Asia's top security grouping reaches critical juncture: analysts
Asia's top security grouping reaches critical juncture: analysts
Samantha Brown, Agence France-Presse, Bangkok
Asia's top security grouping, formed a decade ago with a mandate to help maintain regional peace and stability, has reached a crossroads, say analysts who are divided over assessing its progress.
The ASEAN Regional Forum (ARF) meets for the 10th time next week in Phnom Penh, bringing together foreign ministers from the Association of Southeast Asian Nations (ASEAN) and its security dialog partners including the United States, China and the European Union (EU).
A medley of trying international issues pepper the forum's agenda this year, including terrorism, Iraq and North Korea's nuclear ambitions and the recent democracy crackdown in Myanmar.
Hopes have already been dashed on one front. North Korea's foreign minister Paek Nam-sun pulled out after current ARF chair Cambodia issued a draft for the meet that included a discussion of tensions on the Korean peninsula.
The abrupt cancellation illustrates the difficulties faced by the ARF in bringing key issues to the table, analysts say.
"It's very bad. It's a big loss. The ARF is being used as a tool by one country to manipulate other countries. Instead of solving the problem, it is becoming part of the problem," said Panitan Wattanayakorn, an academic from Chulalongkorn University.
"What else would you like to talk about in this region? There's terrorism and North Korea... and they can't talk, let alone talk about those issues."
Prapat Thepchatree, director of the Thammasat University's Center for International Policy Studies, said the forum has moved too slowly since its 1994 inception.
Back then its creators envisioned members working on confidence-building measures before shifting toward preventive diplomacy and then setting up a conflict resolution mechanism.
"Right now we are still struggling to move from stage one to two. After almost 10 years of existence it's still gradually moving, and most of the time is spent dealing with the so-called confidence-building measures," he told AFP.
"It's at a standstill and in some sense it's going backwards."
Others however are more sanguine and argue that expectations for the forum should not be too high.
"It's still consolidating. It will take another five years maybe for ARF members to feel confident enough to discuss issues," said Kavi Chongkittavorn, group editor of the English- language Nation newspaper.
"They have spent 10 years building up comfort levels... They have built up this rapport. In that sense, there's not much in terms of concrete outcomes -- but I think it is still relevant," he said.
"It is relevant simply because it is the only regional security forum for Asian countries with the participation of key major powers."
ARF is widely recognized as the top such grouping in the region, but it may face a competitor: the two-year old Asian Security Conference.
The annual gathering, the brainchild of the London-based International Institute for Strategic Studies, brings defense rather than foreign ministers together. It last met in Singapore in May.
"They are working more closely than in the ARF and have agreed not to bring itself under the ARF umbrella," Chulalongkorn's Panitan said.
"It could give the ARF a challenge in the longer term. Defense ministers are more relaxed and they have more power on security issues."
The academic added that he believed the ARF progressed sufficiently in its first five years but its development has since slowed to a critical point.
"It's at a very important juncture at which it could become an effective institution. They have to make a strategic move to focus on what is important to them and move way from confidence- building measures to something much more meaningful. At the end of its first decade, the ARF has a second chance."
ASEAN groups together Brunei, Cambodia, Indonesia, Laos, Malaysia, Myanmar, the Philippines, Singapore, Thailand and Vietnam.
Other ARF members are Australia, Canada, China, the European Union, India, Japan, Mongolia, New Zealand, North Korea, South Korea, Papua New Guinea, Russia and the United States.