A joint communique released by ASEAN on Saturday expressed the bloc’s ‘deep concern over the escalation of conflicts’ in member-state Myanmar.
The country has been ravaged by violence since the military seized power in 2021, sparking renewed fighting with established ethnic minority armed groups and dozens of newer ‘People’s Defence Forces’.
ASEAN has spearheaded so far unsuccessful diplomatic efforts to resolve the crisis, with a five-point peace plan agreed between the junta and the bloc now moribund.
The five-point consensus ‘remains our main reference to address the political crisis,’ the joint communique said.
Myanmar’s junta has been banned from high-level ASEAN summits over its coup and crackdown on dissent, in which rights groups say it may have committed war crimes.
Two senior bureaucrats represented Myanmar at the Laos talks.
The military’s readiness to re-engage with ASEAN diplomatically was a ‘sign of the junta’s weakened position’, a Southeast Asian diplomat told AFP earlier this week.
Australia’s foreign minister on Saturday called on Myanmar’s junta to ‘take a different path’ from its bloody crackdown on dissent, saying the situation in the war-torn country is ‘not sustainable’.
Penny Wong made the comments at an Association of Southeast Asian Nations (ASEAN) foreign ministers meeting, where the crisis in ASEAN member Myanmar has divided the bloc.
The country was plunged into a civil war after the military seized power in a coup in 2021.
Weeks after it seized power and launched a crackdown on dissent the junta agreed to a five-point peace plan with ASEAN but has failed to implement it.
‘Myanmar is deeply concerning, we see it in the economy, instability, insecurity, deaths,’ Wong told journalists at a press conference.
‘The message I want to send to the military regime is ‘this is not sustainable for you and your people’.’
‘We urge them to take a different path and reflect the five-point consensus.’
The junta has been barred from high-level ASEAN meetings over its crackdown on dissent.
It had previously refused to send ‘non-political representatives’ but two senior bureaucrats are representing the country at the talks in Vientiane.
A Southeast Asian diplomat told AFP on condition of anonymity earlier this week that the military’s readiness to re-engage diplomatically was a sign of its ‘weakened position’.
In recent weeks ethnic minority armed groups have renewed an offensive against the military in northern Shan state, seizing territory along a vital highway to China.
Myanmar’s generals have yet to make any meaningful counterattack following a previous offensive by ethnic armed groups in October that seized swaths of territory along the border with China.
The losses triggered rare public criticism of its top leadership.
ASEAN has spearheaded diplomatic efforts to resolve the crisis but with little success.
Indonesia, Malaysia and the Philippines have called for tougher action against the junta, while Thailand has held its own bilateral talks with the generals as well as detained democracy leader Aung San Suu Kyi.
The conflict in Myanmar has forced 2.7 million people from their homes since the coup in 2021, according to the United Nations.
