ASEAN lawmakers agree to avoid South China Sea issue: report

PHNOM PENH, 24 September 2012 (Cambodia Herald) - Southeast Asian lawmakers agreed not to go into the details of disputes in the South China Sea during their annual assembly in Indonesia last week, the Jakarta Globe reported.

The weekend report said the issue "prompted heated debate" among legislators attending the 33rd general assembly of the ASEAN Inter-Parliamentary Assembly in Lombok.

Lawmakers from Cambodia and Myanmar "pushed against discussing the territorial spats in depth, on the grounds that most of them did not involve ASEAN countries," it said.

A resolution on the South China Sea drafted by Indonesia had earlier called for the establishment of an advisory group of high-level parliamentarians to create "new political channels" to address disputes in the South China Sea.

The draft said lawmakers were "deeply concerned about the escalation of conflict among the claimant states arising from the overlapping jurisdictional and territorial claims in the South China Sea."

Marzuki Alie, speaker of Indonesia’s House of Representatives, was quoted as saying that the agreement not to go into such details was to avoid escalating tensions.

"This decision has been approved by all parliamentarians from AIPA countries, in light of the dynamics that we witnessed earlier when the issue was discussed more specifically," he reportedly said.

The report said that "tensions had run high during the meeting ... but that the participants had recognized the sensitivity of the issue and agreed for the sake of regional unity to leave it up to their respective governments to address in greater detail."

"The role of the parliaments will simply be to push for resolutions to the various disputes and not to bring them up at the AIPA forum," Marzuki said. "There’s a concern that if we discuss the issue in too much detail, the negative effects will outweigh any positive outcome."

The agreement among lawmakers follows the failure of ASEAN foreign ministers to adopt a joint statement at their annual meeting in Phnom Penh in July in the absence of a regional consensus on the South China Sea.

China has territorial claims in the South China Sea that compete with those of ASEAN members Brunei, Malaysia, the Philippines and Vietnam. China also claims islands in the East China Sea that are administered by Japan.

Senior ASEAN diplomats are expected to discuss the South China Sea issue at a retreat in Thailand next month ahead of an East Asian Summit chaired by Prime Minister Hun Sen in Phnom Penh in November.