‘ASEAN lost face in summit postponement’ -- Thai newspaper

First posted 07:51:28 (Mla time) December 17, 2006
Agence France-Presse

HONG KONG -- The following is a selection from the editorial page of The Nation newspaper of Thailand. The views expressed are those of the newspaper concerned.

The Nation (says the Philippines' decision to cancel this month's Association of Southeast Asian Nations (ASEAN) summit looks bad for the organization.

Gone are the days when the Association of Southeast Asian Nations was steered by Indonesia's Suharto, Singapore's Lee Kuan Yew, and Malaysia's Mahathir Mohamad.
Call them dictators or whatever you like, but to be sure, these leaders did lead ASEAN and made it a real entity in world affairs.

This year's ASEAN summit, which was supposed to be held in Cebu, the Philippines' second largest city, from December 10-14, was postponed at the last minute because, according to the organizing committee, a great big rainstorm was on the horizon.

The real reason behind the abrupt and panicky cancellation, it turned out, was a terrorist threat. Just a few days before the summit was to begin, an intelligence report from Australia said that a terrorist attack in the Cebu area was in its "final stages". Following the report, six countries including Australia, the US, the UK and Japan issued warnings to their citizens advising them not to travel to the province during the summit.

But another reason behind the cancellation was the political situation in the Philippines.
For one thing, the government still has to deal with the Moro Islamic Liberation Front (MILF), the largest Muslim rebel group in the southern Philippines. Furthermore, the summit was taking place at a time of heightened political tension in Manila over the government's plans to push through radical changes to the constitution.

Meanwhile, the debacle has already caused considerable damage to the image of ASEAN as an organization. For one thing, it reflects poorly on the leadership of the Philippines as the host of the summit. Even if the typhoon was the real reason they shut it down, blaming it on the weather is just lame. Besides, if the weather in Cebu was a problem, why not move the summit to another city?

The non-event this year also shows that current ASEAN leaders are not as strong as their predecessors... Indeed, by backing down this year ASEAN has shown that it will cave in to terrorism. This is ironic because one of ASEAN's projects is tighter cooperation among its 10 members to fight terrorism.

It is sad that ASEAN lost face over the Cebu non-summit. It is sadder, however, that the winners in this are the terrorists themselves.