South China Sea disputes, Rohingya refugees on agenda at Asean meeting
- The 10 members also pledged to work together to limit the economic fallout from the Covid-19 pandemic
- There are also indications they agreed on tougher language over the waterway, where five Asean nations have competing claims with China
The chairman’s statement usually released by the 10 national leaders of the Association of Southeast Asian Nations after their biannual meeting was not made public by Friday evening, but media reports citing draft versions of the document suggested they had agreed on tougher-than-usual language on the disputed waterway.
The meeting was to have taken place in Hanoi in April but was delayed due to the virus outbreak. The 10 leaders however met in the same month, also via video conferencing, with counterparts from China, Japan and South Korea specifically to discuss a collective response to the pandemic.
Coronavirus grabs headlines, but South China Sea will be Asean’s focus
The statement drafted to reflect the outcomes of Friday’s meeting mentioned the countries’ concerns on “land reclamations, recent developments and serious incidents” in the South China Sea, according to an Agence France-Presse report.
Government vessels belonging to China, which claims almost the entirety of the waters, have been in stand-offs with Malaysian, Vietnamese and Philippine vessels in recent months – all during the global public health crisis.
“Even as the region struggles to contain Covid-19, alarming incidents in [the] South China Sea occurred,” Duterte told his counterparts in the meeting. “We call on the parties to refrain from escalating tension and abide by their responsibilities under international law, notably the 1982 [United Nations Convention for the Law of the Sea].”
Regional analysts said they had expected Vietnam to press for such tough language given it had borne the brunt of Chinese actions recently, with episodes including the April sinking of a Vietnamese fishing vessel by a Chinese coastguard ship.
“I would expect Vietnam to [push for strong language], given that it has been subjected to the greatest pressure from China in recent months with regard to the South China Sea,” said Jay Batongbacal, director of the Institute for Maritime Affairs and Law of the Sea at the University of the Philippines.
“Regional solidarity and Asean unity against such coercion is one of the ways by which Vietnam can counteract it,” he said.
Asean and India unlikely to pressure Beijing over Hong Kong national security law: experts
Bec Strating, a South China Sea expert at Australia’s La Trobe University, said Hanoi’s next steps – including the possibility that it might pursue a legal case against China, like the Philippines did in 2013 – were worth monitoring.
“There do seem to be some interesting developments in thinking about whether to use international dispute resolution mechanisms to resolve the dispute, a path Hanoi had previously been reluctant to tread,” Strating said.
The decades-old Rohingya crisis was among the myriad issues discussed at Friday’s virtual meeting.
On Thursday, 94 Rohingya refugees were rescued by fishermen from a boat adrift off Indonesia. Earlier in June a boat with 269 people landed on a Malaysian island. Dozens of them reportedly died on the journey and their bodies were thrown overboard.
The Muslim-majority country of 32 million people has long been a preferred destination for refugees from Myanmar’s Rakhine state, where rights groups say Muslim minorities are persecuted by other largely Buddhist indigenous people in the region.
“We can no longer take more as our resources and capacity are already stretched, compounded by the Covid-19 pandemic,” Muhyiddin said. “Yet Malaysia is unfairly expected to do more to accommodate incoming refugees.”
Asean stays on the sidelines as South China Sea tensions mount
The economic ramifications of the pandemic were among the key talking points, going by remarks made public by the leaders on Friday.
Lee urged all 10 member countries to share their respective know-how on curbing new waves of the infection, as well as to cooperate in procuring vaccines and keeping trade flows open.
Some leaders also mooted the creation of a travel bubble comprising “green” Asean states.
Thailand’s Prime Minister Prayuth Chan-ocha told his counterparts to “start considering shared paths in easing measures”, his spokeswoman Narumon Pinyosinwat said.
Additional reporting by Reuters, Agence France-Presse
