Venu Menon
Wellington, July 30,2024
Foreign Minister Winston Peters ensured New Zealand’s voice was heard on critical issues impacting the Indo-Pacific region at the Association of South East Asian Nations (ASEAN) summit which concluded over the weekend in Laos.
The three-day talks that kicked off on July 25 were dominated by the turmoil in ASEAN-member Myanmar as well as tensions in the South China Sea.
“We reiterated our concern about the situation in Myanmar, tensions in the South China Sea, terrorism, transnational crime, and threats to the international rules-based system,” Peters said in a statement released on 27 July 2024.
Peters also held bilateral talks at the 14th East Asia Summit (EAS) Foreign Ministers’ Meeting convened in Vientiane, where he met his counterparts from India, Laos, Brunei, Darussalam, Cambodia, Singapore, Norway, the Philippines, Thailand, and the United Kingdom (UK).
The talks in the Laotian capital, Vientiane, ended with the bloc issuing a joint statement calling for “all relevant parties in Myanmar to ensure the safe and transparent delivery of humanitarian assistance, to the people in Myanmar without discrimination.”
The military junta in Myanmar seized control after ousting the elected government of Aung San Suu Kyi in February 2021. Protests calling for a return to democratic rule have been brutally suppressed by the regime, with over 5,000 people feared killed and more than 27,000 arrested since the coup, according to estimates by rights groups. Fighting has intensified between the military and local ethnic armed groups.
Myanmar’s neighbours Thailand, China and India have been mandated by ASEAN to push for peace, which the military leadership has ignored.
Big power rivalry has also played out around the festering crisis in Myanmar. US Secretary of State Antony Blinken conferred with his Chinese counterpart Wang Yi in Vientiane on the final day of the ASEAN summit, following Wang’s talks with Russian Foreign Minister Sergey Lavrov. Washington is concerned that Moscow and Beijing are moving closer to counterweigh US global influence.
But the South China Sea symbolised the tricky waters to navigate at the summit.
ASEAN members Vietnam, the Philippines, Malaysia and Brunei are opposed to China exercising its suzerainty over the South China Sea, a key global shipping lane where an estimated $5 trillion in trade floats through annually.
The waterway has witnessed direct confrontation between China and ASEAN member states such as the Philippines and Vietnam.
China and the Philippines are understood to be working out a mutually acceptable arrangement to cool tensions, widely hoped to be a precursor to similar deals among other disputants in the South China Sea.
Blinken applauded China’s conciliatory move in his opening remarks at the ASEAN meeting.
But efforts to forge a code of conduct to govern movement in the disputed territorial waters made little headway at the summit.
New Zealand relies on stability in South East Asia to ensure the smooth flow of trade as well as the security of the Indo- Pacific region.
Foreign Minister Winston Peters’ presence at the just concluded ASEAN summit was an important step towards securing those twin goals.
Venu Menon is an Indian Newslink reporter based in Wellington
