The Continuing Impotence of ASEAN

ASEAN leaders walk after they held a retreat at the 18th ASEAN Summit in Jakarta May 8, 2011. (Supri Supri/Courtesy Reuters)

Tuesday, May 10, 2011
By Joshua Kurlantzick
Council on Foreign Relations

This past week’s ASEAN Summit in Jakarta only further highlighted the organization’s continuing impotence at a time when the United States is reengaging with ASEAN and, Indonesia, returning to its role as regional power, is trying to make ASEAN work more effectively. The first U.S. ambassador to ASEAN has arrived, and Indonesian officials have become more involved in everything from Myanmar to the ongoing border dispute between Thailand and Cambodia.

Yet the organization itself still lacks coherence, strong leadership, and speed, and it increasingly appears likely that it will never have these characteristics. Despite Indonesia’s best intentions, ASEAN mediation has produced few results in the Thai-Cambodian dispute, and the organization has not been able to resolve another lingering problem: Myanmar is in line to host the 2014 ASEAN summit, which would almost surely mean the U.S. president will not attend any meetings with ASEAN that year, since he or she will not want to appear to support Myanmar. Some of the more democratic members of ASEAN, including the Philippines and Indonesia, wanted Myanmar to relinquish this right, as it had in the past, but as usual with ASEAN, the organization could reach no consensus–ASEAN Secretary General Surin Pitsuwan just endorsed Myanmar’s right to host –and so the likely result will be some kind of muddle.

Thai-Cambodia border row exposes ASEAN's Achilles heel

Jul 25, 2008
By John Grafilo DPA

Singapore - The failure of the Association of South-East Asian Nations (ASEAN) to settle an escalating border row between two of its members has sorely exposed the bloc's weakness in resolving disputes within the organization.

Fresh from its successful work in spearheading an international humanitarian mission into cyclone-devastated Myanmar, the 10-country ASEAN abdicated from mediating in the dispute between Thailand and Cambodia.

Cambodia had sought the group's help this week, but ASEAN's foreign ministers maintained that the 'bilateral process must be allowed to continue,' referring to efforts by Thailand and Cambodia to negotiate.

Singapore Foreign Minister George Yeo said that during the just concluded ASEAN ministerial meetings in the city-state, Cambodia had proposed the creation of an ASEAN contact group that could help resolve the problem.

'The proposal found favour with a number of foreign ministers, but there was also a general view that the bilateral process should be allowed to continue, and there is still no consensus for the formation of such a group,' he said.

Diplomatic sources said Thailand rejected ASEAN's mediation and was adamant the issue has to be resolved bilaterally.

Hours after ASEAN turned down Cambodia's plea, a disappointed Phnom Penh turned to the United Nations Security Council (UNSC) to intervene in the dispute.

The row over the land near the roughly 1,000-year-old Preah Vihear Temple worsened this month when UNESCO approved Cambodia's application to have the complex named a World Heritage Site.

An estimated 2,000 Thai and Cambodian troops are now facing each other across the border around the temple, situated between Si Sa Khet and Preah Vihear provinces in Thailand and Cambodia, respectively, about 400 kilometres north-east of Bangkok.

While soldiers from both sides were shown on television sitting side by side and talking to each other amiably, the situation remained uneasy.

Analysts said the dispute and the subsequent failure of ASEAN to help bickering members settle their disagreements underscored the need to flesh out a dispute-settlement mechanism provided for in the newly drafted charter for the organization that consists of Brunei, Cambodia, Indonesia, Laos, Myanmar, Malaysia, the Philippines, Singapore, Thailand and Vietnam.

The charter, which was approved during the 2007 leaders summit, also held in Singapore, would make the bloc a legal entity and a rules-based organization. It also provides for the creation of a human rights body and a dispute-settlement mechanism.

But a high-level panel of senior ASEAN officials was not due to present their recommendations on the subject until the leaders summit in Bangkok in December.

'Thailand and Cambodia have slapped ASEAN right in the face,' Indonesia's Jakarta Post newspaper charged.

'The military standoff between the two countries has embarrassed their neighbours, who take pride that their organization is one of the few with an effective mechanism to maintain regional peace,' the newspaper said in an editorial.

'Placing this dispute in the UNSC hands put ASEAN in an awkward position and makes it more difficult to find a regional solution,' it added.

Singapore Prime Minister Lee Hsien Loong said the Thai-Cambodia row underscored the need for ASEAN members to ratify the charter - Thailand, Indonesia and the Philippines have yet to do so - so the organization could have a 'rules-based governing framework' to address such issues within and outside ASEAN.

'ASEAN could not sit idly by without damaging its credibility,' he said. 'As a region, it is vital that we continue to move forward on ASEAN cooperation and integration.'

Thai-Cambodia crisis underscores Asean's failings [-The impotent ASEAN]

July 25, 2008
AFP

ASEAN'S failure to come to grips with the brewing Thai-Cambodia border conflict at ministerial talks here has underlined the organisation's inability to take action during a crisis, observers say.

Some 4,000 Thai and Cambodian soldiers are facing off over a small patch of land near the 11th-century Preah Vihear temple, in one of the most dangerous flare-ups of regional tensions in decades.

The dispute erupted just before foreign ministers of the 10-member Association of South-east Asian Nations convened for annual talks ahead of Asia's top security meeting, the Asean Regional Forum, which embraces their 17 partners including China, the United States and Russia.

Asean held crisis talks on the issue, and extracted an assurance that the neighbours would 'exert utmost efforts' to find a peaceful solution.

But Cambodia's request for the bloc to form a 'contact group' to act as an impartial broker was shot down by Thailand which opposes any intervention.

Asean's long-cherished convention of making decisions by consensus and not interfering in members' internal affairs made it impossible to move forward, and instead Cambodia has asked the United Nations Security Council to act.

'The thing is, Asean is not built to intervene in these kinds of disputes except to urge restraint,' said a former secretary-general of the group, Mr Rodolfo Severino.

'Asean has no armed force, it has no powers of coercion. So it's just the moral weight of the association that's being brought to bear,' he said.

Asean took a dim view of Cambodia's decision to go over its head and appeal to the UN, which some saw as an unwelcome internationalisation of the conflict.

'There is a view that this may be a little premature,' Singapore Foreign Minister George Yeo said on Thursday at the close of the Asean Regional Forum, whose members called for 'restraint, a speedy resolution and to maintain the status quo'.

Mr Tim Huxley from the International Institute for Strategic Studies in Singapore said the mild response showed Asean was 'still underdeveloped as a security grouping'.

'For many years Asean has talked about doing more in the security sphere,' he said. 'If it's going to maintain its relevance it's going to have to try a bit harder.'

'The issue has now gone to the UN Security Council and I think it's an illustration of how far South-east Asian countries still have to go in developing a security community.'

The same shortcomings have vexed Asean's attempts to rein in member state Myanmar, which has earned widespread condemnation for its human rights abuses and refusal to shift towards democracy.

Myanmar came to this week's talks in the bad books for extending opposition leader Aung San Suu Kyi's house arrest for another year, and refusing to quickly open its doors to a foreign-led relief effort after a catastrophic cyclone in May.

But it escaped with effectively a slap on the wrist. Ministers said after an informal dinner on Sunday that they were 'deeply disappointed' with the action against Ms Aung San Suu Kyi, but in the formal communique the words were omitted.

Mr Huxley said the bloc has set itself lofty standards, including a goal to establish a political and security community by 2015.

But in a grouping that includes authoritarian states, democracies and semi-democracies, a military dictatorship, and an absolute monarchy, that kind of cohesiveness will be difficult to achieve.

Asean Secretary-General Surin Pitsuwan, himself a former Thai foreign minister, defended the bloc's failure to achieve a breakthrough in the crisis with Cambodia.

'I think the entry point has to be very carefully chosen,' he said.

On this issue, intervention would have to wait until 'both sides are more ready and emotions calm down a little bit', he said.

ASEAN and the temple of doom [... which reveals ASEAN impotency]

Jul 24th 2008
The Economist
BANGKOK AND PULAONG

Modest progress on Myanmar is overshadowed by the threat of war between Thailand and Cambodia

FOUR months ago, when Thailand’s prime minister, Samak Sundaravej, visited his Cambodian counterpart, Hun Sen, the two countries seemed capable of dealing peacefully with a long-running dispute over an ancient temple on their borders. Thailand backed Cambodia’s bid to have the 11th-century Preah Vihear temple listed as a “world heritage” site and both sides agreed to keep talking over their overlapping claims to a nearby patch of land.

Since then, things have deteriorated to the point where each side has sent thousands of troops to the area. This week talks between the two countries agreed no more than to try to avoid settling things by force. Cambodia asked the UN Security Council to hold an emergency meeting over what it called a state of “imminent war”.

The armed confrontation between two members overshadowed this week’s meeting in Singapore of foreign ministers from the Association of South-East Asian Nations (ASEAN). For all its shortcomings ASEAN had seemed at least to have banished the threat of war between its members. Now even this seems in doubt. ASEAN had hoped to trumpet its achievements over Myanmar, where relief supplies are now flowing fairly freely following cyclone Nargis in May. But the Thai-Cambodian dispute stole the show. Thailand rejected ASEAN’s offer to mediate. As ever, other member countries were reluctant to press too hard. They pleaded unsuccessfully with Cambodia not to show up ASEAN’s failure by pursuing its appeal to the Security Council.

For Cambodians the 900-year-old Hindu temple, perched on an escarpment, is a melancholy reminder of their forebears’ once-mighty Khmer empire, which for centuries ruled much of Indochina. Thailand is still smarting from a 1962 ruling by the International Court of Justice, awarding the temple to Cambodia (but not specifying where the border should be drawn). A loose coalition of Bangkok’s royalist elite, opposed to Mr Samak’s government, has whipped up public outrage over its backing for the world heritage listing, which a UN committee approved this month. Thailand’s Constitutional Court ruled that the government should have consulted parliament first, prompting the resignation of the foreign minister.

In recent years people on both sides have made a living trading with each other and serving tourists. Now, with the area swamped with soldiers, the headman of Pulaong, the village nearest the temple on the Thai side, says dozens of small businesses have closed. On July 17th local shopkeepers traded punches with anti-government protesters from Bangkok.

It is hard now for either country to back down. Mr Samak cannot afford to look weak, and nor can Mr Hun Sen, who is facing a general election on July 27th. He is sure to win it but his critics accuse him of weakness in the face of Thai aggression.

Bilateral talks will resume after the Cambodian election, when it is hoped a peaceful resolution will be easier to reach. But with so many troops and weapons in the disputed area, there is the constant risk of a mishap, leading to bloodshed. In 2003 a mob burned Thailand’s embassy in the Cambodian capital, Phnom Penh, over misunderstood comments by a Thai actress that were seen as asserting Thai sovereignty over Cambodia’s famous Angkor Wat temple complex.

If ASEAN were unable to prevent another such accident, the world’s doubts about the block’s relevance would only deepen. ASEAN had hoped to recover its reputation somewhat with the publication at the summit of a report showing progress in bringing relief to Myanmar’s cyclone victims. ASEAN’s initial response had been slow and feeble: it could have embarrassed its rogue member’s military dictators into allowing in more aid, more quickly, by making a generous and public offer of assistance that, coming from “friendly” neighbours rather than hostile Western powers, would have been harder to reject. Belatedly, ASEAN proposed a “tripartite” group—itself plus the UN and the Burmese government—to oversee relief efforts, thereby giving the regime cover to soften its opposition to foreign aid workers’ presence in the devastated Irrawaddy delta.

The tripartite group’s report to the summit contained fairly good news: although aid workers were only able to offer shelter to 30% of those left homeless by the storm, locals have got on with it themselves and rebuilt about 80% of the 800,000 destroyed or damaged homes. Enough medical aid has arrived to avert a much-feared outbreak of deadly diseases. A senior relief-agency official says ASEAN’s involvement has eased the flow of aid workers and supplies down to the delta. But he says much of the credit is due personally to George Yeo, the foreign minister of Singapore (ASEAN’s current chair), and Surin Pitsuwan, ASEAN’s secretary-general, who are “pushing the envelope” of the block’s rule of non-interference.

Mr Yeo said Myanmar had hinted that Aung San Suu Kyi, the country’s opposition leader, might soon be freed from house arrest. Embarrassingly, his Burmese counterpart swiftly denied this. In its communiqué ASEAN used its strongest language yet to demand that Myanmar release Miss Suu Kyi and other political prisoners, and hold fair elections. But the Burmese generals know that the block is still far from taking any action to back its words. The summit sought to make progress on a new ASEAN human-rights body but the Burmese said it must not have powers to monitor or investigate abuses—only a toothless one would do.

Singapore’s prime minister, Lee Hsien Loong, reminded ASEAN leaders that they had, in 41 years of summitry, honoured only 30% of the fairly modest agreements they had signed. Other, broader Asian forums are developing, he noted, posing a danger that ASEAN might be sidelined. But, as he also noted, the block’s biggest members are preoccupied with domestic matters—political crises in Thailand and Malaysia, approaching elections in Indonesia and the Philippines—that leave little time for thinking about regional unity.

This year saw the end of one of ASEAN’s traditional contributions to that unity—the annual cabaret at which its foreign ministers and their guests entertain each other and make fools of themselves. As host, the famously fun-loving Singaporean government dropped the event. Maybe there is not much to laugh about.

Dictators better than disintegration [-Another case of ASEAN impotency?]

By Girlie Linao

Singapore (dpa) - Despite mounting international pressure for tougher action against errant member Burma, the Association of Southeast Asian Nations is not expected to take visible action when its leaders meet this week in Singapore.

While the 13th Asean Leaders' Summit comes just two months after a violent crackdown on pro-democracy demonstrations in Burma, the crisis did not merit a special agenda during the annual meeting of the 10-member regional bloc.

Officials, however, maintained that the Burmese issue would be discussed during the summit, when the leaders were expected to ask Burmese Prime Minister Thein Sein to explain the junta's violent response to the mass protests led by Buddhist monks.

After the meeting, the leaders would probably again express disappointment, impatience or even "revulsion" over the recent crackdowns in Rangoon as well as call on the military junta to hasten the implementation of democratic reforms as promised.

While such statements can be scathing, the rebukes often seem to be moves merely aimed at appeasing critics, including key dialogue partners the European Union and the United Sates, rather than a real step towards action for the 40-year-old organization.

Diplomats said the group's non-confrontational attitude towards Burma stems from fears that any forceful bid to push the military junta out of power would lead to the country's disintegration, much like the Balkans.

"The fear is that you break up (Burma) if you use more than threat of force because (opposition leader) Aung San Suu Kyi, despite all her good intentions, doesn't have the strength to do governance," one Southeast Asian diplomat who requested anonymity said.

The diplomat warned that if Burma plunges into civil war, neighbours such as China, Thailand, Cambodia [KI-Media note: Cambodia has no common border with Burma] and India would rush in to stake a claim on lands near their borders.

"If there is no leadership, (Burma) will disintegrate," the official added. "Would you want a Yugoslavia in your backyard? Why should your backyard be in that negative situation?"

The diplomat noted that constructive engagement with Burma was still the best option now since Asean does not have the military "capacity" to do much and critics such as the US and the EU have failed to "do more than what they are already doing now."

Asean groups Brunei, Indonesia, Malaysia, the Philippines, Singapore, Thailand, Vietnam, Cambodia, Laos and Burma.

Even with the scheduled signing on Tuesday of a landmark charter that supposedly commits all members to the principles of democracy and protection of human rights, not much change can be expected with the way Asean deals with Burma.

Without provisions for punitive actions, such as expulsion or suspension, against erring members, the charter leaves it to Asean leaders to decide if sanctions are necessary and if so, what punishments to mete out.

Democracy and human rights groups, the US Senate and other critics have called on Asean to either expel or suspend Burma. They have also urged the bloc not to allow Rangoon to sign the charter until the crisis is resolved.

But Asean leaders were not likely to heed any of these calls when they meet in Singapore on Tuesday.

While Singapore Prime Minister Lee Hsien Loong noted that the situation in Burma was "not sustainable," he also admitted that Asean's influence on Burma is limited.

Burma "is a member of the Asean family," Lee told the Straits Times. "No one wishes a family member ill."

"What else can you really do," added one Filipino diplomat ahead of the summit.

The official said Asean supports efforts by the special envoy of the UN Secretary General, Ibrahim Gambari, to jump-start dialogues between the military junta and opposition groups towards the implementation of genuine democratic reforms.

"The feeling of Asean is let's see how far the Gambari process can go and at this stage, coming up with alternate mechanisms may not necessarily be helpful to Gambari," the diplomat said. "You might create a problem if you establish another group."

One diplomat said that if such critics as the US and the EU were so adamant for change in Burma, "why don't they do it themselves instead of yapping at Asean?"