Vietnamese officials said Thursday that next week's meeting in Hanoi of defence ministers from South-East Asia, China, the US and six other countries would avoid the sensitive issue of Chinese territorial claims in the South China Sea, according to dpa. Regional defence ministers "will not turn the meeting into a place for a war of words," said Vietnamese Deputy Defence Minister General Nguyen Chi Vinh at a press conference. The first-ever ASEAN Defence Ministers' Meeting Plus, scheduled for October 11-13, will bring together the ten members of the Association of South-East Asian Nations (ASEAN) along with China, the US, Japan, South Korea, India, Russia, Australia and New Zealand. China's claims to maritime territory in the South China Sea have led to escalating diplomatic tension with Vietnam and other South-East Asian countries, and had been expected to overshadow the meeting. But Vinh said the South China Sea disputes were "not on the agenda." He said the purpose of the inaugural meeting was for participants to "identify common, universal shared interests." While he listed the first priority for the meeting as "maritime security," other items on the agenda include counterterrorism and joint humanitarian assistance and disaster relief. US Secretary of Defence Robert Gates is expected to meet with his Chinese counterpart, General Liang Guanglie, on the sidelines. Tensions between Washington and Beijing have risen since July, when US Secretary of State Hillary Clinton inserted the US into the South China Sea dispute by backing multilateral talks between China and ASEAN over the issue. China had insisted on bilateral talks with each ASEAN member state. China, Vietnam, Malaysia, the Philippines, Indonesia and Brunei dispute sovereignty over parts of the South China Sea. In recent months China has seized hundreds of Vietnamese fishing boats for violating what it considers its territorial waters around the disputed Spratly and Paracel Islands. On Tuesday, Vietnam demanded China "immediately and unconditionally" release a Vietnamese fishing boat and its crew held since September 11 in the Paracel Islands. But Vinh said the question of whether China released the fishermen was "irrelevant" to the meeting.
