Southeast Asian unity stumbles over China’s claims

By Jonathan Manthorpe

For all of its 45-year history the 10-member Association of Southeast Asian Nations (ASEAN) has tottered on the brink of dysfunction.

Last week that stumbling veered dangerously close to the edge when the host of this year’s annual summit, Cambodia’s dictator-Prime Minister Hun Sen, openly acted as a proxy for China in its dispute with four ASEAN members over ownership of islets and shoals in the resource-rich South China Sea.

Hun Sen’s attempt to slip through a resolution backing China’s position that the territorial dispute should not be “internationalized” outraged several member states, especially the Philippines and Vietnam, both of which have in recent months been confronted by aggressive Chinese surveillance vessels in their waters.

Philippines President Begnino Aquino loudly objected to Hun Sen’s attempt to write into the final communique a comment that there was a consensus among ASEAN leaders that the dispute should not be made an international issue.

Aquino said he reserves the right to take what ever steps he wants in whatever forum he chooses to protect his country’s sovereignty.

He pointed particularly at the International Tribunal on the Law of the Sea. But like other southeast Asian leaders, Aquino has in recent years restored strong military and diplomatic ties with the United States as protection against China’s increasing assertiveness.

Beijing has pursued a policy of divide and rule in its disputes over the Spratly and Paracel islands and Scarborough Shoals with the Philippines, Vietnam, Malaysia and Brunei.

Other member states are Indonesia, Singapore, Burma, Laos, Vietnam and Thailand.

Ownership of these outcrops in the sea gives economic control over what are believed to be large submarine reserves of oil and gas as well as abundant fishing grounds and the capacity to regulate some of the world’s busiest maritime trade routes.

China has always insisted these disputes should be resolved on a bilateral basis, where its power to intimidate is most potent. Meanwhile China has agreed to evolving with ASEAN countries a code of conduct for the disputed areas while at the same time using tactics to ensure such a code is never finalized.

Hun Sen has become beholden to Beijing as China establishes itself as a major investor in his country — $2 billion last year, which is 10 time more than the U.S. and twice the combined investment of other ASEAN members.

In July at a ministerial meeting the ASEAN delegates were for the first time unable to issue a communique because Hun Sen, fresh from a bountiful meeting with Chinese President Hu Jintao in which more gifts and low interest loans were given, refused to allow a reference to the South China dispute to be included.

ASEAN’s essential weakness in the face of both internal dynamics and external forces from China stems from the ground rules put in place at its founding in 1967.

Decisions must be made not by majority vote, but by consensus. And there must be no interference in the internal affairs of member states, such as criticism of their political systems or attitudes toward human rights.

The result, of course, is that ASEAN moves at the speed of its slowest and most reluctant member, when it moves at all.

And, in the spirit of unity, ASEAN accommodates without comment member states that are military dictatorships, one-party despotisms, authoritarian personal fiefdoms, family conglomerates masquerading as countries, and the occasional reasonably open and transparent democracy.

ASEAN was founded primarily to end the wars and threats of invasion that plagued the region throughout the 1960s and 1970s by binding the member states into the common purpose of security and economic development.

On the security front ASEAN has been reasonably successful, though the recent border war between Thailand and Cambodia demonstrated the group‘s ineffectiveness when conflicts do occur.

Far less successful has been the evolution of common values and codes of conduct.

Years of hand-wringing over a ASEAN human rights charter has finally produced a document that had to meet the approval of the perpetual human rights abusers, and which therefore has the velocity of a wet rag.

And the timetable for implementing plans to integrate the member state economies into an ASEAN Economic Community similar to the European Union keeps disappearing into the future. There is little real expectation that the current introduction date, January, 2014, will be met.

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