Leaders of the 10-member Association of Southeast Asian Nations, ASEAN, began meeting in Phnom Penh, Cambodia yesterday April 3, 2012 in a two-day summit that focused on concerns over North Korea’s plans to go ahead with a rocket launch this month. According to the BBC, participants also revisited the recent by-elections in Burma in which opposition leader, Aung San Suu Kyi, won a parliamentary seat with her party taking at least 40 of the 44 seats.
The AFP news agency reported that election monitors from Cambodia, which holds the ASEAN chair, declared Sunday's vote in Burma as being free and fair, and urged the West to lift sanctions imposed on the military government for alleged human rights abuses. ASEAN foreign ministers who met on Monday in Phnom Penh to prepare the summit, commended the orderly conduct of the Burmese polls. ASEAN Secretary General, Surin Pitsuwan said the group was encouraged by the way the by-elections were conducted, adding that all the major stakeholders had cooperated to ensure the success of the landmark political exercise.
North Korea's planned rocket launch between 12 and 16 April - which it says will put a satellite in orbit to mark the centenary of late leader Kim Il-sung's birth - also emerged as a key issue for the summit. The US says the launch will be a disguised long-range missile test that breaches UN resolutions. On Sunday, the Philippines lodged protests with Pyongyang's representatives at the United Nations, ASEAN and China, one of North Korea's closest allies. US Assistant Secretary of State, Kurt Campbell said that the rocket path will be between Australia, Indonesia and the Philippines.
Another geopolitical issue that surfaced at the summit was the tension with China over the disputed South China Sea region. China has overlapping territorial claims with several ASEAN members such as the Philippines, Vietnam, Malaysia and Brunei. China has rejected "internationalization" of the dispute over the resource-rich maritime area, preferring to discuss it bilaterally or with ASEAN, which operates on a principle of consensus.
ASEAN comprises Brunei, Cambodia, Indonesia, Laos, Malaysia, Myanmar, the Philippines, Singapore, Thailand and Vietnam - a grouping of nearly 600 million people from differing economic and political systems.
