Lina Alexandra, head of international relations at the Jakarta-based Centre for Strategic and International Studies (CSIS), a think tank, said Indonesia had to producing concrete results for Myanmar peace during its ASEAN chairmanship.

“It will no longer be enough to say that Indonesia has engaged stakeholders in Myanmar. It must now present a road map for ASEAN and the steps to deliver it,” Lina said on Saturday.

Ahead of the four-day ASEAN Foreign Ministers’ Meeting (AMM) in Jakarta, scheduled to start on Tuesday, Foreign Minister Retno LP Marsudi said on Friday that Jakarta had conducted over 110 engagements with various stakeholders in the Myanmar crisis in recent months to deliver assistance and build trust. This included meetings between Retno and the foreign ministers of both the Myanmar junta and the government in exile, as well as meetings between Indonesia’s office of the special envoy for Myanmar and ethnic resistance groups, political parties and civil society organizations in Myanmar.

Retno said the engagements were the first building blocks for a lasting peace, asserting that it was time to push for inclusive dialogue and that “a durable peace will not be achieved with a zero-sum approach”.

Read also: Jakarta prepares for flurry of ASEAN meetings

Dewi Fortuna Anwar, a senior international relations expert from the National Research and Innovation Agency (BRIN), said she hoped "the engagement can provide convergence points for differing positions".

Seven months into its ASEAN chairmanship, Indonesia has grappled with both internal and external pressures to move the needle on the Myanmar crisis, on top of escalating tensions elsewhere in the Indo-Pacific. And while surveys have shown that these crises have eroded the public’s confidence in the bloc over a perceived lack of effective and efficient actions, Jakarta has remained adamant that a dialogue-based approach will yield the most favorable results for the region.

“If ASEAN cannot be united and its work [on Myanmar] remains unfinished, then how can it [make the claim of] ASEAN centrality,” Dewi said.

Randy W. Nandyatama, an international relations lecturer at Gadjah Mada University, noted that attempts outside of ASEAN to normalize relations with the Myanmar junta, including the outgoing Thai government’s recent overtures to the neighboring regime, had hampered Indonesia’s efforts.

"This not only shows the diversity or even disunity of positions and preferences on how to handle the issue of Myanmar but also shows that there is indeed a fatigue among ASEAN [on Myanmar]," Randy said.

Read also: Thailand defends divisive Myanmar junta talks

Jakarta has denied allegations of “Myanmar fatigue” within ASEAN – that the drawn-out crisis has sapped the political will of member states to remedy it as ASEAN’s international reputation suffers.

Lina of the CSIS said ASEAN should not give into this weariness and should instead work faster and harder to provide a solution for Myanmar that did not legitimize the junta’s rule.

The AMM will be followed by a series of meetings with foreign ministers of ASEAN dialogue partners to discuss regional and global topics. The meetings will include the ASEAN Regional Forum, the foreign ministers’ meetings of ASEAN+3 and the East Asia Summit.

United States Secretary of State Blinken will travel to Indonesia to participate in some of the ASEAN meetings after he accompanies President Joe Biden in the United Kingdom and Lithuania for NATO meetings from Sunday to Wednesday.

Washington hopes to rally Southeast Asian nations to take tougher action against the Myanmar junta and push back against China's actions in the South China Sea, Reuters reported, citing a statement by Daniel Kritenbrink, the top State Department official for East Asia.

"We do expect our friends and partners in ASEAN [...] to continue to downgrade Myanmar's representation in the ASEAN ministerial, and we also look forward to finding ways to increase pressure on the regime to compel the regime to end its violence and return to a path of democracy," Kritenbrink said.

Russia has also confirmed that Foreign Minister Sergey Lavrov will be in Jakarta to attend ASEAN meetings on Thursday and Friday.