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Thursday, November 5, 2015

Defense ministers fail to reach consensus

Defense ministers from ten ASEAN countries and eight dialogue partners pose on Wednesday after a two-day security meeting in Kuala Lumpur failed to produce a concluding joint statement.

SUBANG, Malaysia -- After meeting for two days, ten regional defense ministers and eight key dialogue partners have failed to produce a joint statement on the increasingly tense situation in the South China Sea -- underscoring the difficulty China and the U.S. face finding common ground in the disputed waters.
     Hishammuddin Hussein, the Malaysian defense minister, told reporters that no consensus had been reached by the time talks held on the outskirts of Kuala Lumpur closed on Wednesday. Defense ministers from the Association of Southeast Asian Nations (ASEAN) and their counterparts in Australia, China, India, Japan, New Zealand, Russia, South Korea and the U.S. had been expected to sign a "joint declaration" according to a schedule distributed to the media on Tuesday.
     Philippine Defense Secretary Voltaire Gazmin told reporters that delegates had "differences in the language", alluding to wording issues, but declined to elaborate.
     Other sources said China did not want the South China Sea dispute mentioned in any joint statement, a position consistent with other ASEAN gatherings it has attended. Australia, Japan and the U.S. were among those hoping something substantive might emerge this time.
     As the chair of ASEAN this year, Malaysia instead issued a chairman's statement that noted the "effective implementation of the Declaration of the Code of Parties in the South China Sea" and early conclusion of a binding code of conduct to address territorial disputes in the strategic waters where Brunei, China, Malaysia, the Philippines and Vietnam have overlapping claims.
     Tensions in the South China Sea ratcheted up late last month when the U.S. asserted international navigation rights by sailing a well-armed warship past two of seven artificial islands created by China. The patrol was the first since China embarked on major reclamation work with the islands in 2013 to bolster its territorial claims.
     On Wednesday, U.S. Secretary of Defense Ashton Carter sat opposite, Chang Wanquan, his counterpart from China, and declared that the U.S. intends to continue with freedom-of-navigation operations in the region. Among the other ASEAN dialogue partners, the initiative is openly supported by Australia, Japan, New Zealand and South Korea.
     "The U.S. will continue to fly, sail and operate wherever international law permits," Carter said in a press briefing on Wednesday.
     "The presence of U.S. naval vessels in the South China Sea is not new. That's been going on for decades," said Carter. "What is new is the dredging and reclamation -- and the militarization.
     China lays claim to almost all the South China Sea and maintains the recent U.S. patrol violated its sovereignty.
source:  Nikkei Asian Review

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