ASEAN FMs meet against regional tension backdrop
ASEAN FMs meet against regional tension backdrop
YANGON (Agencies): Southeast Asian foreign ministers held an informal retreat in the Myanmar capital on Monday where they were expected to make a discreet vote of support for the political thaw in the military-run country.
The meeting is being held against a backdrop of tension in the region, with an attempted power grab in the Philippines and fears of violence in Indonesia as President Abdurrahman Wahid faced a second censure motion.
The retreat at a plush Yangon golf course, held separately from the formal Association of Southeast Asian Nations (ASEAN) ministerial meeting for the first time, was aimed at creating an environment for a free exchange of views.
But analysts say the talks will instead be hamstrung by the host of serious political and economic woes preoccupying the region.
As they arrived in Yangon, ministers were tight-lipped about the topics they plan to table during the afternoon talks, held after the group paid a courtesy call on Myanmar's leader Senior Gen. Than Shwe.
But they did disclose that they would discreetly throw their weight behind the ongoing political process in Myanmar, where a senior member of the junta has been meeting in secret with opposition leader Aung San Suu Kyi.
"We will encourage it," said Philippine Vice President and Foreign Minister Teofisto Guingona.
Malaysian Foreign Minister Syed Hamid Albar stressed that the fledgling talks, which may be paving the way for an historic official dialogue between the two sides, must not be exposed to the glare of public scrutiny.
"We would like to see Myanmar do what it considers appropriate. They have done it in their own way and at their own pace ... outside the domain of publicity and interference by anyone else," he told AFP on Sunday.
"So it's moving in a positive direction because there is non- interference. We can encourage, we can persuade, but we cannot do it with publicity."
He said the ministers did not want their hosts to feel that ASEAN was meddling in its internal affairs, "but they know they have to find a solution and they have to ultimately follow the democratic process."
Observers in Yangon believe the talks have made little progress since the junta's fourth-ranking leader Lt. Gen. Tin Oo was killed in a helicopter accident on Feb. 19.
Some say that the extremely sensitive process of finding a replacement for Tin Oo, who will enter the core of the ruling junta, has forced a temporary halt in the talks with the opposition leader.
Others believe the dialogue has hit a more serious hurdle, an analysis that Myanmar Foreign Minister Win Aung rejected on Monday as he entered the talks. "No. It has not stalled," he told reporters.
Myanmar's military junta said on Monday that its reconciliation efforts with democracy leader Aung San Suu Kyi are very much alive, and asserted that the talks were not a "public relations stunt" to appease critics.
But there was no time frame for completing the talks because "it is a timeless business," Foreign Minister Win Aung told reporters.
He said the progress and details of the talks, which began in secret in October, will remain confidential and must not be disclosed.
Win Aung's statement was the most unequivocal sign yet of the junta's desire to end the political deadlock that has gripped Myanmar since the generals refused to hand over power to Suu Kyi's party after it won general elections in 1990.
"The internal process is our business, our own process. And we are not playing games ... it is not a public relations stunt. This is for the sake of the people of Myanmar, 52 million people," Win Aung said.
"We don't play games. If we played games we might have played a long time ago. We are simple honest people," he said.
On the eve of the retreat, ministers said they hoped the informal get-together would enable them to catch up on each other's domestic problems and review the troubling developments in the region.
"It is an experiment we are trying and I welcome it," said Singapore's S. Jayakumar.
"We wanted to have a comfort level among foreign ministers to be able to talk freely ... about subjects that will contribute towards furthering the cohesiveness and solidarity of ASEAN as a group," said Malaysia's Syed Hamid.
"There are many things that have happened as a result of the financial crisis, and as a result of changes in government, changes in systems, and with globalization and the WTO."
Syed Hamid said that although ASEAN's spotlight will be on the bloc's economic ministers when they meet in Cambodia this week, the foreign ministers must help create the environment for better economic cooperation.
"It will not be wrong for us to focus on some of the economic issues because nowadays politics is driven by the economy," he said. "We must have the political will to be able to positively see how we move on from now."