An ASEAN success story [... only time will tell]

March 1, 2011
By Michael Vatikiotis
MacArthur Foundation

A landmark agreement among ASEAN foreign ministers meeting in Jakarta on 22nd February to send a small team of up to forty Indonesian civilian and military observers to a disputed area along the Thai Cambodian border has not only helped prevent continued fighting between Thai and Cambodian forces, but also potentially given a boost to ASEAN’s long term capacity to manage internal conflict.

Limited as the observer mission’s terms of reference will be, few observers imagined such an outcome possible just a few weeks earlier when military forces clashed over a 4 square kilometer piece of land surrounding a Hindu temple that straddles the border. Cambodia called for UN intervention and took the issue to the United Nations Security Council, whilst Thailand insisted that the dispute could be settled bilaterally and rejected ASEAN’s overtures of help.

Indonesia as ASEAN Chair took the lead in pressing the case for ASEAN assistance to help resolve the dispute. Indonesian Foreign Minister Marty Natalegawa mobilized swiftly, travelling to Phnom Penh and Bangkok as fighting continued along the border in early February. He also accompanied the foreign ministers of both countries at a UN Security Council Meeting convened on the dispute in mid-February.

The UNSC in effect referred the dispute back to ASEAN, which paved the way for a meeting of ASEAN Foreign ministers in Jakarta on the 22nd.

The level of international concern and attention turned the spotlight on ASEAN, which despite provisions for internal dispute settlement embedded in bedrock treaties, has never successfully established a formal mechanism for resolving internal conflict between member states.

Fortunately for ASEAN, the foreign ministers were able to agree on a tangible outcome. Indonesia was asked to send a team of civilian and military observers to the area. In addition, the ministers offered to assist bilateral negotiations between the two countries. Significantly, the move was widely applauded by ASEAN’s dialogue partners, including China.

Critics might say that this amounts to another ad hoc arrangement, and will watch closely to see if ASEAN builds on these developments to move towards more formal structures and mechanisms. Indonesia for example has long advocated a formal peacekeeping force on standby to deal with just such a crisis. The argument is that without formal structures and mechanisms in place, it takes too long to mobilize and act, allowing the conflict to escalate.

Realistically, however, ASEAN member states won’t support the kinds of elaborate formal structures for conflict management that, for example, the African Union has in place. Nor is there an appetite for strengthening the security functions of the secretariat. ASEAN must therefore move cautiously.

On the other hand, the Thai Cambodian crisis has underscored the threat of internal conflict, and Indonesia’s chairmanship of ASEAN this year offers a real opportunity to begin thinking about how ASEAN can grapple with its security issues within acceptable parameters.

In this respect, precedent does provide some momentum. The idea of sending observers from one ASEAN country to another grew out of Indonesia’s earlier experience with ASEAN military monitors in Aceh, under the Cessation of Hostilities Agreement brokered by the HD Centre between the Indonesian Government an the Free Aceh Movement in 2003. Thai military personnel also joined an earlier monitoring mission to East Timor before independence. These light peace-monitoring rather than peace-keeping missions have helped generate confidence that military officials from neighbouring countries can help on the ground without violating sovereignty.

Nor was it possible for Thailand to realistically resist ASEAN’s offer to help, when Thailand has long been an advocate of ASEAN assistance to help Myanmar deal with its own internal conflict. Now Thailand joins Indonesia as a sizable member state that has called on its neighbours to help, which will reinforce and support future ASEAN collective action.

There is a long way to go before ASEAN can boast a robust and effective response to internal conflict within the ten-nation association. But given how close two neighbouring ASEAN states came to a war along their common border, there is now no longer any doubt about the need for a more effective mechanism to defuse and settle conflict. And it’s not as if ASEAN will be doing anything that requires major negotiation or agreement between member states. The ASEAN Political-Security Community Blueprint, formally adopted at the 14th ASEAN Summit in 2009, calls for the strengthening of existing mechanisms for the settlement of disputes. It also urges the development of ASEAN modalities for good offices, conciliation and mediation.