ASEAN set to meddle with Myanmar
By Marwaan Macan-Markar

BANGKOK - Recent rumblings spreading through Southeast Asian capitals against Myanmar's military regime are taking on the quality of a long-overdue confession - namely that a political principle considered sacrosanct by the region's governments has failed.

That principle is the idea of "non-interference", by which the 10 members of the Association of Southeast Asian Nations (ASEAN) have agreed to avoid commenting about the domestic political affairs of a fellow member.

As recent weeks have revealed, some of the leading members of ASEAN are now prepared to turn their backs on their policy of non-interference because it has not coaxed Myanmar closer to democracy and Yangon is rapidly emerging as an economic and political liability.

This stems from the likelihood of Myanmar, formerly known as Burma, becoming the chairman of ASEAN in 2006 - a fact that is expected to damage the regional grouping's international image. Already the United States government and the European Union, which have imposed sanctions on Myanmar, have issued warnings against allowing the junta to take over the leadership of ASEAN.

The month of April will serve up two opportunities to gauge the depth of such anti-junta sentiments in the countries displaying their pro-democracy commitments. Both parliamentarians and foreign ministers from Indonesia, Malaysia, Singapore and the Philippines will be gathering first in Manila and then in Cebu for two separate meetings.

Beginning this Sunday in Manila will be a meeting of the Inter-Parliamentary Union. At this gathering, due to attract about 1,500 lawmakers from Asia, Europe and the Americas, the focus will be on the state of democracy in the world.

Already, legislators from the Philippines have declared that they will use the occasion to support a move shaped by parliamentarians from other ASEAN countries, including Thailand, Malaysia and Singapore, to prevent Myanmar from becoming the chairman of the regional grouping in 2006.

The factor that has prompted such an unprecedented political coalition to flout openly the non-intervention principle is unequivocal: the junta in Myanmar has refused to give up its stranglehold on power and let democracy flourish.

Similar thinking appears to be behind the critical comments leveled at Yangon by the Singaporean, Malaysian and Indonesian governments.

George Yeo, Singapore's foreign minister, conveyed this new stern tone toward Myanmar in early March. It was subsequently echoed by Nazri Abdul Aziz, a minister in the Malaysian Prime Minister's Office. Indonesia's foreign office has also expressed similar dissatisfaction toward the lack of political reform in Myanmar.

Myanmar's military leaders will find out how serious this new tone is - and whether it means action - when ASEAN's foreign ministers meet in the Philippine city of Cebu from April 10-12. The 10 ASEAN members are Brunei, Cambodia, Indonesia, Laos, Malaysia, the Philippines, Singapore, Thailand, Vietnam and Myanmar.

Debbie Stothard of the Alternative ASEAN Network on Burma (ALTSEAN), a regional human-rights lobby, views the gathering momentum to criticize Myanmar's domestic political affairs as a "turning point for ASEAN".

"The prospect of Burma becoming ASEAN's chairman has become a catalyst for governments and legislators to act and display their pro-democracy credentials," she told Inter Press Service. Most comforting is to see the "non-interference principle being chipped away", Stothard said.

It is a move that will likely earn the regional body some respect for "finally measuring up to international human-rights norms", Boonthan Verawongse of the Asia division of Dignity International, a global human-rights body, said in an interview.

"It was time that some ASEAN countries broke the culture of silence over Burma," he asserted. "Concerns about the lack of human rights and democracy in a country cannot be simply regarded as domestic matters."

Yet this trend has its detractors among ASEAN members, not all of whom themselves are champions of human rights and democracy. After all, the region has two countries that are one-party states - communist-ruled Laos and Vietnam - and a country ruled by an absolute monarch - Brunei. What is more, both Malaysia and Singapore still retain a few authoritarian features.

The countries urging caution against interfering in Myanmar's political affairs include the predictable ones, such as Laos and Cambodia, whose questionable human-rights records have been shielded by ASEAN's non-interference policy.

Disappointing for human-rights groups, however, is Thailand's position. Bangkok has refused to be part of the Malaysian-led campaign to press for change in Myanmar ahead of the 2006 deadline, despite Thailand being one of the region's developing democracies. The government of Prime Minister Thaksin Shinawatra is also protecting the pariah state by asserting the significance of the non-interference policy.

Such attitudes toward non-interference are at odds with what this policy was meant to connote when ASEAN was founded in 1967 by Indonesia, Malaysia, the Philippines, Singapore and Thailand. At that time, the countries pledged that the principle would mean not harboring armed rebel groups in conflict with a fellow member nation.

But by the 1970s, the policy was given a new twist to protect the region's strongmen, including Indonesia's president Suharto, the Philippines' Ferdinand Marcos, Singapore prime minister Lee Kwan Yew and Malaysian premier Mahathir Mohamad.

Myanmar's strongman, Senior General Than Shwe, was a beneficiary of this trend when his country joined ASEAN in the mid-1990s. And out of it grew ASEAN's policy of "constructive engagement", by which the regional body was hoping to protect Myanmar from international criticism and give it time to reform.

"We firmly believe quiet diplomacy to be the only way to deal with Myanmar," a former Thai deputy foreign minister said during a speech about the merits of constructive engagement shortly after Myanmar became an ASEAN member in 1997.

But actual realities are a different matter. The twin policies of non-interference and constructive engagement have mostly helped the junta remain in power and this was reflected last weekend when Yangon celebrated the country's Armed Forces Day.

On that occasion, Than Shwe spoke of plans to usher in "disciplined" democracy soon, which human-rights monitors say is an euphemism for a democracy in which the "military rules without uniforms".

According to Stothard, "This proves that the policies of non-interference and constructive engagement have failed to produce change in Burma." But, she noted, "ASEAN is finally accepting reality."

(Inter Press Service)