Ministers meet after Jakarta attacks

Big Pond News
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Monday, July 20, 2009

Asian foreign ministers met on Sunday ahead of the continent's biggest security dialogue, under the shadow of the Jakarta bomb attacks and North Korea's nuclear programme.

A proposed regional rights body that critics say will lack teeth to tackle violators such as Myanmar is also on the agenda at days of talks culminating in the Association of Southeast Asian Nations (ASEAN) Regional Forum.

The 27-member forum, which includes Asian nations, the EU and the United States, meets on the resort isle of Phuket on Thursday with a debut appearance from US Secretary of State Hillary Clinton.

The fight against Al-Qaeda and the Taliban in Pakistan as well as tensions between Thailand and Cambodia over an ancient temple on their border are also on the long list of security problems facing Asia.

But Friday's twin suicide bombings at hotels in the Indonesian capital which police said left nine people dead have unexpectedly thrown the Southeast Asian terror network Jemaah Islamiyah (JI) back into the spotlight.

Indonesian police Sunday confirmed JI as having carried out the attack, which has shattered years of calm in ASEAN's most populous member nation.

The group carried out the 2002 Bali bombings which left more than 200 dead.

'It remains for all of us to work vigorously in future to prevent terrorist acts,' Thai Foreign Minister Kasit Piromya said after meeting counterparts from the 10-member ASEAN in Phuket on Sunday.

'At the beginning of our meeting, all of us expressed condolences to the Indonesian government and people and especially to the bereaved families,' Kasit said.

Kasit meanwhile defended an unprecedented new regional rights body as ministers prepared to endorse its terms of reference on Monday, despite admitting that it would involve compromises on military-ruled Myanmar.

Myanmar, ASEAN's most troublesome member since joining the bloc in 1997, has stirred up fresh international outrage by putting democracy icon Aung San Suu Kyi on trial over an incident in which an American swam to her lakeside house.

Leaders of the bloc are set to launch the rights watchdog in October but critics say it will be powerless to investigate or punish abuses such as those by Myanmar but also by communist Vietnam and Laos.

'It is important to make this human rights body credible, but at the same time take into account the real situation in ASEAN member countries,' Kasit said.

Shortly before he spoke, Myanmar authorities detained around 20 members of Aung San Suu Kyi's party as they headed back from events to mark the anniversary of her father's death in 1947.

Myanmar also showed its defiance of foreign opinion earlier this month by refusing to allow UN Secretary General Ban Ki-moon to visit the opposition leader when he visited.

Meanwhile hopes of any resolution to the tensions over North Korea's nuclear programme dimmed after the communist state's foreign minister declined to attend the ARF and sent a roving ambassador instead.

US State Department officials said they expected the showdown over North Korea's nuclear and missile tests and political repression in Myanmar to be among the leading topics that Clinton will discuss when she arrives.

Regional tensions have soared since the North quit six-nation talks on nuclear disarmament and vowed to restart its atomic weapons programme in the wake of its recent defiant nuclear test and missile launches.

Foreign ministers from the other five parties - the US, Russia, China, Japan and South Korea - will all be in Phuket.

But Bridget Welsh, an associate professor of political science at the Singapore Management University, said the ARF's role in containing North Korea would be 'very limited'.

'ASEAN countries (in particular) will not be able to do more than express their concern,' Welsh said.

Thousands of troops and police threw a ring of steel around Phuket to prevent a repeat of anti-government protests which derailed a key Asian summit in the coastal city of Pattaya in April.