ARF officials to discuss ways to make ARF 'more responsive'

MANILA, May 23 Kyodo

The Association of Southeast Asian Nations Regional Forum is discussing ways to use its meetings as platform to tackle serious security issues, including denuclearization of the Korean Peninsula, a discussion paper obtained by Kyodo News said Wednesday.

ARF senior officials are to meet in Manila on Friday to discuss the need to ''mobilize'' ARF experts and eminent persons ''to deliberate on salient regional security issues such as the Northeast Asia security dilemma and disarmament,'' said the statement.

''In particular, the recommendations on organizing small working groups...for in-depth discussion on important security issues and using ARF meetings as opportunities for the six-party talks process and other participants to hold separate meetings may be explored further,'' the paper said.

In their second meeting last February in Manila, the experts and eminent persons recommended that participants of the six-party talks on North Korea's nuclear program should use the ARF meetings to move the talks forward.

ARF member countries involved in the talks are North and South Korea, Japan, the United States, China and Russia.

The paper, a review of the ''practicability'' of recommendations from the experts and eminent persons, said the idea was broached during the meeting in Manila on Feb. 5 and 6.

The paper said the group ''made recommendations for six-party talks participants and other interested ARF participants to utilize ARF meetings as opportunities to hold separate meetings on various security issues in Northeast Asia.''

''The meeting also agreed that the ARF can and should contribute to multilateral security in Northeast Asia and the wider East Asian region.''

ARF senior officials will also discuss a new security mechanism aimed at making ARF, Asia-Pacific's only multilateral security forum, ''more responsive,'' a bid to erase the perception of ARF as ''too rigid and too slow to react to emerging issues in a timely and effective manner.''

Philippine Foreign Undersecretary Erlinda Basilio said ASEAN has already agreed on the terms of reference of the ''Friends of the Chair,'' a new security tool that will help the ARF chairman act on pressing security issues in the region.

''Finally, we were able to get the ASEAN consensus, and we hope that we will also get the approval of the non-ASEAN ARF partners,'' she said.

The idea of the new mechanism, an initiative of the Philippines, is to give the ARF chairman the power to make a decision with the help of his ''friends'' -- the previous and incoming ARF chairs and a non-ASEAN minister.

''The reason why we set up the Friends of the Chair is precisely to enable the current chair of the ARF to be able to respond in a timely manner any emergency situation,'' she said, stressing the importance of a new mechanism for ARF to act swiftly should a crisis arise.

ARF meets only once a year to discuss global issues.

''This will enable the chairman together with his friends to be able to respond to any emergency situation or crisis in the region or in the world,'' she said, adding, ''If there's a situation in country X, ARF will select a non-ASEAN ARF minister who is friendly with that government and who can open doors for the ARF current chair to be able to do something about bringing about a solution to the crisis.''

She hopes the terms of reference will be endorsed by ARF officials and eventually adopted by the ARF ministers when they meet in Manila on Aug. 2.

Amid all the discussions to make ARF more responsive and relevant, ASEAN said it will make sure ASEAN will still be the driving force.

Established in 1994, ARF aims to resolve conflict by peaceful means and to pursue preventive diplomacy in the Asia-Pacific region.

Each ARF member has representatives in the experts and eminent persons group. Their role is to craft policies on issues such as confidence building measures, the development of preventive diplomacy and approaches to conflicts in the region.

ARF comprises the 10 members of ASEAN -- Brunei, Cambodia, Indonesia, Laos, Malaysia, Myanmar, the Philippines, Singapore, Thailand and Vietnam - plus Australia, Canada, the European Union, New Zealand, the United States, Russia, Papua New Guinea, East Timor, Pakistan, North Korea and South Korea, Mongolia, Bangladesh, Japan, China and India.

Sri Lanka is to be admitted to ARF this year.

COPYRIGHT 2007 Kyodo News International, Inc.
COPYRIGHT 2008 Gale, Cengage Learning