A senior official from New Zealand’s Ministry of Defence has indicated that the country will likely sit out a counter-terrorism meeting to be hosted by Myanmar’s junta and Russia early next month.
The online meeting, slated for December 6-7, will bring together representatives of the Association of Southeast Asian Nations (ASEAN) and their partners as part of the ASEAN Defence Ministers’ Meeting-Plus (ADMM-Plus).
“While Aotearoa has yet to receive a formal invitation through the ASEAN Secretariat to the ADMM-Plus Experts Working Group on Counter-Terrorism, we are very unlikely to participate,” Michael Swain, the ministry’s deputy secretary of defence policy and planning, told Myanmar Now, using the Maori name for New Zealand.
New Zealand previously boycotted a meeting of the group held in Moscow in July.
“Aotearoa strongly condemns both Russia’s invasion of Ukraine, and the coup in Myanmar and associated violence,” Swain added.
The governments of the United States and Australia also withdrew from the July meeting, citing the hosts’ use of their joint position to attack their opponents.
A Pentagon spokesperson told Myanmar Now that they had not been officially notified of the next meeting and criticised the co-chairs for continuing to use the platform for propaganda purposes.
“Russia and the Myanmar military regime have consistently used their co-chairmanship … to propagandise and justify the atrocities they are continuing to commit against innocent people, and to imply support for these atrocities by the ADMM-Plus and its members,” said Department of Defence spokesperson Lt-Col Martin Meiners.
“This is a clear breach of ASEAN values and their responsibilities as co-chairs, and the United States continues to condemn Russia’s invasion of Ukraine and the Myanmar military regime’s violence against its people, and reiterates that in all ADMM-Plus engagements in which it participates,” he added.
The defence ministries of Australia, Japan and South Korea did not respond to questions from Myanmar Now regarding their participation in next month’s meeting.
Myanmar and Russia took over as joint chairs of the counter- terrorism working group at the beginning of 2021 for a three-year term, after a December 2020 handover ceremony held in Bangkok.
As co-chairs, the Myanmar and Russian militaries are organising both field training and tabletop exercises that will involve the participation of the armed forces of the ADMM-Plus countries.
The Myanmar military hosts the working group’s official website and has been using it to accuse the shadow National Unity Government and other bodies formed to oppose the regime of being terrorists.
The ADMM-Plus group includes the 10 member states of ASEAN, as well as Australia, China, India, Japan, New Zealand, Russia, South Korea, and the United States.
An investigation by activist group Justice for Myanmar in May concluded that ASEAN’s “practical assistance and support for the Myanmar military likely amounts to the aiding and abetting of the military’s genocide, war crimes and crimes against humanity.”
