China and other Asian powers on Saturday accused the United States of overstepping by seeking a U.N. resolution against Myanmar, saying the Security Council was not the place to tackle the isolated Southeast Asian junta.
Military-run Myanmar, formerly called Burma, escaped censure at the United Nations Security Council on Friday after China and Russia vetoed a draft U.S. resolution calling on the regime to stop persecuting minority and opposition groups.
China, one of the five permanent Security Council members whose no-vote automatically kills a U.N. resolution, was tight-lipped about Myanmar’s crackdown on pro-democracy activists and directed its criticisms at Washington’s resolution, which it said did not warrant Security Council attention.
“The situation in Myanmar does not constitute a threat to regional and international peace and security,” Chinese Foreign Ministry spokesman Liu Jianchao said in Beijing, according to the official Xinhua news agency today.
“If the Security Council passed a resolution on the Myanmar issue, that would have exceeded the duties of the Council laid out in the United Nations Charter.”
The U.S. resolution urged Myanmar to release political prisoners, move toward democracy and stop attacks against minorities, many of whom are used for forced labour.
RIFTS OVER MYANMAR
Beijing’s criticisms of it were echoed by the Indonesian foreign minister, who said his views reflected other Southeast Asian countries.
“The case would be more appropriately brought to the attention of the human rights council rather than the U.N. Security Council,” Hassan Wirajuda told Reuters.
The 10-member Association of Southeast Asian Nations (ASEAN), currently holding its annual summit on the central Philippines island Cebu, declined to take a position on the U.S. resolution.
The question of Myanmar has exposed rifts in ASEAN, an organisation that has prided itself on consensus. Some members say ASEAN should not interfere in Myanmar’s domestic affairs; others say the junta’s rights record is already an international issue.
Thailand’s Foreign Minister Nitya Pibulsonggram said in Cebu it was now up to the Myanmar’s Southeast Asian neighbours to show they could handle the dispute.
“I think we should perhaps redouble our efforts to see what we can do to help one another in terms of keeping this matter — give it a regional focus the way it should be — rather than to have it internationalised,” he told reporters.
Earlier this week, ASEAN foreign ministers told member-state Myanmar it must make more progress on its “roadmap” for national reconciliation and democracy.
But critics of Myanmar’s hardline rule said the time had come for firmer action from international organisations.
“I think the United Nations’ human rights council has been examining this issue closely for over a decade, but there has never been any result. That’s why we need the Security Council,” Debbie Stothard of the Alternative ASEAN Network on Burma told Reuters.
RARE DOUBLE VETO
Both Russia and China, which had not cast a double veto since 1972, argued that human rights violations were not the purview of the Security Council unless they endangered regional or international peace and security, which Myanmar did not.
“As a matter of fact, none of Myanmar’s immediate neighbours … believe the notion that the current situation in Myanmar poses a threat to regional peace and security,” China’s ambassador to the U.N., Wang Guangya, said in New York.
The military has run Myanmar in various forms since 1962 and no one has denied its abusive policies, which have been condemned by the 192-member General Assembly.
Beijing appeared fearful that censuring Myanmar would set a threatening precedent for an expanded Security Council role in human rights matters — of which Communist Party-ruled China has plenty.
“If you read the United Nations Charter, you’ll clearly see why China voted against,” the Chinese Foreign Minister Li Zhaoxing told reporters in Cebu, where China and other Asian neighbours are holding talks with ASEAN members.– Reuters