Asean foreign ministers are meeting on Wednesday August 3 in Phnom Penh (Cambodia), but without Burma, with which they could toughen their tone after the executions of political opponents by the increasingly isolated Burmese junta.
After the indignation, the sanction? The execution of four prisoners sentenced to death, including two pro-democracy opposition figures, announced at the end of July, could mark a turning point in the approach of the Association of Southeast Asian Nations (ASEAN) on Burma. The heads of diplomacy of the ten member countries, minus Burma, which was not invited, meet in plenary session from 10:15 a.m. local time (03:15 GMT), in a luxury hotel in the Cambodian capital, on the edges of the Mekong.
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“I think we’re going to see ASEAN get tougher on Burma“, told AFP Aaron Connelly, specialist in Southeast Asia at the International Institute for Strategic Studies. A working version of the joint statement, obtained by AFP, refers to the “deep concernof ASEAN, which calls on stakeholders to carry outconcrete actionsagainst the military regime. Seeing the junta apply a death penalty for the first time in more than thirty years was a “serious setback“Reacted the head of Singaporean diplomacy Vivian Balakrishnan.
No ‘real progress’
“This shows that the junta doesn’t careof the five-point plan she agreed with ASEAN in April 2021 to end the violence and facilitate a settlement of the crisis, wrote on Twitter her Malaysian counterpart Saifuddin Abdullah, who wants to suspend Burma from all organizational meetings. However, the exclusion of the country from Asean is not on the table, assured a diplomatic source close to the negotiations.
Frustration is spreading through the ranks of the bloc, especially since its mediation has not yielded any “real progress“, according to the head of diplomacy of Malaysia. Worse, the situation is getting worse in Burma. Since the February 1, 2021 coup that overthrew former civilian leader Aung San Suu Kyu, the junta has continued a bloody crackdown on its opponents with more than 2,100 civilians killed and nearly 15,000 arrested, according to a local NGO.
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Other executions of prisoners could follow, warned experts from the United Nations, which counted more than a hundred death sentences in more than a year. ASEAN has not invited Burmese Foreign Minister Wunna Maung Lwin to the meeting in Phnom Penh, and the isolation of the junta, whose atrocities are regularly condemned by the international community, could well last at least until at the next summit in November. Naypyidaw had boycotted the October 2020 meeting to which his leader had not been invited.
With Blinken
“Even North Korea is invited (to Phnom Penh), but not the junta… This shows how isolated Burma is, even within its region“, estimated Aaron Connelly. US Secretary of State Antony Blinken will travel to the Cambodian capital on Wednesday. His Russian counterparts Sergei Lavrov and Chinese Wang Yi are also expected.
Sovereignty issues in the South China Sea, most of which is claimed by Beijing, to the detriment of Vietnam, Malaysia, Brunei or the Philippines, all members of ASEAN, are another expected hot spot for discussions. The last time that Cambodia, today with the rotating presidency of ASEAN, hosted a summit of the organization, in 2012, no agreement had been reached on the subject, suggesting divisions within the ‘instance.
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“It was the first time that ASEAN met without concluding with a joint declaration, and it was a snub for Cambodia. Cambodia learned its lesson“, Deciphered for AFP Thitinan Pongsudhirak, professor of political science at Chulalongkorn University in Bangkok.
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