Batik diplomacy

The second APEC summit may have looked and sounded important, but the truth is it was largely a symbolic occasion. The real battlefield for making APEC work lies with the legislatures and government bureaucracies all round the Pacific Rim.

This is where APEC leaders will try to pass GATT, align NAFTA and AFTA with APEC, and attend to the nuts and bolts of implementing the final declaration. They also have to convince their people that free trade is the wave of the future. This is where APEC will succeed or fail, not in a five-and-half-hour gabfest (time for lunch included) in an Indonesian resort.

Like most summit meetings, such as the G-7 meetings of the top industrialized countries, the second APEC meeting was really just one huge photo opportunity...

-- Manila Times