Deputy Defense
Minister Lieut. Gen. Nguyen Chi Vinh joined senior defense officials from 22
other ASEAN Regional Forum (ARF) member countries at the eighth ARF Security
Policy Conference in Indonesia Thursday.

Deputy Defence Minister Lieut. Gen. Nguyen Chi Vinh

The
conference focused discussions on international and regional issues and the
coordination between ARF and the ASEAN Defence Ministers Meeting Plus (ADMM+)
to avoid conflicts in regional efforts and cooperation to ensure cooking and energy
security in ARF member countries.

Addressing
the event, Lieut. Gen. Vinh highlighted the diversity, complexity and
transnational nature of regional challenges, and ARF’s increasingly important
role in enhancing cooperation to cope with new challenges, of which those
caused by humans, combined with environmental changes, were expected to bring
manacing long-term implications to the region.

He
emphasised the importance of the newly formed ADMM+ structure to realise and
formalise issues put forward by ARF, expressing his hopes to see early
practical outcomes of this architecture.

Vinh
affirmed Vietnam’s stance on
the East Sea
and the Mekong River
of that the nation considered them as extremely important issues that could
cause long-term consequence if they were left unresolved, as these challenges
affected not only countries connected with the sea or Mekong River,
or direct beneficiary countries, but also all countries in the region.

The East Sea
issue needed to be settled through multilateral peaceful negotiations and
follow the 1982 United Nations Convention on the Law of the Sea (UNCLOS 1982)
and the Declaration on the Conduct of Parties in the East Sea (DOC) and work
towards the Code of Conduct in the East Sea (COC), as soon as possible.

The Lieut.
Gen. voiced Vietnam ’s
support for strong and practical proposals made by Indonesian Defence Minister
Purnomo Yusgiantoro on new progress to be made on COC by the end of this year
and the wish made by Cambodian Prime Minister Hunsen that the COC would be
signed in 2012 in Cambodia
on the 10 th DOC anniversary.

However, he
said, while COC had not yet been reached and UNCLOS 1982 had not been fully
implemented, all differences and disputes in the issue must be settled through
peaceful measures in the absence of unilateral activities, particularly the
absolute avoidance of use of violence or other strong measures.

To smoothly
implement responses to challenges, all ARF members and beneficiary countries in
the Asia-Pacific needed to have stronger and fuller responsibility for security
challenges, and ASEAN nations needed to enhance solidarity and unanimity,
especially to avoid division and conflict, to ensure ASEAN always becomes the
cornerstone of regional security architectures, he said.

China ’s Deputy Chief of General Staff Lieut. Gen. Wei
Fenghe, who headed the Chinese delegation, affirmed that China would strictly follow the
principles of peace and development that it had pledged to the world community.

China pledged to continue to play its
role in maintaining peace and security in the region and supported UNCLOS 1982
and in the settlement of disputes through peaceful measures, but did not agree
to bring bilateral issues, like territorial disputes, to multilateral forums,
Wei said.

During the
conference, the head of the US delegation affirmed his nation’s pledge to
further expand cooperation based on the international legal foundation to
ensure all countries can freely and completely access sea, air and land routes
to ensure free circulation of trade and goods.

The US
opposed using forces in handling disputes and called on countries to abide by
UNCLOS 1982 and free navigation and parties claiming their sovereignty to
strictly follow DOC and advance towards COC, the delegation said.

The US
hailed ASEAN and China for conducting meetings of technical groups on the
implementation of DOC and towards the building of COC to ensure a binding
agreement in enforcing pledges over the East Sea, in order to solve issues of
dispute in the region through peaceful means.

Source: VNA