The 55^th ASEAN Foreign Ministers’ Meeting (AMM) from Aug. 2 to 5 will likely discuss issues related to theme Addressing Challenges Together set by ASEAN chair Cambodia, which includes post-pandemic recovery, some regional and international issues, as well as Timor Leste's membership application.

The coming AMM will be the first time the meeting will be held in person since 2019, when pandemic restrictions forced the bloc to convene virtual ministerial-level meetings.

The foreign ministers are also set to meet their dialogue partners from the United States, Australia, the United Kingdom, Canada, China, the European Union, India, Japan, New Zealand, South Korea and Russia either in separate meetings or through forums. This includes ASEAN Plus Three, the East Asia Summit’s foreign ministers' meeting and the bloc’s key security dialogue framework, the ASEAN Regional Forum.

Foreign Minister Retno LP Marsudi is scheduled to fly to Phnom Penh on Monday for the ASEAN meetings, during which she expects all countries to take "a constructive stance to look for solutions over common issues" like Myanmar and the war in Ukraine.

Ignoring appeals and warnings from several international actors, Myanmar's military junta announced last week that it had executed pro-democracy political prisoners accused of helping a resistance movement fighting the army that seized power in a coup last year.

This prompted widespread condemnation from around the globe. ASEAN chair Cambodia issued a response the day after news broke of the executions, saying the bloc “denounces and is strongly disappointed” by Myanmar, adding that its decision to carry out the executions a week before the 55^th AMM was “highly reprehensible”.

President Joko “Jokowi” Widodo, through Retno, has expressed his “disappointment” over the executions. He called it a sign of “a lack of significant progress" in the implementation of the Five-Point Consensus – an ASEAN peace plan for Myanmar that was agreed upon last year in response to the military coup there.

Read also: Jokowi ‘disappointed’ by Myanmar military executions

Indonesia, according to Retno, was among the first to push the ASEAN chair to issue a statement regarding the executions, actively making suggestions for the draft statement.

Retno said she had also made a personal suggestion to her counterparts to discuss the latest developments in Myanmar at the coming meetings in Phnom Penh, as the implementation of the peace plan is lacking progress.

“More than a year and a half has elapsed since the Five-Point Consensus [was agreed upon]. It is time for ASEAN to discuss the matter again seriously,” she said in a briefing in Tokyo last week, when she was accompanying Jokowi on his Japan visit.

Dewi Fortuna Anwar, a senior researcher on international politics and foreign policy at the National Research and Innovation Agency (BRIN), said that following the executions, ASEAN ministers should start to consider the crisis in Myanmar as no longer about internal strife.

She urged the AMM to seek ways to prevent the military junta from becoming a stumbling block for ASEAN in making substantial progress on its regional agenda.

“[The conflicts in Myanmar] have also impacted the performance and existence of ASEAN itself,” Dewi told The Jakarta Post on Friday.

She is concerned that the lack of implementation of the peace plan might affect ASEAN's future decision-making, which needs the consensus of all members. She warned that if ASEAN continued to tolerate the military junta, it would encourage the latter to ask for recognition in exchange for allowing ASEAN to make decisions that would normally require the consensus of all 10 members, which in turn would damage ASEAN’s credibility.

Read also: ASEAN must step up pressure on Myanmar junta: UN expert

Senior fellow Randy Nandyatama at Gadjah Mada University’s ASEAN Studies Center said addressing Myanmar's issues remained an important task for the regional bloc, particularly as the United States and its allies began to see ASEAN losing relevance amid tensions between the US and China.

“In this case, ASEAN needs to reassert its relevance,” he said.

The US, the United Kingdom and Australia formed late last year a new security partnership dubbed AUKUS to respond to China's growing military assertiveness in the Indo-Pacific region.

But Randy also reminded the AMM not to sideline other pressing issues the region is facing, such as inflation.

In her visit to Cambodia this week, Retno is also expected to hold bilateral meetings with her counterparts from ASEAN and partner countries.

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