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Clear Myanmar road map needed, experts say
“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,” a member of the Centre for Strategic and International Studies (CSIS) said on Saturday.
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Foreign Minister Retno LP Marsudi delivers a speech during a press briefing ahead of the ASEAN Foreign Ministers' Meeting in Jakarta on July 7, 2023. (Reuters/Ajeng Dinar Ulfiana)
E
xperts have welcomed Indonesia’s engagement with the parties to the Myanmar crisis but say the effort must result in a clear plan to achieve ASEAN’s Five-Point Consensus (5PC) for peace before Jakarta’s chairmanship of the bloc ends.
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”.
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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".
