JAKARTA, INDONESIA (AP) – Southeast Asian foreign ministers are meeting in Indonesia’s capital yesterday for talks bound to be dominated by the deteriorating situation in Myanmar despite an agenda focussed on food and energy security and cooperation in finance and health.
Myanmar belongs to the 10-member Association of Southeast Asian Nations (ASEAN), but the annual ministers’ retreat is being held in Jakarta without Myanmar’s Foreign Minister Wunna Maung Lwin.
The absence was forced by the fallout over Myanmar’s lack of cooperation in implementing a five-step agreement made in 2021 between ASEAN leaders and Myanmar’s military leader, Senior General Min Aung Hlaing.
In the agreement, Myanmar’s military leaders promised to allow a special ASEAN envoy to meet the ousted and jailed leader Aung San Suu Kyi and others to foster dialogue aimed at easing the crisis.
Last year, when ASEAN was chaired by Cambodia, Min Aung Hlaing was not invited to the November meeting of ASEAN leaders in Phnom Penh after Myanmar declined to let an ASEAN envoy meet with her.
Analysts said the shadow of the military takeover in Myanmar looms large over the foreign ministers’ meeting, even as Indonesia, the chair of ASEAN this year, seeks to dampen concerns that the issue will not hold the bloc “hostage”.
Kicking off the country’s year chairing the regional bloc, Indonesia’s President Joko Widodo said late last month that ASEAN would continue contributing to the Indo-Pacific as a peaceful and stable region and maintaining regional economic growth.
“Economic crisis, energy crisis, food crisis as well as warfare, we face all of them this year,” Widodo said. “ASEAN will remain essential and relevant for people in the region and beyond as ASEAN is the epicentre of growth.”
Indonesia’s Foreign Minister Retno Marsudi said Indonesia would ensure the focus is on the development of the regional bloc as a community and to capitalise on ASEAN’s economic growth, which always records stronger growth than the global economy.
“The issue of Myanmar will not be allowed to hold hostage the process of strengthening the ASEAN community development,” Marsudi said last month in outlining Indonesia’s foreign policy for the year.
She said ASEAN was disappointed by its lack of progress in the past two years in Myanmar, despite growing countermovement and global threats of sanctions and political exclusion.
“Despite all the efforts of the chair and all ASEAN member countries, the implementation of the five-point consensus by the Myanmar military junta has not made significant progress,” she said.
