Indonesia’s foreign minister yesterday criticized Myanmar’s military junta for refusing to implement a regional peace plan, as fighting intensifies between the military State Administration Council (SAC) and a broad coalition of rebel forces.
Retno Marsudi’s comments came as foreign ministers of the Association of Southeast Asian Nations (ASEAN) held a private retreat in Vientiane yesterday, part of the 57th ASEAN Foreign Ministers’ Meeting (AMM) and its various affiliated meetings. According to a statement from the Indonesian Foreign Ministry that was quoted by Reuters, Retno told the retreat that there had been “no progress on the implementation” of ASEAN’s Five-Point Consensus peace plan.
Formulated two months after the February 2021 coup, the consensus called for an immediate cessation of violence, inclusive dialogue involving “all parties” to the country’s conflict, and the appointment of an ASEAN special envoy on Myanmar. But the military junta has made no effort to implement the most important parts of the agreement, responding with intensifying force to those resisting its rule and lambasting ASEAN member states for even suggesting that they might engage resistance forces as legitimate parties to the conflict.
Retno told yesterday’s session that as long as the junta stonewalls on the implementation of the consensus, it will remain on the sidelines of the bloc, and that Myanmar’s participation in high-level ASEAN meetings would “be kept at [a] non-political level.” She also stated that Myanmar’s representative at yesterday’s meeting addressed the issue “as if everything goes well, but the facts on the ground do not show it.”
ASEAN has barred “political” representatives from Myanmar’s military junta – this is generally understood to mean its ministers and vice-ministers – from attending the bloc’s summits since late 2021, though to little apparent effect.
After a meeting with her Singaporean counterpart Vivian Balakrishnan in Vientiane yesterday, Retno also gave voice to veiled frustrations on the social media platform X, stating that the two diplomats “shared the same view on the lack of commitment of Myanmar military junta to implement the 5PC [Five-Point Consensus].”
All of this highlights just how difficult the Myanmar crisis has become for ASEAN, nearly three-and-a-half years after the military takeover. A number of member states, particularly Indonesia, Malaysia, and Singapore, have advocated a more proactive policy toward the country’s conflict, and some have directly engaged segments of the opposition, including the National Unity Government. Other ASEAN governments have adopted a policy of strategic engagement with Naypyidaw, framed by a more conservative reading of the bloc’s principle of “non-interference” in member states’ internal affairs. ASEAN’s need for consensus among its member states has also complicated its ability to form a realistic and robust approach
While some Southeast Asian governments are expressing frustration, there are signs that Myanmar’s military administration is seeking to enhance its engagement with ASEAN. Until this year, the junta, in a show of anger at ASEAN’s decision to bar the attendance of “political representatives” to its summits, refused to send anyone at all. But beginning with the ASEAN Foreign Ministers’ Retreat in Luang Prabang in late January, it chose for the first time to send a diplomat to fill its seat, and has done the same for this week’s AMM.
On Wednesday, a senior junta diplomat said Myanmar was eager to normalize relations with ASEAN. “I think we are very much hopeful, very hopeful because if we consider the extent of cooperation from our side, normalization should be coming very soon,” Khin Thidar Aye, director-general of the ASEAN Department at Myanmar’s Foreign Ministry, told reporters in the Lao capital. “So we very much need the support of the international community, and need the understanding and support, not criticisms and pressure.”
It is likely that this outreach is a result of the worsening situation on the home front, where the military has lost considerable amounts of territory to resistance groups in various parts of the country, particularly in Shan and Rakhine states. Incidentally, the past few days have brought reports that ethnic armed groups have seized Mogok, a ruby-mining town in Mandalay Region, and overrun the military’s Northeast Regional Command headquarters in Lashio, the main city in northern Shan State.
Despite its avowed frustrations with the Myanmar military’s indifference to the Five-Point Consensus, ASEAN seems no closer to discarding or reassessing an agreement that was arguably outdated before the ink on the signatures was even dry.
In a Facebook post detailing the discussions during yesterday’s retreat, Singapore’s Foreign Minister Vivian Balakrishnan wrote that he and his counterparts discussed “the importance of upholding the implementation of the Five-Point Consensus.” The Straits Times also cited an Indonesian diplomat as saying that ASEAN was “very clear that the Five-Point Consensus remains the main reference on solving the crisis in Myanmar.”
Reuters also quoted statements from Malaysian Foreign Minister Mohamad Hasan, who expressed concern on the absence of dialogue, and his Thai counterpart Maris Sangiampongsa, who it reported said that Thailand has proposed “open-ended talks with all stakeholders.”
Beyond these rote expressions of support for the Five-Point Consensus, however, the path forward is far from clear. The junta’s obduracy and the zero-sum nature of the country’s conflict suggest few options for outside parties hoping to bring the warring parties to the table, at least at the current juncture.
A senior government official of one ASEAN member state told Nikkei Asia yesterday that the bloc was running out of ideas. “The meeting earlier reaffirmed support for the peace process in Myanmar. As for the details on how that can be done, no creative ideas have been floated,” the official told the Japanese publication. “That’s what is difficult when a country becomes a pariah. No one gets access.”
The focus of some member states now appears to be an increase in humanitarian assistance to the country, one of the five points of consensus that can realistically be fulfilled. A number of Retno Marsudi’s social media posts referenced the need to “scale up” humanitarian assistance to those in need. Nikkei Asia also quoted a draft copy of the joint communique that will be issued at the end of these meetings, which it said included a call that the people of Myanmar receive humanitarian assistance “without discrimination.”
ASEAN’s decision to focus on aiding civilian populations makes a degree of sense, given the difficulties of achieving progress elsewhere. But here, too there are thorny challenges. Constrained by its “non-interference” principle, the ASEAN Coordinating Centre for Humanitarian Assistance (AHA Center) has felt obliged to liaise with junta-controlled organizations such as the Myanmar Red Cross. By doing so, Thiha Wint Aung, Jaivet Ealom, and Mehek Berry argued in an op-ed for The Diplomat this week, “the AHA inadvertently strengthens and legitimizes the military regime.”
They also noted that these channels were ineffective in reaching the bulk of the 2.6 million people that the United Nations estimates have been displaced by the country’s conflict.
In any event, the impending release of the ASEAN ministers’ joint communique should offer some indication of whether, and how far, the bloc’s policy on Myanmar has shifted since the start of the year.