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Yogyakarta meeting endorses Indonesia's initiative on ASEAN identity
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The Education and Culture Ministry's director general for culture, Hilmar Farid. (JP/Sri Wahyuni)
S
enior ASEAN officials agreed in a meeting on Wednesday to endorse Indonesia’s initiative concerning a narrative about the identity of the regional grouping to be delivered at a ministerial meeting slated for October.
The 15th ASEAN Senior Officials Meeting for Culture and Arts (SOMCA) was held in Yogyakarta as a follow-up to the ASEAN Ministers Responsible for Culture and Arts (AMCA) meeting conducted last year in the same city, which was named the 2018-2019 ASEAN City of Culture thanks to Indonesia’s being the chair of AMCA.
"With the agreement, hopefully the narrative on ASEAN identity will be finally adopted during the leaders' meeting in the 2020 summit," the Education and Culture Ministry’s director general for culture, Hilmar Farid, said after closing the two-day meeting on Wednesday.
The narrative was presented in the SOMCA in the form of an initial briefing paper that came out of consultations with relevant academics and experts from Indonesia, the Philippines and Malaysia.
"With that now we are just waiting for the formal process for the adoption of the narrative by ASEAN leaders,” Hilmar said.
He said, however, some improvements would be made on the narrative before it was officially brought to the next meeting of AMCA, to be further endorsed for the 2020 ASEAN summit for approval by the bloc leaders.
Indonesia, which, as a chair of the meeting on Wednesday, proposed that the narrative be endorsed, considered it important because although ASEAN was established 52 years ago, the bloc had yet to define ASEAN identity.
