Delay membership: ASEAN founder

Delay membership: ASEAN founder

BANGKOK (AP): One of the key founders of the Association of Southeast Asian Nations has urged that the admission of three new members -- Cambodia, Laos and Myanmar -- be delayed.

Thanat Khoman, Thailand's foreign minister from 1959-1971, warned in a letter published in the newspaper The Nation yesterday, that "Premature expansion will be deleterious to both the candidates and ASEAN."

"It would seem opportune" to add new members on the 30th anniversary of the regional cooperation group, especially as it would bring in the remaining countries in the area, he wrote.

He said, however, that it was "a well-known fact that some candidates still have some weighty domestic problems to resolve or, by their own admission, are neither financially nor administratively capable of properly discharging their membership obligations."