Cambodia Joins Southeast Asian Bloc

Cambodia realized its long-pursued goal of greater international and regional legitimacy Friday when it was admitted as the 10th member of the Assn. of Southeast Asian Nations in a ceremony here.

Its admission represents a significant victory for Hun Sen, Cambodia’s mercurial prime minister, whose July 1997 coup resulted in Cambodia being denied its seat in the United Nations at that time. Cambodia’s then-pending membership in ASEAN also was put on hold, and most international aid was suspended.

The fact that Friday’s ceremony was held on the 24th anniversary of Saigon’s fall to the North Vietnamese army was presumably more than coincidental: The Vietnamese government chose the date for the gathering of the region’s 10 foreign ministers.

Vietnam, which led the push for Cambodia’s inclusion in ASEAN, is an ally of Hun Sen and already exerts great influence over Laos. As such, Vietnam emerges as a more powerful regional player and certainly the key voice in Indochina, the former French colonial grouping of the three nations. Holding ceremonies on the anniversary of its military victory over South Vietnam and the U.S. was Hanoi’s way of subtly underscoring how far it has come in 24 years, political analysts said.

Cambodia had been scheduled to gain admission during the ASEAN summit in Hanoi last December, but Thailand, Singapore and the Philippines were so concerned about what they viewed as Hun Sen’s roughshod style of governance that they insisted that Cambodia--the only Southeast Asian nation that was not part of ASEAN--first undertake political reforms.

Hun Sen, once a low-ranking officer in the Khmer Rouge guerrilla army that ruled Cambodia from 1975 to 1979, has carried out those reforms. The moves included establishing a senate, which was approved by the National Assembly in March, and giving a government role to the man he overthrew in 1997, Prince Norodom Ranariddh. National elections held last July had been judged by most international monitors as flawed but relatively free.

With Cambodia now having at least the appearance of being a democracy, the balance of numerical power in ASEAN has shifted against the authoritarian member states: Vietnam, Laos, Myanmar and Brunei. Most nations in the region have been moving gradually toward democratic reform.

ASEAN’s voice has always been a timid one. Its members have never formulated a fruitful plan for economic recovery and have shied away from controversial issues such as human rights. But political analysts see advantages to having all 10 nations at least symbolically united.

It gives Southeast Asia the opportunity to take unified stands on political issues and perhaps to pressure countries, such as Myanmar and Vietnam, that have been reluctant to accept reforms. It also rewards Cambodia for having made the changes that the international community demanded in return for ending Hun Sen’s isolation. Late last year, Cambodia was allowed to reclaim its U.N. seat.

ASEAN, whose members have a combined population of about 507 million and enjoyed a booming regional economy until a fiscal crisis hit two years ago, was set up in 1967 by Indonesia, Malaysia, Singapore, Thailand and the Philippines.