ASEAN MPs to send mission to Myanmar

Ivy Susanti, The Jakarta Post, Jakarta

Legislators from seven Association of Southeast Asian Nations (ASEAN) grouped in the ASEAN Inter-Parliamentary Caucus (IPC) will send a fact-finding team to Myanmar to meet government officials and opposition leader Aung San Suu Kyi.

Lim Kit Siang, a member of the caucus and Malaysian parliamentary opposition leader, said that the group would convey the legislators' aspirations for democratization in the country, to free Suu Kyi from house arrest and to encourage a tripartite dialog between the junta, the National League for Democracy (Suu Kyi's party) and the ethnic groups.

Lim, a parliamentarian from opposition Democratic Action Party, said that the caucus' president, Datuk Zaid Ibrahim, would write to the Myanmar foreign affairs ministry to inform them of the visit. Zaid Ibrahim is a Malaysian legislator from the ruling UMNO party.

Myanmar will take over ASEAN's rotational chairmanship in 2006.

"We will meet the chairman of SPDC (the State Peace and Development Council), the foreign minister, Aung San Suu Kyi, the representatives of the pro-democracy forces and ethnic groups some time in March.

"We also agreed that unless there is improvement in the political situation in Burma (the former name of Myanmar), with meaningful democratization and improvement in national reconciliation, for example a meaningful National Convention, Burma is not qualified to be chairman of ASEAN in 2006 and this must be the concern of all ASEAN parliamentarians," Lim told The Jakarta Post after the caucus meeting here on Wednesday.

National Convention is one of seven measures proposed in the Myanmar's road map for democracy by the former prime minister Khin Nyunt after international pressure for democratization and Suu Kyi's release.

But in a government shake-up in October, Khin Nyunt was dismissed and detained on a corruption charge. The military junta announced last November that the convention would be held this month.

The May convention was canceled because the NLD and two other political parties refused to attend the convention unless Suu Kyi was freed. The junta extended Suu Kyi's detention in October.

ASEAN Parliamentary Caucus is a loose grouping of legislators from Malaysia, Indonesia, Cambodia, Myanmar, the Philippines, Singapore and Thailand. The first informal meeting that served as an embryo to this caucus was held in Kuala Lumpur last November.

Lim expressed hope that the caucus would develop into various working groups aside from Myanmar, such as for good governance or human rights issues.

During the two-day meeting here, which ended on Wednesday, the ASEAN Inter-Parliamentary Caucus formalized the Indonesian parliamentary caucus. Among Indonesian legislators who are members of the ASEAN Caucus are Nursyahbani Katjasungkana of the National Awakening Party and Djoko Susilo of the National Mandate Party.

Earlier, Ade Nasution, the vice chairman of the Committee for Inter-Parliamentary Cooperation in Indonesia's House of Representatives, said the caucus was for individual legislators who shared the same concerns, and was not officially endorsed by the House.

"Myanmar is a member of ASEAN, and we can't really intervene in other countries' affairs," he said.