NUSA DUA, Indonesia, 9 October 2003 — Southeast Asian nations signed wide-ranging deals with China, Japan and India yesterday in an attempt to transform economic competitors into partners and to keep the regional peace. Nuclear-armed China and India signed a pact with the 10-member Association of Southeast Asian Nations (ASEAN) “to promote perpetual peace”, the first countries outside ASEAN to do so.

ASEAN leaders meeting here also inked agreements on freeing up trade with China, India and Japan, a day after vowing to work towards their own giant single market. The accession of China and India to ASEAN’s Treaty of Amity and Cooperation means there are “almost three billion people grouped under the same rules of good conduct,” said Indonesian Foreign Minister Hassan Wirayuda.

He said he hoped Japan and South Korea would also soon sign the pact, which renounces the threat or use of force to settle disputes. “It will certainly help to develop not only peace and stability, but prosperity in the region,” Wirayuda said. “It shows the element of trust between China and ASEAN. That’s a very important statement by both sides,” Singapore Prime Minister Goh Chok Tong told AFP.

China and some ASEAN states have overlapping claims to the potentially oil-rich Spratly archipelago in the South China Sea. Vietnam, which is now an ASEAN member, and China have clashed twice over the Spratlys, in 1988 and 1992, and fought a brief land border war in 1978.

ASEAN and China also signed a Declaration on Strategic Partnership for Peace and Prosperity. Chinese Foreign Minister Li Zhaoxing said the pacts “will definitely bring substantial benefit to China and ASEAN.”

Chinese Premier Wen Jiabao offered at the two-day summit on the resort island of Bali, where extremists killed 202 people in twin bombings almost one year ago, to work with Southeast Asia to fight terrorism. “At present, we are all faced with threats posed by terrorism, religious extremism and separatism, as well as challenges from other transnational problems,” he said in a speech.

At the end of meetings yesterday with dialogue partners China, Japan, South Korea and India, the ASEAN leaders in a chairman’s statement gave their support to six-party talks on resolving one of the region’s most pressing issues, the North Korean nuclear crisis. North Korea said Tuesday it wants Japan out of the talks. But Wirayuda said ASEAN “of course” wants Japan to stay involved.

The focus of the summit was economic, with some of Southeast Asia’s former “miracle” economies still not fully recovered from the 1997 98 financial crisis and facing increasingly stiff competition from China and elsewhere for foreign investment.

On Tuesday, ASEAN leaders had endorsed a plan to achieve a single production base and market by 2020, with a free flow of goods, services and investments in the region of 530 million people.

The “strategic partnership” with China commits the two sides to speed up talks on establishing a free trade area by 2010. It will cover 1.7 billion consumers with a combined gross domestic product of two trillion dollars. A “framework for comprehensive economic partnership” with Japan commits them to have a partnership in place, including elements of a possible free trade area, within 10 years.

ASEAN leaders avoided any public criticism of fellow member Myanmar’s crackdown on the opposition but Wirayuda said the leaders discussed the issue among themselves. “We continue to maintain open lines of communication and quiet dialogue with Myanmar... We also urge Myanmar to do more within the road map for democracy and reconciliation,” he told reporters.

South Korea’s President Roh Moo-hyun proposed at his meeting with ASEAN leaders a joint study on closer economic relations, including a possible free trade area. ASEAN said it tasked ministers to discuss the idea.

The Southeast Asians and India signed a “framework agreement on comprehensive economic cooperation” that binds them to start talks on tariff cuts and other trade-promoting measures, leading eventually to a free trade area in goods, services and investment.