Indonesian President Susilo Bambang Yudhoyono as chairman of ASEAN has asked the regional association's foreign ministers to speed up the realization of the declaration on handling the South China Sea, ANTARA reported. In his address opening the 44th meeting of ASEAN foreign ministers at the Bali Convention Center, Nusa Dua, Tuesday, the President said the ASEAN joint declaration on the South China Sea was for the first time issued long ago in 1992. After that, the President added, it took ten years for China to agree to the declaration although eventually the two sides in the nine years that followed were still unable to reach a joint agreement on basic directives on handling the South China Sea. "The solution to the problem is not supposed to be so slow. I have asked the foreign ministers meeting to speed up this effort of solving the most important and last stage of this important document," the President said in his speech in English with the help of two teleprompter screens. He said ASEAN needs to send a strong signal to the world that the future of the South China Sea could be predicted and handled. "Therefore we need to reach a joint agreement on directives and guidelines of the South China Sea that had been delayed for a long time and after that we need to step further, namely identifying all the elements of realizing the guidelines on handling the South China Sea," he said. The sooner ASEAN discussed the agreement with China, he said, the easier the handling of the South China Sea. The President also believed that ASEAN and China would soon agree to discussions on how to handle the South China Sea. In his speech the President also asked the ASEAN foreign ministers to soon reach agreement on ASEAN as a nuclear free zone. The head of state said now is the best time to reach agreement as a positive signal had been given by the nuclear powers to ratify a nuclear free zone agreement in Africa and South Pacific. "There is a fresh momentum to make the nuclear powers including China, the United States, and Russia, to agree to an ASEAN nuclear free zone in the earliest possible time," he said. President Yudhoyono also underlined the importance of speeding up the handling of human smuggling and trade in South East Asia.
