ASEAN remains an alliance in search of a meaningful role
By Mark Baker, Herald Correspondent in Hanoi
Thirty-four years after South-East Asian leaders forged a hasty alliance against communism, the Association of South-East Asian Nations is gathering in Hanoi and Vietnam is in the chair.
If this alone were not icing on the cake of Vietnam's revolutionary victory in 1975, the foreign ministers of the now 10-nation ASEAN will later this week be joined by their counterparts from China, Japan, the European Union and the United States - with the US Secretary of State, Mr Colin Powell, making his first return visit to the country where he fought as a junior officer in the 1960s.
But while Vietnam has come full circle since the war - a socialist state bristling with capitalist enterprise - ASEAN remains much as it was at its founding in 1967: a clutch of wary neighbours and economic rivals searching for focus and direction.
Once more ASEAN's relevance is being called into question as momentous events unfold around it and it has little to offer but apprehension.
The upheaval in Indonesia, once ASEAN's most powerful member, is overshadowing this week's meeting and has forced Jakarta's Foreign Minister, Mr Alwi Shihab, to cancel. Officials and ministers have already rushed to declare there is little they can contribute towards restoring peace and stability in Indonesia - a legacy of ASEAN's cherished policy of non-interference in member states.
It is the same policy that has seen ASEAN largely sidelined in most of the important regional events of the past decade, including the peace process in Cambodia and the United Nations intervention in East Timor. It also left the grouping floundering for a co-ordinated response to the 1997 regional economic crisis.
The region's underlying differences have resurfaced this week with preliminary meetings of officials apparently failing to make progress on the bitter issue of rival territorial claims in the South China Sea, and signs of an unravelling of earlier commitments to regional free trade in the face of the worsening global economic outlook.
Last week Singapore's veteran Foreign Minister, Mr S. Jayakumar, warned that unless members stuck to targets for trade liberalisation they should not be surprised if international investors abandoned the region.
One initiative on this week's agenda - a plan to combat the poverty of ASEAN's weaker members, including Burma, Laos and Cambodia - is shaping as another proposal strong on platitudes and short on substance.
This week's gathering has been further compromised by the abrupt decision of the North Korean Foreign Minister, Mr Paek Nam-sun, to stay home because he is "too busy". Scheduled meetings with South Korean and US delegates were seen as an important chance to revive the faltering Korean peace process.
And if the outlook were not grim enough, even the annual song and dance show at the closing night dinner - a ritual as old as funny shirts in the official portrait - is in jeopardy. With the former US Secretary of State and recent star performer Dr Madeleine Albright gone, Mr Powell has made it clear he has no intention of picking up her song sheet.
