Price of Asian harmony is avoiding key issues

By Paul Eckert

BANGKOK (Reuters): A smiling North Korea and polite China at a key Asian diplomatic meeting this week were signs to some that peace is upon the region, but others fear too many hard issues are being swept under the carpet for the sake of show.

The debut of North Korean Foreign Minister Paek Nam-sun at the Bangkok ASEAN Regional Forum (ARF) will probably go down as the most significant achievement of the security gathering of Asian countries and Western nations including the United States, Russia and the European Union.

But behind the diplomatic cocktail party, some diplomats readily acknowledge that it is precisely those issues which make ARF necessary: missile threats, Chinese intimidation of Taiwan, territorial disputes, and the past behavior of North Korea, which are being conveniently ignored.

In addition to North Korea, China got off lightly as the Association of Southeast Asian Nations (ASEAN) applied its non- interference principle to its ARF partners -- an approach that key ASEAN envoys frankly admitted earlier this week had failed to address local economic and political crises.

It is doubtful that treating the region's tough Communist customers with kid gloves will work any better.

Host Thailand -- which didn't want to bring up "thorny issues" to spoil the mood -- had to overlook Pyongyang's default on a US$97 million rice bill from Thailand and North Korea's 1999 kidnapping of a defecting diplomat and his family in Bangkok.

For the top diplomats of Japan and South Korea, the price of landmark meetings with Paek on Wednesday was also steep: treading lightly over North Korea's missile threat and ignoring what Japan believes was the kidnapping of 10 Japanese in the 1970s and 1980s, and as many as 400 South Koreans in the past.

The day after Japanese Foreign Minister Yohei Kono held a historic meeting with Paek, Pyongyang's Korea Central News Agency declared that: "There is no denying that Japan will launch the second Pacific war under the signboard of 'humanitarianism'."

China, the largest of the 37 members of ARF, has made a diplomatic art of pressing partners to treat it differently from others, said EU Foreign Affairs Commissioner Chris Patten.

ASEAN and others should "treat China as they would treat any other country", said Patten, who was vilified by Beijing for his bluntness as Britain's last governor of Hong Kong.

China used the forum to sound off on the "Cold War mentality" of the United States and others studying a proposed shield against ballistic missiles and rail against intervention to prevent human rights abuses in authoritarian states.

But Beijing's threats to use force to bring Taiwan to heel and the thicket of missiles it has deployed across the narrow waterway from the island were not on the agenda.

Although the China-Taiwan dispute is a major potential Asian flashpoint with global security implications, Beijing has declared the island it considers a wayward province an internal affair off limits to outsiders' concerns.

Also not discussed meaningfully were vast Chinese claims to the South China Sea and Beijing's creeping fortification of some of the islets -- an advance that will bring China's claimed maritime borders to the shores of many ASEAN states.

China's claims on the South China Sea overlap with four of ASEAN's 10 members: Brunei, Malaysia, the Philippines and Vietnam. The other ASEAN members are Cambodia, Indonesia, Laos, Myanmar, Singapore and Thailand.

"We like the ASEAN way of quiet diplomacy," a Chinese official said before the Bangkok meetings. But the official stumbled when asked to cite an instance where that worked.

Canada, which announced plans to normalize diplomatic relations with North Korea, bucked the trend and joined other Western states in ARF in raising concerns about human rights.

Ottowa, recognizing Pyongyang unconditionally, saw normalization as "a way of raising some tough, open and honest questions", said Canadian Foreign Minister Lloyd Axworthy.

"Recognition does not represent acceptance," he said.

U.S. Secretary of State Madeleine Albright, who arrived on Friday after delays due to the Middle East peace talks, is likely to step on some toes as she presses U.S. concerns on missiles in a landmark meeting with North Korea's Paek.

But China-watcher Wang Gungwu, director of the East Asian Institute at the National University of Singapore, said the quiet approach was the only way to build confidence in a nervous Asia.

"To ensure the prosperity in this region, we have to build trust," he said. "So much of traditional diplomatic policy has been built on suspicion. Asians are asking: "Why not try trust?'"