ASEAN partners encourage regional self-reliance

Thu, 30 Jul 1998 | Source: AP

MANILA (AP): Apprehensive over desperate poverty and social unrest from the year-long financial crisis, Southeast Asian countries found at the end of talks yesterday with the United States, Europe and other rich nations that the limit on bailouts may have been reached.

Japan and Western powers pressed for more self-reliance in making not only financial, but political reform in meetings this past week with the Association of Southeast Asian Nations.

Formed in 1967 to prevent the spread of war in the region, ASEAN made a start toward dealing with a new kind of danger by adopting Thailand's proposal for a forum on how to help people suffering from the economic crisis.

"From now on the threat to security in the region will probably come in another form," Foreign Minister Surin Pitsuwan of Thailand told a news conference. "Millions of our people will probably slide back into poverty. Millions will lose their jobs."

Desperation "could lead to violent rebellion and insecurity in the entire region," he said. But the proposal seemed to imply that donor countries would be counted on to fund the social safety nets.

Conference chairman Domingo Siazon, the Philippine foreign affairs secretary, said the United States should increase its share of funding for the International Monetary Fund. The IMF's reserves have been depleted by bailouts of several Asian nations in the past year. The Clinton administration's request for $18 billion for the IMF has been languishing in Congress for months.

But the financial crisis "is not going to be resolved by aid alone," U.S. Secretary of State Madeleine Albright said yesterday. The European Union, Japan and other donors such as Australia, New Zealand and Canada were also reticent in responding to ASEAN's request for more aid, seed money and investment in educational and social development programs.

The dialog ended with foreign ministers from outside Southeast Asia focusing on the right of free travel and free association for Myanmar opposition leader Aung San Suu Kyi; and warning all political parties in Cambodia to abide by the results of recent elections or face a continued cutoff of development assistance.

Whether any common ground was reached is debatable.

As the ASEAN conference ended, Myanmar's Foreign Minister Ohn Gyaw sat at a press conference with his Western colleagues and said simply that their request for U.S. and Japanese envoys to meet Suu Kyi was unnecessary and had been denied.

In Cambodia, the supporters of Prime Minister Hun Sen, who refused to accept the results of 1993 elections and staged a coup last year against his rival, declared victory before the ballots of the latest election had been counted.

Although some ASEAN countries say they are disappointed in Myanmar's slowness to arrest drug traffickers, negotiate with the opposition and open the economy during its first year of membership in the group, none of the Southeast Asians joined the United States and other powers in the public demands for prompt human rights actions.

"We would not do it in the way the West would prefer to," with sanctions and isolation, Indonesian Foreign Minister Ali Alatas told reporters. "We would do it in the Southeast Asian way. We will talk with one another very frankly, but we will talk with Myanmar very quietly."

In a speech to the American Chamber of Commerce in Manila yesterday, Albright had criticized a long-held tenet of autocrats in Asia: that citizens must have rice in their stomachs before they can be given political freedoms.

"Democracies are better able to adjust than regimes which are autocratic," she said.

But ASEAN's new chairman, Singapore Foreign Minister Shanmugam Jayakumar would be the first to disagree. His party has retained authoritarian power for 33 years in one of the most prosperous states in Asia.