MGG Pillai Commentary View

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ASEAN on its death throes

ASEAN IS A DEAD LETTER. What started as a bang in 1967 will go out in a whimper. It is now beholden to outsiders, especially the United States. The chairman of the ASEAN Summit in Kuala Lumpur which just ended, Malaysian Prime Minister, has made sure of it. The United States papers have said the country need not worry because ASEAN's chairman is a 'friend'. Pak Lah gave interviews with the Wall Street Journal and other Western newspapers, but not to a local. He, like all Malaysian leaders, want to be loved by foreigners, especially from the West. Local journalists write about ASEAN only on public statements, and do not report beyond their brief. But this does not mean they do not have opinions or hear others talk about it. They do. Only they discuss it with the colleagues and does not write about it because they would annoy their editors and more important, the officials. Malaysian officials think therefore that the ASEAN Summit is a success while it is run down. ASEAN foreign mininsters met annually in the past, and the focus of reporting was on what they said, leaving their bosses, prime ministers and presidents enough manouverability to accept or reject what was agreed by the foreign ministers. But not now. The ASEAN Summit, which was orginally held when it had to, is now an annual affair. Next year's will be in the Philippines. But it is now an organisation its members do not control.

The ASEAN organisation does not deal with individuals. It does not interfere in each other's affairs. It should not deal with the Thai Malays. But it issued in its Summit communique its concern for internal affairs: it brought out its concern for one individual that the United States supports: the Myanmarese lady, Daw Aung San Suu Kyi. But it could have delayed its extinction if it had also reported on other internal issues – the Thai Malays, Acheh and the Moluccas in Indonesia, Mindanao in the Philippines, even Sarawak and Sabah in East Malaysia, for example. Daw Aung San Suu Kyi heads one of theposition groups in Myanmar, abeit one the United States supports. Do we want to be unable to establish links with Mynamar if the 'wrong' opposition group takes over power. Malaysia supported the wrong part in Afghanisation by establishing diplomatic ties with the group in power, in which 'our' man, Gulbudeen Hikmatyar, was Prime Minister, but it was swept any in the round-robin of governments the country is famous. Malaysia once had links with Afghanisation, but not any more.

ASEAN is a regional organisation. If it decides to interfere in one member country, it should in others too. The communique, which highlighted interference in one, should not have been allowed. But what the United States wants, it goes – for the moment. It is upset that no Western nation is involved in ASEAN deliberations. So it did the next best thing: have its own man in, in this case Pak Lah. With other leaders who are the United States' men and women, it would not have survived a few years long, if it did not make a point of being beholden to the United States. ASEAN used to be effective, but not now. It will go the way of other international organisations, like the United Nations, and will continue with a whimper until it finally dies. To those living in Kuala Lumpur, the snarling traffic jam in the centre of the city is how they will remember the ASEAN Summit.

But the officials do not care. The traffic jams are to be endured for gallivanting to international organisation meetings, which happened to be in Kuala Lumpur this year. They were not interested in anything else – one ASEAN leader lost his reputation because he had an officer who was in his cavalcade who had only one task: to hold the great man's spectacles. In most countries, these foibles would have been reported. But not here, with Malaysian reporters busy being stenographers to the people in power. Others than Pak Lah made important speeches, but you had to search them for it, if at all. Two weeks after the ASEAN Summit, Malaysians do not know what it is about, except for those in Kuala Lumpur for those awful ltraffic jams. Compare this with ASEAN foreign ministers' meeting in Kuala Lumpur, and it will show that it has deteriorated over the years.

Malaysia saw the ASEAN Summit as a forum to show off its facilities: the international metings have been held in the Putra World Trade Centre, the Palace of the Golden Horses, Putra Jaya convention centre, and many others over the years. It is held in the KLCC convention centre, because it had just been ready for an international conference. Malaysia has so many convention centres, empty for the most times, to show the world Malaysia is a convention city. It does not matter what it cost, the long suffering Malaysians are there to pick up the tab. The conventions and conferences are held to ensure that the rulers rule it over the ruled. It is no wonder that the Malaysian prime minister has more in common with President George W. Bush or British Prime Minister Tony Blair than with Malaysians. The more the countries think that – and this is not a Malaysian official fixation – the more these would be held irrelevantly.

This ASEAN Summit agreed to set up the East Asian Summit, proposed earlier by former Prime Minister, Tun Mahathir Mohamed. But it was more concerned to making Australia and New Zealand as members than North Korea. There is much discussion if Russia would be a member, although it should be because of its Asian land north of China. It showed the United States' fear of China and Russia more than anything else, and afraid that the EAS may make decisions behind their backs. It sees China as a threat, but China has not ever fought behind its boundaries, with eleven countries on its periphery. Its aim is to keep its borders safe from outsiders. The last time it left its borders was in the Yuan dynasty in the 13th century, and it stopped when the Ming dynasty (17th to the 20th century). The ASEAN leaders, reading from the local newspapers, ignored all that, and welcomed Australia and New Zealand into the organisation. The EAS began with a whimper and will linger on with a whimper.

ASEAN was founded in 1967 so that Indonesia and Malaysia would not ever go to war. When the new members came in, it was not either of these two countries which were important, but the Buddhist nations – Thailand, Cambodia, Laos, Vietnam, Myanmar. And so, these two countries did not for it to be relevant. In the meanwhile, a secretariat has been set up in Jakarta, with Malaysian as its first secretary-general and Singapore took up that post as the second. But it is Bangkok which decides whether ASEAN survives or not. It will let it continue, as ASEAN countries are more caught up in internal and bilaterial affairs. It is a fact that Malaysia and Thailand are caught in the problem of Thai Malays, who are ethinically Malays in Malaysia but have Thai citizenship. Malaysians believe that all Malays must be united under its leadership, and conducts its foreign policy to win a march over Parti Sa Islam (PAS), whose control of Kelantan the ruling National Front believes has to do with many Kelantanese having relatives with the Thai Malays.

When an organisation does not change a every generation, it goes into the doldrums. The officials would not allow it to fold, for a bureaucracy has grown over it, and giving it up is painful indeed. What would it do with the officers assigned to it? ASEAN is in this position. It has become an organisation the United States controls, like the United Nations. and it is looked upon as being important when it is not. Meanwhile, we can hear stirring statements that mean nothing, and be happy to go along as a United States plaything to its whimpering death.

[This appeared as my colum in the second issue in December of Harakah, the twice-monthly organ of PAS.]

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