Leader

NST Leader: Of putsch and sea change

EVERY time there is an Asean summit, an obituary or two make it to the media. This time is no different. Former Indonesian foreign minister Marty Natalegawa acknowledged as much on Tuesday, though not on the frequency.

Irrelevance comes before death. The 10-member bloc can at times be very unalike. Claiming to operate on consensus, Asean has appeared to have agreed to disagree. If there ever was a formula for irrelevance, that must be it.

Two dangers in the region are threatening to hasten Asean into oblivion: Myanmar's two-year plus civil war and China's baseless claims to almost the entire South China Sea.

Start with Myanmar's coup-led civil war that has killed more than 4,000 people, many of them children. Two months into the putsch — an indication of the speed with which Asean solves crises — the bloc summoned junta leader Min Aung Hlaing to a summit for what has now become the infamous Five-Point Consensus.

Oh how the bloc loves consensus. Despite the name of the agreement, the general refuses to implement it. The junta is barred from Asean meetings, including the summit that is going on in Jakarta. Min Aung Hlaing doesn't care. He has friends in Cambodia, Laos and Thailand.

The three think a nation-by-nation approach to be better. They can't be more wrong. Cambodia, when it last held the annually revolving chair, tried that approach against the advice of Asean, but it had nothing to show for it.

Thailand, under the previous military government, tried a similar one-on-one approach, but similarly came up with zilch. It is unclear if the newly-appointed Thai prime minister would follow the previous lead.

Malaysia is clearly frustrated. On Monday, it called for strong measures to be taken against Myanmar generals because they are blocking the bloc's peace plan. Hard to find a message as blunt as this coming from Kuala Lumpur. Put it as necessary.

Twenty-eight months of the Five-Point Consensus and Asean has nothing to show for it. In the meantime, Min Aung Hlaing is on a killing spree. If war crimes in one small member country can't make Asean act, nothing else can.

Now for the second irrelevance-inducing danger. If China's nine-dash line claim over the South China Sea was preposterous — an arbitration court siding with the Philippines said it had no basis in international law — a ten-dash line that made its appearance last week in the country's new map, the 2023 China Standard Map, must be beyond preposterous.

It includes a significant portion of Malaysian waters near Sabah and Sarawak. Also included are maritime areas of Brunei, the Philippines, Indonesia and Vietnam. It didn't stop there. It included some land territory that India claims to be its.

Malaysia protested last Wednesday, saying it considers China's map as having no legal binding force. Others have protested, too. Kuala Lumpur must do another thing. It must speedily issue a new map of Malaysia. The last time one was published was in 1979.

China should not think that its heft defines international maritime law. If it thinks so, there is no difference between Washington and Beijing's approaches to resolving disputes. Both are based on the principle of "might is right".

International law recognises no such principle. Asean has to stick together to safeguard its members' interests. The alternative is irrelevance.

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