Myanmar’s military-backed government has formed a new ASEAN Affairs Committee in order to support its efforts to reintegrate itself into the Association of Southeast Asian Nations.
The Southeast Asian bloc has excluded Myanmar from its summits and foreign ministers’ meetings since late 2021, due to its failure to implement ASEAN’s Five-Point Consensus plan. Promulgated in April 2021, two months after a military coup, the Consensus calls for an immediate cessation of violence, dialogue among “all parties” to the country’s conflict, and access for humanitarian aid.
The Irrawaddy reported yesterday that the new body, which met for the first time on Tuesday, ahead of the 49th ASEAN Summit next month, is intended to “regain the country’s original role and rights” in the 11-nation organization. Tuesday’s meeting was chaired by Foreign Minister Tin Maung Swe and attended by representatives from the President’s Office and ministries of Defense, Home Affairs, Information, and Social Welfare.
Tin Maung Swe told the meeting that Myanmar had suffered “discriminatory treatment” from ASEAN since 2021, The Irrawaddy reported. The meeting also discussed “Myanmar‑led approaches” for restoring the country’s position in the bloc.
Since taking office in April, Min Aung Hlaing’s quasi-civilian government has launched a diplomatic charm offensive, involving visits to India, China, Russia, Belarus, and Kazakhstan, aimed at consolidating key partnerships and seeking injections of much-needed foreign investment.
A priority has been the normalization of Myanmar’s relations with ASEAN. Many of the latter’s member states appear to be supportive of Naypyidaw’s goal, and five of them – Laos, Thailand, Cambodia, Vietnam, and Malaysia – have rolled out the red carpet for the coup leader in recent months, with Indonesia and Brunei possibly to come.
The Philippines also appears to be softening. In a recent interview, Philippine President Ferdinand Marcos Jr., who holds the rotating chairmanship of ASEAN for 2026, said that while the Five-Point Consensus was “absolutely correct,” the bloc needed to try a “new approach” on Myanmar.
At the same time as it has wooed individual ASEAN member states, the military-backed government has forcefully rejected the Five-Point Consensus. In July, Myanmar’s military proxy parliament adopted a motion rejecting the Consensus as an unwarranted interference in Myanmar’s internal affairs, which “does not align with the current political developments in Myanmar.” Min Aung Hlaing said in a speech the following month that some member states had “adopted positions and practices that it regarded as discriminatory towards Myanmar.”
While most member states are now leaning in the direction of reopening ASEAN’s door to Myanmar – Thailand and Malaysia have both explicitly stated that this is their goal, and Singapore and Timor-Leste appear to be the last hold-outs – full normalization, like all ASEAN decisions, will require a consensus among all 11 member states. As I noted earlier this week, however, there are “evidently still differences within ASEAN over how fast engagement should proceed, and to what end.”
Unless ASEAN agrees to abandon the Five-Point Consensus altogether, normalization would seem to require at least some effort to implement it, however nominal. With the Myanmar military ramping up its attacks on resistance groups and civilian populations accused of harboring them, this seems unlikely in the current circumstances.