JakartaPost-Jan 6
The Myanmar crisis may have accentuated differences between ASEAN member states and will be one of Indonesia’s most pressing challenges during its chairmanship, experts have said. But they also suggested there was still reason to remain hopeful, underlining that differing opinions and divergent governance had always been characteristic of the 10-member bloc. As such, disagreements over conflict resolution were neither unprecedented nor impossible to overcome. “Conflicting opinions within the ASEAN landscape are not new. […] But it is a challenge. It will always be,” Dewi Fortuna Anwar, senior ASEAN researcher at the National Research and Innovation Agency (BRIN), told The Jakarta Post. On Dec. 22, foreign ministers from Myanmar, Thailand, Cambodia, Vietnam and Laos met informally in Bangkok to discuss progress on the Five-Point Consensus, ASEAN’s peace plan for Myanmar. While maritime states like Indonesia and Malaysia were inconspicuously absent from the meeting, which the Indonesian Foreign Ministry told reporters was “informal” and not representative of ASEAN, some media reported this as a sign of an increasingly divided organization. A week later, Malaysian Foreign Minister Zambry Abdul Kadir said although the informal meeting might cause misunderstanding, ASEAN could not force any party to terminate their relationship or engagement with Myanmar. “Any attempts at resolving the Myanmar crisis should be based on the 5PC,” he asserted, referring to the bloc’s Myanmar strategy. Dafri Agussalim, an international relations expert at Gadjah Mada University (UGM), said that recent developments clearly indicated that ASEAN was “not in a good place”, and that an internal fracture would be difficult for Indonesia to overcome unless it decided to take a novel approach. Read more at: https://www.thejakartapost.com/world/2023/01/05/myanmar-may-have-highlighted-differences-but-asean-still-united-experts.html.
