Obama asks RP to draft US-Asean partnership accord

By Christian V. Esguerra, Philippine Daily Inquirer, 22:06:00 11/15/2009

SINGAPORE —US President Barack Obama and the Association of Southeast Asian Nations (ASEAN) tapped the Philippines, on Sunday, to draft a fresh five-year plan covering his country’s groundbreaking engagement with the region on a variety of areas, such as trade, security, climate change and human rights.

Already the coordinator for the first-ever Asean-US leaders’ meeting, Manila was designated to “lead the drafting” of the existing five-year enhanced partnership agreement between the two parties.

“We welcome the role of the Philippines as the country coordinator … and requested the Philippines to lead the drafting of the next five-year plan of action,” Obama and the Southeast Asian leaders said in a five-page joint statement.

Obama sat down, on Sunday, with all 10 Asean leaders—a first for the United States—in what could be considered a concrete follow-up to his promise on Saturday to “strengthen and sustain our leadership in this vitally important part of the world.”

In the joint statement released after the private meeting at the Shangri-La Hotel here, Obama and his counterparts tackled a number of pressing issues, such as human rights, regional security and economic integration, nuclear arms, food security and climate change.

The group expressed hope that the “high level dialogue and the policy of the US to engage with the government of Myanmar … would contribute to broad political and economic reforms.”

“We also underscored the importance of achieving national reconciliation and that the general elections to be held in Myanmar in 2010 must be conducted in a free, fair, inclusive and transparent manner in order to be credible to the international community,” the leaders declared.

They called on Burma (Myanmar) to “help create the conditions for credible elections by initiating a dialogue with all stakeholders to ensure that the process is fully inclusive.

Obama invited the newly formed Asean human rights commission to the United States next year “to consult with international experts in the field.”

Besides being country coordinator until 2012, the Philippines’ upcoming role as next year’s chair of the Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty Review Conference in New York figured in the meeting.

Obama and the Asean urged North Korea to return to the six-party talks and “fully implement its commitments … to abandoning all nuclear weapons and existing nuclear programs.”

In the wake of recent calamities that hit the region, both parties “agreed to further strengthen cooperation on disaster management.”