No ASEAN deal on Thai-Cambodian row
JAKARTA—Southeast Asian leaders failed to achieve any breakthrough on Sunday to end deadly border skirmishes between Thailand and Cambodia that overshadowed a regional summit in Jakarta on economic integration.
The clashes around crumbling Hindu temples in disputed areas have starkly illustrated the tensions between countries in the Association of Southeast Asian Nations (ASEAN) that could derail plans to create a single economic community by 2015, and the apparent inability of the bloc to deal with disagreements.
Indonesia, host of the 18th ASEAN summit, has been pressing for a deal that would prevent the meeting being marred by the border dispute. But in the end all that was achieved was a face-saving announcement that the Thai and Cambodian foreign ministers would stay an extra day in Jakarta for more talks.
“I’m coming here not to create a war of words,” Cambodian Prime Minister Hun Sen told a news conference in which he announced the extra round of talks. The two sides have spoken plenty of times in recent weeks, but without finding a resolution to clashes that have killed 18 people since April.
At the end of the summit, the leaders declared that the Thai-Cambodian border dispute should be peacefully resolved in the spirit of ASEAN solidarity.
Indonesian President Susilo Bambang Yudhoyono said Indonesia would provide a “facilitator” to assist in ending the dispute.
The summit agreed to adopt three joint statements, one on enhancing cooperation against trafficking in persons, another on establishing an ASEAN institute for peace and reconciliation, and the third on forging an ASEAN position on global issues.
Deadliest in 2 decades
ASEAN, a collection of authoritarian states and nascent democracies, has a policy of non-interference in each other’s domestic affairs, and so is struggling to resolve a spat fueled by domestic nationalist sentiment ahead of likely Thai elections.
The conflict is the deadliest between countries in the region since Thailand and Laos fought a border war in 1987-88.
Hun Sen described the plenary meeting on Saturday as tense, as both sides blamed the other at the summit for adding new conditions that delayed an agreement, but he added that the atmosphere in a meeting with Thai Prime Minister Abhisit Vejjajiva on Sunday, brokered by Indonesia, was good.
“It is very important that we hold together,” Yudhoyono told the region’s leaders at its annual two-day regional summit, adding the group faced enormous challenges.
Security challenges
Singapore leader Lee Hsien Loong did not attend the summit, staying at home for general elections that saw the ruling People’s Action Party easily returned to power as expected. But the foreign minister lost his seat in a landmark vote for an opposition bolstered by a more skeptical younger generation.
The rest of the region’s leaders, who met in a cavernous conference center with an intricately carved wooden ceiling, have also struggled to engage the region’s 500 million people in a project to build an economic community with free movement of people and goods by 2015.
In a venue patrolled by hundreds of police and military personnel after worries over reprisal attacks by Islamists in Indonesia following the killing of Osama bin Laden, leaders discussed security challenges such as food and energy supply.
The fast-growing region has again become a magnet for emerging market investors and is trying to grow its $1.8-trillion economy by negotiating bilateral trade deals with the European Union and improving transport links with key trading partner China.
Previous meetings have often been overshadowed by controversy over member Burma (Myanmar), which wants to host the gathering in 2014. Burma’s bid for ASEAN presidency would almost certainly attract howls of protest from the West, further denting the bloc’s credibility. Reports from Reuters and Norman Bordadora
