The COVID-19 pandemic, which had a devastating impact on the whole world, was one of the greatest challenges addressed by the Association of Southeast Nations (ASEAN). READ:
“It is the most difficult, as countries closed their borders,” noted ASEAN Secretary-General Dato Paduka Lim Jock Hoi during the 11th Editors’ Roundtable organized by the Indonesia-based Economic Research Institute for ASEAN and East Asia and Khmer Times in Cambodia.
While the 10-nation ASEAN crafted better strategies and institutional capacity to help, Lim insisted the bloc should not be held hostage by this crisis.In anticipating that the Myanmar junta will ask ASEAN to send “observers” to their country, Lim guaranteed they will not respond to that. “Obviously, he said nobody could have predicted the Ukraine conflict and all the negative effects on the global communities that followed,” said Koji.But the ERIA official noted that the ASEAN region remains peaceful and “it is still a rendezvous place for all major powers to converge and talk to one another.”
He related that ASEAN leaders opted last year that all the best minds of Asean must work out a new vision for the bloc that will go beyond 2025, a new vision that spans the decade 2026-2035.