Friday, November 23, 2012

4 ASEAN West PHL Sea claimants to meet in Manila to discuss disputes


Four Southeast Asian countries locked in a raging territorial row with China over disputed territories in the West Philippine Sea (South China Sea) will meet in Manila next month in a move to resolve the conflicting claims threatening the region’s peace and stability.

The Philippines, Vietnam, Malaysia and Brunei will hold a meeting—the first of its kind—on December 12 “to discuss viable options to move the issue forward” and find a “peaceful resolution” to the unresolved territorial row, Foreign Affairs Secretary Albert del Rosario said on Wednesday.

“If we can, for example, discuss the delimitation solutions to areas where we have disputes with each other, that certainly would be a good result to that initiative,” Del Rosario told a press briefing.

The issue on the rival claims to the resource-rich West Philippine Sea has divided the Association of South East Asian Nations (ASEAN), which also includes Indonesia, Singapore, Thailand, Cambodia, Laos and Myanmar.

The lack of unified position among the group over the maritime disputes has pushed the four claimants to seek other avenues as the group’s other members wary of offending claimant China had discouraged the regional bloc to take bold steps to resolve the long-running disputes.

ASEAN decides by consensus, meaning a veto by one of its members can block a proposal.

“We are hoping that this can be done under the auspices of ASEAN but we don’t think we should be limited in terms of finding solutions to our disputes among the four of us,” Del Rosario said, calling the new approach “constructive” and “practical.”

The Philippines and Vietnam, two claimants that recently had the most number of confrontations with China over the West Philippine Sea, have accused Beijing of becoming increasingly aggressive in asserting its claims. Taiwan is also a claimant to the vast waters believed to have huge undersea oil and gas deposits

This has intensified calls to transform non-aggression pact between the ASEAN and China into a legally-binding Code of Conduct aimed at preventing armed hostilities from breaking out.

ASEAN, in the recently concluded summit in Cambodia, said it is ready to sit down and talk to China on hammering out a code, but Beijing remained non-committal.

China, which claims the sea nearly in its entirety, objects to any discussion of the disputes in a multilateral forum and prefers to deal with the claimants one-to-one.

Del Rosario said details of the meeting, to be conducted on the vice ministerial level, are still being finalized.

“We will be treating the issues on how to move forward and we’re not sure what the agenda will be. We will be preparing that,” Del Rosario said.

The territorial rifts have spilled over to an ASEAN meeting in Cambodia in July. In an unprecedented show of disunity in the bloc’s 45-year history, ASEAN failed to issue its traditional joint statement at the conclusion of their high-level talks in the Cambodian capital of Phnom Penh last week.

Manila and Hanoi blamed Cambodia, this year’s host of the ASEAN’s rotating chairmanship and a known Chinese ally, for blocking any mention of the territorial row in the joint statement.-Black Pearl (November 23, 2012 1:08AM)

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