Not irrelevance but the dance

The Asian Wall Street Journal, true to its preachy predilection, ran a sourpuss editorial yesterday, bleakly asserting in its title: "Asean Slips Into Irrelevance."

Of course, who can disagree with our own ASEAN Secretary General Rod Severino, who’s exiting his five-year term as SecGen of the Association of Southeast Asian Nations, when he warns that the group is falling short of its goal of economic integration? Indeed, the way things are going, ASEAN won’t be able to transform itself into a single market of half a billion people (its aggregate population) "big enough and attractive enough to compete with China".

Even if there were no threat of Islamic terrorism (sanamagan, some indignant Mulims will again cry out that this is bigoted religious profiling!), the ten countries of ASEAN would remain competitors rather than collaborators, each one of them striving to beat the others to the same slice of a shrinking pie.

It is to China, with its dirt-cheap "coolie labor", a no-strikes guarantee, and a tough government law-and-order) policy which brooks no terrorism or religious deviation (certainly not from the Falun Gong) that foreign investment is flowing.

If you ask me, ASEAN in its Phnom Penh session hammered another nail – but a $1.2 trillion nail – in its own coffin by signing that "free trade" agreement – over a 10-year escalation period – with Beijing. The Chinese will gobble us up along with our ASEAN brethren. (I guess the cock-eyed principle behind the deal was: "If you can’t lick ‘em, join ‘em.") China seems to be well on the way to reclaiming what some of the Chinese claim to be their "lost empire". Our Trade and Industry Secretary Manuel "Mar" Roxas even praised the accord as a sort of "early harvest" in which (he said) ASEAN will be able to benefit earlier than China during the interim period. C’mon, Mar. We’re going to be the ones who are "harvested".

The Spratly pact? It’s just the freezing of the status quo, but I’ll buy that. It’s a good move.

As for that subsequent pact with Japan’s savvy Prime Minister JunichiroKoizumi, I’m uncertain what benefit selling to Japan as much as Japan sells to us will get us, but I’m willing to be convinced. Trade’s always good if it keeps money circulating, rather than have the Japanese hiding their yen under the futon.

I think ASEAN, over the years, has been a big success — not because of the economic benefits it has engendered, but because it keeps ten nations with potential harmful disagreements on not merely speaking terms but even cheerful (and dancing, golfing, drinking) terms with each other. Other than that, let’s not be too solemn and portentous about ASEAN’s goals. It’s a club in which its members can make "happy-happy".

That is achievement enough.

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There was a charming Agence France-Presse dispatch from Phnom Penh yesterday which said that Cambodia’s 80-year old monarch, King Norodom Sihanouk, "swept the presidents of Indonesia and the Philippines off their feet as he danced, sang and entertained ASEAN leaders at a palace banquet."

The wire service story reported that King Sihanouk, backed up by a band, "sang up to 12 songs with at least one tune from each country at Monday evening’s banquet" for the ASEAN leaders. The King delighted the gathering by dancing with several of the first ladies, then with Indonesia’s lady President Megawati Sukarnoputri and our own Dancing Queen, President Macapagal-Arroyo.

I’m glad to discover that our old friend, His Majesty Sihanouk, who has been sick and ailing and under medical treatment in Beijing (for diabetes and cancer of the colon), has recovered so well that he’s returned to being the life of the party.

Sihanouk’s long and eventful career mirrors the changing and fickle fortunes of Cambodia, which included his painful eclipse when the Khmer Rouge, under the demented Red butcher Pol Pot, began a two-year massacre of 1.7 million Cambodians in 1977, and its slow resurrection from the genocidal pogroms of that era of the "killing fields". It was the colonial French, who then ruled Indo-China, who had handpicked him to be the Boy King in 1941 – when he was crowned at the age of 19 to reign until his abrupt abdication in 1955 as King Norodom Sihanouk Varman. (He was the great-grandson, after all, of the original King Norodom who reigned until 1904, and whose chief claim to fame was that it was he who had invited the French to come into Cambodia and make it a "protectorate".) When he gave up his throne, Sihanouk turned it over to his father, Norodom Suramarit, the only monarch I know — but some reader will probably correct me – who became king on March 3, 1955, by succeeding his own son. As for "Snooky", as we irreverent foreign correspondents used to call him (but under our breaths) in the 1960s, he served as "off and on" premier of the kingdom under the political aegis of a militant "Popular Socialist Community" which he formed under the name of Sangkum Reastr Niyum.

Much as he tried to become a pauper, as in The Prince and the Pauper of novelist Mark Twain, nobody could ever forget he was not merely a Prince, but the highest royalty. Peasants and villagers cheered him as we accompanied him through the country, kneeling at his feet and blessing him as he passed by. Nor could "Premier" Sihanouk shuck off his Western, very French ways. He played a mean saxophone, and led his own band. He loved to regale audiences with song, delivered in his fine tenor with magnificent aplomb. I remember that in the old days, one of his favorite songs was the plaintive Hollywood ditty, The River of No Return. During the 1959 wedding party of his then 16-year old daughter, Princess Bopja-Devi, which lasted up to the wee hours of the morning, Sihanouk belted out repeated renditions of that watery ballad in his unusually fine voice. The choice of lyrics was whimsical when one recalls that Cambodia is perhaps the only country where the river does return and actually flows backward.

This singular phenomenon is, in fact, annually celebrated during November at a holiday called The Festival of the Reversing Current. In the course of one such festivity, under the light of a full moon, we once witnessed the impressive ceremony presided over by Sihanouk's late father, King Norodom Suramarit, in which the monarch, aboard his imperial barge, lit the candles on a floating votive altar and cast it adrift on the surface of the river.

It was a major feast, for Cambodians are a river people to whom they yearly ebb and flow of the waters, the incidence of flood and rain, are the prerequisite of continued fertility. The superstitious used to attribute the reversing current of the Tonle Sap River to "magic," but the simplest of hydraulic principles is involved when the Tonle Sap River flows back at that time of the year into the womb of the mother lake, which bears the same name. The Tonle Sap is a river that runs south from the central reaches of West Cambodia to merge with the Mekong River at the so-called Quatre Bas junction just off the city of Phnom Penh. When the mighty Mekong River (which has traveled 800 miles from the heart of China’s Szechwan province) is in flood, its higher banks and strong flow forces the water to back up the Tonle Sap and return to its own Great Lake. This reverseal is corrected in late November, when the dry season starts and the water level descends once more, permitting the Tonle Sap to begin flowing southwards again towards its junction with the Mekong and eventually the sea. That’s all there is to it.

In those salad days of the 1960s, this correspondent once wrote that "like that reversing river, Sihanouk’s foreign policy flows north and south, blows hot and cold, in reversals of mo?? More fickle than the Tonle Sap." But, probably, Sihanouk had good reason. His favorite proverb was: "When elephants fight, an ant should stand aside." To him, Cambodia was that ant, so vulnerable to being crushed.

That is maybe what characterizes, alas, the ASEAN mentality. For emanating from the capitals of the bombast the nations in its circle, its leaders cannot seem to shruge off the subliminal influence of that self-defeating parable about the elephants and the ant.