ASEAN's new member

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.