JAKARTA: Southeast Asian leaders failed to achieve any breakthrough Sunday to end deadly border skirmishes between Thailand and Cambodia that overshadowed a regional summit in Jakarta supposed to showcase progress towards economic integration. The clashes around crumbling Hindu temples in disputed areas have starkly illustrated the tensions between countries in the Association of South East Asian Nations (ASEAN) that could derail plans to create a single economic community by 2015, and the apparent inability of the bloc to deal with disagreements. Indonesia, host of the 18th ASEAN summit, has been pressing for a deal that would prevent the meeting being marred by the border dispute. But in the end all that was achieved was a face-saving announcement that the Thai and Cambodian foreign ministers would stay an extra day in Jakarta for more talks. “I'm coming here not to create a war of words,” Cambodian Prime Minister Hun Sen told a news conference in which he announced the extra round of talks. The two sides have spoken plenty of times in recent weeks, but without finding a resolution to clashes that have killed 18 people since April. ASEAN, a collection of authoritarian states and nascent democracies, has a policy of non-interference in each other's domestic affairs, and so has struggled to resolve the border dispute which — although on the surface about ownership of some ancient temples — is being driven by domestic political dynamics in both Thailand and Cambodia. Singapore leader Lee Hsien Loong did not attend the summit, staying at home for general elections that saw the ruling People's Action Party easily returned to power as expected. But the foreign minister lost his seat in a landmark vote for an opposition bolstered by a more sceptical younger generation. The rest of the region's leaders, meeting in a cavernous conference centre with an intricately carved wooden ceiling, have also struggled to engage the region's 500 million people in a project to build an economic community with free movement of people and goods by 2015. “If the Cambodia and Thailand situation gets worse, then I'm afraid they might have to postpone it to 2020 or even put it on hold,” said Enrico Tanuwidjaja, an analyst at OSK-DMG Group in Singapore.
