JAKARTA, Indonesia — Southeast Asian leaders led by Indonesian host President Joko Widodo are gathering in their final summit this year, besieged by divisive issues with no solutions in sight: Myanmar’s deadly civil strife, new flare-ups in the disputed South China Sea, and the longstanding United States-China rivalry.
The Association of Southeast Asian Nations meetings will open Tuesday in the Indonesian capital Jakarta under tight security. The absence of U.S. President Joe Biden, who typically attends, adds to the already somber backdrop of the 10-state bloc’s traditional show of unity and group handshakes.
After discussions Tuesday, the ASEAN heads of state would meet Asian and Western counterparts from Wednesday to Thursday, providing a wider venue that the U.S. and China, and their allies, have used for wide-ranging talks on free trade, climate change and global security. It has also become a battleground for their rivalries.
Chinese Premier Li Qiang was set to join the meetings, including the 18-member East Asia Summit. There, he would meet U.S. Vice President Kamala Harris — who will fly in lieu of Biden — and Russian Foreign Minister Sergey Lavrov.
While skipping ASEAN, Biden will fly to Asia for the G-20 summit in India, then visit Vietnam to elevate ties. Washington says Biden was not relegating the bloc to a lower rung of geopolitical priorities and cited the U.S. president’s effort to deepen America’s engagement with the region.
“It’s hard to look at what we’ve done as an administration, since the very beginning, and come away with a conclusion that we are somehow not interested in the Indo-Pacific or that we are deprioritizing the Southeast Asia nations and those relationships,” John Kirby, a national security spokesperson, said at a news briefing Friday in Washington.
In November, Biden attended the ASEAN summit meetings in Cambodia and in May 2022 hosted eight of the bloc’s leaders at the White House to demonstrate his administration’s commitment to their region while dealing with Russia’s invasion of Ukraine.
The Biden administration has also been strengthening an arc of security alliances in the Indo-Pacific, including in Southeast Asia, alarming China.
Marty Natalegawa, a respected former foreign minister of Indonesia, expressed disappointment over Biden’s non-appearance, but said such red flags were more alarmingly emblematic of ASEAN’s declining relevance.
“The absence of the U.S. president, while it is disappointing and symbolically significant, is for me the least of the worry because what’s more worrisome actually is the more fundamental structural tendency for ASEAN to become less and less prominent,” Natalegawa told The Associated Press in an interview.
Founded in 1967 in the Cold War era, ASEAN has a principle of non-interference in each member state’s domestic affairs. It also decides by consensus, meaning even one member can shoot down any unfavorable decision or proposal.
Those bedrock rules have attracted a starkly diverse membership, ranging from nascent democracies to conservative monarchies, but have also restrained the bloc from taking punitive actions against state-sanctioned atrocities.
The bloc currently groups Brunei, Cambodia, Indonesia, Laos, Malaysia, Myanmar, the Philippines, Singapore, Thailand and Vietnam.
Natalegawa said ASEAN’s failure to effectively rein in Myanmar’s military government from committing human rights atrocities and its “deafening silence” when a Chinese coast guard ship recently used a water cannon to block a Philippine supply boat in the disputed South China Sea underscore why the group’s aspiration to be in the center of Asian diplomacy has been questioned. Member states have turned to either the U.S. or China for security, he said.
“Absenteeism by ASEAN is leading to unmet needs, and those needs are being met elsewhere,” he said.
Myanmar’s civil strife, which has dragged on for more than two years after the army ousted the democratically elected government of Aung San Suu Kyi, and the South China Sea disputes were again expected to overshadow the Jakarta summit agenda, as in previous years. Indonesia tried to swing the focus to boosting regional economies with an upbeat theme this year — “ASEAN Matters: Epicentrum of Growth” — but the geopolitical and security issues have continued to pester and spark diplomatic fallouts.
The European Union has warned that its relations with ASEAN may be affected if it has to deal with Myanmar in any leadership role. Following the EU warning, Myanmar’s military-led government, which has not been recognized by — but remains a member of — ASEAN, gave notice that it may not be able to chair the regional bloc as scheduled in 2026, two Southeast Asian diplomats told the AP.
ASEAN leaders would have to decide in Jakarta whether to ask the Philippines to replace Myanmar as host for that year, said the diplomats, who spoke on condition of anonymity because of a lack of authority to publicly discuss the issues.
Myanmar could also not assume a three-year role starting next year as coordinator of ASEAN-EU relations, according to the two diplomats.
Myanmar’s generals and their appointees have been barred from attending ASEAN’s leaders and foreign ministerial meetings, including this week’s summit meetings, after the military government failed to fully comply with a five-point peace plan that called for an immediate end to violence and the start of dialogue between contending parties, including Suu Kyi and other officials, who have been locked up in jail since they were overthrown.
About 4,000 people have been killed and more than 24,400 people arrested since the army takeover in Myanmar, according to the advocacy group Assistance Association for Political Prisoners.
In a crucial reform that would allow ASEAN to respond faster and prevent such crises from degenerating into deadly disasters, its member states have discussed proposed rules that would allow the group to make a decision even in the absence of consensus from all member states, one of the two diplomats said.
Dinna Prapto Raharja, a Jakarta-based analyst and professor on international relations, said ASEAN’s credibility is on the line if the Myanmar crisis drags on. While the bloc has no conflict-resolution mechanism for such domestic strife, it should be flexible enough to harness its clout and connections to help address such problems.
“ASEAN continues to say that it’s so difficult, it’s so complex,” she said. But, “as time goes by, all these opportunities simply evaporate.”
ULAANBAATAR, Mongolia — Pope Francis sent a special greeting to China’s “noble” people on Sunday, giving them a special shout-out at the end of a Mass celebrated in neighboring Mongolia during the first-ever papal visit that was largely overshadowed by Beijing and its crackdown on religious minorities.
Francis brought up to the altar the retired and current bishops of Hong Kong, Cardinal John Hon Tong and Cardinal-elect Stephen Chow, clasped their hands and told the crowd that included many mainland Chinese pilgrims that he wished them all well.
“I want to take advantage of their presence to send a warm greeting to the noble Chinese people,” Francis said. “To all the (Chinese) people I wish the best and to always go forward, always progress.”
“I ask Chinese Catholics to be good Christians and good citizens,” he added, to cheers from the crowd in the Steppe Arena, in the capital, Ulaanbaatar.
It was the first and only time that Francis has publicly mentioned China during his four-day visit, despite the large shadow that Beijing has cast over the trip and Mongolia.
China’s ruling Communist Party has been waging a yearslong, sweeping crackdown on religion, tightening controls, especially on Christianity and Islam that are viewed as foreign imports and potential challengers to Communist authority. The crackdown targeting Uyghurs in the northwestern Xinjiang region has been especially fierce, with claims that more than 1 million ethnic minority members were forcibly sent to prison-like reeducation centers where many have said they were tortured, sexually assaulted, and forced to abandon their language and religion.
The U.N. last year accused China of serious human rights violations that may amount to “crimes against humanity;” China has denied targeting Uyghurs and others for their religion and culture, denouncing the accusations as lies by the West and saying its crackdown was aimed at quashing separatism, terrorism and religious extremism.
The pope did send a telegram of greeting to President Xi Jinping as his aircraft flew early Friday through Chinese airspace, offering him “divine blessings of unity and peace.” The Beijing foreign ministry acknowledged the gesture and said it showed “friendliness and goodwill.”
But while small groups of Chinese pilgrims attended Francis’ main Mass here, no mainland Chinese bishop was believed to have been given permission to travel for the papal visit to Mongolia. Their absence underscored the tenuousness of a 2018 Vatican-China accord over Catholic bishop nominations, which Beijing has violated by making appointments unilaterally.
Earlier Sunday, China’s crackdown on faith groups was indirectly apparent as Francis highlighted, by contrast, Mongolia’s long tradition of religious tolerance: He presided over an interfaith event with Mongolian shamans, Buddhist monks, Muslim, Jewish, Shinto leaders and a Russian Orthodox priest.
Sitting among them on a theater stage, Francis listened intently as the faith leaders described their beliefs, their relationship with heaven and the peace and harmony their faiths bring the world. Several said the traditional Mongolian ger, or round-shaped yurt, was a potent symbol of harmony with the divine — a warm place of family unity, open to the heavens, where strangers are welcome.
“The fact that we are meeting together in one place already sends a message: It shows that the religious traditions, for all their distinctiveness and diversity, have impressive potential for the benefit of society as a whole,” Francis said.
“If the leaders of nations were to choose the path of encounter and dialogue with others, it would be a decisive contribution to ending the conflicts continuing to afflict so many of the world’s peoples,” he said.
Francis is in Mongolia to minister to one of the world’s smallest and newest Catholic communities and highlight Mongolia’s tradition of tolerance in a region where the Holy See’s relations with neighboring China and Russia are often strained. Beijing’s crackdown on religious minorities has been a constant backdrop to the trip, even though the Vatican hopes to focus attention instead on Mongolia and its 1,450 Catholics.
Hong Kong Cardinal-elect Chow, who made a historic visit to Beijing earlier this year, accompanied 40 pilgrims to Mongolia. He declined to discuss the absence of his mainland Chinese counterparts, focusing instead on the importance of Francis’ visit to Mongolia for the Asian church.
“I think the Asian church is also a growing church. Not as fast as Africa — Africa is growing fast — but the Asian church also has a very important role to play now in the universal church,” he told reporters.
Chinese President Xi has demanded that Catholicism and all other religions adhere strictly to party directives and undergo “Sinicization.” In the vast Xinjiang region, that has led to the demolition of an unknown number of mosques, but in most cases, it has meant the removal of domes, minarets and exterior crosses from churches.
“We really hope that gradually our government and leaders will accept him and invite him to visit our country,” said Yan Zhiyong, a Chinese Catholic businessman in Mongolia who attended an event on Saturday with Francis at the city’s cathedral. “That would be the most joyful thing for us.”
Most Mongolians follow the dominant Gelugpa school of Tibetan Buddhism and revere its leader, the Dalai Lama. As a result, many Mongolians are concerned with the Communist Party’s opposition to the exiled Tibetan leader and its heavy-handed control over monastic life and what appears to be a concerted effort to gradually eliminate Tibetan culture.
Yet, given the need to maintain stable relations with Beijing — China is Mongolia’s top export partner — the country’s leaders have not spoken out on the matter, just as they have remained largely silent about repressive linguistic and cultural policies toward their ethnic brethren in China’s Inner Mongolia region.
Francis also has largely avoided antagonizing Beijing, most significantly by dodging any criticism of Beijing or by meeting with the Dalai Lama.
While the Dalai Lama wasn’t present Sunday, he was mentioned by the head of Mongolia’s main Tibetan Buddhist monastery, Khamba Nomun Khan Gabju Choijamts Demberel.
The abbot noted that “His Holiness,” as the Dalai Lama is known, had recently recognized the 10th reincarnation of the head lama of Mongolian Buddhists.
“This is an extraordinary fortune for us,” said the abbot.
The recognition has posed a problem, given that China requires all reincarnated lamas to be born within China and be officially certified by Beijing; the newly recognized Mongolian lama meets neither criterion.
SAN FRANCISCO — Silicon Valley billionaires behind a secretive $800 million land-buying spree in Northern California have finally released some details about their plans for a new green city, but they still must win over skeptical voters and local leaders.
After years of ducking scrutiny, Jan Sramek, the former Goldman Sachs trader spearheading the effort, launched a website Thursday about “California Forever." The site billed the project as “a chance for a new community, good paying local jobs, solar farms, and open space” in Solano, a rural county between San Francisco and Sacramento that is now home to 450,000 people.
He also began meeting with key politicians representing the area who have been trying unsuccessfully for years to find out who was behind the mysterious Flannery Associates LLC as it bought up huge swaths of land, making it the largest single landholder in the county.
An all-star roster of Silicon Valley entrepreneurs and venture capitalists are backing the project, including philanthropist Laurene Powell Jobs, LinkedIn co-founder Reid Hoffman, and venture capitalist Marc Andreessen. The New York Times first reported on the group's investors and plans.
California Forever, the parent company of Flannery, has purchased more than 78 square miles of farmland in Solano County since 2018, largely in the southeastern portion of the county, with parcels stretching from Fairfield to Rio Vista. According to the website, Sramek fell in love with the area over fishing trips and he and his wife recently purchased a home in the county for their growing family.
The project issued a poll to residents last month to gauge support for “a new city with tens of thousands of new homes," solar energy farm and new parks funded entirely by the private sector.
But to build anything resembling a city on what is now farmland, the group must first convince Solano County voters to approve a ballot initiative to allow for urban uses on that land, a protection that has been in place since 1984. Local and federal officials still have questions about the group's intentions.
Two area congressmen who sought for years to find out whether foreign adversaries or investors were behind the buying spree around a U.S. Air Force base vital to national security and the local economy are furious that Flannery kept its identity hidden for so long. The website say 97 percent of its funding is from U.S. investors and the rest are from the United Kingdom and Ireland.
“The FBI, the Department of Treasury, everyone has been doing work trying to figure out who these people are,” U.S. Rep. Mike Thompson, who represents much of the county, said this week after meeting with Sramek. “Their secrecy has caused a lot of problems, a lot of time, and a lot of expense.”
The investment group said secrecy was required until enough land was purchased, in order to avoid short-term speculation, but that it is now ready to hear from Solano households via a mailed survey and creation of a community advisory board. Past surveys showed parents were most concerned about their children's future, the website said.
“Instead of watching our kids leave, we have the opportunity to build a new community that attracts new employers, creates good paying local jobs, builds homes in walkable neighborhoods, leads in environment stewardship, and fuels a growing tax base to serve the county at large,” it said.
California is in dire need of more housing, especially affordable homes for teachers, firefighters, service and hospitality workers. But cities and counties can't figure out where to build as established neighborhoods argue against new homes that they say would congest their roads and spoil their quiet way of life.
In many ways, Solano County is ideal for development. It is 60 miles northeast of San Francisco and 35 miles southwest of California's capital city of Sacramento. Solano County homes are among the most affordable in the San Francisco Bay Area, with a median sales price of $600,000 last month.
But Princess Washington, mayor pro tempore of Suisun City, said residents deliberately decided to protect open space and keep the area around Travis Air Force Base free of encroachment given its significance.
She’s suspicious that the group’s real purpose is “to create a city for the elite” under the guise of more housing.
“Economic blight is everywhere. So why do you need to spend upwards of a billion dollars to create a brand new city when you have all these other things that can be achieved throughout the Bay Area?” she said.
Flannery further infuriated locals in May when it sued several landowners in court, accusing them of conspiring to fix prices for their properties. The company disclosed it had purchased or was under contract to buy about 140 properties for more than $800 million.
Then last week, residents began receiving a push poll gauging voter support for “a major new project” that would include “a new city with tens of thousands of new homes." The poll asked if they would be more likely to support the project if county residents were given priority and financial assistance to lease or purchase one of the new homes.
Thompson, the congressman, was unimpressed after meeting with Sramek, saying that the developer was vague on details and failed to display an understanding or appreciation of the county or its values.
Asked how he would help residents finance new homes, Thompson said Sramek told him he planned to use “all of his knowledge as a finance guy” to generate savings. Development in California is convoluted, but Thompson said Sramek told him they're hoping for expedited permitting "because their project is so good and their intentions are so great.”
“He doesn’t have a plan, he’s not there yet,” Thompson said.
U.S. Rep. John Garamendi, whose district includes Travis and immediate areas around it, said base and county officials reached out roughly five years ago for help in figuring out who was buying up land. Garamendi, who is scheduled to meet with Sramek Friday, was appalled to learn who was backing the project.
“You big wealthy Silicon Valley billionaires, you’re party to all of this. This is the kind of people you are? This is how you want to operate?” he said. “What they’ve managed to do is to totally poison the well.”
Hoffman and Andreessen did not respond to emailed requests for comment, nor did Jobs through her business Emerson Collective.
Project developers said they will protect the military base and farmers who want to keep farming on their parcels can do so.
Flannery has purchased virtually all the land surrounding the small city of Rio Vista, said Mayor Ron Kott.
He suspects older people who make up half of the city's 10,000 residents won't appreciate the added congestion and noise, but others might like the improved medical care, nightlife and shopping that a sophisticated city nearby might bring.
“If it’s done correctly, I think there’s a lot of opportunities for the county. Their tax revenue base will increase quite a bit. So there’s going to be a big windfall from that. Property values would probably go up around here as well even further. And so I think from those perspectives it’s good," Kott said.
"But again, I think you’re giving up a quality of lifestyle that’s kind of unique to this area."
COLUMBUS, Ohio — The wording of a proposed constitutional amendment on Ohio's fall ballot to ensure abortion rights seems straightforward: It would enshrine the right “to make and carry out one's own reproductive decisions.”
Yet as the campaigning for and against the nation's latest tug-of-war over abortion begins in earnest this weekend, voters are getting a different message from the measure's opponents. They are characterizing it as threatening a wide range of parental rights.
“As parents, it’s our worst nightmare," one particularly ominous online ad funded by Protect Women Ohio, the opposition campaign, says of November's Issue 1.
That ad suggests the amendment would let minors end pregnancies without parental permission, calling it “a potential reality so grim it’s hard to even imagine.” Another suggests parents would have no say in minors' ”sex change surgery."
It's no surprise that anti-abortion groups opposed to the amendment are promoting that message. They are trying to flip the script in how they talk to voters after a string of losses in statewide ballot fights since the U.S. Supreme Court ended a nationwide right to abortion last year.
Measures protecting access to abortion have succeeded in Democratic- and Republican-leaning states, including California, Kansas, Kentucky, Michigan, Montana and Vermont.
Data collected last year by AP VoteCast, a broad survey of the electorate, showed that 59 percent of Ohio voters believe abortion should generally be legal. Just last month, Ohio voters soundly defeated a measure that GOP lawmakers placed on a special election ballot that would have raised the threshold to pass constitutional amendments to 60 percent — a proposal seen as a first step to defeating the abortion amendment.
Before what is expected to be the highest profile national issue in November's elections, Ohio also is serving as a testing ground for political messaging headed into next year's presidential race. Abortion rights groups are trying to qualify initiatives in more states in 2024, potentially including the perennial battleground of Arizona.
To try to reverse their string of losses, anti-abortion groups are using the Ohio campaign to test arguments over parental rights and gender-related health care as potentially a winning counterpunch.
“It’s clear that the misinformation about abortion is not winning,” said Elisabeth Smith, director of state policy and advocacy at the Center for Reproductive Rights. “It didn’t win in Michigan. It didn’t win in Vermont. It didn’t win in Kansas. It didn’t win in Kentucky. So instead, we are seeing anti-abortion factions in search for that new, winning talking point.”
Legal experts disagree over what effect, if any, the Ohio amendment would have on parents' ability to control their children's access to abortion and gender-related health care, including surgery.
The points of contention are in the measure's fine print. Where the amendment says “every individual has a right to make and carry out one's own reproductive decisions,” opponents focus on the words “individual” and “reproductive” as potential openings.
Mehek Cooke, a Republican lawyer working with Protect Women Ohio, said the amendment's authors were intentionally vague when they used the word “individual,” allowing it to apply to any gender and to both adults and children.
“This is very deliberate, and I don’t think it’s open to interpretation,” she said. “It’s very clear ‘an individual’ means both.”
Ohio already has a parental consent law governing minors' access to abortion. Cooke said the amendment's wording means that would become unconstitutional, along with possible new laws aimed at restricting minors' access to gender-related health care.
Tracy Thomas, a University of Akron law professor who directs the school’s Center for Constitutional Law, was among several legal scholars who said that reading of the amendment is a stretch.
“It is a straw argument, a false argument that they're setting up,” she said. “Children do have constitutional rights, but we have lots of examples in the law, both state and federal, where these children’s rights are limited. Marriage is a good example.”
To be overturned, Ohio's existing parental consent law would have to be challenged in court and struck down by the state Supreme Court, which has a conservative majority, said Jessie Hill, a law professor at Case Western Reserve University and a consultant to the Issue 1 campaign.
Hill said similar arguments related to parental consent were made before Michigan’s vote last year to codify abortion rights in that state’s constitution, and “none of these things have come to pass.”
Ohio is among 36 states that require parental involvement in a minor’s decision to have an abortion, according to the Guttmacher Institute, a research and policy organization that supports legal access to abortion.
Dan Kobil, a law professor at Capital University in Columbus, said courts upheld Ohio's parental consent law when abortion was legal nationwide “as being consistent with a woman’s right to terminate a pre-viability pregnancy, as long as it maintained a provision for a judicial bypass in extreme cases.”
Because of that, he said it's reasonable to think that parents would retain the right to be involved in reproductive decisions involving their children if voters approve the abortion amendment.
The amendment makes no reference to gender-related health care, and it's supporters say the reason is simple: It's not about that.
The proposal cites reproductive decisions “including but not limited to” contraception, fertility treatment, continuing one's own pregnancy, miscarriage and abortion.
Opponents are making a case to voters that such phrasing could open the door to minors' gender-related health care decisions being constitutionally protected from parental interference.
Frank Scaturro, a constitutional lawyer working with Protect Women Ohio, said legal interpretations under the Roe v. Wade standard were dealing with a document — the U.S. Constitution — “that says nothing at all specifically about abortion, or even more broadly about reproduction.” He said that under the Ohio amendment, anything that alters the human reproductive system could be understood as a “reproductive decision.”
David Cohen, a law professor at Drexel University, called such interpretations of the measure “far-fetched.”
“This is a very clear provision that is based in, or connected to, abortion and pregnancy, and that is a very different topic than gender-affirming care,” he said. "I can imagine some gender-affirming care might be related to fertility treatment, but that’s a very specific part of gender-affirming care. This is a scare tactic to try and make this about that.”
