East
Timor's push for an ASEAN-11 By
Megawati Wijaya
SINGAPORE - The
Association of Southeast Asian Nations (ASEAN)
will weigh this week in Jakarta whether to bring
East Timor, also known as Timor Leste, into the
10-member regional grouping. Dili's bid has
received support from ASEAN's current chair and
former ruler Indonesia, but other members have
sounded warnings that East Timor's poverty and
political instability could hamper the grouping's
goal of forming an integrated community by 2015.
East Timor's foreign minister Zacaria
Albano da Costa formally submitted the application
to join in March and Indonesian Foreign Minister
Marty Natalegawa has circulated a note requesting
"urgent attention" from his foreign minister
counterparts when they meet during the ASEAN
Coordinating Council meeting on Friday. The
council's recommendation will be submitted to
ASEAN heads
of government who will decide
by consensus whether to accept the application
during this weekend's summit meeting.
East
Timor, one of the world's youngest and smallest
countries, formally gained independence from
Indonesia in 2002 following years of bloody
struggle and a decisive vote for self-rule in a
United Nations-backed referendum. The government
now depends mainly on oil and gas resources to
finance the country's budget. One of the biggest
foreign projects, the Bayu Undan operated by
Conoco Phillips in the Timor Sea, funds a US$5
billion sovereign wealth fund held in the US.
Despite those energy derived revenues,
East Timor is Asia's least developed country,
ranking 158th out of 179 countries in the United
Nations Development Program's Human Development
Index. Gross domestic product (GDP) in 2009 was a
mere $558 million, lagging far behind ASEAN's
current smallest economy in Laos, which recorded a
GDP of $5.9 billion that same year. Half of East
Timor's citizens live below the poverty line and
unemployment currently runs at about 20%.
Although debt-free, East Timor is highly
dependent on foreign aid. Reports from
non-governmental agencies (NGOs) and the media
claim that in the decade spanning 1999 to 2009
East Timor received somewhere between $5.2 and
$8.8 billion, representing one of the highest per
capita rates for international aid receipts in the
world.
East Timor's backward economy has
raised strong doubts on whether its entry into
ASEAN would be more of a liability than asset to
the grouping's timetable for a trade and
investment promoting integrated community by 2015.
Declared at the ASEAN summit in Cebu in
January 2007, a plan for an ASEAN Economic
Community (AEC) envisions an integrated region
where goods, services, capital and skilled labor
would flow more freely than at present. The
concept is built upon the wish to leverage the
region's collective strength to compete for
foreign investments, particularly against big
countries like China and India.
An AEC
blueprint, approved in 2007, laid out a strategic
schedule for implementing measures including
procedures to eliminate tariff and non-tariff
barriers and achieving more all-encompassing goals
such as creating a more competitive economic
region.
Experts at a seminar at the
Institute of Southeast Asian Studies (ISEAS) in
Singapore last month cast doubts on whether East
Timor, with its limited monetary and human
resources and lower level of economic development,
will be able to meet all of those requirements any
time soon.
Termsak Chalermpalaunupap,
director of the political-security directorate
department at the ASEAN Secretariat in Jakarta,
expressed concerns on whether East Timor, with its
limited number of qualified civil servants, will
be able to attend all the ASEAN meetings that
number about 1,000 annually from the ministerial,
official and expert levels.
Unlike other
groupings such as the European Union that function
through democratic voting, ASEAN makes decisions
through consensus. As such, anytime a member state
is absent it slows down decisions.
"ASEAN
is now a legal entity, with a charter and legal
agreements like the [ASEAN Free Trade Agreement].
Will East Timor be able to accept and carry out
all these obligations?" asked K Kesavapany,
ISEAS's director.
Others have expressed
concerns that East Timor may seek exemption from
the obligations, resulting in a less cohesive and
credible ASEAN community. Given East Timor's
unsteady politics, some have recommended that it
would be better to give it an "associate
membership" that can be converted to full
membership once it has met all ASEAN requirements.
Resource constraints During a
March visit to Jakarta, East Timor president Jose
Ramos-Horta gave his assurances that East Timor
was not asking for financial help from ASEAN.
Foreign Minister da Costa also told Indonesian
media that East Timor has in place a road map to
grow together with ASEAN so that it "won't be a
burden" to member countries. ASEAN membership, he
said, would boost the country's image and allow it
to learn from its neighbors.
"Some of the
concerns raised are legitimate ... We emerged from
a conflict, but we have proven that we have
managed to recover quickly," he said.
Despite its resource constraints, East
Timor has set up an ASEAN National Secretariat,
participated in various ASEAN Regional Forum
meetings, and invited ASEAN to send observers to
monitor its 2012 general election. Roberto Soares,
East Timor's ambassador to Singapore and Brunei,
made his case for entry by saying his country is
"the lost child of ASEAN seeking to rejoin its
family".
Significantly, Indonesian
President Susilo Bambang Yudhoyono's government
has publicly supported East Timor's bid. "[The
president] has hinted support for East Timor to
join ASEAN. It is time for East Timor to be part
of ASEAN," Yudhoyono's aide Teuku Faizasyah said
during the official visit of Horta in Jakarta.
In an interview with the media last month,
Indonesian Foreign Minister Marty Natalegawa said
that continuing to exclude East Timor from ASEAN
would be "economically unnatural" and "politically
destabilizing" for the region in the long term.
Other ASEAN members have not publicly
stated their official positions, though insider
government sources said that Singapore and
Malaysia have objected on the grounds that East
Timor is not ready economically to meet all of the
EAC's requirements.
"The other ASEAN
member governments would no doubt be reminded of a
previous instance when membership was granted on
grounds other than technical ones and ASEAN had to
live with the consequences of that decision and
continues to do so even today," said Kesavapany.
ASEAN last opened its doors to Vietnam,
Myanmar, Laos and Cambodia between 1997-1999.
Questions were then raised about whether it was
wise to admit four countries that had far lower
levels of economic development than the grouping's
six original members, the Philippines, Thailand,
Indonesia, Singapore, Malaysia and Brunei. (There
was also controversy over whether to admit
military-run Myanmar until it undertook
substantial political reforms.)
According
to the ASEAN declaration of 1967, the only
conditions for "participation" in the grouping is
to be located in the Southeast Asian region and
adherence to the grouping's stated aims,
principles and purposes.
"There are no
other conditions for membership, certainly none in
terms of the behavior of states towards their
citizens and other people in their territories,
none in terms of political or social systems, and
none in terms of economic policy other than those
pertaining to regional economic integration and
cooperation," wrote former ASEAN secretary general
Rodolfo Severino in his 2006 publication
Southeast Asia in Search of an ASEAN
Community.
"This is why, when people
ask why ASEAN accepted Myanmar and three other
newer members [Vietnam, Laos, and Cambodia], the
question may be posed in riposte: on what grounds
should ASEAN have rejected them?"
Severino
has argued that progress with ASEAN's economic
integration plans has not been hampered by the
admission of the four less-developed members so
much as by the six original members' policy
positions and implementation delays, including
those involving the dismantling of non-tariff
barriers, negotiations on trade in services and
the implementation of agreements on goods in
transit.
Instead, he has argued the
ASEAN-4, as the newer members are sometimes
referred to, has given investors "a wider choice
of where to place their investments in the free
trade area according to the availability and cost
of the required labor, the accessibility and cost
of other resources, the effectiveness and
enforcement of the legal and policy regime, and
the overall investment climate, and so on."
In that subtext is a compelling argument
for East Timor to make up an ASEAN-5 and formally
join the grouping this weekend.
Megawati Wijaya is a
Singapore-based journalist. She may be contacted
at megawati.wijaya@gmail.com
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