From Cambodia to Myanmar: Can ASEAN and China broker another peace?

The February 2021 military coup in Myanmar has plunged the country into a devastating civil war. The conflict pits the military junta against the anti-junta resistance forces, known as the People’s Defence Force, which are supported by several powerful Ethnic Armed Organisations (EAOs) that have long been in conflict with the Myanmar military.

Since the coup, armed clashes have killed at least 80,000 people and displaced more than 3.4 million people. The crisis also created an outflow of close to 150,000 refugees to neighbouring countries. In the wake of the recent devastating quake in Myanmar, temporary ceasefires have been announced, but these are fragile, and the fighting could erupt again anytime.

However, the 2021 coup reversed these gains, reigniting intense fighting and dealing a significant blow to ASEAN’s credibility.

Credibility of ASEAN in question

The Myanmar crisis remains a persistent challenge for the Association of Southeast Asian Nations (ASEAN). Despite five member-states chairing ASEAN since 2021, with Malaysia currently at the helm, no substantial progress has been made in resolving the crisis.

Early on, ASEAN developed a “Five-Point Consensus” as a framework to address the situation, reportedly with the endorsement of Min Aung Hlaing, Myanmar’s military chief. However, the military authorities’ refusal to honour this agreement has highlighted ASEAN’s limitations, turning the Myanmar crisis into a geopolitical embarrassment for the organisation.

Since expanding to its current ten-nation bloc in 1999 with the inclusion of Cambodia, ASEAN has not faced a crisis as severe as the one unfolding in Myanmar. The coups in Thailand in 2006 and 2014 elicited minimal response from ASEAN, largely because these events were less destabilising and ultimately gained tacit legitimacy through acceptance by the Thai king.

When Myanmar joined ASEAN in 1997, it was under military rule and in conflict with EAOs. Despite this, ASEAN pursued a strategy of persistent and patient engagement, citing the tentative democratisation and ceasefires from the 2010s — though imperfect — as vindications of their approach. However, the 2021 coup reversed these gains, reigniting intense fighting and dealing a significant blow to ASEAN’s credibility.

ASEAN was unanimously behind the CGDK [the Coalition Government of Democratic Kampuchea] during the conflict, but it understood a political settlement required creativity and flexibility.

Lessons from the Cambodian crisis

ASEAN did successfully navigate a somewhat similar crisis in the 1980s and early 1990s, known as the Cambodian crisis, which posed a significant regional geopolitical challenge. This crisis stemmed from Vietnam’s war against the Khmer Rouge, the radical communist regime whose rule over Cambodia from 1975 to 1979 resulted in the deaths of nearly 25% of the population, an atrocity now recognised as the Cambodian genocide.

Vietnam’s December 1978 invasion of Cambodia liberated the population from the Khmer Rouge, but also validated ASEAN countries’ fears of Vietnamese hegemonic ambitions and its battle-hardened army, polarised Southeast Asia into two contending blocs (ASEAN versus Indochina), invited Sino-Soviet rivalry into the region, and brought about a decade-long war between the Vietnam-installed People’s Republic of Kampuchea (PRK) regime and the resistance forces.

Country flags seen on the streets of Vientiane, Laos, on 7 October 2024. (SPH Media)
Country flags seen on the streets of Vientiane, Laos, on 7 October 2024. (SPH Media)
The resistance consisted of the deposed Khmer Rouge, the royalist National United Front for an Independent, Neutral, Peaceful and Cooperative Cambodia (commonly known as FUNCINPEC) and the republican-oriented Khmer People’s National Liberation Front (KPNLF). Strong antagonisms among these factions never disappeared despite their common enemy in the PRK and Vietnam.

With ASEAN’s mediation and blessing, the three uneasy resistance factions formed the Coalition Government of Democratic Kampuchea (CGDK) in Kuala Lumpur in 1982. The CGDK occupied Cambodia’s seat at the United Nations until 1990.

Up until 1991, the war in Cambodia raged on the ASEAN doorstep. ASEAN supported the CGDK, as did China and the US, due to their common animosity towards Vietnam and its patron, the Soviet Union. China was the major supplier of military arms to the various component forces of the CGDK.

The war exhausted all involved parties. Peace finally arrived in October 1991 with the signing of the Agreements on a Comprehensive Political Settlement of the Cambodia Conflict in Paris, by the warring Cambodian parties, Vietnam, ASEAN member states, permanent members of the United Nations Security Council (P5), Australia, and other stakeholders. But the process leading to that outcome was highly uncertain and required utmost diplomatic skills, patience, concessions, adjustments, creative intervention and the adept use of leverage and incentives from various parties and stakeholders.

Among those, ASEAN, and especially some of its more activist member states, proved to be agile diplomatic actors. As shown in the book Singapore, ASEAN and the Cambodian Conflict 1978-1991, written by historian Ang Cheng Guan, resolving the Cambodian crisis was the pivotal diplomatic achievement of ASEAN.

United, persistent and flexible

ASEAN was unanimously behind the CGDK during the conflict, but it understood a political settlement required creativity and flexibility. The convening of the Jakarta Informal Meetings (JIM) in 1988 was highly crucial for the warring Cambodian parties to meet and discuss for a political solution. The JIM meetings were not always successful and went through ups and downs, but persistence did pay off, as eventually the meetings managed to bring all four Cambodian sides together and reached tentative agreements.

Other actors certainly also played important and crucial roles. The Soviet-Vietnam bloc gradually adjusted its position and searched for solutions on their side as well. Australia was active in making proposals to break impasses. Since 1990, the Permanent Five, also became more involved in finding and drafting the foundation of a political solution to the war.

China, of course, was not doing this out of purely altruistic reasons, but when the time came for it to play its cards right, it could engineer crucial moves in facilitating the peace process.

Among the P5, China held the strongest direct leverage in terms of its patronage of the Khmer Rouge, which remained the strongest resistance force of the CGDK. The attitude of the Khmer Rouge towards continued war or settled peace, to a large extent, was the most crucial one.

China used that leverage to influence the peace process, sometimes threatening to strengthen supplies to the Khmer Rouge (to pressure other sides to make concessions) while other times warning the Khmer Rouge to fall in line and also make concessions to other sides.

Political scientist Robert S. Ross, in analysing China’s role in the Cambodian peace process, wrote that the crucial agreements in June 1991, which brought all protagonists to issue joint communiques that initiated the ceasefires, “did not take place under UN auspices but under China’s imprimatur, reflecting the primary role of Chinese policy in bringing about the agreement”.

China, of course, was not doing this out of purely altruistic reasons, but when the time came for it to play its cards right, it could engineer crucial moves in facilitating the peace process.

From left, Myanmar permanent secretary of Foreign Affairs Aung Kyaw Moe, Philippine President Ferdinand Marcos Jr, Singapore Prime Minister Lawrence Wong, Thai Prime Minister Paetongtarn Shinawatra, Vietnamese Prime Minister Pham Minh Chinh, Lao President Thongloun Sisoulith, Lao Prime Minister Sonexay Siphandone, Malaysian Prime Minister Anwar Ibrahim, Brunei Sultan Hassanal Bolkiah, Cambodian Prime Minister Hun Manet, Indonesian Vice-President Ma’ruf Amin and Timor-Leste Prime Minister Xanana Gusmao at the opening ceremony of the 44th and 45th Asean Summits and Related Summits in Vientiane, Laos, on 9 October 2024. (SPH Media)
From left, Myanmar permanent secretary of Foreign Affairs Aung Kyaw Moe, Philippine President Ferdinand Marcos Jr, Singapore Prime Minister Lawrence Wong, Thai Prime Minister Paetongtarn Shinawatra, Vietnamese Prime Minister Pham Minh Chinh, Lao President Thongloun Sisoulith, Lao Prime Minister Sonexay Siphandone, Malaysian Prime Minister Anwar Ibrahim, Brunei Sultan Hassanal Bolkiah, Cambodian Prime Minister Hun Manet, Indonesian Vice-President Ma’ruf Amin and Timor-Leste Prime Minister Xanana Gusmao at the opening ceremony of the 44th and 45th Asean Summits and Related Summits in Vientiane, Laos, on 9 October 2024. (SPH Media)
The Cambodian peace certainly was not perfect. The Khmer Rouge eventually withdrew from the agreements and renewed its war, although its move did not unravel the peace framework. A major weakness of the peace process was that political reconciliation, not to mention democracy, failed to take roots.

After the 1993 elections supervised by the United Nations, FUNCINPEC’s leader Norodom Ranariddh and Cambodian People’s Party (CPP) leader Hun Sen had to share power as the first and second prime minister in an uneasy power-sharing arrangement, until Hun Sen carried out a coup in July 1997 against Ranariddh and ushered in CPP’s political hegemony since then. ASEAN temporarily paused Cambodia’s accession to ASEAN in the wake of Hun Sen’s coup, but two years later finally admitted Cambodia, recognising that the CPP regime was here to stay.

Despite these serious and undeniable flaws, Cambodia has been stable for decades, after the bloody wars in the 1970s and 1980s, and the difficult peace in the 1990s. Refugees returned to the country, and citizens could live normal lives. ASEAN was credited for having helped resolve one of the most intractable crises in Southeast Asia.

But it bears reminding that ASEAN was not always as powerless or lacking the toolkits to deal with this kind of crisis as today’s critics often charged.

Can ASEAN and China do more in the current Myanmar crisis?

There are similarities between the Cambodian crisis of the 1980s and the Myanmar crisis of today. Like Myanmar today, the legitimacy of the regime in power (PRK in Cambodia) was deeply challenged by different armed groups. The warring Cambodian protagonists were as much “sworn enemies” with untold mutual hatred for each other as the warring protagonists in the Myanmar war today. The reign of terror it imposed on the Cambodian people made the Khmer Rouge almost universally the most despised group in the Cambodian war. Myanmar’s military junta, although not as genocidal, are seen by many as an equally loathsome actor.

This is not to suggest that the Cambodian crisis could offer any directly applicable lessons to the Myanmar crisis. Each conflict is unique, complex and challenging on its own, and it is hard to say whether the Cambodian crisis was more intractable or less compared to the Myanmar crisis today. But it bears reminding that ASEAN was not always as powerless or lacking the toolkits to deal with this kind of crisis as today’s critics often charged.

Buddhist monks cross a street to collect alms in Yangon on 17 April 2025. (Amaury Paul/AFP)
Buddhist monks cross a street to collect alms in Yangon on 17 April 2025. (Amaury Paul/AFP)
ASEAN today appears to have forgotten that it once achieved a great diplomatic success in Cambodia. It took a clear stance but was not dogmatically rigid; it was versatile but not unprincipled. It was sensitive to shifting movements in geopolitics and was alert to opportunities that could be seized. It maintained broad unity but also accommodated the different measures of its member-states in search of solutions.

However, after the resolution of the Cambodian crisis, generations of ASEAN diplomats seemed to be less schooled in coping with the harsh, challenging realities of realpolitik. The end of the Cold War reoriented the ASEAN agenda towards economic integration and development and regional community building. This was not wrong, but slowly and gradually, ASEAN has become less prepared for coping with geopolitical crises. Its institutional memory of successfully handling such crises faded. It became less imaginative in crafting solutions to difficult geopolitical challenges.

China also once played a proactive role in ending a major regional crisis in Cambodia, but now appears to be content with being a reactive, if not opportunistic actor in Myanmar. China is not completely idle, having appointed a special envoy to deal with this crisis and having made some discreet moves here and there. But largely China prioritises securing its most tangible interests in Myanmar over making a more robust contribution in finding a solution to the crisis.

Source: https://www.thinkchina.sg/politics/cambodia-myanmar-can-asean-and-china-broker-another-peace