On Myanmar, ASEAN needs to maintain the momentum

Author: Editorial Board, ANU

The headline of the Jakarta Post’s editorial last Wednesday said it best: ‘ASEAN, hurry up’.

It’s been a month since ASEAN’s heads of government met in an informal summit in Jakarta to discuss their collective response to the February coup in Myanmar.

It was an achievement that, despite the presence of the coup leader Min Aung Hlaing, the group was able to come to a five-point consensus. Now, observers — and those who continue to face a brutal crackdown — are getting impatient to see follow-through on the plan.

By inviting junta leader General Min Aung Hlaing to April’s mini-summit, ASEAN accepted the risk of legitimising the junta in exchange for its engagement with an ASEAN-brokered dialogue and aid plan. Like clockwork the junta has been using the general’s visit to Jakarta as fodder for its propaganda.

It would be a travesty if the April ASEAN summit gave a veneer of legitimacy to the coup leaders without leading to concrete follow-through on ASEAN’s five-point ‘consensus.’ The most urgent — and one would think the most straightforward — element of this plan was the appointment of a Special Envoy for the ASEAN Chair, who would spearhead a process of dialogue between the junta and the deposed government and coordinate ASEAN’s delivery of humanitarian aid as the Myanmar economy collapses.

That envoy has yet to be named. Commentators have called on Brunei, which holds the ASEAN Chair this year, to cut through the bureaucracy and make the appointment quickly; the Jakarta Post’s editors labelled the delay ‘ridiculous’.

It is appropriate that such calls are being heard from Jakarta. Indonesia’s President Joko Widodo and Foreign Minister Retno Marsudi have prosecuted Indonesia’s natural leadership role within ASEAN ably throughout the crisis. But the fact is that their eagerness for action is not matched by other quarters in ASEAN, as Barry Desker explains in the first of two lead articles this week.

Whereas ‘Indonesia, Malaysia and Singapore [have] emphasised the unacceptability of the use of force against unarmed civilians’, Desker writes, ‘Thailand and Vietnam, supported by Cambodia and Laos, have advocated acceptance of the Myanmar fait accompli’, invoking ASEAN’s tradition of non-interference.

Because ‘ASEAN’s influence lies in its capacity to persuade Myanmar’s military authorities, not the presence of rules which could be enforced’, that apparent divergence is bad news. ASEAN’s ability to exert its influence is only as strong as the internal consensus it can forge on the need for change in Myanmar.

As was observed in the aftermath of the coup in February, the same goes for the international response more broadly. Unanimity is the only weapon in the arsenal. The United Nations is largely toothless given the protection China and Russia will offer the junta at the Security Council; economic sanctions and arms embargoes, meanwhile, have limited utility because Myanmar’s biggest trading partners and arms suppliers aren’t interested in them.

‘The reality’, Desker reminds us, ‘is that ASEAN remains the only game in town.’ Its five-point consensus is the only viable set of lowest-common-denominator demands on which ASEAN, Asian and western democracies, and potentially even China, can and should collectively pressure the junta.

If the ASEAN-process doesn’t get results, there are alternative options, but likewise these are dicey. In a second feature article this week, Greg Poling lays out the grounds for scepticism about ASEAN’s ability to shift the facts on the ground in Myanmar, arguing that the momentum from the April summit has quickly dissipated and that member states and ASEAN partners need to get creative in finding pressure points independent of ASEAN processes. ‘That would not be an assault on ASEAN’s centrality, but a recognition of its limitations’, argues Poling.

No matter what form diplomacy takes, if a partial or whole reversal of the coup isn’t negotiated then things could unravel even further within Myanmar. The anti-coup National Unity Government has linked up with the ethnic organisations that operate in the country’s periphery, raising the prospect of the continuing strife between the Tatmadaw and ethnic armies being augmented by terrorist tactics in urban areas. Myanmar’s economy is in freefall and may be a source of economic refugees as well as those fleeing violence.

The failure of diplomacy to arrest Myanmar’s downwards spiral could have very serious implications for Southeast Asia’s regional architecture as well. It was immediately apparent in the aftermath of the February coup how much was at stake for ASEAN’s relevance and credibility. As violence continues on the streets of Myanmar, this remains the case. Brunei will host the ASEAN Regional Forum in August and the East Asia Summit in November. Having a coup leader at the table whose soldiers are gunning down civilians in the streets would not be a good look.

Amid the Myanmar crisis we’re seeing a familiar but increasingly stark set of gaps — between ASEAN member states’ interests and ambitions in the international arena; and between what many expect of ASEAN and what its institutional processes can deliver.

Within those gaps lie considerable hazards for the ability of Southeast Asia’s homegrown regional association to safeguard its centrality in regional affairs. That will only be tested more as great power rivalries escalate. ASEAN doesn’t have a moment to waste.

The EAF Editorial Board is located in the Crawford School of Public Policy, College of Asia and the Pacific, The Australian National University.

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