Asean members on Friday could not agree on a final joint statement at
the end of eight days of meetings, underscoring divisions among its members
over the South China Sea issue.
“Some” members wanted to include
in a statement that Asean had not come to an agreement on that issue, while
other members did not want that failure included, Foreign Minister Hor Namhong
told reporters on Friday.
“We had agreed on most of the
points,” he said. “There were more than 100 points in the joint communique and
the only remaining issue was the dispute among some countries in Asean with
China in the South China Sea. Therefore, I think we should not have taken the
joint communique as a hostage of their bilateral disputes with other country in
the region.”
The result was no official joint
statement, despite achievements in other areas.
“Some countries still kept
insisting on putting in the Scarborough Shoal issue, which is a bilateral
dispute between the Philippines and China,” Hor Namhong said in the press
briefing. “And some still insisted on putting the dispute between Vietnam and
China on an exclusive economic zone and a sea dispute, in the joint
communique.”
He called these requests
“unacceptable,” and laid the blame for the breakdown on “the whole of Asean.”
Asean members had hoped to put
together a code of conduct as a negotiation point with China. The code would
govern the behavior of naval vessels in the areas under dispute, but it would
not settle the overlapping claims issue at the heart of the issue.
By late Thursday, the 10 member
states could not come up with agreed-upon language for the code of conduct,
especially whether to address Scarborough Shoal, a small atoll surrounded by
rich fishing grounds claimed by both China and the Philippines.
Philippine Foreign Secretary
Albert del Rosario told Bloomberg News on Thursday that the “impasse” on the
code of conduct was because of Cambodia’s recalcitrance and the “pressure,
duplicity, intimidation” of China.
Some analysts have suggested that
Cambodia could play a major role in helping solve the decades-long dispute over
the South China Sea, which sees overlapping claims by China and Taiwan and
Asean members Brunei, Malaysia, the Philippines and Vietnam. The sea contains a
number of island chains and undersea oil reserves and is a major waterway for
global sea transportation.
However, the breakdown in talks
this week shows how divisive the issue can be.
Phat Kosal, a researcher for
Asian affairs at the University of Southern California, told “Hello VOA”
Thursday, that the issue is unlikely to be resolved under Cambodia’s
chairmanship of Asean this year.
Major powers like China and the
US are involved in the issue, and Asean has remained divided over it, he said.
Speaking from Cambodia, where she
attended meetings among regional leaders, US Secretary of State Hillary Clinton
said the US would not take sides in the South China Sea issue, but that the US
has interests in maintaining stability there. China considers the sea as a core
strategic interest as well.
That means Asean members may
polarize between the two, Phat Kosal said. Negotiation is made even harder
because the dispute itself is older than Asean as a group.
If Asean can’t speak with one
voice, “it will be weak as before, which means speaking more than doing,” he
said. “Mostly, we can’t put pressure on big superpower countries like China and
the US.”
Reporters,VOA Khmer | Phnom Penh
and Washington, DC
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