Myanmar, South China Sea in ASEAN spotlight; Marcos sees productive summit

LABUAN BAJO, Indonesia – Alarm over Myanmar’s still-unfolding deadly civil strife, including an armed attack on an aid convoy, and China’s aggressive actions in the South China Sea are expected to be put in the spotlight at the 42nd summit of the Association of Southeast Asian Nations.

Top ASEAN diplomats convened yesterday in this resort town to finalize the agenda ahead of the two-day summit of the 10-nation bloc’s heads of state.

Before departing Manila yesterday, President Marcos said he was expecting a “productive” engagement with fellow ASEAN leaders with whom he would discuss the South China Sea row as well as the prospective membership of Timor-Leste in the regional bloc.

PR 001 carrying Marcos and his delegation landed at the Komodo International Airport in Indonesia at 4:53 p.m yesterday. Marcos was accompanied by First Lady Liza Marcos.

Among the officials who joined the President’s delegation here were Speaker Martin Romualdez, former president and Pampanga Rep. Gloria Macapagal-Arroyo, Foreign Affairs Secretary Enrique Manalo, Social Welfare Secretary Rex Gatchalian, Trade Secretary Alfredo Pascual and Presidential Communications Office Secretary Cheloy Garafil.

At the foreign ministers’ meeting, meanwhile, Manalo emphasized the importance of an ASEAN-led approach to solving the Myanmar crisis.

The United States and China are not part of the twice-yearly summit, but their escalating rivalry looms large over the high-profile Asian gathering. Beijing has warned that US efforts to strengthen security alliances and intensify combat-readiness drills with Asian allies would endanger regional stability.

Founded in 1967 in the Cold-War era, ASEAN has struggled to avoid getting entangled in the major power competition as a bloc. But that often seemed futile given the regional group’s diverse membership – from authoritarian Cambodia, Laos and Myanmar, which are closely geopolitically aligned with Beijing, to liberal democracies like the Philippines, which is Washington’s oldest treaty ally in Asia and recently allowed an expansion of American military presence in the country, to China’s outrage.

The rest – Brunei, Indonesia, Malaysia, Singapore, Thailand and Vietnam – have heavy economic and security engagements with the US and China.

“ASEAN wants to remain open, to cooperate with anyone,” said Indonesian President Joko Widodo, this year’s ASEAN chair. “We also don’t want ASEAN to be anyone’s proxy.”

Bedrock principles of non-interference in each other’s domestic affairs and deciding by consensus have held the unwieldy club of tyrants, monarchs and democracies together for decades. But that approach has also constrained it from rapidly dealing with crises that spill beyond borders.

Those principles were being tested after Myanmar’s army seized power from the elected government of Aung San Suu Kyi in February 2021 and plunged the country into deadly chaos. It’s become one of ASEAN’s gravest crises since its establishment.

Myanmar military airstrikes in April killed as many as 100 people, including many children, who were attending a ceremony by opponents of army rule, according to witnesses.

Revisit principles

Lina Alexandra of the Center for Strategic and International Studies in Jakarta said ASEAN’s inability to persuasively and rapidly address a potential political conflagration like the Myanmar crisis should prompt it to take a second look at its founding principles.

“ASEAN can no longer hide under the principles of non-interference and consensus,” she said. “All of that can work in a non-urgent situation that does not require speed and immediate decision-making to control a crisis.”

Over the weekend, around the time Widodo was frantically calling for an end to such violence, a convoy delivering aid to displaced villagers and carrying Indonesian and Singaporean diplomats came under fire by unidentified men armed with pistols in Myanmar’s eastern Shan state. A security team with the convoy returned fire and a vehicle was damaged, but no one in the convoy was injured, state-run television MRTV reported.

Indonesia had arranged for the delivery of the aid after a long-delayed assessment “but it was very unfortunate that in the middle of the trip there was a shootout,” Widodo said Monday.

“This will not dampen the level of ASEAN and Indonesia to call again to stop violence,” Widodo told reporters Monday, renewing his call for dialogue among contending parties in Myanmar. “This condition will not make anyone win.”

More than 3,450 civilians have been killed by security forces since Myanmar’s military forcibly took power and thousands more remain imprisoned, said the Assistance Association for Political Prisoners, which keeps tallies of casualties and arrests linked to the repression by the military government.

As ASEAN’s current leader, Indonesia has considerably eased its fierce criticism of Myanmar’s military and took “a non-megaphone diplomacy approach” to encourage dialogue and an immediate halt to the violence, which are part of a five-point peace plan Southeast Asian leaders forged with Myanmar’s top general in 2021, Indonesian Foreign Minister Retno Marsudi said.

Uninvited

Under international pressure to do more to address the violence, ASEAN leaders stopped inviting Myanmar’s top general to their summits, instead allowing only non-political representatives. Myanmar’s military-led rulers have protested the move as a violation of the bloc’s non-interference policy.

Marcos’s Indonesia visit is his 12th official trip as President and his second to Indonesia. He made a state visit to Indonesia in September last year.

In a departure statement delivered at the Villamor Airbase, Marcos said his participation in the regional meet would help promote and protect the interests of the Philippines.

“I will join other leaders of ASEAN to advance our community-building efforts in the region and ensure the well-being and security of our people, in line with Indonesia’s chairmanship theme of ‘ASEAN Matters: Epicentrum of Growth,’” Marcos said.

“The leaders of ASEAN will also exchange views on pressing issues of common concerns such as developments in the South China Sea, the situation in Myanmar and major power rivalries, amongst others,” he added.

Aside from the Philippines, ASEAN member-countries Malaysia, Brunei and Vietnam also have overlapping claims in the South China Sea, which Beijing claims almost entirely as its own.

An international arbitral court based in The Hague invalidated China’s claim in 2016 and reaffirmed the Philippines’ maritime entitlements. China has never recognized the ruling.

Reports about Chinese ships driving away Filipino fishermen and harassing Philippine Coast Guard patrol vessels in the South China Sea have raised concerns among Beijing’s smaller neighbors and renewed calls for a binding code of conduct for claimants. – Alexis Romero, Pia Lee-Brago