Foreign Minister Marty Natalegawa left the country for the Philippine capital of Manila on Tuesday to begin a mission to lobby his ASEAN counterparts to find peaceful resolution to the South China Sea dispute that has caused a rift within the regional grouping.
Marty is
also slated to tour some ASEAN cities, including Hanoi, Phnom Penh,
Kuala Lumpur and Singapore. He will wrap up the tour on Thursday.
Foreign
ministers of those countries were involved in a heated discussion in
last week’s ASEAN Ministerial Meeting (AMM) in Phnom Penh on how the
summit should deal with the sensitive and prolonged territorial dispute.
As a result, the summit ended without a joint statement, a first in
ASEAN’s 45-year history.
“Our aim is to create more intensive
communications and seek a mutual position among ASEAN member states on
the South China Sea issue. I hope my counterparts will be eager to
convey all their views,” Marty said.
Marty said he had also
spoken on the phone with Philippine Secretary of Foreign Affairs Albert
Ferreros del Rosario on Monday and told him of the plan.
He said that the dialogue would be the key to maintaining stability in the region.
“The
absence of mutual views could be dangerous, in the sense that ASEAN
could be mistakenly seen as disunited and will be weakened,” Marty said.
He said that although Indonesia was no longer ASEAN chair, it wanted to present itself as a responsible member of the group.
On Monday, President Susilo Bambang Yudhoyono instructed Marty to tour some ASEAN countries to help settle differences.
Speaking
in an impromptu press briefing, Yudhoyono said that he, as the leader
of one of ASEAN’s founding member nations, was disappointed and
concerned about the failure of the Phnom Penh summit.
Foreign
Ministry spokesman Michael Tene, however, insisted that the President
was not expressing his disappointment over Indonesia’s failure to
utilize its central role in ASEAN to help settle differences.
“I
have read thoroughly the transcript of President Yudhoyono’s statement
at the press conference yesterday and my understanding is that the
President never mentioned anything about his disappointment with
Indonesia’s failure,” Michael said in a statement sent to The Jakarta
Post on Tuesday.
As Marty traveled the ASEAN countries, Yudhoyono
on Tuesday spoke of the success achieved by Indonesia in helping
resolve domestic and international conflicts in a forum in Jakarta on
Tuesday, attended by an international audience.
Among those who
sat on the front row were Thaksin Shinawatra, former Thai prime minister
who was ousted in 2006 and is now living in exile; Jose Ramos-Horta,
the former Timor Leste president; and Anwar Ibrahim, a Malaysian
opposition leader and former deputy prime minister.
“In the
1990s, we assisted the peaceful resolution of conflicts in the southern
Philippines, and Indonesia was the first country to be able to engage
all the claimants in the South China Sea and all ASEAN states in an
informal track-two process. More recently, we are playing a role in
facilitating talks on the Thai-Cambodia border disputes, and we actively
supported the democratic transformation in Myanmar, and we continue to
do so,” Yudhoyono said.
He also said that finding solutions to the conflicts was not always easy.
“Every
conflict has its own personality. Different conflicts require different
solutions. We found a good solution to the conflict in Aceh, and to the
communal conflict in Ambon [Maluku] and Poso [Central Sulawesi].
However, these formulas cannot be entirely applied in Papua, which needs
a different type of solution,” the President said.
Yudhoyono was
speaking at an event held to officially launch the international
relations journal Strategic Review, which was run by former foreign
minister Hassan Wirajuda and was first published in August 2011.