ASEAN partners encourage regional self-reliance

Thu, 30 Jul 1998, 00:00 WIB | 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.