(China Daily)
Updated: 2008-05-14 07:30

ASEAN as a grouping must be feeling an awful sense of helplessness over the Myanmar devastation, for being unable to do more to help the cyclone victims.

Indonesia, Singapore, Malaysia, Thailand and the Philippines were quick with their individual dispatches of relief supplies and monetary aid in the first days after the disaster.

Citizens of several of these countries, private charities and the local offices of international relief organizations such as the Red Cross/Red Crescent and the World Vision have also been exemplary in organizing aid and the logistics.

But ASEAN as the region's formal political grouping should not be placed in a permanent position of just saying how sorry it is whenever a member-nation is stricken by a massive natural calamity, with people dying in their thousands.

The 2004 tsunami, which struck Indonesia the hardest, taught the organization's member-nations the need for some form of institutionalized mechanism that could activate relief work and the dispatch of military manpower at short notice.

These trained, disciplined people are essential for aid delivery and carrying out immediate physical rehabilitation, like reopening road links and port-handling capacity. Four years later, the scale of the Myanmar tragedy should put an end to just talk and good intentions.

Most of the ASEAN nations - the exceptions being Singapore, Malaysia, Brunei and the inland Indochina states -are unlucky to be native territory for earthquakes, volcanic eruptions and monster typhoons.

A meeting of ASEAN foreign ministers which Singapore is proposing should go beyond discussing Myanmar's present predicament.

This is the appropriate time to test whether it is feasible to develop a disaster quick-response system. Ideally, the militaries of member-states would form the nucleus of the mechanism. The air and naval wings are most suitable for prompt delivery of relief supplies, whereas army personnel are best equipped for repair work and for helping relief workers and volunteers in aid distribution.

Central stores, such as what United Nations agencies like United Nations Children's Fund and UN High Commissioner for Refugees maintain in dispersed locations, may be hard to administer.

Decisions on supplies are best left to individual states but the triggering of the response mechanism should be the responsibility of the ASEAN Secretariat.

As sovereignty issues will be encountered, the ASEAN leaders' summit will need to build consensus on an issue that ought not be put off much longer.

The Straits Times

(China Daily 05/14/2008 page9)