Asia-Pacific plans regional exercises for disasters

SINGAPORE (Reuters) - Asia-Pacific nations on Thursday called for greater coordination in dealing with natural disasters, including deploying military resources, in a region prone to earthquakes, cyclones and tsunamis.

Foreign ministers from the 26-member ASEAN Regional Forum held wide-ranging talks about threats to the region's security, including North Korea's nuclear program, Myanmar's rocky road to democracy and a Thai-Cambodia border spat.

But the ministers spent a great deal of time talking about disaster management in a region that has seen international aid efforts mounted after a major cyclone in Myanmar and a devastating earthquake in China in recent months, and where worries persist about a potential bird flu pandemic.

"They recognized that military assets and personnel, in full support and not in place of civilian responses, have played an increasingly important role in regional disaster responses," said a final draft document, scheduled for release later on Thursday.

One of the sticking points, it noted, would be to find a template for agreements that would allow foreign military forces to be deployed for disaster relief.

A U.S.-Philippine exercise this year could be a model, said Singapore Foreign Minister George Yeo, who chaired this week's series of meetings of foreign ministers from the Association of South East Asian Nations.

"It makes a lot of sense to conduct such exercises. You don't want to be working together for the first time when there's a disaster," Yeo said.

"If you have practiced before, if you know the radio frequencies, you share common language, common procedures, then you can act so much more effectively in a disaster situation."

INFORMAL DIPLOMACY

The forum, which has ambitions ultimately of evolving beyond a talking shop, gave a big round of applause to six of its participants, who had what was described as "a good meeting" on Wednesday on North Korean nuclear disarmament.

"By all accounts, the talks went much better than anyone expected," said Yeo, who attributed some of that success to the relaxed style of informal diplomacy ASEAN practices and its geopolitical position as a large but neutral grouping of growing Asian economies between China and India.

North Korea's foreign Minister Pak Ui-chun briefed the forum and "they heard in his speech many positive points and many on the table nodded their heads", Yeo said.

North Korea on Thursday signed ASEAN's non-aggression treaty that promotes the peaceful settlement of disputes, a further sign that Pyongyang is coming in from the diplomatic cold.

Hosting the six-party North Korea talks and pursuing a multinational mechanism for cooperating on disasters marks a big step forward for ARF, which has been searching for a more activist approach since its inception 15 years ago.

But taking even baby steps on coordinating military resources raises sensitivities in a region that has been a field for big-power rivalries since colonial times and is riven by a number of border disputes and overlapping territorial claims.

The U.S., French and British militaries offered to ship relief supplies into Myanmar after Cyclone Nargis left some 138,000 dead or missing in May. Myanmar's generals dithered about that for days before allowing limited relief flights. The United States, however, led a robust multinational military effort to aid survivors of the 2004 Indian Ocean tsunami.

"It's for the country in need of help to decide," Yeo said.

"In Myanmar, the warships which carried supplies anchored outside the territorial waters caused confusion, created distrust, which in fact impeded the flow of international aid to Myanmar at that time."

The border spat between Thailand and Cambodia also got an airing at the forum. Yeo said Cambodia should not have referred the dispute to the United Nations Security Council.

With ASEAN members Vietnam and Indonesia on the 15-member Security Council, he thought the matter would be sent back to ASEAN to be pursued bilaterally, as Thailand would prefer.

Cambodia referred the dispute to the Security Council after bilateral talks between the two countries failed to solve a military standoff over disputed ownership of a 900-year-old temple on their border, which has sparked fears of a conflict.

(Additional reporting by Neil Chatterjee, Manny Mogato and Melanie Lee; Editing Alex Richardson)