expert level meeting.
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