ASEAN's herd mentality simply emboldens Myanmar government

Kavi Chongkittavorn, The Nation, Asia News Network, Bangkok

ASEAN foreign ministers meet this week in Jakarta to discuss the grouping's prospects and problems. The likely outcome and overall sentiment will lean towards dismay. After all, no one expects ASEAN, which groups the diverse countries of Southeast Asia under one roof, to rear its collective head at this meeting.

As host, Indonesia has the difficult and mammoth task of shepherding this meeting along for two reasons. The first one has to do with its own national agenda of pushing through the draft action plan for the ASEAN Security Community (ASC), which, over the past four months, has been watered down greatly.

Indeed Indonesia's interest is at stake here. Due to domestic turmoil following the collapse of the Suharto regime in 1998, ASEAN's biggest member has until recently maintained a low profile. Now, with renewed confidence and a bolder vision, Indonesia would like to reassert the leadership within ASEAN that it enjoyed during the previous three decades. It would like to reclaim its rightful place.

However, this has not been easy for Jakarta, judging from the way ASEAN senior officials have dissected and responded to the substance of the ASC action plan. The ASEAN foreign ministers have to decide whether to adopt the plan now or leave it until the summit in Vientiane in October. A few countries have expressed great disappointment over the weakened plan and have urged the host to delay adoption so it can be improved further.

For now, Indonesia has insisted that the revised draft, which consists of more than 70 proposals, should be adopted at this meeting. Jakarta fears that once its turn at the head of the grouping ends it will not be able to oversee the content when the next ASEAN chair, Laos, takes over later this week.

All the plan's prominent features, which Indonesia earlier fervently hoped would propel ASEAN into a political and security community, have either been amended or deleted.

The first casualty was the much-talked-about proposal to create a regional peace-keeping force to be available to help end conflicts within the region.

After four rounds of discussion, ASEAN senior officials agreed that one element of the ASC was to establish a peace and stability mechanism, a generic designation thought up to replace the idea of regional peace-keeping forces in order not to provoke any one.

The part that committed ASEAN members to holding free and regular elections was also deleted. Most of the ASEAN countries contended that the paragraph mentioning the promotion of democracy and human rights, as well as the unchecked flow of information and the building of open, tolerant and transparent societies, was sufficient to make ASEAN more open and democratic.

Several ASEAN diplomats have blamed Indonesian senior officials for their failure to consult ASEAN members on the draft in advance. One of them said that while the draft was ideal and contained imperatives drawn from the UN and other international instruments, it did not reflect ASEAN thinking.

Worst of all, they said, they did not have the sense of ownership at all. For example, the call for free and regular elections could embarrass certain ASEAN members that do not have them.

Apart from these controversial aspects, the plan outlines ASEAN cooperation in fighting transnational crime and other areas. The draft maintains ASEAN basis principles, including unanimity, non-interference in members' internal affairs, respect for national sovereignty, peaceful settlement of disputes and comprehensive security. The security community is one of the three pillars for the establishment of the ASEAN Community by 2020, which was approved by leaders of the organisation last October. The other two pillars are the ASEAN Economic Community and the ASEAN Social and Cultural Community.

Another reason is how Indonesia going to deal with the grouping's only pariah member, Myanmar. Unlike in the previous seven years since its admission, Myanmar's perpetuated political crisiscontinue to punish the well-being of ASEAN-EU relations. After more than 13 years of apprehension, Myanmar remains an impediment to ASEAN-EU cooperation as some of the EU members want to please ASEAN.

However, the enlargement of the EU in May saw 10 new members enter the union. Some of them know first hand what it means to be a pariah state. Now as new democracies and EU members, countries such as Poland, Hungary, the Czech Republic, Latvia and others want the EU to be firmer with Myanmar so that it is held accountable for its actions.

Now ASEAN and the EU are looking for a way out, a compromise rather, which is not easy. It has been suggested that Myanmar should downgrade its representative at ASEM from the head of state to the foreign-ministerial level to allow the EU leaders, who could be reluctant to join the Myanmarese junta leader Prime Minister Khint Nyunt, to attend the summit.

Will Myanmar accept such a formula? It will not be long before we find out. Before the formation of the ASEM in1996, Myanmar was the only thing standing in the way of ASEAN-European cooperation. Now it continues to undermine the whole gamut of Asian-European relations.

The Netherlands, which will assume the rotating presidency of the EU on July 1, is trying to save the Asia-Europe summit and wishes to see it proceed as scheduled.

Two important ASEM ministerial meetings concerning financial and economic matters were cancelled recently.

Amid increased external pressure on Myanmar from the EU, ASEAN is resorting to the herd instinct, aka the ASEAN Way, by strengthening its solidarity and defending the pariah state, reluctantly or not. Better this than face humiliation from Europe.

Obviously this ingrained behaviour enables Myanmar to repeatedly exploit ASEAN and hold it captive, as a group or individual members, without changing its status quo since May 1990.

A withered ASEAN creates an unwavering Myanmar. Therefore the EU must be rock solid. It is a contest of wills. As long as ASEAN or Asia at large quarrels with Europe over Myanmar, the pariah state wins.