Leaders meet to discuss 'the Asian century'
December 15, 2005
Seth Mydans

KUALA LUMPUR Japan and China were not talking. Russia was talking to everybody. Australia was fending off bad press. The Philippines was denying coup rumors. India was offering to teach English. And the United States, for once, was looking in from the cold.

The inaugural East Asia Summit, which brought together 16 regional leaders on Wednesday, was a mix of here-we-go-again and never-seen-this-before as Asia began shuffling the political deck for the century ahead.

"The East Asia Summit was a great success," the host, Prime Minister Abdullah Badawi of Malaysia, declared in a final news conference. "There was a high degree of acceptance that we are one community with a common interest."

That, in fact, was the lasting question at the end of the one-day meeting, which followed a conference of the 10-member Association of Southeast Asian Nations.

What is the shape of the region as the "Asian century" begins? Is it one community? Can it agree on a common interest?

Amid a complex crisscrossing of national agendas, the main dynamic was the competition for regional dominance between the established powers - Japan and the United States - and the rising giant, China.

With the United States absent from an Asian association for the first time in the postwar era, this competition was played out here in a spat between Japan and China over old war wounds.

Because Prime Minister Junichiro Koizumi of Japan had once again visited a shrine to Japanese who died in World War II, some of them war criminals, Prime Minister Wen Jiabao of China refused to meet him, placing the new association's two most powerful members in mute confrontation.

South Korea was also at loggerheads with Japan over what it sees as Tokyo's failure to acknowledge and adequately address wartime atrocities.

The membership of the group had itself been the subject of dispute, with the eventual admission of Western-oriented Australia and New Zealand, which, along with Japan, were seen as conduits for U.S. influence.

The United States declined to join because of a reluctance to sign a pledge renouncing the use of force and interference in internal affairs in the region.

Although the East Asia Summit had been conceived years ago as a tight Asian association excluding Westerners, it has since redefined itself to welcome nations with economic and political involvement in Asia.

The United States is being short sighted by absenting itself, Jusuf Wanandi, director of the Center for Strategic and International Studies in Indonesia, said by telephone.

"I know about the mess in the Middle East, but don't be distracted," he said. "There's a bigger region that you have to pay attention to for the long term. This is definitely, whether you like it or not, the most important region for the future."

Asia needs the United States, too, he said, as a balancing force and as an economic partner. "Everyone, including China, recognizes that," he said.

The meeting itself, with its vision of a united Asia, lasted just three hours Wednesday morning. Most of the leaders' time was consumed in multilateral networking, part of the process by which Asia defines itself today.

One of the busiest networkers was President Vladimir Putin of Russia, who attended as an invited observer and lobbied hard for full membership when the second East Asia Summit is held in Manila next year.

Russia meets two of the three requirements for membership. It has agreed to renounce the use of force in the region and has signed an economic cooperation agreement. But unlike the United States, Russia has only minimal economic and political involvement in the region.

Putin's smiling, deferential participation seemed to underscore the awkward absence of the United States from a forum whose theme was optimism about the future of Asia.

Also in the glare of publicity, but not happily so, was Australia, accepted for the first time as a member of an Asian club despite being tagged with the epithet "America's sheriff" for its participation in the campaign against terrorism and with soldiers deployed in Iraq.

Wherever he went - to face the press or to share cocktails with his colleagues - Prime Minster John Howard was asked about race riots that have erupted in Sydney.

Former Prime Minister Mahathir bin Mohamad of Malaysia, who first proposed the conference as an Asians-only circle, took the opportunity to say once again that Australia should not be here.

Throughout, Mahathir, who stepped down as prime minister two years ago, has taken verbal shots at the East Asia Summit, which he declined to attend, and he has organized his own alternative caucus once it ends.

"There is still racism in Australia," he said, in one of a stream of comments. "Every now and again it is going to explode."

But other participants played down Australia's difficulties.

"It shows extremism is not peculiar to Muslims, or not all Asians or Arab-looking people, but it can exist in any community, in any religion," said Foreign Minister Syed Hamid Albar of Malaysia.

Also suffering embarrassment about events at home was President Gloria Macapagal Arroyo of the Philippines. Once again, her country is in the grip of the coup rumors that flare periodically like malarial fevers.

"We believe that we have the situation under control," said her spokesman, Ignacio Bunye, using well-practiced phrases. "There is absolutely no cause for alarm."

Also busy networking was India, one of the three Asian economic heavyweights along with China and Japan, and one of the new members from outside East Asia, along with Australia and New Zealand.

Like other leaders here - particularly Japan and Russia - Prime Minister Manmohan Singh of India came bearing a Christmas stocking of little gifts. Singh promised to lower some trade barriers, to help in making generic drugs to combat bird flu, and to take part in regional maritime security.