Yesterday, as she and other Southeast Asian leaders arrived in Vientiane for this week’s ASEAN Summit and related meetings, Thailand’s Prime Minister Paetongtarn Shinawatra said that the Association of Southeast Asian Nations (ASEAN) needed to play a key role in ending the raging war in Myanmar.
Speaking at an event in Bangkok, the Thai leader, who took office in August, said that Thailand planned to use diplomatic means to resolve the conflict, which would supplement the Southeast Asian bloc’s own efforts. “ASEAN must play an important role in bringing peace back to Myanmar as soon as possible,” Paetongtarn said.
In many ways, Paetongtarn was merely stating the obvious: if any regional organization has been in a position to address the conflict that has consumed Myanmar since the military seized power in February 2021, it is ASEAN, which counts Myanmar as a member. Her comment also reflects ASEAN’s frustrating inability to arrest the deterioration of Myanmar’s political situation over the past three years.
Despite formulating a Five-Point Consensus in April 2021 calling for an immediate end to violence and inclusive dialogue featuring “all parties” to the country’s conflict, ASEAN’s peace efforts have failed to make much headway. Restricted by its operating principles of consensus and mutual non-interference, the 10-nation bloc has had little power to compel or punish the military junta in Myanmar for refusing to implement the terms of the consensus. (Rather than engaging in dialogue with its opponents, the junta has branded them “terrorists,” sought to eliminate them by force, and vociferously protested any suggestion that ASEAN might engage directly with such forces.)
The most that ASEAN has been able to do is restrict Myanmar’s attendance at high-level meetings to “non-political” representatives and force it to relinquish its chairmanship of the bloc in 2026. In line with the former practice, the junta has reportedly sent Aung Kyaw Moe, the permanent secretary of the Foreign Ministry, to Laos for this week’s meetings. Aung Kyaw Moe attended the foreign ministers meeting in July, but this is the first time that a “non-political representative” from the junta will attend a major summit since the coup. (Previously, the junta chose to skip major meetings altogether in protest at ASEAN’s decision to exclude its political leadership).
As Southeast Asian leaders gather in Laos for the ASEAN Summit and related meetings, Myanmar will again appear high on the agenda, with Reuters reporting a possible “renewed effort by the bloc to push for a resolution as their leaders gather for an annual summit on Wednesday.”
Late last week, Indonesia hosted an international meeting including representatives from “Indonesia, ASEAN, the European Union, United Nations, and members of anti-junta groups.” The outcome of the meeting has not been made public, but according to one reporter, the meeting included representatives from India and Japan but not from China. The military junta was invited but unsurprisingly didn’t attend.
Thailand has also announced that it will host a meeting of the ASEAN Troika Plus meeting in mid-December. The ASEAN Troika is a new formulation that brings together the bloc’s foreign ministers of the previous, present, and future chair countries – in this case, Indonesia, Laos, and Malaysia – in order to ensure a degree of continuity in their approaches toward Myanmar. The “plus” refers to any other ASEAN members interested in pushing forward peace efforts, who are also invited to attend.
These efforts reflect at least some awareness that ASEAN needs to adopt a more creative and flexible approach to the conflict in Myanmar. Over the past year, the country’s civil war has evolved considerably. Ethnic armed organizations (EAOs) and People’s Defense Forces have managed to seize large amounts of territory across the country’s periphery, particularly in Shan and Rakhine States, creating de facto governing authorities that now control long stretches of Myanmar’s borders. These anti-regime forces are now in a position to launch large-scale operations into the country’s central dry zone, which the military has historically viewed as a stronghold.
As two former diplomats, Laetitia van den Assum and Kobsak Chutikul, argued in the Bangkok Post yesterday, the “growing strength of Myanmar’s resistance” had created new realities on the ground that ASEAN, hampered by the “state-centric” approach of the Five-Point Consensus, is currently incapable of grasping.
Myanmar’s neighbors have already adjusted to these changing realities along their borders with Myanmar, where EAOs and other groups now enjoy de facto autonomy. Chris Gunness made a similar point in The Diplomat last week, when he argued that the fast-changing situation in Rakhine State, which the Arakan Army is close to seizing in its entirety, was creating new paradigms for how aid can be delivered to populations in need, including with the support of Bangladesh’s government. To the northeast, China has been doing this for years with the ethnic armed groups that control territories along its border in Shan and Kachin states.
While ASEAN’s “state-centric” approach to Myanmar may once have been defensible as the most pragmatic solution to the country’s troubles, van den Assum and Kobsak Chutikul argue that the bloc is now in danger of being left behind as non-ASEAN members, including China, begin to exercise a greater influence over the course of the conflict.
For all these reasons, it is well past time for ASEAN to move on from the Consensus and adopt a new approach – “one that does not put the SAC at its center but accepts that de facto authorities with proven track records should not be marginalized by international diplomacy.” They added, “Many of these authorities hold significant regional and local legitimacy, not in the least as providers of governance and services that the SAC no longer delivers.”
Whether ASEAN is capable of making such a shift – or carving out an exception to the state-centric modus operandi that has treated the junta as the de facto government of Myanmar, even as its effective jurisdiction shrinks – at all, let alone within the confines of this week’s summit, is unclear. But the longer it puts off such an adjustment, the more abstracted its approach will be from the realities on the ground.