HANOI, April 9 (Reuters) - Southeast Asian leaders urged Myanmar to hold fair and inclusive elections, and pledged to work together to sustain recovery from the global financial crisis as they wound up their summit on Friday.
A statement at the end of the Association of Southeast Asian Nations' (ASEAN) meeting in Hanoi said the flood of government spending and easy credit had borne fruit, putting the region's economy on an increasingly solid footing. [ID:nSGE63807C]
They said ASEAN will maintain monetary and fiscal support "until the recovery is on a firm footing", but needed to start working out ways "to reverse the fiscal and monetary stimulus and then phase out these policy accommodations".
The leaders urged Myanmar to hold a "free, fair and inclusive" election, and to work with ASEAN and the United Nations in this process, after Myanmar's Prime Minister Thein Sein briefed them on the election plans, this year's ASEAN chairman, Vietnam's Prime Minister Nguyen Tan Dung, said.
He went to Myanmar's capital just before the summit to deliver a similar message from the leaders, including that the election should have "the participation of all parties". [ID:SGE63807H]
The remarks were unusually blunt for ASEAN, and indicative of the concern some members have expressed that Myanmar's intransigence is hurting the group's credibility when it is trying to turn itself into a regional bloc.
Myanmar's leaders recently unveiled widely criticised election laws barring political detainees, including opposition figurehead Aung San Suu Ky, from running.
Her National League for Democracy, which won the last election in 1990 by a landslide but was denied power by the army, is boycotting this one. That move could make it difficult for the junta to portray the polls as free, fair, inclusive and credible.
CLIMATE CHANGE
The leaders issued a separate statement on climate change, calling on developed countries to set out "specific and binding targets to reduce greenhouse gas emissions" and provide aid to poor countries and those most affected by climate change.
The summit declaration was filled with the usual ASEAN alphabet soup of acronyms, meetings about processes and hopeful homilies about the community they are trying to build.
Foreign ministers on Thursday signed a protocol establishing a "dispute settlement mechanism" within the charter to resolve arguments between ASEAN member states, such as over territory.
Procedures for the mechanism, to be finalised at a meeting in July, completes the charter's legal framework, ministers said.
The charter, adopted two years ago, will turn a region of 580 million people with a combined GDP of $2.7 trillion into a rules-based political and economic bloc over the next five years.
The region is home to some of the fastest-growing emerging economies, which the World Bank said earlier this week is helping to lead the world out of recession.
ASEAN finance ministers said on Thursday they expected the region to achieve 4.9-5.6 percent economic growth this year, against 1.5 percent last year.
The ASEAN leaders said they will develop an independent economic surveillance unit to keep the region from falling into the kind of contagious financial crisis that happened in 1997/98.
The surveillance unit along with a $120 billion multilateral currency swap pool that went into operation last month, is a possible step toward establishing what some have called "a mini-IMF" for the region.
Myanmar, however, continues to dent the reputation and credibility of the group as it nurtures its regional ambitions.
ASEAN has always taken a gentle approach to the resource-rich country wedged between India and China -- and a half-century ago, one of Asia's most developed nations.
"We are not in a position to punish Myanmar," Singapore Foreign Minister George Yeo said.
"ASEAN takes a very realpolitik position, which is that if China and India remain engaged in Myanmar, we have to. It is better that Myanmar remain in the ASEAN sphere than being a buffer state in between the two biggest countries on earth."
ASEAN includes an absolute monarchy in Brunei, the junta in Myanmar, one-party communist states in Laos and Vietnam and robust democracies such as the Philippines and Indonesia. Finding common ground is not always easy in this group, which also includes Cambodia, Malaysia, Singapore and Thailand.
Source :http://www.reuters.com/article/idUSSGE63803N20100409?type=usDollarRpt
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