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View all search results‘Resilient’ ASEAN tops RI foreign policy priorities
Indonesia guarantees that the Myanmar coup crisis will not hold ASEAN hostage and keep it from pursuing other collective interests, especially in the economy.
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mid the gloomy forecast for 2023, reinforcing ASEAN’s resilience, both politically and economically, will top Indonesia’s priorities, Foreign Minister Retno LP Marsudi said in her annual foreign policy speech on Wednesday.
The elephant in the room, the Myanmar coup crisis, featured prominently as Southeast Asia’s biggest economy assumes the chairmanship of the bloc. However, Retno vowed not to let ASEAN dwell on it for too long.
“Amid difficult global challenges, a positive outlook, cooperation and optimism are even more necessary. [...] The history and story of ASEAN have always been related to the economy,” she proclaimed at the event in Jakarta.
“The Indonesian chairmanship will ensure that the development of the ASEAN community will remain a focus. The issue of Myanmar will not take ASEAN’s development process hostage.”
Glacial progress has hampered the region’s peace initiative for Myanmar, encapsulated in the conception of the Five-Point Consensus (5PC), a list of guiding principles to allow for national reconciliation and humanitarian assistance – two years after the putsch.
Some analysts have described it as one of the bloc’s most exasperating challenges, with the military regime in Naypyidaw not only defying calls for a return to normalcy but also escalating their offenses. Seeming to be at its wits’ end, the very integrity of the 10-nation ASEAN has been relentlessly scrutinized by its sharpest critics.
But Retno asserted that the 5PC would remain at the heart of the association’s engagement strategy with the junta, while also announcing that an Office of the ASEAN Special Envoy would be set up and led by her ministry.
