ASEAN's new member

After days of rifts over Cambodia's admission to the Association of Southeast Asian Nations (ASEAN), the grouping's nine leaders eventually reached a compromise on Tuesday by announcing that the country was to become the association's 10th member.

A statement by Vietnamese Foreign Minister Nguyen Manh Cam at the end of the first day of the ASEAN summit in Hanoi on Tuesday evening cleared up all controversy and clarified conflicting remarks made earlier by ASEAN officials regarding Cambodia's membership.

Cam said that all ASEAN leaders, in their speeches at the opening of the summit, welcomed Cambodia's admission so that "right now Cambodia is a member of ASEAN", although the admission ceremony will not take place for another two to four weeks. It too will be in the Vietnamese capital.

With Cambodia becoming a new member, despite the unceremonious nature of its admission, ASEAN has thus achieved one of the ultimate goals envisaged by its founders 31 years ago; namely that all 10 countries in Southeast Asia should cooperate peacefully and solidly in an organization to ensure regional stability.

In addition to host Vietnam, Indonesia and Malaysia ardently supported Cambodia's admission at the Hanoi summit which ended on Wednesday. Phnom Penh would have become a member along with Laos and Myanmar last year had Hun Sen not engineered the violent ouster of his copremier, Prince Norodom Ranariddh, less than a month before the admission was due to have happened.

Indonesian Foreign Minister Ali Alatas had pointed out that the main criterion for Cambodia's admission was the establishment of a new credible coalition government in Phnom Penh. Cambodia has fulfilled this and Alatas said that anything beyond it could be construed as interference in another country's internal affairs. ASEAN's guiding principle is nonintervention in member states' domestic affairs.

Other member countries like the Philippines, Singapore, and Thailand called for a delay of Cambodia's membership on the grounds that Phnom Penh had yet to prove its political stability and effective power sharing in the new coalition government, including the setting up of a senate and revision of its constitution.

This explains why Cambodian strongman and Prime Minister Hun Sen wasted no time in thanking Indonesia, which has helped and actively followed Cambodia's political development since the early 1980s, when it was ravaged by a bloody civil war, when he met Indonesian President B.J. Habibie on Tuesday evening.

ASEAN's decision to admit Cambodia is obviously a triumph for Hun Sen whose visit to Hanoi on a state visit and hard work to lobby ASEAN leaders paid off.

Hun Sen and his administration, however, still have a lot of work to do to fully meet all ASEAN's membership requirements, such as introducing greater trade liberalization and tariff cuts in the next few years while reducing its dependence on customs duties as a source of income.

For leaders of the regional grouping, the issue rightly dismissed speculation that there was a growing split between them. The fact that they reached a consensus on Cambodia shows their solidarity in facing crucial problems in the region. This should convince the international community that, despite their differences on a variety of issues, they are still as united as a solid.

In this context, it is high time for ASEAN to reconsider its nonintervention policy and begin to adopt a new approach of constructive intervention. The new approach, proposed by some members countries last year, would strengthen cooperation and confidence, especially during hard times when each member's frankness and transparency would be needed to the full to resolve political and economic problems in Southeast Asia.