Negotiating A Dispute in 'The Spirit' Of ASEAN
International Herald Tribune
September 24, 1996
Michael Richardson

Shortly before Japanese patrol ships repelled Chinese nationalists from Taiwan and Hong Kong who were trying to land on disputed islands in the East China Sea, Indonesia indicated how another part of Asia has kept nationalism in check.

Officials in Jakarta said that President Suharto would visit Malaysia early next month for talks with Prime Minister Mahathir bin Mohamad on bilateral

matters, including overlapping claims both countries have to Sipadan and Ligitan, two small islands off the east coast of Borneo.

"Indonesia wants the issue of Sipadan and Ligitan resolved in a family-like manner based on the ASEAN spirit," said General Feisal Tanjung, chief of Indonesia's armed forces. "We do not want to resolve it through conflict, but by peaceful means." ASEAN is the Association of South East Asian Nations, which comprises Brunei, Indonesia, Malaysia, the Philippines, Singapore, Thailand and Vietnam.

While Northeast Asia is still riven with ideological differences, mutual suspicion and territorial disputes long after the end of the Cold War, Southeast Asia has resolved or successfully managed many similar conflicts over the past three decades. As a result, it is moving toward closer political cooperation and economic integration.

But Southeast Asian leaders worry that tensions in Northeast Asia could erupt in conflicts that would undermine economic growth and development throughout East Asia by diverting resources into a competitive weapons buildup, upsetting business and investment confidence in the region.

"If the present concentration of economic growth and cooperation prevails in East Asia for another 10 to 20 years, Asia will be transformed," Lee Kuan Yew, Singapore's senior minister, said at an international conference in Beijing the other day. "But there are dangers that the mood could change and attention could be diverted by disagreements between East and West, and among East Asians themselves, which would dispel this optimistic mood and disrupt the present concentration on cooperation and growth."

Much of the cohesion in Southeast Asia comes from ASEAN. Formed in 1967 following a damaging period of armed confrontation between Indonesia and Malaysia, which then included Singapore, ASEAN sought to advance regional cooperation in as many areas as possible.

An ASEAN Free Trade Area is being formed that will allow most goods in the region duty-free movement across borders by 2003. Vietnam and three prospective new members of the group — Burma, Cambodia and Laos — will be given several years longer to meet the open trade deadlines.

ASEAN has provided a useful framework for settling political and security problems among its members, and for promoting economic collaboration.

There is little doubt that Indonesia and Malaysia will either resolve their dispute over the Sipadan and Ligitan islands through bilateral negotiations, or agree to refer the issue to the International Court of Justice for adjudication.

Singapore and Malaysia have already chosen the latter course to end a conflicting claim to ownership of an island-lighthouse. And Thailand and Malaysia have agreed to turn a 7,250-square-kilometer area of overlapping claims in the South China Sea into a joint development zone for natural gas and oil production.

Some Asian and Western officials say that Northeast Asia urgently needs its own multilateral forum, similar in structure and style to ASEAN, to ease tensions.

Yukihiko Ikeda, the Japanese foreign minister, appeared to support such a proposal in May when he spoke of the need to establish a new mechanism to build mutual confidence in the region. "As a country in Northeast Asia, we should devise concrete ways of improving mutual confidence in the region," he said.

Mr. Ikeda will meet his Chinese counterpart, Qian Qichen, at the United Nations in New York this week to discuss relations between Japan and China, including their dispute over the small and barren East China Sea islands known as the Senkakus by Japan and the Diaoyus by China.

Japanese nationalists sailed to the islands this month and repaired a makeshift lighthouse that had been damaged in a typhoon. Their landing sparked anti-Japanese protests in Chinese communities in Hong Kong, Macau and Taiwan as well as on mainland China, leading to Monday's confrontation between Japanese patrol ships and boats carrying Chinese protesters.

Paul Evans, director of Canada's Joint Center for Asia Pacific Studies, said that a major obstacle in the way of setting up a representative ASEAN-style forum for Northeast Asia is that the "level of trust, familiarity and confidence that exists in discussions in Southeast Asia doesn't exist in Northeast Asia."

The Korean Peninsula remains bitterly divided, as do mainland China and Taiwan. Japan, which occupied much of Northeast Asia before and during World War II, is still feared and resented by its neighbors. Japan also has island and maritime boundary disputes with China, Taiwan, South and North Korea, and Russia.

Copyright © 2006 The International Herald Tribune