ARF security forum graduates to deter diplomacy

ARF security forum graduates to deter diplomacy

HANOI (AFP): The Asia-Pacific region's sole security forum adopted landmark operational procedures on Wednesday that will help prevent disputes from flaring up into a full-blown war, officials said.

The procedures would give the ASEAN Regional Forum (ARF) legitimacy in resolving bilateral and multilateral problems, like the Korean conflict and overlapping claims to the Spratly islands in the South China Sea.

Foreign ministers and officials from 23 member countries of the ARF agreed at a one-day meeting in Hanoi that the forum graduate from its traditional confidence-building role to preventive diplomacy, said a statement issued after the talks.

"The ministers agreed that while moving towards PD (preventive diplomacy), the ARF should continue to strengthen its confidence- building process so as to substantially enhance mutual trust, confidence and understanding as well as cooperation among the ARF participants," the statement said.

Following its establishment in 1994, the 23-member ARF agreed on a gradual three-stage evolution of confidence building, preventive diplomacy and, in the longer term, conflict resolution.

So far, the forum, which includes the 10 Association of Southeast Asian Nations (ASEAN) states, had concentrated on confidence-building measures.

Aside from having annual ministerial-level meetings which discuss pressing regional security and political concerns, ARF members hold talks among their military chiefs, compare notes on defense expenditures and keep each other informed on military exercises.

ASEAN groups Brunei, Cambodia, Indonesia, Laos, Malaysia, Myanmar, the Philippines, Singapore, Thailand and Vietnam.

The ARF also includes Australia, Canada, China, the European Union, India, Japan, Mongolia, New Zealand, North Korea, Papua New Guinea, Russia, South Korea and the United States.

"We are (in effect) developing processes of conflict prevention and may be one day, leading to conflict prevention policies," Belgian Foreign Minister Louis Michel, the current holders of the EU presidency, told AFP.

"I feel there is a progress and there is movement now," he said.

Analysts said the agreement to move towards preventive diplomacy -- resolving or containing disputes through peaceful non-military methods -- was a breakthrough because some members, China and India particularly, were worried that the move might violate the principle of state sovereignty.

They were concerned that the new role would give a "third party" an excuse to interfere in domestic affairs.

The forum had been debating the issue for more than two years. Professor Amitav Acharya, among a group of experts and eminent persons who act as a resource in ARF meetings, told AFP that preventive diplomacy procedures within ARF would however be confined to resolving inter-state conflicts and not intra-state disputes.

Acharya, the deputy director of the Singapore-based Institute of Defense and Strategic Studies, said the ARF could reduce, if not eliminate, the reliance of Asia Pacific countries on exclusionary bilateral military arrangements.

The ARF is different from European-style multilateral institutions. It is non-legalistic and avoids binding and intrusive approaches to security cooperation.

Acharya said the ARF had successfully engaged the region's two key security players, China and the U.S., both of whom were reluctant to join a multilateral security arrangement initially.