China and Myanmar likely to be high on the agenda when Southeast Asian leaders meet in Australia

MELBOURNE – An an increasing number of assertive China and a humanitarian disaster in Myanmar are likely to be high on the agenda when Southeast Asian leaders meet in Australia for an extraordinary summit this week.

The ASEAN-Australia Special Summit that begins in Melbourne on Monday marks 50 years since Australia was the first authentic spouse of the Asian bloc.

Leaders of 9 of the 10 Association of Southeast Asian Nations are anticipated to attend the three-day summit, with Myanmar excluded from political illustration over its failure to stem violence in that nation since an army junta seized keep watch over in 2021. East Timor’s chief has been invited as an authentic ASEAN observer and Australian Prime Anthony Albanese invited his New Zealand counterpart to Melbourne to meet regional leaders.

“Australia sees ASEAN at the center of a stable, peaceful and prosperous region,” Albanese stated in a remark on Friday.

“Strengthening our relationship ensures our shared future prosperity and security,” he added.

Australia has hosted ASEAN leaders once before in Sydney in 2018. The leaders issued a remark with the host nation then that referred to as for a code of habits protecting the contested waters of the South China Sea, the place China has turn into an increasing number of assertive over its competing territorial claims with quite a lot of ASEAN international locations.

Australia and the Philippines, an ASEAN member, carried out joint sea and air patrols in the South China Sea for the first time in November ultimate yr.

Also in November, Australia proposed to ASEAN contributors that they claim in a joint remark at the finish of the Melbourne summit their give a boost to for the 2016 arbitration ruling in The Hague in want of the Philippines that invalidated Beijing’s huge territorial claims in the South China Sea, Australian Broadcasting Corp stated in December. China has rejected that ruling.

Other ASEAN international locations with territorial claims in battle with China are Brunei, Malaysia and Vietnam.

China’s an increasing number of assertive posture in the South China Sea and violence in Myanmar crowned a meeting of ASEAN diplomats in January in Laos, the workforce’s poorest country, which has taken over the bloc’s rotating management this yr.

International Crisis Group’s Asia program deputy director Huong Le Thu, who’s attending the summit in Australia, stated ASEAN has at all times been divided over how to way China, with every member country keeping up a novel bilateral courting with the financial large.

“I don’t see the commonality of one approach being feasible. They are working out the best way to manage this power asymmetry that they have with China,” Le Thu stated.

The humanitarian crisis in Myanmar that hangs over the summit demanding situations ASEAN’s credibility as a company, she stated.

“It poses the question for its existence in the first place: why the countries’ governments in the region get together and what is the purpose of this intergovernmental institution if it cannot act on the internal crisis that effects its own organization and the region?” Le Thu stated.

Around 200 protesters, most commonly from the Myanmar diaspora, demonstrated outdoor the summit on Monday morning hard the recovery of democracy in Myanmar and that ASEAN no longer interact with the nation’s army leaders.

Australia, as the summit host, is concentrated on maritime cooperation, financial ties, local weather trade and blank power.

Melissa Conley Tyler, govt director of the Asia-Pacific Development, Diplomacy and Defense Dialogue assume tank, expects leaders will center of attention on what they percentage in commonplace slightly than their variations on problems akin to China and Myanmar.

“The focus is very much going to be on how do Australia and the ASEAN countries work together to create a region where we want to live?” stated Conley Tyler, who’s attending the summit.

“Myanmar is a continuing issue, but I’m not sure it’ll be a focus. I feel the focus will be all positive, very future-oriented, talking about what we can do together and building that sense of excitement and momentum,” she added.

ASEAN contributors come with Brunei, Cambodia, Indonesia, Laos, Malaysia, Myanmar, the Philippines, Singapore, Thailand and Vietnam, and they’ve a blended inhabitants of greater than 650 million and GDP of greater than $3 trillion.

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