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ASEAN will not be allowed to exist, except as a body controlled by the United States

NO INTERNATIONAL ORGANISATION SURVIVES if it is not altered to fit the times. Nor would it survive if the promoters are not keen. The latest that will not survive is ASEAN. Nor would the East Asian Summit. Both have lost the reason for being. The EAS has become a talking shop, with all members afraid of China, and to make sure of that, it has admitted Australia and New Zealand as members, but not North Korea. The United States hates North Korea for its independence, and so it is not in the East Asian summit. The 2005 chairman of ASEAN put the knife into the organisation by doing all that a non-member, in this case the United States, wanted discussed. The ASEAN Summit thought that one Myanmarese lady was worth more in ASEAN than 4 million Thai Malays. Neither EAS nor ASEAN can discuss matters of mutual concern without making sure the United States approved. In EAS, Australia and New Zealand are in it to make sure; in ASEAN, this year's chairman is touted as the United States' man. The Wall Street Journal thinks so. ASEAN and EAS has become talking shops, in which nothing of importance will be discussed. They have become organisations more important to the outside world, in which journalists and academics have become more important than the participants. Both ASEAN and EAS are dead, but it will linger on for years, because the countries want it to exist. But no decision they take will be of importance.

An organisation must reorient itself to make it relevant. The United Nations is dead, ever since the United States took it as an extension of its foreign policy when it liked, and attacked when it did not coincide. It is regarded around the world as an organisation of substance, but it has failed perhaps for 40 years. The Non-Aligned Nations, which Pak Lah is the current president, lost its importance once the Cold War between the United States and the Soviet Union ended. It should have revitalised itself into a third force, but it did not. It was once important. The prime movers of the body was President Gamel Abdel Nasser of Egypt, President Sukarno of Indonesia, President Tito of Yugoslavia in Djakarta in 1955. Hovering in the wings was Prime Minister Jawaharlal of India, Prime Minister Kwama Nkrumah of Ghana, Prime Minister Ahmed Ben Bella of Algeria, President Haib Bourghiba of Tunusia, and others. The deaths of the founders did not cease its relevance. But the leaders of non- alighnment when the Soviet Union cracked up did not reorient the Non- Alignment Movement, and it now is of no importance. And so it is with ASEAN.

ASEAN was founded in 1967 to make sure Indonesia and Malaysia never went to war again. I was on holiday from Reuters in Saigon, and had gone to the 'wrong' room in a restaurant in Bangkok where the officials met. There was Mr Thanat Khoman, foreign minister of Thailand, who brought them together; Col. Benjamin Loudevik Murdani, who was then deputy head of Garuda, the Indonesian airways, later became the first diplomatic head for Indonesia in Malaysia, and went on to be a lieutenant general in the Indonesian armed forces; Tan Sri Ghazali Shafie, now Tun, but then secretary-general of the Malaysian foreign ministry. In return for my silence, the three of them told me of these behind-the-scenes talks. Later on, the Indonesian vice- president Adam Malik, who I had known since the early 1960s and who is dead now, filled me in the details. If Indonesia and Malaysia lost control of ASEAN, it would be a dead letter, as now. It was originally the foreign ministers who met, but now it is a meeting of presidents and prime ministers. The Summit should look at South East Asian Regional Conference, which is not allowed to succeed because India, its leading member, plays politics with other members.

Because Indonesia and Malaysia represented the main members, the ASEAN raison d'etre kept it going. But the moment the Buddhist nations - Thailand, Cambodia, Vietnam, Laos, Myanmar - took a dominant role, Indonesia and Malaysia, both Muslim nations, ceased interest in keeping ASEAN alive. So they never bothered. ASEAN became another organisation dominated by the West, and was no longer important. ASEAN got a secretariat, and journalists from the West kept it alive. The member countries in ASEAN kept it alive, for it showed how important they are when the organisation's meeting is held in their capitals. The traffic was diverted for this year's conference at the Kuala Lumpur City Centre that the city was impassable to vehicular traffic. All that the Malaysian in Kuala Lumpur made of it is the traffic jame they encountered, and the public statements Malaysian leaders made. The other leaders were mentioned not for what they said, though that got published if they agreed with Pak Lah, but for the human interest stories.

The American newspapers said it all. They wrote that it went the United States' way, although Washington was not present. Pak Lah gave an interview with the Wall Street Journal, but to no local journalist. At the best of times, he allows foreign academics, but not local, to interview him. But Malaysian leaders kick the local journalists about. But he should know that while they write reports he would like, their personal feelings are far different. When the Malaysian government is in trouble, as with the nude ear squat episode, the reporters do not come to its aid. A local reporter told me of the minister of home affairs, Dato' Azmi Khalid, going to China to apologise for the nude squat, but it has now been revealed, by the police themselves, that the girl in question is a Malay! The newspapers in Malaysia are owned by one or other of the National Front parties, and any attempt at going against their owners is given short shrift, UMNO telling the other National Front parties who is boss.

So ASEAN's lingering death is not reported in local newspapers. Pak Lah is chairman of ASEAN, and his officials make sure he is treated with kid gloves. But any organisation that does not revamp itself in a generation is headed for irrelevancy. It is then used to keep up the divide between the rulers and the ruled. One ASEAN leader had an aide walking close to him carrying the great man's spectacles. It must be kept going, so that journalists will write of how badly it is doing, giving the impression that only the West can keep an Asian grouping going. It is irrelevant now but is of use to Western academics to show that it is but a talking shop. There must be a common ground for an organisation like this to take off. It was wrong for Turkey to join the European Common Market. Whether you like it or not, it is a Christian organisation, and if Turkey is brought in a member, it will become in time as irrelevant as ASEAN is.

It is important that international bodies reorient itself within a generation so that it can react to any developments. The United Nations had not done so. ASEAN has not done so. The Soviet Union collapsed, not because of democracy but because of the corruption within the system. The Russians are worse off today than under communism. But we are told that democracy has succeeded in Russia, just as it has 'succeed' in Iraq. Pak Lah has presided over the lingering death of ASEAN, which started with a bang, as T.S. Eliot wrote in his poem, The Hollow Men, but wil end in a whimper. It will not be allowed to exist. No amount of whitewash will change that.

M.G.G. Pillai
pillai@streamyx,com