KUALA LUMPUR, Dec 12: Southeast Asia’s premier regional grouping turned on military-ruled member state Myanmar on Monday with its clearest call yet for the junta to free opposition leader Aung San Suu Kyi from house arrest.
The 10-member Association of South East Asian Nations (Asean), dispensing with its usual hands-off approach to its most awkward member, made the call in a statement from the grouping’s current chairman, Malaysian Prime Minister Abdullah Ahmad Badawi.
“We also called for the release of those placed under detention,” Mr Abdullah said in a written statement after an annual summit of Asean leaders, which included his Myanmar counterpart.
Asean has rapidly lost patience this year with a lack of progress in Myanmar’s ‘roadmap to democracy’, describing the issue as an embarrassment and a distraction. Myanmar is shunned by the West and is seen by Washington as an ‘outpost of tyranny’.
The grouping pressured the junta at the weekend into accepting an Asean envoy to pay a planned visit to Suu Kyi, an extraordinary move by Asean’s own gentle standards of diplomacy. She has been under house arrest since 2003.
Asean wants to clear a way through the Myanmar issue so that it can focus on strengthening economic and political ties with the rest of the region — a task it wants to kick off on Wednesday with the first East Asian summit in the Malaysian capital.
“It must not be simple language,” Malaysian Foreign Minister Syed Hamid Albar told reporters, explaining that Asean had to see real progress on democracy in Myanmar. “There must be something that we can see and that we can feel.”
Only hours earlier, the grouping had agreed to draft its first charter which could enshrine human rights and democracy. It also heard calls from a tandem summit of non-government bodies for a Southeast Asian human rights commission to be set up.
POWER POLITICS: While Myanmar met a cold reception inside Asean, the focus was also on external relationships with their powerful neighbours to the north — China, Japan and South Korea — themselves at odds over Japan’s treatment of its wartime past.
The so-called Asean+3 will be joined for the first time by India, Australia and New Zealand at the East Asia summit.
Japanese Foreign Minister Taro Aso set the tone for that meeting last week when he said Tokyo welcomed the newcomers because they would lead to an open East Asia community that respected universal values such as democracy — a clear swipe at Beijing.
The birth of an East Asia summit, to be held annually in tandem with the Asean summit, has fuelled talk that it could eventually lead to a pan-Asian free-trade area spanning about half the world’s population and a fifth of global trade.
Asean made clear on Monday that it did not want the newcomers to share the driving seat on the journey toward an East Asian community.
“We reiterated our commitment to ensuring that the Asean+3 process would be the main vehicle for the realization of the East Asian community in the future,” Mr Abdullah said in his statement.
Japan and India are viewed as being keen to dilute China’s influence over the new community, but China is seen as wary of a wider grouping that would include two strong US allies, Japan and Australia, and an emerging economic rival in India. The United States was not invited to Wednesday’s meeting.
Chinese Premier Wen Jiabao reassured his neighbours on Monday that China’s rapid economic rise was an opportunity, not a threat, to the rest of East Asia. —Reuters
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