Balikpapan talks aim to ease tension in S. China Sea

JAKARTA (JP): Senior government officials and experts from 11 countries will meet in the East Kalimantan city of Balikpapan next week to hammer out cooperation programs concerning the geographically strategic South China Sea.

The Workshop on Managing Potential Conflicts in the South China Sea, planned for Oct. 9-13, will pick up where they left in October 1994, when they held their last meeting in the West Sumatra town of Bukittinggi.

Progress has been painfully, but understandably, slow. This will be the sixth workshop and so far not a single cooperation program has been started.

Any program agreed upon at the workshop will likely face major political stumbling blocks because the conference has been deemed informal in nature and agreements are not binding.

As Indonesian officials point out, however, such gatherings bring countries with overlapping territorial claims in the South China Sea into one forum where they can explore possibilities of cooperation rather than indulging in antagonism.

Hasyim Djalal, Indonesia's ambassador-at-large for maritime affairs, describes the workshop as a confidence building measure which will eventually bring amity through cooperation.

"Countries in the South China Sea have limited experience in cooperating with each other. On the contrary they have a lot of experience in altercating," Hasyim told reporters on Thursday.

The Spratly Islands in the middle of the South China Sea are claimed in part or full by six countries -- Malaysia, China, Brunei, the Philippines, Vietnam and Taiwan.

Five other countries taking part in the workshop are Indonesia, Singapore, Thailand, Laos and Cambodia.

Each participant will be attending in an individual, non- official capacity.

Indonesia, playing the role of an "honest broker" in the Spratly conflict, will lend credence to the meeting with a visit from Minister of Foreign Affairs Ali Alatas, who is scheduled to address the participants on Tuesday.

Alatas has repeatedly stressed in past workshops that the annual gathering is not designed to resolve the conflict. "Indonesia is not proposing any recipes for that (solution)," he once said.

Hasyim Djalal on Thursday echoed Alatas' sentiments: "We're trying to change the mood which has been fraught by strife for centuries into a mood of cooperation."

He contended that such an effort could not be accomplished in one or two days, or even in one or two years.

Consensus remains the discussion's key word.

There is no use in coming up with high-sounding resolutions if not all the participants agree to take part, Hasyim said.

In keeping with the informality of the meeting, all the workshops are held away from Jakarta. After the first in Bali in 1989, the meeting has been held in Bandung, Yogyakarta, Surabaya and Bukittinggi.

The workshop is organized by the foreign ministry's Research and Development Agency with the support of the Canadian International Development Agency.

Three technical meetings have been held over the past year to prepare the way for the Balikpapan workshop.

The first was a marine research meeting in Hanoi, the second a marine law meeting in Phuket, Thailand. The third, concluded here on Thursday, was on safety of navigation, shipping and communications in the South China Sea.

During the meeting here, participants recognized the need for multilateral cooperation and coordination in Search And Rescue (SAR) activities.

They urged countries to delimit their respective SAR areas with a view to enhance the effectiveness of SAR operations.

"This would in no way prejudice sovereignty or jurisdictional claims," the participants said in a joint statement.

It is through these many joint activities that Indonesia hopes to dissuade possible flare-ups in the dispute.

"Hopefully our friends in the South China Sea feel that cooperation is better than confrontation," Hasyim commented.(mds)