Thailand Says Past Meeting on Myanmar Remains within ASEAN Framework

Jakarta. Thai Foreign Affairs Minister Don Pramudwinai said that his country’s decision to host the controversial informal talks that invited the Myanmar junta was in line with an earlier ASEAN document, which called on the bloc to possibly explore other approaches.

Thailand last month held an informal talk — outside the ASEAN framework — in Pattaya that aimed to re-engage the Myanmar military rulers. Laos was the only ASEAN country to have sent its foreign minister to the talks. 

Pramudwinai justified the dialogue in Pattaya as an attempt to explore other approaches to the Myanmar crisis, which an earlier ASEAN document had called for consideration. Thailand had also hosted two other informal talks prior to the June meeting, according to the minister. 

“The first and second informal meetings, including the third one [in Pattaya], were very much on Article 14 [of the ASEAN’s leader review on the five-point consensus] adopted in Phnom Penh, which opens up other approaches to be explored,” Pramudwinai told reporters on the sidelines of the ASEAN Ministerial Meeting in Jakarta on Tuesday.

When asked by the press about seeing Myanmar back in the ASEAN meetings, Pramudwinai said: “We all would like to see all ASEAN family members.

ASEAN has banned the Myanmar junta from attending the bloc’s high-level summits following stagnant progress in the five-point peace plan. The regional grouping now only allows Myanmar to send a non-political representative. Under the five-point consensus, ASEAN calls for Myanmar to cease violence and pursue a constructive dialogue among all parties.

In 2022, ASEAN issued a review of the implementation of the five-point consensus. Article 14 of the document reads: “ASEAN shall consider exploring other approaches that could support the implementation of the five-point consensus.”

The years-long crisis in Myanmar has become one of the biggest challenges in Indonesia’s ASEAN chairmanship. Indonesia is now under even greater pressure as past chairs Cambodia and Brunei Darussalam failed to resolve the issue.

Indonesia so far has always favored “non-megaphone diplomacy” when navigating the Myanmar political turmoil. Jakarta has held 110 engagements with the stakeholders in Myanmar during the past six and a half months of its ASEAN chairmanship.

These stakeholders include Myanmar’s government-in-exile National Unity Government (NUG) as well as the junta State Administration Council (SAC), among others.

When the news broke that Thailand was hosting an informal talk last month, Indonesia said that an engagement involving one party would be against the five-point consensus.

“If a country makes its own initiative, let them be. That is their country’s right. But if we speak of ASEAN, we have our rules of games that we must pay attention to, namely the five-point consensus and the past summits’ decisions,” I Gede Ngurah Swajaya, the special advisor to the foreign affairs minister for regional diplomacy, told reporters in Jakarta on June 19.

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