When a regional group of foreign ministers meets this week, Malaysia is expected to take the lead in pushing for harder sanctions against Myanmar as resentment toward the junta for blocking crisis resolution efforts grows.
While junta leader Min Aung Hlaing was passed over at a leaders’ summit last year, Myanmar’s newly appointed foreign minister Wunna Maung Lwin has not been invited to Phnom Penh for the ASEAN gathering and was also not included in a foreign ministers’ retreat in February.
The Association of Southeast Asian Nations (ASEAN), a group of ten nations that has led so far unsuccessful diplomatic efforts to restore peace, denounced the junta’s execution of four inmates last week.
Since a coup in February of last year, Myanmar has been in chaos, and 2,100 people have died as a result of the military’s harsh crackdown on dissent, according to a local monitoring organization.
The “five-point consensus” plan for ASEAN, agreed to in April of last year, which called for an immediate end to violence and dialogue between the junta and coup opponents, is expected to be lamented by ministers meeting in Phnom Penh starting on Wednesday.
The ministers will demand “concrete efforts to effectively and fully implement the Five-Point Consensus” in addition to expressing “great concern” over current events and urging caution, according to a draft communique obtained by AFP.
Even as detractors mock the ASEAN as a toothless talking shop, Malaysia will propose a framework for its execution after more than a year of little progress on the plan.
“There must be an end-game, which is the framework’s fundamental component. You must have a goal in mind. What is the five-point consensus’s ultimate goal? Saifuddin Abdullah, the foreign minister of Malaysia, said to AFP.
