Myanmar’s membership of ASEAN, achieved in 1997, has always been a test of the rules and norms that govern the regional body.
But the nature of that test has changed with the plight of the Rohingya, 8,000 of which are now trapped at sea – unable to make landfall in neighbouring states. ASEAN, and its members, are failing this test, a failure which will have lethal consequences for one of the most vulnerable people of the region.
In the past the test that Myanmar posed was to the diplomatic rules of ASEAN – commitments to non-intervention and sovereign equality. In the past ASEAN member states showed that they were willing to chastise Myanmar publicly when, for example in 2007, it engaged in harsh repression of the Saffron Revolution. George Yeo, then Singaporean Foreign Minister, went so far as to express his ‘revulsion’ at the crackdown – a radical and undiplomatic tone to use towards a fellow ASEAN member.
The test posed for ASEAN by the current crisis is far more existential than that they faced in the 2000s. The Rohingya expose the dangerous vacuum at the heart of ASEAN’s commitment to become people-centred. We have gone from a test of a set of diplomatic rules to a test of the very moral purpose of ASEAN as a body....
