Asian editorial excerpts

TOKYO, Jan. 10 Kyodo

Selected editorial excerpts from the Asia-Pacific press:

RANGOON RUNAROUND (New Straits Times, Malaysia)

Gesture and nuance speak volumes in diplomacy, and the desire to keep talking can be just as telling as the talks themselves. But as snubs go, there was nothing ambiguous about the one handed to the United Nations special envoy Razali Ismail by the Myanmar junta.

After stringing him along in the early part of his commission by releasing Aung San Suu Kyi and allowing him a say in former prime minister Khin Nyunt's ''road map'' to democracy, the generals dropped all pretence of engagement and froze him out for the next 22 months. Repeated attempts to get a word in to Yangon on the fringes of ASEAN conferences were rebuffed. On Sunday, Razali resigned in frustration. ''It is clear they do not want me back,'' he said.

The artful generals haven't entirely closed the door on international mediation, however. Recently, another of U.N. Secretary General Kofi Annan's emissaries, former Indonesian Foreign Minister Ali Alatas, came calling and was teased with the prospect of a bigger U.N. role in the country.

Yangon has not been unskillful in its stonewalling, playing one interlocutor off against another, buying time and doing just enough to foil a consensus against it, such as by forging commercial deals with China and India.

Last month, the U.N. Security Council held a closed-door briefing on Myanmar, which offered unanimous expressions of concern but no agreement on what is to be done next. Although submissions were made on the threat of refugees, insurgencies and drugs spilling across borders, none was deemed sufficient to warrant intervention.

Between the lack of external unity and the paucity of internal reconciliation, Yangon could afford to keep everyone waiting. Referring to Foreign Minister Syed Hamid Albar's postponed visit, Razali's parting shot was: ''More delays can be expected.''

Patience is always a virtue in bridging opposing viewpoints, but its exercise by ASEAN with no result has left the Southeast Asian grouping with egg on the face. In 2004, the ASEAN-Europe Meeting in Hanoi was nearly brought to a halt by ASEAN's insistence on keeping Myanmar on board. Yangon did not see this as worth reciprocating, except perhaps as a fillip to its courtesy in standing down from the association's chair this year.

Relocating to the new capital of Pyinmana may have given the generals an excuse to fob off Syed Hamid for the time being. But the decision at last month's summit to dispatch a high-level delegation intimated that ASEAN was at last taking the Myanmar problem seriously as it rises to the challenge of East Asian integration.

With Razali's humbling failure, the onus has fallen even more heavily on ASEAN to bring the generals to heel.

(Jan. 10)

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