ASEAN relieved as Myanmar skips chair

ASEAN relieved as Myanmar skips chair

Darren Schuettler, Reuters/Vientiane

Army-ruled Myanmar will skip its turn as ASEAN chairman in 2006, defusing a simmering row between the southeast Asian bloc and the West over the junta's lack of democratic reform and its detention of Aung San Suu Kyi.

"We agreed that once Myanmar is ready to take its turn to be the ASEAN chair, it can do so," Lao Foreign Minister Somsavat Lengsavad said on Tuesday, reading out a joint statement by the Association of Southeast Asian Nations (ASEAN).

Myanmar wanted to focus its full attention on efforts at national reconciliation and restoring democracy after more than four decades of military rule, the statement said.

"We expressed our sincere appreciation to the government of Myanmar for not allowing its national preoccupation to affect ASEAN solidarity and cohesiveness," Somsavat said, adding that 2006 would be a "critical year" for the former Burma.

Few western governments believe Yangon's democracy rhetoric, especially while Nobel laureate Suu Kyi -- whose National League for Democracy won a landslide election victory in 1990 only to be denied power by the army -- remains under house arrest.

On the eve of the ASEAN meeting in Vientiane, British Foreign Office minister Ian Pearson had repeated U.S. and European threats to boycott ASEAN proceedings in 2006 if the generals took up the reins without embracing any meaningful political reform.

The Philippines, the next in line for a role which rotates alphabetically, will now become chairman after Malaysia finishes its stint in mid-2006.

"The Philippines would like to express its appreciation to Myanmar for not allowing its national preoccupation to affect ASEAN's solidarity and cohesiveness," the Philippine foreign ministry said in a statement.

Singapore Foreign Minister George Yeo said the decision removed a "thorny problem", although he added the group would have supported Yangon if it had insisted on assuming the chair.

"It was a relief to us," he told reporters."Their domestic problems and our interests as a region had been intertwined. It's good that these will be decoupled."

ASEAN, which groups Brunei, Cambodia, Indonesia, Laos, Malaysia, Myanmar, the Philippines, Singapore, Thailand and Vietnam, has been trying to tease political reforms out of Yangon's generals through "constructive engagement".

Conversely, Europe and the United States have favored sanctions in an attempt to force the restoration of multi-party civilian government to the former British colony, which has been under army rule since a 1962 coup.

Neither approach has made any headway and ASEAN, which admitted Myanmar in 1997 in the hope of showing it the benefits of political and economic openness, has found itself tainted by the intransigence of its "black sheep" member.

But the EU saw Myanmar's decision as progress.

"The position that the ASEAN countries have taken, we think, is a good one that goes in the direction that the European Union wanted," EU foreign policy chief Javier Solana told a news conference in Brussels.

"Whatever can be done to have that country evolve towards democratic values is worth doing," he added.

Australian Foreign Minister Alexander Downer praised ASEAN efforts in trying to bring Yangon's generals in from the cold.

"The ASEAN countries have done much more than people realize to promote political reform in Myanmar and also to argue for the release of Aung San Suu Kyi from house arrest," he said.