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Calls grow for Indonesia to engage with Myanmar's NUG as incoming ASEAN chair
Activists are increasing pressure on Indonesia to shift ASEAN's approach to the Myanmar crisis as the country gears up to assume the regional bloc's chairmanship next year.
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A police officer walks past a display sign for the Association of Southeast Asian Nations (ASEAN) Oct. 27, 2022 while on duty at the ASEAN Secretariat in Jakarta.
(Reuters/Willy Kurniawan)
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ctivists are calling for Indonesia as next year’s ASEAN chair to start engaging with and recognizing the National Unity Government (NUG), as the regional bloc’s Five-Point Consensus and other efforts to engage with the military junta had failed to improve the situation in Myanmar.
Advisory board chair Khin Ohmar of the Progressive Voice Myanmar advocacy group said the people of Myanmar continued to resist the junta’s rule, including through the NUG, Myanmar's government in exile composed of leaders elected in the 2020 general election.
She said the fact that ASEAN kept referring to the Myanmar junta instead of all stakeholders was a problem, and the reason that the Five-Point Consensus had failed to deliver.
“We are proposing that the Indonesian government, during its [2023] chairmanship, start formally engaging with the NUG and other key stakeholders [in Myanmar],” Ohmar told a press briefing in Jakarta on Wednesday.
Debbie Stothard, a coordinator at rights group ALTSEAN-Burma, said while ASEAN had agreed last year to prevent Myanmar junta representatives from attending the ASEAN foreign ministers meeting and summit, the junta had not reduced its violence in Myanmar or implemented the Five-Point Consensus.
“We are asking for Indonesia as the [incoming] chair to extend the ban on political representation to all ASEAN ministerial meetings,” Stothard said at the same briefing.
Meanwhile, the International Parliamentary Inquiry (IPI) on Myanmar said in a report that governments across the world had failed to properly respond to the junta’s coup, while ASEAN and the United Nations Security Council remained paralyzed on the issue.
