Rush to embrace Burma's dictators will be swept aside in march of history

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WHEN regional governments came together 30 years ago to form the Association of South-East Asian Nations it was a modest partnership built in the name of economic development and co-operation.

The real, yet mostly unspoken, motivation was the Vietnam War raging to the north and fears that the communist dominoes were about to come tumbling down.

As both an economic and security alliance, ASEAN amply rewarded the ambition of its founders. As the communist threat withered, member economies boomed and the grouping helped cement the peace between a clutch of neighbours with divergent cultures and political systems, and unresolved territorial disputes.

Now, as ASEAN prepares to celebrate its 30th anniversary, a new dynamic is at work that is casting the seven-nation association not in the role of peacemaker and unifier, but as a force of reaction confronting the aspirations of a new Asian generation. A movement that helped an emerging region find its voice is now acting to silence the clamour for the freedoms it once claimed to defend.

The decision by ASEAN foreign ministers to admit Burma as a full member next month in open defiance of the United States, many other Western governments and the manifest wishes of the Burmese people. It has confirmed the grouping's status as an authoritarian club deaf to the winds of change gathering in their region.

It is a decision that is likely to seriously complicate ASEAN's future relations with Europe and the US - the nation which continues to underwrite regional security. It will further undermine the credibility of ASEAN's claims to be committed to democratisation and human rights, and to speak with moral authority in international affairs.

In rushing the entry of Burma, Cambodia and Laos, ASEAN could also threaten its own internal cohesion. Both Burma and Cambodia are politically unstable and both, along with Laos, are a long way from being capable of fulfilling the association's free-trade commitments.

While it is hardly surprising the likes of Indonesia and Vietnam have chosen to give comfort to a regime in their own totalitarian mould, the speed with which the ostensible democracies of the Philippines and Thailand have jumped on the bandwagon sends a disturbing message about the future of political liberalisation in South-East Asia.

There are, of course, compelling economic and security considerations to dissuade any member of ASEAN from rocking the boat. Thailand, which shares an unstable border with the Burmese, has particular reason to avoid antagonising its troublesome neighbour.

But the conspicuous failure of the Philippines to take a stand against the worsening repression in Burma - and the military's denial of the popular will expressed in elections in 1990 - is a betrayal of the spirit of the "people's power" victory over the regime of Mr Ferdinand Marcos in 1986.

ASEAN has justified its decision to speed Burma's entry by saying regional security demands that the regime be engaged rather than isolated, that the political situation in Burma is an internal matter and that, through engagement, the generals can be persuaded to reform.

In defence of ASEAN's policy of "constructive engagement", the Thai Foreign Minister, Mr Prachuab Chaiyasan, said: "Even a playboy can become a good husband after his marriage, with the family's help. That's the Asian way."

But the latest wave of arrests of members of Ms Aung San Suu Kyi's National League for Democracy - on the eve of the foreign ministers' meeting - has underlined the regime's contempt for ASEAN's token criticisms of their repression.

ASEAN's decision to close ranks behind Burma - which otherwise is being increasingly isolated - has been condemned by human rights groups, prominent political analysts and independent newspapers across the region.

As the modern political history of Thailand and the Philippines has shown - and the recent violent election campaign in Indonesia has reaffirmed - the democratic aspirations of the Burmese people are no regional aberration.

It is the ASEAN leaders who now stand isolated and who, with their Burmese military cohorts, will be swept aside in the inexorable march of history.