ASEAN to urge nuclear states to respect pact

ASEAN to urge nuclear states to respect pact

KUALA LUMPUR (Agencies): Senior officials from the Association of Southeast Asian Nations (ASEAN) will meet today to urge the world's five main nuclear powers to respect a treaty banning nuclear weapons from the region.

The three-day meeting will be attended by officials from ASEAN's seven members of Brunei, Indonesia, Malaysia, Philippines, Singapore, Thailand and Vietnam, as well as would-be entrants Myanmar, Cambodia and Laos, a foreign ministry official said.

The meeting will explore how the five nuclear states could accede to the protocol of the Southeast Asian Nuclear Weapons Free Zone treaty, the official was quoted as saying by Bernama news agency.

Tomorrow, the ASEAN officials will meet representatives from nuclear powers Britain, China, France, Russia and the United States to resolve problems in certain provisions of the protocol, he said.

The treaty, forged at ASEAN's 1995 Bangkok meeting, came into force on March 27 and forbids the acquisition, development, use, testing and stationing of nuclear arms in the region.

The Bangkok declaration urged the five nuclear states to back the treaty but none of them have so far signed an associated protocol to affirm support for the zone.

The United States had wanted modification to the treaty and protocol before giving its support.

Meanwhile, Singapore's Deputy Prime Minister/Minister of Defense Tony Tan is scheduled to open a regional security meeting in the city-state tomorrow.

The one-day meeting is organized by the Council for Security Cooperation in the Asia-Pacific (CSCAP), a regional body founded by 10 private strategic institutes in June 1993 in Kuala Lumpur.

The council, which now has 18 members, is not a formal intergovernmental body although each of the institutions has a close link with its respective government.

The 10 founding members are strategic institutions from Indonesia, the Philippines, Malaysia, Thailand, Singapore, Australia, Canada, Japan, South Korea and the United States. The others are from China, North Korea, the European Union, India, Russia, New Zealand, Vietnam and Mongolia.

CSCAP, which invites government officials in their private capacity to its meetings, aims at preventing potential conflicts in the post-Cold War Asia-Pacific region.