Back in 1971, the five original members of ASEAN — Indonesia, Malaysia, the Philippines, Singapore and Thailand — signed a pact in Kuala Lumpur that set out a vision for Southeast Asia as a peaceful region, around the time Vietnam was caught in the throes of the Cold War.

The declaration, known as the Zone of Peace, Freedom and Neutrality (ZOPFAN), was instrumental in the establishment of the Southeast Asia Nuclear Weapon-Free Zone (SEANWFZ), a treaty that ASEAN signed in Bangkok in 1995 but one that was only adopted alongside an action plan in 2007.

Under the two instruments, all ASEAN member states are henceforth bound to protect peace and stability in the region from any nuclear weapon-related developments and activities, which include providing assistance or encouraging the manufacture or acquisition of such weapons.

After more than a decade since the adoption of the action plan, observers in the field had their sights set on the second meeting of Donald Trump and Kim Jong-un that took place on Wednesday and Thursday in the Vietnamese capital Hanoi.

And while experts and officials alike have pointed to the Hanoi summit and its precursor in Singapore last year as an acknowledgement that Southeast Asia was on its way to becoming a zone of peace, freedom and neutrality, ASEAN itself simply looked on from the shadows while the United States and North Korea negotiated an end to the latter’s nuclear weapons program.

So far, the bloc has only issued normative statements welcoming positive developments and voicing support for the inter-Korean peace process.

At the 33rd ASEAN summit in November, Singapore issued a chairman’s statement which on the one hand “reaffirms” the group’s commitment to engage nuclear weapon states and resolve all issues pursuant to the SEANWFZ Treaty, while also merely “noting” efforts to bring about complete denuclearization “in a final, fully verified manner”.

Another statement issued after a foreign ministers’ retreat in Thailand earlier this year echoed the previous statement exactly.

“Unfortunately, ASEAN statements last year and this year have softened their tone on North Korea, even though these [nuclear weapon-related] activities continue,” said Aaron Connelly, a Southeast Asia expert at the Singapore-based International Institute for Strategic Studies.

Connelly argued that, while there was not much of a role for ASEAN to play at the US-North Korea summits, the group could still take on “a more useful role” — as laid out in ZOPFAN — to prevent Pyongyang from taking advantage of countries in the region, whether through alleged drug trafficking for gathering funds or through the sourcing of “dual use materials” for its nuclear weapons program.

“These activities are not just a violation of the SEANWFZ principles but [also United Nations] Security Council resolutions which ASEAN nations have supported when they [were] on the Council,” Connelly told The Jakarta Post recently.

Indonesia is currently a nonpermanent member of the Security Countil until the end of 2020.

There was also no mention of the murder of Kim Jong-nam, the North Korean leader’s half-brother, who died after spies from Pyongyang allegedly duped two women into smearing an outlawed toxic substance on him at a Malaysian airport in 2017.

Connelly said ASEAN could demand that Pyongyang extradite the alleged agents, some of whom were already leaving the country moments before the hit, to Malaysia to stand trial.

The two women, Siti Aisyah from Indonesia and Doan Thi Huong from Vietnam, are still in court facing possible capital punishment, with the case likely to drag on until mid-2019.

Pyongyang denies having ordered the assassination.

Jakarta’s top diplomat for ASEAN affairs, Jose AM Tavares, has conceded that the group had taken on a very small — if not nonexistent — role in contributing to the denuclearization of the Korean Peninsula.

Jose said ASEAN did not play and would not seek a greater role because neither Washington nor Pyongyang — as disputing parties — had asked for help.

“Neither party sought any assistance apart from asking Vietnam and Singapore to host the summits,” Jose told the Post earlier this week, adding that both nations worked in their capacity as individual states.

The office of ASEAN Secretary General Lim Jock Hoi did not respond to a request for comment on Wednesday.

In a lecture in Singapore just a month after the historic first Trump-Kim summit last June, South Korean President Moon Jae-in called on ASEAN to invite “North Korea to the various consultative bodies run by ASEAN” and asked “bilateral exchanges and cooperation between ASEAN and the North” to be strengthened.

Moon said ASEAN and North Korea had a mutually beneficial economic relationship before international sanctions were ramped up against Pyongyang in response to its nuclear program.

“When international sanctions against the North are lifted, once North Korea carries out complete denuclearization, the once-vibrant economic cooperation between North Korea and ASEAN will be revived again,” he said at the time, as quoted by The Straits Times.

Since 2000, ASEAN has supplied a venue for dialogue between North Korea and the international community — the ASEAN Regional Forum. It is the only multilateral forum North Korea takes part in outside of the United Nations.

Pyongyang had also applied to become a sectoral dialogue partner to ASEAN, the first step to having full-fledged ties with the Southeast Asian bloc.

Despite a marked absence of engagement on denuclearization, Jose said ASEAN nations saw an opportunity to establish closer ties with Pyongyang in other fields such as the economy and tourism.

In November, Indonesian President Joko “Jokowi” Widodo suggested a plan to set up a meeting between ASEAN leaders and Kim Jong-un at an upcoming commemorative summit between ASEAN and South Korea later this year, which Jose said was welcomed by the other leaders.

But the breakdown of talks in Hanoi over US-enforced sanctions threatens to put a damper on the political goodwill the bloc may try to muster.

Trump told reporters Kim wanted all sanctions imposed on the North over its weapons programs lifted before it made any further moves over its Yongbyon nuclear plant and other covert sites, and he had decided to walk away, AFP reported.

ASEAN and its member states have yet to comment on the outcome of the Hanoi summit. (tjs)

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