|
|
Change Your Life! |
10-member ASEAN meeting begins today |
|
News
|
|
|
July 24, 2000
BANGKOK (AP) - North Korea's attendance at a regional security forum here this week, a major step toward breaking decades of isolation, will likely grab the headlines, but its hosts will also be grappling with their own issues of cooperation and openness. The 10-member Association of Southeast Asian Nations will be holding its annual round of ministerial meetings, including the ASEAN Regional Forum on security issues in the Asia-Pacific region. beginning Monday. For the first time, North Korea will participate in the forum, which is already attended by representatives of global powers such as the United States, European Union and Japan. But while the focus may be on Pyongyang's high-level bilateral contacts at the meeting and its sidelines, ASEAN will be considering measures which could for the first time open up the problems of each member-state to the scrutiny of the others. The prospect is not appreciated by ASEAN's more closed societies, who look upon it as interference in domestic affairs. Thailand, the outgoing chair of ASEAN, has for the past two years been advocating revamping the grouping toward further openness after it failed to effectively respond to its biggest test in a decade, Asia's 1997 economic crisis and the social upheaval that followed. It is seeking to allow member states to poke their noses into each other's problems, when those problems spill across borders. At Thailand's bidding, ASEAN ministers will consider the idea of establishing a ministerial "troika," a three-country diplomatic squad to deal with regional crises, such as forest fires that spread haze across frontiers and last year's violence in East Timor after it voted for independence from Indonesia. At the same time, transnational crime, including trafficking in drugs, arms and human beings, will for the first time be discussed at the ASEAN Regional Forum. Both measures begin to breach a founding principle of ASEAN, set up with five members 33 years ago as a Cold War bulwark against communism: that a country's internal affairs, particularly its politics, are its own affair. ASEAN now comprises liberal democracies like Thailand and the Philippines, and one-party regimes such as Laos, Vietnam and Myanmar. Other members are Brunei, Cambodia, Indonesia, Malaysia and Singapore. "The time has come for us to enhance our interaction to make ASEAN relevant for the new globalized world," Thai Foreign Minister Surin Pitsuwan said at a press conference last week. Yet efforts to broaden cooperation beyond traditional areas like trade and investment - for example, into cross-border concerns like drugs and terrorism - could run into opposition. Raising the issue of drugs is unlikely to be welcomed by military-run Myanmar, admitted to ASEAN in 1997 despite the opposition of Western nations who abhor its poor human rights record. Thailand, furious over the millions of methamphetamine tablets made in Myanmar and smuggled in over their long common border, has vowed to take up the matter, which has been roiling Thai-Myanmar relations. Myanmar, which is also the world's second largest producer of heroin after Afghanistan, says it is doing all it can to combat the drug menace. Meanwhile, the Thai proposal to institute a troika system - modeled on the European Union's practice of having a three-nation ad hoc group consult on urgent issues - could be shot down. "Personally, I think that the troika is a good idea but don't think it will go through easily," said Eric Teo, honorary secretary of the Singapore Institute of International Affairs Council, an independent think-tank. "Unlike the EU, ASEAN may not be quite ready for it." The difficulties in expanding ASEAN's role underscore the political differences among its members, which in some cases have widened in the wake of the economic crisis. Democracy has come to what had been ASEAN's biggest dictatorship, Indonesia. But in countries like Myanmar, Laos and Vietnam, unelected regimes responded to the perceived threat to their political hegemony by only tightening their grip on power. The ideological gulf was plain when Thailand's Surin declared that this is an age of "globalization and democratization." It is not a question of outside interference, he said in an address to an academic audience on the eve of the ASEAN meeting. "It's whether you want to prepare for the tsunami of globalization or you want to fall back into the cocoons of comfort that we used to be in 20 or 30 years ago."
|