Baker, ASEAN Ministers to Discuss China, Cambodia, Trade

Secretary of State James A. Baker III, determined to demonstrate American interest in Asia, arrived Wednesday in this tiny but oil-rich nation where his predecessor, George P. Shultz, obtained an ill-fated $10-million contribution for the Nicaraguan Contras three years ago.

Baker came to this steamy capital for meetings that start today with the foreign ministers of the Assn. of Southeast Asian Nations, a 22-year-old organization that includes Brunei, Indonesia, Malaysia, the Philippines, Singapore and Thailand. He wants to discuss such issues as China, Cambodia and a proposal for a new organization to foster economic cooperation among the nations of the Pacific Rim.

But the serious diplomatic objectives seem to be lost in this vest-pocket sultanate where the 215,000 citizens enjoy the world’s highest per capita income--about $15,000 a year--and where the ruler lives in a 1,700-room palace that looks a little bit like a luxury hotel might if the decorator was given an unlimited budget.

It was in that palace that Shultz, the last secretary of state to stop here, obtained Sultan Muda Hassanal Bolkiah’s commitment for the $10-million donation to the Contras. However, the sultan was given the wrong Swiss bank account number, and the money never reached the insurgents fighting Nicaragua’s Sandinista government. It was discovered later to have been deposited to the account of a Swiss businessman who eventually returned it to the sultan.

Baker assured reporters he would perform no similar errand this time.

A senior Administration official who accompanied Baker on the flight from Tokyo to Brunei said the secretary of state reached agreement with Japanese Prime Minister Sosuke Uno that no new sanctions on China are warranted but that the existing ones should be kept in place until the Beijing government ends its crackdown on dissent.

The officials said Baker and Uno stressed “the importance of not taking action that would isolate the Chinese people but at the same time taking action that would show our outrage” over the brutal suppression of the pro-democracy movement.

Baker will seek a similar agreement with the ASEAN foreign ministers.

The senior official said Baker was unwilling to speculate about conditions that would prompt Washington to lift the sanctions that President Bush imposed after the Beijing massacre of June 3-4. But he made it clear that no change in policy is likely any time soon.

The President first suspended arms sales to China and military contacts. Then he also suspended high-level diplomatic contacts and said he would work to persuade international lending bodies such as the World Bank not to grant new loans to China.

Uno told Baker that Japan also has no plans to resume the economic programs that it interrupted after the crackdown, the official said.

“They are taking a wait-and-see attitude,” the official added. “That might not be too bad a formulation.”

Avoiding Interference

Nevertheless, it appears significant that diplomats are now talking about when the pressure on China might be eased. So far, they have concluded: not yet. In contrast, Congress is debating measures that would impose additional sanctions despite opposition from the Administration.

Although the ASEAN nations have generally expressed shock over recent events in China, they have avoided taking any sort of action that China might interpret as interference in Chinese internal affairs.

“Normally the custom of ASEAN is not to comment on the internal affairs of other countries because we don’t want others to interfere in our affairs,” Tommy T. B. Koh, Singapore’s ambassador to the United States, said recently. To which Malaysia’s ambassador, Albert S. Talalla, added, “Especially not China.”

China is expected to intrude into Baker’s discussion with the ASEAN ministers about proposals for a Pacific Rim organization to coordinate economic matters, much as the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development has done for years in Europe.

Baker said in a speech last month that such an organization is “an idea whose time has come.” But he carefully avoided spelling out details of how the plan should work, saying instead that the nations of the Pacific region should try to reach a consensus.

The official traveling with Baker said that a key unanswered question is, “What do we do now with China?”

He said it would be extremely difficult to include China in the organization after the events of last month in Beijing. He said that including China would have been troublesome even without the suppression of the pro-democracy movement because China’s economy is not a good match for the prosperous, capitalistic economies in the rest of the region. But some nations believe that the proposed organization should include every state in the area.

ASEAN nations are known to be cool to the plan because they fear that it might dilute the influence of their existing organization. One ASEAN official said the annual meeting between the ASEAN foreign ministers and the foreign ministers of the United States and five other industrialized nations already provides enough economic coordination for the Pacific area.