Socioeconomic challenges for the ASEAN People's Assembly

Socioeconomic challenges for the ASEAN People's Assembly

Eric Teo Chu Cheow, Singapore

The 4th ASEAN People's Assembly (APA) was held in Manila May
10-13, bringing together more than one hundred ASEAN participants
from NGOs, the academia, the media, peoples' organizations, civil
society and civic groups. There were also some fifty foreign
observers from regional countries and international players.

This is the 4th in a series of APAs, which began with the
Batam Assembly in November 2000, organized to coincide with the
2000 ASEAN Summit in Singapore. The 2nd APA was held in Bali in
July 2002 and the 3rd in Manila in September 2003.

From the 2nd APA came the initiative to do the human rights
and gender scorecards, whereas the 3rd APA launched a human
development report for ASEAN, which was presented this year at
the 4th Assembly.

The convening of APA is based on the rationale that community-
building in ASEAN must include all sectors of society, as ASEAN
must be made relevant to the ordinary citizens of each of the
member states, as it is already to the elite communities of the
organization.

In this perspective, for ASEAN to build a genuine Southeast
Asian Community, it must be based on a wider and deeper
understanding of ASEAN amongst its citizens. The ASEAN Vision
2020 in fact seeks to build a community of caring societies, the
component elements of which target the currently unsatisfactory
socio-economic conditions affecting its population at the
grassroots level.

At the core of this initiative is ASEAN-ISIS, a network of
nine ASEAN think tanks, which conceived this project way back in
1996. In the Vientiane Action Plan adopted at the last ASEAN
Summit, both APA and ASEAN-ISIS were mentioned as initiatives
ASEAN governments are supporting in order to bring the peoples of
ASEAN closer, together with the ASEAN Business Advisory Council,
the ASEAN Parliamentary Organization and the ASEAN University
Network.

Moreover, APA has an important role in the current ASEAN
efforts to build its three communities, as "the pillars of
ASEAN's future". These three communities include the ASEAN
Security Community, ASEAN Economic Community and the ASEAN Social
and Cultural Community, commonly known as the three "P"s, for
peace, prosperity and people respectively. APA is thus an
integral part of the ASEAN Social and Cultural Community, which
should 'bond' the peoples of ASEAN together more tightly.

But the challenges for ASEAN are enormous in the socio-
economic arena, as well as in social justice and good governance.
ASEAN's human rights and democracy scorecards were presented at
the recent Assembly, as well as the gender scorecard and its
human development report.

There is still much progress to be made here, as peace and
reconciliation still need to be enhanced within ASEAN. In on-
going religious, economic and communal conflicts, the common and
indigenous peoples of ASEAN are perceived to be at the mercy of
diverse interest groups, as numerous panelists at the Assembly
had pointed out. Refugees, displaced persons and human
trafficking still constitute a scourge across vast areas of
ASEAN.

Human security and conflict prevention remain a hope for many
amongst the ASEAN poor, just as social justice and good corporate
and public governance still remain elusive for them.

In fact, the 'responsibility to protect' is now a slogan
ringing across ASEAN too, but ASEAN governments need to adopt
this approach and mindset more in order to effectively put this
into practice. The role of the media and civil society was
examined, just as natural disaster relief and management came to
the fore at the Assembly, given the Dec. 26 tsunami and the
subsequent earthquake that shook Nias in Indonesia.

The Assembly thus provided a useful platform to discuss all
aspects of comprehensive and human security, especially from
ASEAN NGOs' perspective.

As regionalism gathers momentum, ASEAN's peoples must be given
more say and a greater stake in ASEAN, especially as the future
Southeast Asian Community's principal share-holder.

But as ASEAN governments are so diverse and differ greatly in
accountability to their people, there is also a wide range of
differences in the level of participatory politics within the
organization; moreover, the levels of people's participation
within ASEAN are still subjected to different interpretations and
implementation, just as Myanmar poses a direct political problem
to the organization; in fact, Myanmar has been completely absent
from APA thus far, as no Myanmar delegate has frequented APA for
obvious political reason.

But popular socio-economic participation must form the crux of
ASEAN peoples' participation in the organization's decision-
making process, as ASEAN seeks not only to enlarge the economic
pie with sound growth and sustainable policies, but also to
implement a greater and wider social redistribution of the fruits
of growth, progress and prosperity across the region and within
individual countries.

Therein lies perhaps ASEAN's greatest challenge ahead, as
socio-economic imperatives could eventually also contain the
seeds of social and political instability in the region. It is
thus for this reason that socio-economic problems and challenges
constituted, rightly so, the main crux of the APA's agenda.

A more even social redistribution, with a strong
implementation of social justice, is thus necessary to help
ensure economic sustainability, as well as social and political
stability.

Therein lies the fundamental and most important challenge for
ASEAN, as it builds a true Southeast Asian Community of "caring
societies".

The peoples' voice must be heard in this regard and APA
provides the useful platform for ASEAN to voice out. Only with
the consensus of the ASEAN peoples would social redistribution
and social justice be effectively implemented across ASEAN lands,
so as to provide political and social stability for continuous
economic growth and progress.

The writer, a business consultant and strategist, is Council
Secretary of the Singapore Institute for International Affairs
(SIIA), and a role-player and participant at the 4th ASEAN
Peoples' Assembly.