How to approach the protracted Myanmar crisis – Thu, January 19 2023

In her annual foreign policy speech on Jan. 11, Foreign Minister Retno LP Marsudi outlined the general direction of Indonesia’s foreign policy for the rest of 2023. While she touched on a range of issues in her speech, including last year’s achievements, it is important to look at how Indonesia plans to approach the Myanmar cause.

It is this problem that has received a lot of attention from the region and beyond. Moreover, expectations are very high that Indonesia, which assumes ASEAN chairmanship this year, would be able to produce a breakthrough on the current impasse.

It is clear that the first challenge that Minister Retno needed to address is the management of expectation. She stated that while Indonesia’s chairmanship would pay serious attention to finding solutions to the Myanmar crisis, Indonesia would not allow other equally important points on ASEAN’s agenda to be held hostage by this problem. In other words, Indonesia’s chairmanship of ASEAN is not going to be a single-issue chairmanship.