ISLAMABAD: Chairman Senate Mian Raza Rabbani, has said that roadmap for peace in Asia, the nations which have suffered and those continue to suffer from internal and external conflicts, can only be made by finding indigenous solutions excluding superpowers from “peace-making” efforts as the superpowers need war to keep their military industrial complexes running “efficiently.”

He asked the Asian nations whether they can consider to agreeing on reducing the defence budget every year by certain percentage and divert the savings towards specific national funds created for poverty alleviation and developing a common technology pool and free transfer of technology among themselves.

He stressed that the region should prove itself equal to the task as the might cannot be accepted as right because right is might.

He expressed these views on Monday while addressing the inaugural session of the 9th Plenary of the Asian Parliamentary Assembly being held in Siem Reap, Cambodia.

In a message received from Siem Reap, Cambodia, the Senate Chairman said that regional conflicts in post-colonial Asia and other colonized continents have emerged from disputed boundaries that colonial powers left undecided while leaving those countries.

“Peace can only be brought about by nations that desperately need peace”, he maintained, adding that regional conflicts have led to higher defense budgets.

He informed that higher defense budgets have led to higher budgetary deficits destroying our economies.

He said that donor driven economies are designed to create poverty and to increase income gaps.

Their formula for economic growth starts and ends with retrenchment of workers and closure of industrial units. He said that economic growth is not possible without increasing purchasing power (wages) of the poor, increasing national production and decreasing income gaps. Nations have to focus on equality, maximum employment, higher production, poverty reduction and poverty eradication.

Mian Raza Rabbani said that former colonial masters have been main suppliers of weapons to the conflicting nations.

He emphasized that western policy of supporting extremist groups to overthrow progressive regimes has to be openly condemned and resisted in Asia.

He underscored the need for making collective efforts to combat the scourge of terrorism saying that it is only through collective action and sharing of intelligence on the identification and activities of extremist and terrorist groups that these menaces can be finally eliminated.

He called for reviving the same passion and zeal that saw the Asian and African nations unite at the platform of the first Afro-Asian Conference, held at Bandung, Indonesia, in 1955.—PR