Large scale terrorist violence continues to beset South Asia today. Over the last decade or so, various terrorist groups have been responsible for the deaths of more than 50,000 people in Pakistan and even more in Afghanistan. Nepal struggles to leave behind an era of violence perpetrated during the decade-long conflict. The Holey Artisan Bakery incident in Dhaka shows the evolution of terrorism. India suffers incessantly as terrorism unfurls itself in different manners in varied cultures and geographies. From Chhattisgarh to Nagaland and Jammu and Kashmir to Andhra Pradesh, human insecurity triggered by terror abounds. 

South Asian countries are finding it increasingly difficult to keep up with the changing tactics, transformed linkages, diverse strategies and convoluted instruments that are found among the terrorist groups in the region. The impacts are both dynamic and varying; they include destruction of infrastructure, factories and standing crops, withdrawal from economic activities, loss in tourism and production base, fiscal and balance-of-payment deficits, diminution of foreign investment and exchange reserves and increase in security-defence expenditure. Countries have downplayed the impacts by both statistical manipulation and information restriction. No one has put together the magnitude of long run impacts and indirect costs such as the loss of a generation, erosion in public confidence, brain drain, displacement and migration, economic distortion and environmental dislocations.

While Pakistan recorded destruction worth an estimated $100 billion, the terrorist attack on the Indian parliament on December 13, 2002 and the consequent military mobilisation hurt both the tourism industry and investor sentiment. In India, the security budget of a particular terrorism affected state government, allocations made by special commissions like the Finance Commission on maintaining law and order, and the grants extended by the union government to the affected states for relief and compensation provide deeper insights into the diversion of the development budget towards terror management. During 1989-2002, a phase of renewed violence in Jammu and Kashmir, the reimbursement transfer of security-related expenditure from the union to the state government in India alone was a whopping IRs2357.85 crore.

Terror financing

More diabolical is the metamorphosis seen in the mode of financing that sustains terrorism.  It was primarily diaspora financing that led to Sri Lankan Liberation Tigers of Tamil Eelam’s (LTTE) categorisation as the most lethal group. LTTE, minus the terrorism and violence, was actually a multinational company involved in numerous activities, from operating a shipping business for illegal trafficking of people and drugs to arms smuggling and extortion. It mobilised at least $50million a year. The Achik National Volunteer Council has also benefitted from the brisk business by Meghalaya in the export of coal, limestone and boulders; estimated to pull in IRs2billion annually from Bangladesh, this has been a very fertile revenue base. 

Recent arrest of senior officials of the Nagaland government by the National Investigating Agency (NIA) for their alleged role in large-scale extortion and illegal tax collection on behalf of the National Socialist Council of Nagaland (Khaplang) has brought forward another newer method. The NIA found that some government offices maintained receipts of the amount paid to the outfits and seized minutes of meetings that were held in various departments to discuss the amounts to be paid.

A very recent report of the Washington-based Centre for a New American Security mentioned that terrorists—particularly in the Gaza Strip and members of Islamic State in Iraq and Syria (ISIS)—have now started using ‘virtual currency’. They are gradually discarding the orthodox and widely used hawala route for fund transfers to finance their operations. Virtual currency transfers are “low cost, high speed, verified transactions that can unite counterparties around the world”. Their studies found that new financial technology firms often lack the resources to comply effectively with oversight obligations. Regulators do not devote much time and resources to non-bank institutions. This is made more serious by varying approaches to the regulation of virtual currencies among the countries.

Agreeing to disagree

All these instances are occurring against the backdrop of a comprehensive Saarc Regional Convention on Suppression of Terrorism signed during the 3rd Saarc Summit in 1987. This convention provides a regional approach to well-established principles of international law in respect to terrorist offences. It has provisions from sharing of information on terrorist activities to extradition. Article VIII of the convention emphatically states that “contracting States shall cooperate among themselves and exchange information, intelligence and expertise and such other cooperative measures as may be appropriate, with a view to preventing terroristic activities through precautionary measures”. This convention also led to the setting up of Saarc Terrorist Offences Monitoring Desk (STOMD) in Colombo in 1990, primarily to collate, analyse and disseminate information about the terrorist incidences, tactics, strategies and methods. Recognising the distinct ominous link between terrorism, drug trafficking, money laundering and other transnational crimes, the 12th Saarc Summit in 2004 signed an Additional Protocol to the Convention to deal effectively with terrorism financing. It takes into account obligations devolving on member states in terms of the United Nations Security Council resolution 1373 of 2001 and the International Convention for Suppression of Financing Terrorism (ICSFT) of 1999.

A full 11 years after the 1987 Saarc Regional Convention on the Suppression of Terrorism, legal experts met for the first time in 1999 at the ICSFT. They formulated future guidelines and identified three key elements in the convention as prerequisites for its successful implementation viz, creation of offences listed in the convention as extraditable offences under the domestic laws of Saarc member states; treatment of such offences as “non-political offences” for purposes of extradition and vesting of extra territorial criminal jurisdiction in the event of extradition not being granted. Since then, several meetings of Saarc interior/home ministers and other related agencies have taken place. But they only agree to disagree.

This convention, based on the extremely sensitive issue of terrorism, has been totally infructuous. Since 1988, Saarc summits have passed the same resolution, asking member countries to formulate laws compatible to the convention. Some member countries have consistently failed to enforce domestic legislations, thereby making this convention ineffective and inconsequential.

Little expectation

Terrorists activities, both cross-border and within countries, have sharply increased. Not a single action has been taken under this convention, despite leaders who expressed “serious concern on the spread of terrorism in and outside the region and reiterated their unequivocal condemnation of all acts, methods and practices of terrorism as criminal”. They deplored “all such acts for their ruinous impact on life, property, socio-economic development and political stability as well as on regional and international peace and cooperation”.

There is no harmonisation of domestic legislations in respect to the convention. There is an absence of bilateral agreement on extradition. There are differences on the very definition of terrorism. Most of the information on terrorism in South Asia in the public domain is generated by academics, researchers and civil society organisations. The STOMD remains largely defunct and inaccessible.

There is no public pressure on the member states to implement the convention, as most South Asians do not even know that such a convention exists. This is because, like other Saarc conventions, this was also signed without consulting different stakeholders. As a result, civil society has literally no role in this convention. Given the size of the Saarc Secretariat in Kathmandu, the limited human resources, constricted mandate and narrow autonomy given to it, one cannot really expect too much from this institution.

Lama, a former member of National Security Advisory Board of the Government of India, is presently a high end expert in the Institute of South Asian Studies, Sichuan University, China