Myanmar"s Thein Sein (L-R), Philippine President Benigno Aquino, Singapore"s Senior Minister S. Jayakumar, Thailand"s Prime Minister Abhisit Vejjajiva, Vietnamese Prime Minister Nguyen Tan Dung and his wife Tran Thanh Kiem, Indonesia"s First Lady Kristiani Yudhoyono, Cambodia"s Prime Minister Hun Sen, Brunei"s Sultan Hassanal Bolkiah, Prime Minister of Laos Thongsing Thammavong, Malaysia"s Najib Razak and his wife Rosmah Mansor and ASEAN Secretary General Surin Pitsuwan and his wife Alisa pray before having dinner at the 18th Association of Southeast Asia. JAKARTA (Reuters) - The prime ministers of Thailand and Cambodia met on Sunday after pressure from other regional leaders to end deadly border skirmishes, but there was no sign of a breakthrough to resolve Southeast Asia's bloodiest conflict in nearly a quarter century. The clashes around crumbling Hindu temples in disputed border areas are getting in the way of an annual meeting of Southeast Asian leaders and damaging the credibility of the region's pledge to forge a united economic community by 2015. Thai Prime Minister Abhisit Vejjajiva and his Cambodian counterpart Hun Sen offered no comment after a meeting brokered in Jakarta by Indonesia's president to seek a solution to a conflict that has killed 18 people in recent weeks. "It is very important that we hold together," President Susilo Bambang Yudhoyono told the region's leaders ahead of the meeting at an annual two-day regional summit, adding the group faced enormous challenges. The 10-member Association of South East Asian Nations (ASEAN), a collection of authoritarian states and nascent democracies, has a policy of non-interference in each other's domestic affairs, so is struggling to resolve a spat fuelled by domestic nationalist sentiment ahead of likely Thai elections. "They need to ponder how badly the ill will generated would impede ASEAN collaboration on projects... An ASEAN disunited will be taken less seriously by investors," said Singapore's state-controlled Straits Times newspaper in an editorial. The conflict is the deadliest between countries in the region since Thailand and Laos fought a border war in 1988. 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 sceptical younger generation. Security challenges: The rest of the region's leaders, meeting in a cavernous conference centre 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 were discussing security challenges such as food and energy supply. The group ranges from oil and gas-rich Indonesia, Malaysia, Brunei, Vietnam and Malaysia, and the world's top rice exporter Thailand, to port trading centre Singapore and resource-scarce Laos, Cambodia and the Philippines. 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 Myanmar, which wants to host the gathering in 2014. A Myanmar ASEAN presidency would almost certainly attracted howls of protest from the West, further denting the bloc's credibility. By Neil Chatterjee, May 8, 2011
0 comments:
Post a Comment