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By Sarah Stewart
SINGAPORE: Asean’s failure to come to grips
with the brewing Thai-Cambodia border conflict at ministerial talks
here has underlined the organization’s inability to take action
during a crisis, observers say.
Some 4,000 Thai and Cambodian soldiers are
facing off over a small patch of land near the 11th-century Preah
Vihear temple, in one of the most dangerous flare-ups of regional
tensions in decades.
The dispute erupted just before foreign
ministers of the 10-member Association of Southeast Asian Nations
convened for annual talks ahead of Asia’s top security meeting,
the Asean Regional Forum, which embraces their 17 partners including
China, the US and Russia.
Asean held crisis talks on the issue, and
extracted an assurance that the neighbors would “exert utmost
efforts” to find a peaceful solution.
But Cambodia’s request for the bloc to form a
“contact group” to act as an impartial broker was shot down by
Thailand which opposes any intervention.
Asean’s long-cherished convention of making
decisions by consensus and not interfering in members’ internal
affairs made it impossible to move forward, and instead Cambodia has
asked the United Nations Security Council to act.
“The thing is, Asean is not built to intervene
in these kinds of disputes except to urge restraint,” said a
former secretary-general of the group, Rodolfo Severino.
“Asean has no armed force, it has no powers of
coercion. So it’s just the moral weight of the association
that’s being brought to bear,” he told AFP.
Asean took a dim view of Cambodia’s decision
to go over its head and appeal to the UN, which some saw as an
unwelcome internationalization of the conflict.
“There is a view that this may be a little
premature,” Singapore Foreign Minister George Yeo said Thursday at
the close of the Asean Regional Forum, whose members called for
“restraint, a speedy resolution and to maintain the status quo”.
Tim Huxley from the International Institute for
Strategic Studies in Singapore said the mild response showed Asean
was “still underdeveloped as a security grouping.”
“For many years Asean has talked about doing
more in the security sphere,” he said. “If it’s going to
maintain its relevance it’s going to have to try a bit harder.”
“The issue has now gone to the UN Security
Council and I think it’s an illustration of how far Southeast
Asian countries still have to go in developing a security
community.”
The same shortcomings have vexed Asean’s
attempts to rein in member state Myanmar, which has earned
widespread condemnation for its human rights abuses and refusal to
shift towards democracy.
Myanmar came to this week’s talks in the bad
books for extending opposition leader Aung San Suu Kyi’s house
arrest for another year, and refusing to quickly open its doors to a
foreign-led relief effort after a catastrophic cyclone in May.
But it escaped with effectively a slap on the
wrist. Ministers said after an informal dinner Sunday that they were
“deeply disappointed” with the action against Aung San Suu Kyi,
but in the formal communique the words were omitted.
Huxley said the bloc has set itself lofty
standards, including a goal to establish a political and security
community by 2015.
But in a grouping that includes authoritarian
states, democracies and semi-democracies, a military dictatorship,
and an absolute monarchy, that kind of cohesiveness will be
difficult to achieve.
Asean Secretary-General Surin Pitsuwan, himself
a former Thai foreign minister, defended the bloc’s failure to
achieve a breakthrough in the crisis with Cambodia.
“I think the entry point has to be very
carefully chosen,” he said.
On this issue, intervention would have to wait
until “both sides are more ready and emotions calm down a little
bit,” he told Agence France-Presse.
-- AFP
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