Jakarta trip continues Vietnam's ASEAN flirtation
Jakarta trip continues Vietnam's ASEAN flirtation
HANOI (Reuter): Vietnamese President Le Duc Anh's talks in
Indonesia next week continue an increasingly steamy affair
between communist Hanoi and its non-communist neighbours,
diplomats said yesterday.
Anh's Jakarta visit, due to start on Tuesday, rounds off a
series of top-level contacts which appear to have advanced
Vietnam's bid to join the Association of Southeast Asian Nations
(ASEAN), they said.
Communist Party General Secretary Do Muoi visited Malaysia
last month. Philippines President Fidel Ramos, Singapore Prime
Minister Goh Chok Tong and Thai Prime Minister Chuan Leekpai held
talks in Hanoi.
Following these contacts, Anh's visit to Indonesia will leave
Brunei as the only one of the six ASEAN members with which
Vietnam's top leaders have not had recent talks.
Asian diplomats said the swift pace set by Vietnam was a sign
of its keeness to join ASEAN -- at whose meetings it is already
an observer -- as a cornerstone of its policy of diversifying
diplomatic links.
Once locked into the communist network centred on Moscow and
mired by its occupation of Cambodia until 1989, Vietnam has built
up links with Western and other non-communist states in the 1990s
while trying to mend fences with China and other old foes.
"Everyone's talking about a much shorter time frame (for ASEAN
membership)," one diplomat said. "Initially the talk was of the
year 2000 but now they're talking about the next few years."
Vietnam has only said it wants to join the hitherto non-
communist grouping "at an appropriate time", and its ASEAN
interlocutors have given few hints of when that might be.
Singapore's Goh was the most specific, saying he did not
expect Hanoi formally to apply for membership within 18 months.
The Philippines' Ramos said Vietnamese membership was "now a
matter no longer of policy or principle but merely of time and
procedure".
In Indonesia, Anh, a 73-year-old former military commander,
will be returning a historic visit to Hanoi in 1990 by President
Souharto, who became the first non-communist Southeast Asian
leader to visit Vietnam since the Vietnam War ended in 1975.
During the war, some ASEAN members such as Thailand and the
Philippines supported the U.S.-backed South Vietnamese government
which was defeated by communist armies led from Hanoi.
There are few problems to settle during Anh's visit.
Indonesian officials said this year they saw Vietnam as more
flexible on a boundary dispute in the South China Sea.
Indonesia is not directly involved in disputes more important
to Hanoi such as Vietnam's rivalry with China, Taiwan and three
other claimants over the Spratly Islands.
Indonesia -- not a party to the dispute -- is trying to defuse
tension over the potentially oil-rich archipelago.
A key issue in Anh's talks, due to end on April 29, is likely
to be Indonesia's wish to speed up repatriation of about 10,000
Vietnamese boat people from its Galang Island refugee camp near
Singapore, which it wants to develop as an industrial zone.