The Nation
Asean needs the trust of Myanmar to play a role in
resolving the Rohingya crisis and to face ground realities in tackling the
contentious South China Sea issue, former Indonesian foreign minister Marty
Natalegawa said over the weekend.
The international and Rohingya communities have
consistently urged Asean to play a greater role in helping end the crisis in
Myanmar’s Rakhine state after some 700,000 people fled from the conflict to
Bangladesh since August last year.
While the United Nations has viewed the issue seriously
due to atrocities and hinted at “ethnic cleansing”, Asean, of which Myanmar is
a member, has confined its involvement to humanitarian assistance.
Asean leaders said
they continued to support Myanmar’s humanitarian relief programme in Rakhine
and welcomed the ongoing work of the Asean Coordinating Centre for Humanitarian
Assistance on disaster management (AHA Centre) to deliver humanitarian
assistance to all displaced persons without discrimination, according to the
chairman’s statement issued at the meeting last month in Singapore.
“I hope Asean in the near future can develop things
beyond the humanitarian dimension, but Myanmar’s trust must be earned,” Marty
told a group of editors and senior journalists at the Asean Media Forum held in
Singapore on Friday.
Non-interference, which is the main principle of the
regional grouping, is no longer an excuse for Asean to refrain from getting
involved in the crisis in Myanmar since the group has played crucial roles in
political developments in the country for a long time, he said.
“It is certainly an internal issue of Myanmar but that
does not mean there is no potential for regional contribution,” Marty said.
Asean used to work intensively to have the Myanmar
authority and the military deliver on its seven-step road map towards democracy
and reconciliation, which eventually ended up with the 2008 constitution and a
historic election in 2010.
The process paved the way for the current government
under the leadership of Aung San Suu Kyi.
On the Rohingya issue, Marty said many Asean countries –
notably Indonesia – used to play a key role to facilitate communication with
the government in Nay Pyi Taw to the tackle the problem in 2013.
The communal conflict in Myanmar’s Rakhine state took
place as the Muslim Rohingya have been discriminated against by the authorities
and the Buddhist majority. By calling them Bengali, the Myanmar authorities
have denied them citizenship.
Another relevant issue for Asean is the territorial
disputes in the South China Sea where many members of the group including
Malaysia, the Philippines and Vietnam are contestants with China for a long
time.
The way Asean dealt with the issue over the past decades
is to prolong the problem, rather than resolve it with drastic action, Marty said,
and added that the group had spent time, resources and energy to produce the
non-binding Declaration of the Conduct (DOC) of Parties in the South China Sea
in 2002. But, the situation in the contentious sea has only aggravated since
then.
The group is now producing another document known as the
code of conduct which, Marty said, was based on a draft he has seen and would
not be any different from the DOC.
“I mean diplomats cannot just sit in the room to discuss
where to put a comma and hyphen, since things happen at sea, otherwise the code
of conduct would be obsolete on the very day it is adopted,” he said.