Burma and North Korea dominate ASEAN
Updated
The trial on security-related charges of Burma's opposition leader Aung San Suu Kyi is due to resume today with no indication from the country's military regime that it will heed international calls to free her.
At Asia's biggest security forum this week U.S. Secretary of State Hillary Clinton offered Burma the prospect of better business ties with the United States, but said that depended in part on the fate of Suu Kyi.
Presenter : Claudette Werden
Speakers: Stepehn Smith, Australia's Foreign Minister; Hillary Clinton US Secretary of State.; Ri Hung-Sik, North Korean ambassador
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WERDEN: South-east Asia has long been reluctant to strongly criticise Burma's military junta, choosing instead a much softer rhetoric.
But this week US Secretary of State Hillary Clinton was very direct in her criticism suggesting ASEAN might expel Burma over its human rights record and the regime's detention of Opposition leader Aung San Suu Kyi who faces up to five years in jail on charges of breaching the conditions of her house arrest after an incident in which a US national swam to her lakeside home uninvited in May.
Australia's Foreign Minister Stephen Smith says there was widespread support for Mrs Clinton and her comments.
SMITH: The ASEAN colleagues all very warmly welcomed her presence and there was an overwhelming if not unanimous view that the Burmese adminsitration, the Myanmar administration had to move, had to make progress, there were repeated calls for Aung San Suu Kyi's immediate release, repeated calls for a fully fledged democratic election, and we had the same conversation over lunch without wanting to breach the confidentiality of the ministers' lunch, the ASEAN ministers are fully expecting the Burmese administration to make real progress and not think or believe that they can get away with what they've been doing for a long period of time
WERDEN: The US Secretary of State was just as strong in her remarks about North Korea saying Pyongyang had no friends left to defend it from nuclear sanctions. She also told Asia's largest security forum that international efforts to squeeze the North over its atomic program were paying off and she said North China and Russia, traditional allies of the North had also strongly criticised the stalinist regime.
CLINTON: "There is no place to go for North Korea, they have no friends left. that will protect them from the international communitiy's efforts to move towards de-nuclearisation. So I think it's fair to say that not only were Russia, China, Japan and South Korea very strong in making the points which they did this morning, but those points were echoed by so many of the ASEAN members and other regional partners. So the message is coming out loudly and clearly to North Korea and I don't think we've seen at all the way this will eventually develop, I think we're just at the beginning of determining how they're goign to respond."
WERDEN North Korea's state media responded by saying Mrs Clinton's renewed offer of a package of incentives in return for disarmament was nonsense and
by describing the US Secretary of State as unintelligent, a funny lady and a school girl.
RI: We are not against having a dialogue. We were never against having a dialogue. But how can you have a dialogue with a knife at your back. Until America's deep-rooted anti-North Korea attitude is solved the problems will continue. Because of that, the Six-Party Talks are also over."
