ASEAN set to upgrade multilateral security talks

ASEAN set to upgrade multilateral security talks

HANOI (Agencies): Southeast Asian nations may take an important step next week to upgrade their dialog on regional security, a Vietnamese official said on Thursday.

Foreign ministers from the Association of Southeast Asian Nations (ASEAN) will consider adopting a document setting out "the concepts and principles" of preventive diplomacy when they hold their annual security talks next week in Hanoi, Vice Foreign Minister Le Cong Phung said.

Phung said ASEAN members initially differed over what those principles should be, but settled those differences when their senior officials met in Hanoi in May and wrote the document. The text was not publicly released so the details are unclear.

Phung said, however, that it was agreed there should be a "transition period" before ASEAN becomes active in preventive diplomacy.

ASEAN began the annual security talks, called the ASEAN Regional Forum (ARF), in 1994 and has been using it to air views on territorial and other disputes with the involvement of major powers, including the United States and China.

The forum was supposed to move gradually through three stages: from confidence-building to preventive diplomacy to actual resolution of conflicts.

"The ARF...will go through three stages, namely confidence building, preventative diplomacy and management and settlement of conflicts," Phung said.

"The papers expected to be adopted at this conference are necessary preparations of ARF to move to the second stage of preventive diplomacy."

Phung said the move would be a natural progression of the ARF's role in bringing together ASEAN's 10 member states with top officials from world and regional powers.

"The main thrust of this initiative is that ASEAN member countries help their less developed members including Cambodia, Laos, Myanmar and Vietnam," he said.

ASEAN has come under growing pressure to move quickly to the preventive diplomacy stage by those who say it has done too much talking and too little action.

Since its founding in 1967, ASEAN has considered decision- making by consensus and "noninterference in the internal affairs" of member states as two main principles of the grouping. Some ASEAN countries had expressed concern that the movement toward preventive diplomacy may undermine those principles and open the door to outside intervention in their affairs or force them into joining conflict resolution actions.

Phung said that during the past year, ASEAN has agreed to maintain the grouping's two guiding principles.

He said the security forum has discussed disputes over islands, including the Spratly Island group, in the South China Sea that are claimed by China and several ASEAN member countries.

The claimants have made "huge improvements" in jointly drafting a "code of conduct" intended to prevent conflict in the disputed areas, but some differences remain, Phung said.

The differences include disagreements over what areas in the sea the code would cover, he said. The dispute has sparked some small armed clashes over the years.

ASEAN groups Brunei, Cambodia, Indonesia, Laos, Malaysia, Myanmar, the Philippines, Singapore, Thailand and Vietnam.