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ASEAN: Little unity in the face of
'war'
By Phar Kim Beng
HONG
KONG - During the latest foreign ministers' meeting of
the Association of Southeast Asian Nations (ASEAN) in
Cambodia, the group once again decided to focus its
attention on the "war on terrorism". This is neither
novel nor unprecedented.
Rhetorically, at least,
ASEAN has been at the forefront of the US "war on
terrorism" almost from the word go. In the early days
after September 11, 2001, three international forums
enabled ASEAN members to demonstrate regional support
for the US-led military and diplomatic actions.
On October 9, 2001, ASEAN voiced its support for the
United States at the World Trade Organization (WTO)
Ministerial Meeting in Doha, Qatar.
On October 29, 2001, during talks on global climate
change in Marrakesh, Morocco, ASEAN once again supported
the US.
On December 25, 2001, at the Asia Pacific Economic
Cooperation (APEC) summit in Shanghai, the same position
was adopted.
In each case, the official record
revealed that ASEAN leaders sanctioned efforts to combat
terrorism. But they also insisted that the "war on
terrorism" be conducted under the mandate of United
Nations Security Council resolutions.
Prompted
by the US to develop a coordinated response, some or all
ASEAN states also issued a series of policy documents in
the year after the attacks on New York and the Pentagon.
Three were particularly important.
On November 5, 2001, the ASEAN Declaration on Joint
Action to Counter Terrorism was issued by the seventh
ASEAN Summit. As well as condemning the September 11
attacks, this statement noted the 1997 ASEAN Declaration
on Transnational Crime, and the creation of an ASEAN
Ministerial Meeting on Transnational Crime (AMMTC). It
further noted that in 1999 the second AMMTC adopted an
ASEAN Plan of Action to Combat Transnational Crime, and
that in October 2001 the third AMMTC agreed to convene
an Ad Hoc Experts Group Meeting and special sessions of
existing ministerial groups to focus on terrorism. The
November Declaration welcomed Malaysia's offer to host a
Special AMMTC on issues of terrorism in April 2002.
Beyond this, it contained a nine-point list of
coordination and capacity-building measures ASEAN
members would jointly undertake in pursuing the global
efforts against terrorism.
On May 21, 2002, a Joint Communique of the Special
ASEAN Ministerial Meeting on Terrorism was issued. This
was the Special AMMTC originally planned for April 2002.
In its ninth point, the Communique registered an
unequivocal commitment to national sovereignty: "We
recognize that the sovereignty, territorial integrity
and domestic laws of each ASEAN Member Country shall be
respected and upheld in undertaking the fight against
terrorism." Within this framework, it advanced a Work
Program on Terrorism to implement an ASEAN Plan of
Action to Combat Transnational Crime approved a few days
earlier, on May 17. In so doing, ASEAN states undertook
to develop "multilateral or bilateral legal arrangements
to facilitate apprehension, investigation, prosecution,
extradition, inquiry and seizure in order to enhance
mutual legal and administrative assistance among ASEAN
Member Countries where feasible, enhancement of
cooperation and coordination in law enforcement and
intelligence sharing, and development of regional
training programs". The communique also noted "with
appreciation" a number of single-state and bilateral
anti-terrorism initiatives.
On August 1, 2002, the US-ASEAN Joint Declaration
for Cooperation to Combat International Terrorism was
released. Building on the November Declaration, it
pledged the United States and all ten ASEAN members to
improve intelligence-gathering efforts, strengthen
capacity-building measures, and enhance mutual
cooperation and liaison.
However, behind this
apparently united front, ASEAN states in fact revealed
considerable internal division on the war on terrorism,
a development that has only begun to change lately.
To begin with, neither Indonesia nor Malaysia,
sensitive to the Islamic reaction at home, endorsed the
US-led attack on Afghanistan. By contrast, Brunei,
Singapore, the Philippines and Thailand fell in line
behind the US action.
The military presence of
US forces in the region was also deeply contentious.
While Brunei, the Philippines, Singapore and Vietnam
were in favor of such a presence for their respective
national-security considerations, Indonesia and Malaysia
were opposed to the idea. Even Thailand, which conducts
its annual Cobra Gold military exercise with the United
States, only tentatively supported US military activity
in Southeast Asia.
Indeed, in the early phases
of the "war on terrorism", other than giving rhetorical
backing to the US campaign, ASEAN exhibited few signs of
coordinated progress in dealing with the terrorist
threat in a multilateral manner. Almost all initiatives
were either bilateral or trilateral.
In May 2002, Indonesia, Malaysia and the Philippines
signed an Agreement on Information Exchange and
Establishment of Communication Procedures committing
them to cooperation in combating transnational crime,
including terrorism.
In July 2002, Malaysia and the Philippines persuaded
Indonesia to sign an anti-terrorist agreement based on
enhanced cooperation in monitoring borders. Thailand
also became a signatory to the agreement.
In
addition to the initiatives above, the defense
intelligence chiefs of Indonesia, Malaysia, the
Philippines and Singapore also met to exchange
information on terrorist activity, and engage in
coordinated surveillance of suspected groups. There was
also some coordination among police forces.
Mostly, however, cooperation was bilateral, with
agreements to strengthen intelligence sharing occurring
when, for instance, heads of state visited one another.
The above efforts do not imply that bilateral
and occasionally multilateral contacts between ad hoc
groups of ASEAN states have been ineffective. On the
contrary, they have registered some progress.
In
January 2002, Malaysia sent the renegade Muslim leader
of the Philippines' Moro Islamic Liberation Front, Nur
Misuari, back to Manila after he had led a short-lived
insurrection in Mindanao.
Indonesia also sent
police specialists to the Philippines to assist in the
investigation of suspected terrorist Fathur Rohman Al
Ghozi, an Indonesian with links to the radical
pan-Islamist organization Jemaah Islamiyah.
Be
that as it may, bilateral and trilateral initiatives do
not by themselves constitute a coordinated ASEAN
response to the war on terrorism.
In this
regard, it shows that ASEAN is merely a front for
behind-the-scenes efforts in the "war on terrorism". If
anything, intelligence coordination continues to take
place through traditional diplomatic channels, rather
than through ASEAN's regional structures.
If and
when multilateral sharing of intelligence was needed, it
was based on how some members of ASEAN had once
cooperated before in dealing with Vietnam's occupation
of Cambodia in the 1980s. During that period, ASEAN
formed the Bangkok Working Group to coordinate
intelligence-sharing.
What is conspicuously
missing in ASEAN's "war on terrorism" is the issue of
extradition. Rather, member states of ASEAN have decided
to apply ad hoc methods in dealing with the issue.
On October 11, 2002, one day before the Kuta,
Bali, bombing that killed more than 200 people, Ahmed
Ibrahim, an American student at the International
Islamic University of Malaysia suspected of being an
al-Qaeda cell member, was deported to the United States.
This was done on the pretext that his Malaysian travel
documents had been nullified by US immigration, thereby
rendering him an illegal resident.
Nevertheless,
to date the biggest surprise in the ASEAN Foreign
Ministers Meeting in Cambodia was the change in the
attitude of Indonesia in welcoming the United States to
play a more constructive role in the region's fight
against terrorism.
ASEAN, together with
Indonesia's active leadership and consent, has endorsed
a plan with the US to guard shipping in the vital
Malacca Strait from the threat of terrorism.
To
prevent the US from being too unilateralist, the ASEAN
ministers were quick to "emphasize the need to address
the root causes of terrorism and rejected any attempt to
associate terrorism with any religion, race, nationality
or ethnic group".
Indonesia's action is
surprising because it has traditionally not been in
favor of allowing any powerful actors to play a role in
the region, a privilege it has hitherto sought to
preserve for itself since its independence.
Furthermore, according to Kusuma Atmadja, an
Indonesian scholar who had once served in the Suharto
government, Indonesia's independence struggle had had an
adverse impact on Indonesia's confidence in external
powers too. Writing in the Journal of Contemporary
Southeast Asia, he affirmed:
The sentiment against military pacts or
the forming of other kinds of security agreements is
deeply ingrained in the minds of the Indonesian body
politic ... All the forms of exchange (data,
intelligence), standardization (equipment, procedure),
cooperation and exercises are essentially bilateral or
trilateral in character and do not amount to the
existence of ASEAN security cooperation in a formal
sense. Yet, backed by Indonesia, ASEAN in
its own way is clearly taking another step toward
endorsing the "war on terrorism" in support of the
United States.
What remains unclear is whether
ASEAN can come up with a coordinated approach in the war
on terrorism, or whether it will still prefer to stick
to the tried and tested way of combating terrorism based
on bilateral or trilateral methods preferred by Jakarta.
(Copyright 2003 Asia Times Online Co, Ltd. All
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