By Mizan Rahman & Agencies   
DHAKA: Foreign ministers of Saarc member-states in Dhaka yesterday agreed in principle on forum’s membership of Afghanistan but a member-state strongly stood opposed to China’s observer status.
The agreement and disagreement came during “informal meeting” of the Council of Ministers comprising the foreign ministers of the Saarc member-countries, who formally met at Hotel Sheraton yesterday for a last-ditch deliberation before their top leaders sit for the forum’s summit meet today.
A Saarc delegation source told newsmen that India vehemently opposed the “observer” status of China, proposed by Pakistan and supported by five other members - Bangladesh, Bhutan, Nepal, the Maldives and Sri Lanka.
“As the Foreign Ministers wanted to refer the case of China to the Summit leaders, India did not agree either,” said the source.
However, all the seven Foreign Ministers agreed in principle to grant Saarc membership to Afghanistan. Afghanistan earlier applied for membership to the current Saarc chair, Pakistan.  
If the council of ministers formally takes a decision at its meeting, it will be placed for approval by the Saarc heads of state and government meeting today and tomorrow.
If finally Afghanistan is awarded Saarc membership, the forum charter will need to be amended to take the troubled country in.   
A South Asian diplomat said that if the summit leaders finally agreed on Kabul’s plea, next Saarc summit in India might grant the membership to Afghanistan.
Earlier, Additional Foreign Secretary Moniruzzaman told a press briefing that there had not been any consensus in the Saarc foreign secretaries’ meeting about Afghanistan or China.
Meanwhile, India has offered host the Saarc Disaster Preparedness and Management Centre to deal with natural calamities affecting countries in the region.
This was conveyed by Indian Foreign Secretary Shyam Saran during the two-day meeting of the Standing Committee of Saarc Foreign Secretaries in Dhaka, officials said yesterday.
Saran later told reporters that the recent earthquake in India and Pakistan and the tsunami tragedy that affected Sri Lanka, the Maldives and southern parts of India had brought home the need for giving priority attention to building capacities in South Asian countries to predict such disasters and also how to pool their resources to deal with them.
He said India has a good institute for disaster management and if the offer for a centre was accepted, it could be easily linked to this institute.
The Saarc summit, to be attended by Prime Minister Manmohan Singh, would be underscoring the need for putting in place a Regional Response Mechanism regarding disaster preparedness, emergency relief and rehabilitation.
The forthcoming meeting of the Saarc Environment Ministers is expected to provide important directives in this regard.
The foreign ministers also sought to push a free trade agreement and a possible "economic union", officials said.
The foreign ministers, who were still finalising the summit agenda late yesterday, also hoped to reach an accord on combating terrorism, in addition to implementing a South Asian Free Trade Agreement (Safta).
The Safta deal would create the world's biggest free trade area and promote the group's founding objective of poverty alleviation in a region that is home to 1.4bn people, including 60% of the world's poor.
The meeting of foreign ministers also discussed setting up of a new economic body to take regional integration beyond Safta, an Indian official present at the discussions said.
"The ministers have made an ambitious recommendation - the setting up of a high economic council comprising ministers of planning and finance and their senior officials," he said, speaking on condition of anonymity.
The council would aim to push regional integration forward to include "trade in services, enhanced investment and harmonising of customs union and, beyond that, a South Asian Economic Union," said the official.
The foreign secretaries on Thursday also agreed to set up a regional disaster preparedness centre in the Indian capital, a decision expected to be endorsed by the summit.
The agreement to set up a free trade area was signed at the grouping's last summit in Islamabad in January 2004 with January 1, 2006 set as a deadline for implementation.
But negotiations have since stumbled over a sensitive list of products, rules of origin and a compensation mechanism for the least developed countries.
India's Junior Foreign Minister E Ahmed said that the delegations had agreed to implement Safta on time and would work to resolve all outstanding issues by the end of November.
"There will be a clear message from Saarc leaders that any pending issues must be resolved by the end of November by the committee of experts," he said. The committee is due to meet in Kathmandu in late November.
A Bangladeshi official said earlier that ending the deadlock would require a "meeting of minds at the highest level," but other ministers said they were confident of an on-time implementation.
"Though there are some outstanding issues like rules of origin, the Safta can be launched in due time," Pakistan's Foreign Minister Khurshid Mahmood Kasuri told reporters.
Sri Lankan Foreign Minister Anura Bandaranaike said the talks had been delayed by the postponement of the summit due to last year's Asian tsunami which battered his country, the Maldives and India.
But he said the outstanding issues could be resolved and added that "we still hope to launch the system by January or early next year."