Episode #248: ASEAN’s Inconvenient Humanitarian Crisis
“I have always been passionate about ASEAN. People always associated me with ASEAN,” says Adelina Kamal. “So they were kind of shocked when they found out not long after I left, I wrote an article and it got published by the Jakarta Post. I was really critical about ASEAN's approach to the Myanmar crisis.”
Affiliated with ASEAN for 27 years, Adelina co-drafted its agreement on disaster management and emergency response (AADMER). This document played a pivotal role for ASEAN in establishing their AHA Centre AHA Centre in 2011. Adelina was ultimately appointed its executive director, a position for which she had to be personally approved by all 10 ASEAN member states.
After nearly three decades of service, Adelina decided the time was right to take a break, and she left the AHA center and ASEAN in August of 2021. Despite her considerable contributions, she felt that ASEAN had given her as much as she has given ASEAN: “Basically, I grew up together with ASEAN, and I have become the person I am right now partly because of ASEAN. ASEAN has shaped me as an individual.” Yet, at the same time, as the introductory quote shows, she harbored a few misgivings about some of ASEAN’s policies, in particular towards Myanmar, though she did not share them publicly.
She initially planned to take some well-earned rest and move on from the politics and stress of her ASEAN work. However, she thought about the ongoing crisis in Myanmar and what role she could play as an informed and now independent ally in raising awareness and driving change within the ASEAN infrastructure. She thought, “What should I do? I'm given this platform and I'm now independent. I have my own thoughts. What should I do? Right?”
The Center for Strategic and International Studies (CSIS) in Indonesia asked her to write an article on ASEAN’s approach to the Myanmar crisis. This would tap into her feelings about this subject, and largely be critical, and she agonized over the decision. But she took strength from her Muslim faith, and encouragement from her trusted friends and colleagues. “I really had had to muster my courage,” Adelina admits. “I had a conversation with one of my good friends. I consider her as a mentor, and she's also humanitarian … I always look up to her and I asked her, ‘What should I do?! I'm given this platform, and I'm now independent. I have my own thoughts. What should I do?! She didn't lecture me. I didn't also give her details. But she just said, ‘Adelina, only fear Allah. Only fear God.’” And so Adelina made a fateful decision: she not only wrote the article for CSIS, but also penned an additional op-ed in the Jakarta Post, criticizing ASEAN’s humanitarian response to the devolving situation in Myanmar.
It was like kicking a hornets’ nest! “Basically, I questioned the issue of the AHA center being tasked to facilitate assistance to the crisis-affected people,” she says. “I questioned the issue of trust of the people, and then I really grilled whether ASEAN has to work with an outfit that killed their own people! So these were actually the questions and the dilemmas that I had during my last year with ASEAN.”
While many of her former colleagues called her out for turning her back on ASEAN, Adelina insists that her only intention is to use her voice to improve and strengthen the regional bloc. “I'm not actually ‘exposing the dirt’ of ASEAN! I do it because I love ASEAN, and I think that ASEAN can be better. But since I'm no longer inside the system, I continue to contribute to ASEAN, by becoming that ‘loving critic and critical lover,’” she says. “To be a loving critic and a critical lover of ASEAN is important, because otherwise ASEAN will languish, if our lovers are uncritical and our critics are unloving."
Adelina’s commitment to being a “loving critic and critical lover” is inspired by Professor Tommy Koh his 2019 article in the Straits Times about how the next Prime Minister could help improve Singapore after its elections that year. In this spirit, Adelina to put pressure on the ASEAN to take serious action on Myanmar, in large part by changing its attitude towards humanitarian aid. On this latter point, Adelina notes that “when the when the coup happened in February 2021, and when the decision [was made] to assign the [AHA] center to facilitate humanitarian assistance as part of the Five Point Consensus, I was not consulted. The Governing Board was also not consulted,” she says. “We have our own standard operating procedure and our own Disaster Management Agreement, and political crisis, war, conflict, like what's happening in Myanmar: genocide, crimes against humanity, you name it; these are not under the ASEAN agreement on disaster management and emergency response. These are not under the agreement on the establishment of our center. These are not under our standard operating procedure!”
Yet due to the complexity of the situation, Adelina understands why the AHA Centre is a politically appealing option for the ASEAN leadership. As she explains, “When it comes to the Myanmar crisis, any negotiation and any political debate, it's always difficult, right? It's dynamic, you have to basically negotiate on the spot, and things are moving [fast]! Sometimes you just have to put it on the table. Humanitarian assistance, often in political crises or political debate, like what's happening in Myanmar, is so often used as the bargaining chip, as a tool, because it's the most acceptable, non-contentious [item].”
When that happens, the consequences can be disastrous. While the AHA Centre was founded with the best of intentions with the lessons of the Indian Ocean tsunami of 2004 in mind—that structured and coordinated efforts are essential for humanitarian aid to be most impactful—Adelina has also seen the unfortunate intersection of humanitarianism and political interest enacted in ASEAN’s policies. Simply put, ASEAN has relied on the AHA Centre and the blueprint of disaster management, even in conflict situations. Adelina’s point is that in the case of Myanmar, that approach is like trying to force a square peg into a round hole, and doing more harm than good. She explains that humanitarian operations run out of AHA were designed based on the assumption that domestic bodies, including the respective government in question, were determined to oversee relief efforts to the best of their abilities, in good faith, and in line with the humanitarian mission’s objectives. But in Myanmar, the leading military authority is unwilling or unable to carry out missions in key areas of their country. Although this is not an entirely new issue for the AHA Centre, the problem that post-coup Myanmar represents is front and center like never before. So Adelina stresses the need for ASEAN to recognize this problem and set clear guidelines and establish bodies to deal with such crises.
“You cannot expect a rambutan tree to produce a durian fruit, meaning that you cannot use a disaster management agreement to provide humanitarian assistance for a conflict setting like the Myanmar crisis,” she says. “In a situation like the Rohingya [genocide] or the coup, the so-called ‘government’ is unwilling to help their own people! So that has to be differentiated. Second, what is needed in ASEAN is not to over-rely on the disaster management agreement and [the AHA Centre].”
What Adelina emphasizes instead is the need for ASEAN leaders to establish a principle or code of conduct regarding its humanitarian missions, because for the time being, the AHA Centre can’t act independently of the political context … and so the result is a lackluster and mismanaged response to urgent needs on the ground.
She notes that one key roadblock comes from ASEAN members who don’t understand the fundamental complexities of humanitarian operations in conflict zones. In the case of Myanmar, it means they are hoping to squeeze easy solutions out of politically neutral bodies such as the AHA Centre. Otherwise, they would have to confront the deeper realities of the 2021 coup, which would require a commitment to bold decisions. “Some people within the member states actually asked me, ‘Adelina, why can't you just move in and just drop the boxes!?’ No! Cannot! ... Is the objective of our mission is just to drop boxes at the airport? Easy! ... When I was still with the center, the AHA Centre already responded to catastrophic disasters—not only one, right, but more than thirty!” she explains. “So we had that experience of facilitating ASEAN’s response, and not only that, facilitating ‘One ASEAN, One Response’. So I think we are the ‘good news’ in ASEAN, but the political leaders cannot use this good news, right?”
Essentially, Adelina is getting at the fact that the AHA Centre's successful track record in disaster response represents is a significant achievement for ASEAN, demonstrating the organization's ability to bring regional solidarity into action. However, she laments that ASEAN political leaders are unable to leverage this success in addressing the Myanmar crisis. They ignore the complexities and political sensitivities of the coup and just try to apply the same approach they’d used in previous natural disaster scenarios. But in such a complex situation, where the supposed humanitarian aid partner is the one that has caused (and continues to cause) the harm in the first place, expecting positive results of any kind is simply unrealistic.
Adelina believes that ASEAN must begin by stating unequivocally that the 2021 coup was illegitimate, and that the military regime is an illegitimate regime guilty of crimes against its people. Because if ASEAN continues to avoid calling out the military as a bad actor, the very principles on which the AHA Centre was founded become an impediment to providing humanitarian aid to those affected. In particular, Adelina points to the AHA Centre’s agreement on disaster management and emergency response, which stipulates that the affected country must not only consent to the assistance but also direct and control how it is provided. So calls by ASEAN members for the AHA Centre to engage in Myanmar may make for good political messaging, but the unfortunate and brutal reality is that their supposed Myanmar counterpart is not a good faith partner.
“You cannot just send your troops, your tools on the ground, without telling them what we want to achieve out of this. Are we just dropping boxes? Again, easy! But if we really want to elevate the suffering of the people, and if we really want to make our assistance effective, not just performative, but effective, then we have to question the things that I question: whether it is the right focal point? Are we allowing our assistance to be manipulated by the ones who bombed and who killed their own people? Can we allow the assistance to be directed [by the military]?” To Adelina, this also includes deciding who receives the aid and how it should be distributed. She illustrates this point by saying that one can't just enter a country during a disaster with a tourist visa and start offering help independently; proper consent and coordination with the government are required. “You have to have the consent,” she states. “But if the so-called ‘government’ [in Myanmar]—which is not a government, right; it is illegal and illegitimate, and is killing their own people—why should we actually rely on them for their consent?! So the issue of consent is very critical, right? And then the disaster management agreement cannot be used. It's an abuse of the humanitarian system. Therefore, I was so angry that the AHA Center was used by our political leaders.”
Adelina passionately points out that while ASEAN consults the military on humanitarian projects, the actual voices of the Burmese people have been largely left out of the conversation. “The Myanmar people say, ‘We cannot trust the military because they want to kill us. We want to get assistance from those who we trust; they're most effective.’ Then that brought me to the other analysis, if you really want to have our humanitarian assistance effective, then try to find those who can do the work better, and those who can be trusted,” she says. “It is a human right for those affected by the crisis to get assistance. Now, should we actually [have to] get approval or consent from the one who killed people?! I mean it just doesn't make sense, for God's sake! So that was the dilemma that I had.”
For humanitarian missions to achieve their stated goals, they must be above politics. States and governments are not the arbiters of consent or morality, those derive directly from the people. Adelina points to the very foundational principles of ASEAN: “The ASEAN charter starts with ‘We the People of ASEAN.’ So, ASEAN needs to transform itself from being an elite, regional grouping dominated by states to a truly people-centered ASEAN, whereby the people [have] the ultimate power. So, shift to a people-centered organization that places people as the ultimate sovereign of that country of the organization, because that's what the ASEAN charter is all about. But right now, it’s dominated by states, and many of them are not aware that their power is given by the people.”
This gets at the core of the dilemma: a people-centered government, indeed even the notion of democracy, is a contentious point within ASEAN. Many of the member states are either dictatorships, or democracies in name only. Even Indonesia, one of the world’s biggest democracies and often considered “the de-facto leader of ASEAN,” has seen recent cracks in the foundations of its democracy. An Indonesian herself, Adelina stresses the role that her country must take within ASEAN to push the bloc collectively toward a more democratic future. “If Indonesia engages and is pushing strongly for ASEAN to thrive, then ASEAN would thrive,” she says simply. “But if Indonesia is regressing in its democracy path, then ASEAN is going to wither. Generally, what's happening in Indonesia is showing that our democracy is not progressing, it is regressing. So I think we have come to the dark age, both for Indonesia as well as for ASEAN, because the largest democracy in ASEAN is experiencing regress.”
Finally, Adelina arrives at the crucial question: what can ASEAN realistically do regarding Myanmar? The Five Point Consensus has largely been seen as a failure, and the junta has repeatedly made a mockery of the ASEAN institution; for example, it has refused to engage in meaningful discussions with ASEAN envoys, and continues to wreak violence on its own people. Adelina is encouraged by the fact that ASEAN has moved to exclude the SAC from its meetings and summits, while simultaneously opening both discreet and public channels with the NUG; at the same time, she emphasizes the need for ASEAN to distance itself from more traditionally “Western” approaches to the conflict, such as sanctions. This partially because ASEAN has no punitive sanction mechanism and partially because ASEAN as an organization is pointedly non-colonial; indeed, ASEAN’s non-interference policy is in many ways a deliberate rejection of more traditionally Western approaches. However, the concept of non-interference is murkily defined for ASEAN nations, basically meaning “hands off,” regardless of the circumstances. Even if some change were made to the meaning of non-interference for ASEAN states to better address the Myanmar situation, any such change would apply to all ASEAN member states … which makes the prospect politically unpalatable for many, a fact that the Myanmar military uses to its advantage. Adelina explains, “Some ASEAN countries also have skeletons in their closets. The Myanmar junta also knows this and the way non-interference is practiced in ASEAN right now is the traditional way of defining non-interference. What we can do is ‘dynamic interference’: you intervene when you have to.” Adding to this, Adelina implores the West to become more actively involved in the Myanmar crisis while also letting ASEAN take the lead. Ideally, she believes the entire international community, ASEAN included, should work together to leverage every option to find a solution to the crisis.
And the Myanmar crisis is more than just a domestic issue. Despite the many formidable challenges inherent in effecting institutional change, ASEAN must either adapt proactively and creatively to the current crisis and push decisively for a resolution, or risk falling into irrelevance and powerlessness. “It is the existential crisis of ASEAN!” she says in closing. “It is not only a Myanmar crisis, but ASEAN is in crisis too. I hope that ASEAN will exist in decades to come because really, the relevance of ASEAN is being questioned here. With what's happening on the ground [in Myanmar], and with the nature of the Spring Revolution, which is really teaching us a lot of things; for this older generation, it is really the time for us and for ASEAN to do so; if we want to make ASEAN matter to the people.”