Since assuming ASEAN’s rotating chairmanship this year, Indonesia has initiated some 110 meetings with groups in Myanmar and provided humanitarian aid to build trust, Indonesian Foreign Minister Retno Marsudi said, adding that continuing violence would hurt efforts to return the nation to normalcy within ASEAN. That prompted the regional group to take an unprecedented punitive step by barring Myanmar’s military leaders from its top-level gatherings, including the ministerial meetings, that Indonesia will host. Myanmar’s military government has largely ignored a five-point plan by ASEAN heads of state that includes an immediate end to the violence and dialogue among all contending parties. More than 3,750 civilians, including pro-democracy activists, have been killed by security forces and nearly 24,000 arrested since the military takeover, according to the Assistance Association for Political Prisoners, a rights group that keeps tallies of such arrests and casualties.
But that approach has also prevented the 10-nation bloc from dealing swiftly with crises that spill across borders.ĪSEAN’s principles have been tested since Myanmar’s army seized power from the elected government of Aung San Suu Kyi in February 2021 and plunged the country into deadly chaos.
The top diplomats of ASEAN, which includes Brunei, Cambodia, Indonesia, Laos, Malaysia, Myanmar, the Philippines, Singapore, Thailand and Vietnam, will meet Tuesday and Wednesday before their Asian and Western counterparts join them in discussions on Thursday and Friday.įounded in 1967, the often-unwieldy collective of democracies, autocracies and monarchies has been held together for decades by bedrock principles of non-interference in each other’s domestic affairs and consensus-based decision-making. It’s also unclear who among the key figures in the world’s most intractable conflicts will meet on the sidelines of the group’s ministerial meetings. North Korea has yet to say whether its foreign minister, Choe Son Hui, will attend the ASEAN Regional Forum, an annual regional security meeting. Secretary of State Antony Blinken, Russian Foreign Minister Sergey Lavrov and Chinese Foreign Minister Qin Gang participate as dialogue partners of the Association of Southeast Asian Nations foreign ministers in the Indonesian capital of Jakarta. Russia’s year-old invasion of Ukraine and the U.S.-China rivalry will also be under the spotlight as U.S. JAKARTA-Myanmar’s prolonged civil strife, tensions in the disputed South China Sea and concern over arms buildups in the region are expected to dominate the agenda when Southeast Asia’s top diplomats gather for talks this week in Indonesia.
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