ASEAN foreign ministers achieve much, but resolve little
Meidyatama Soeryodiningrat, The Jakarta Post, Vientiane
Southeast Asian foreign ministers completed a day of endless meetings in Vientiane on Saturday, seemingly content in the knowledge that they had achieved much while resolving little.
The agenda moved swiftly -- as swiftly as the ushers who manually changed the giant backdrop of the meetings' different designations in the main hall of the ICTC venue. Five meetings in all; seven-and-a-half hours of "oblique speak" involving the 10 ASEAN foreign ministers, and, at different junctures, their counterparts from China, Japan, South Korea and India.
The talks, a prelude to Monday's two-day annual Association of Southeast Asian Nations (ASEAN) summit, cruised through the mandatory agenda of discussing already agreed upon documents -- under the glitzy titles of "action plans" and "action programs".
These documents will comprise the piece de resistance of the summit, action plans for the security community and social- cultural communities: the Vientiane Action Program. With the already-adopted action plan for the economic community, it will establish targets for creating an ASEAN Community by 2020.
In official lingo, this means a closely "intertwined and mutually reinforcing community" between Brunei, Cambodia, Indonesia, Laos, Malaysia, Myanmar, the Philippines, Singapore, Thailand and Vietnam, aimed at shared peace and prosperity.
Once a taboo subject within the ASEAN straitjacket of "nonintervention", member states have begun to qualify the discussion of certain domestic issues that impact on regional security. Issues such as the 1999 East Timor crisis, the 1997 political crisis in Cambodia, and the suppression of political rights in Myanmar, have challenged ASEAN's usually detached position on domestic issues.
It was newly democratic Indonesia that thrust such an agenda on the table. Yet, it is Thailand, one of the initial proponents of a review of the once-sacrosanct nonintervention principle, that is now on the defensive against anyone daring to raise the issue of the recent deaths in Southern Thailand during this summit.
Thai Prime Minister Thaksin Shinawatra threatened to walk out of the meetings if the issue was raised within ASEAN. Thai foreign ministry spokesman Sihasak Phuangketkeow, tactfully maintained here on Saturday that Thailand was not opposed to explaining the issue -- but stressed that "it is not a regional issue, but a domestic one".
Another sensitive issue was the dissension to adopt what amounts to another headline-grabbing ASEAN initiative.
On the heels of the two-day summit, ASEAN leaders will also hold the catchy-phrased ASEAN Plus Three Summit, which incorporates leaders from China, Japan and South Korea.
China and Malaysia seem the most eager to see the meeting evolve into an East Asia Summit. If approved, it would begin next year in Kuala Lumpur -- which, coincidentally, is also vying to host the secretariat of this new initiative.
Most ASEAN countries agree that the Plus Three process should evolve toward a larger East Asia Community. But a few members, namely Indonesia, have been reluctant to hasten the process while ASEAN itself is only now beginning to engage in its own community-building program.
Indonesia warns that ASEAN could lose its role as the driving force behind this initiative. Short of an outright rejection, the foreign ministry's director for ASEAN affairs, Marty Natalegawa, said Indonesia was "thinking aloud" on the need to carefully study this proposal. He stressed the need to engage in a comprehensive process, and not just simple add-ons.