Burma Democratic Concern has the firm determination to carry on doing until the democracy restore in Burma.

Thursday 23 July 2009

Tea farmers are in crisis because of the SPDC’s problematic handling of tea problem


Photo by http://kyaukme.ning.com/


Press Release on

Tea farmers are in crisis because of the SPDC’s problematic handling of tea problem;

“Tea Crisis” Report

On March 12, 2009, the SPDC's health ministry announced the banning of tea products which contain Auramine 'O' stating that it can harm public health. Even though the regime claimed it was doing this to protect the public health, the consequences of the authorities' mismanagement and corruption caused over five hundred thousand tea farmers to find themselves deep in economic crisis. The result is that the people now believe that they do not have safe food.

The Food and Drug Administration of the SPDC admitted that they have found the yellow dye Auramine 'O' in tea products as many as two years ago; however, they have only just now banned and destroyed the tea products in question. As a result of the SPDC’s destruction of tea products, tea farmers and traders have lost over hundreds of millions of Kyat and now face difficulty in the continuation of tea production.

The SPDC military troops, police, USDA, women’s affairs, militia and local authorities simply confiscated and destroyed tea products without checking whether or not these products contained Auramine 'O' or not. However, the SPDC’s groups display bias in their implementation of the destruction of tea products as evidenced by their decision to not destroy the products of some traders who are either related to or enjoy good relations with the military authority.

"We are not the only ones using Auramine 'O'. Most tea production used Auramine 'O' because we did not know that it was harmful to public health. The SPCD banned and destroyed our products; however, they gave impunity to some tea producers, e.g. 'Yuzana' tea brand and others. If they do check, they will find that those brands were using color also", one of the banned tea traders expressed.

At least three hundred thousand tea farmers who rely mainly on tea production now cannot afford to buy basic food such as rice, oil, et cetera. As a result, there were thousands of tea farmers who fled to other places as migrant workers and some families who could not provide for their children’s educations.

The General Secretary of Palaung State Liberation Front, PSLF, Mai Aik Phone said, "The SPDC is ruling Burma under military command. With those bad impacts of the SPDC's tackling of the tea problem in mind, it is being shown that the military regime cannot take responsibility for their actions and that they do not care about the public health, development, or human security."

Therefore, we, the Palaung working group, earnestly urge our local tea community, tea traders, Palaung political groups and local community leaders to solve this tea crisis as comprehensively as possible.

Moreover, we would like to recommend that the international community, in particular the World Food Program and the United Nations International Children's Emergency Fund, provide assistance for tea farmers who now cannot provide for their livelihood solely through tea cultivation.

In conclusion, we call on the SPDC to educate people to not use chemical dye in foods through collaboration with local community, to find a good solution by appropriate reparation to tea traders whose products they have destroyed, and to immediately take action with respect to food products they find which are using chemical dyes in food before widespread human consumption can harm the public health.

# # #

Date: 23 July, 2009

Taang (Palaung) Working Group;

1) Ta'ang Student and Youth Organization – TSYO

2) Palaung Women's Organization - PWO

3) Palaung State Liberation Front - PSLF

Contact- (66) 080 118 4479

(66) 084 817 3936

http://www.facebook.com/note.php?note_id=133330755630&ref=nf
ဒီႏွစ္ ကမာၻအဆုိး၀ါးဆုံးအာဏာရွင္ ၁၀ ဦးစာရင္းကုိထုတ္ျပန္ရာ
နံပါတ္တစ္အေနျဖင့္ ဇင္ဘာေဘြ မွ မူဂါဘီက ပထမ ေနရာယူခဲ့ပါသည္။ ယမန္ႏွစ္
တြင္မူ မူဂါဘီသည္ နံပါတ္ ၆ သာ ခ်ိတ္ခဲ့ျပီး ဤႏွစ္၌ ပထမစြဲခဲ႔သည္။ မူဂါဘီ
သည္ ၁၉၈၀ မွစတင္၍ အာဏာယူခဲ႔ျပီး ေနာက္ ေငြေၾကးေဖာင္းပြႏႈံး
အဆုိး၀ါးဆုံးသုိ႔ေရာက္ခဲ႔သည္။ သန္း၅ေသာင္း တန္ ေငြစကၠဴကုိ
ပုံွႏွိပ္သုံးစြဲ သည့္အထိ ျဖစ္ေနခဲ့ျပီး အလုပ္လက္မဲ့ႏႈံးမွာလည္း
၈၅ရာခုိင္ႏႈံးထိ တုိးတက္ျမင့္မားလာခဲ႔သည္။ ၎အစိုးရ၏ ႏွိပ္ကြပ္မႈေၾကာင့္
အတုိက္အခံ ၁၆၃ေယာက္ေသဆုံးခဲ႔ျပီး လူ၅၀၀၀ ေက်ာ္ဖမ္း ဆီးညွမ္းပန္း
ခံခဲ႔ရသည္။ အစုိးရ၏မ်က္ကြယ္ျပဳမႈေၾကာင့္ ၀မ္းေရာဂါျဖင့္ လူေပါင္း ၄၀၀၀
နီးပါး လြန္ခဲ့သည့္ ႏွစ္ ၾသဂုတ္လမွ စတင္၍ ေသဆုံးခဲ႔ရသည္။ မၾကာခဏ
အတုိက္အခံမ်ား ႏွင့္ အာဏာခြဲေ၀ အုပ္ခ်ဳပ္ရန္ သေဘာတူညီ ဆုိင္းထုိးမႈမ်ား
ရွိိခဲ႔ေသာ္လည္း မူဂါဘီသည္ အၾကိမ္ၾကိမ္ခ်ိဳးေဖာက္ခဲ႔ပါသည္။

2. Omar al-Bashir
Sudan
Age: 65
In power since: 1989
Last year's rank: 2

အဆုိး၀ါးဆုံး အာဏာရွင္ ဒုတိယဆုကုိ ဆူဒန္မွ အုိမာအယ္ဘရွား
ကုိေပးအပ္ခဲ႔ပါသည္။ ႏုိင္ငံတကာ ရာဇ၀တ္တရားရုံး (International Criminal
Court) မွ အယ္ဘရွား ကုိ ဖမ္းဆီးရန္ ဒီလအတြင္း ၀ရမ္း ထုတ္ခဲ႔ပါသည္။ ၎၏
ျပစ္မႈမ်ားမွာ လူသတ္မႈ၊ မုဒိန္းမႈ၊ႏွိပ္စက္ညွင္းပန္းမႈ၊ အတင္းေရြ
႔ေျပာင္းေနရာခ်မႈ၊ ျပည္သူပစၥည္းမ်ား ကုိ အဓမၼ သိမ္းဆည္းမႈ တုိ႔ျဖင့္
၀ရမ္းထုတ္ျခင္းခံခဲ႔ရပါသည္။ ယမန္ႏွစ္ကလည္း ဒုတိယေနရာမွာသာ ခ်ိတ္ခဲ႔ပါသည္။
အုိမာ၏ အာဏာရွင္သက္မွာ အႏွစ္ ၂၀ ရွိပါသည္။

3. Kim Jong-Il
North Korea
Age: 67
In power since: 1994
Last year's rank: 1

တတိယ အဆုိးရြားဆုံး အာဏာရွင္ မွာမူ ယမန္ႏွစ္က ပထမစြဲ ခဲ႔ေသာ
ေျမာက္ကုိရီးယား အာဏာရွင္ ကင္ဂ်ဳံအီး အား ေပးအပ္ခဲ႔ပါသည္။ ကင္ဂ်ဳံအီး မွာ
ဤႏွစ္အတြင္း က်မ္းမာေရး သိတ္မေကာင္းလွဟု ႏုိင္ငံတကာမွ
ခန္႔မွန္းၾကေသာ္လည္း ၎၏ ဖိႏွိပ္မႈမ်ားမွာ ပုံမွန္အတုိင္း ျဖစ္ေနခဲ႔ပါသည္။
ကင္၏ အာဏာရွင္သက္မွာ ၁၅ ႏွစ္ရွိပါသည္။

4. Than Shwe
Burma (Myanmar)
Age: 76
In power since: 1992
Last year's rank: 3

စတုတၳ အဆုိး၀ါးဆုံး အာဏာရွင္ အျဖစ္ ျမန္မာကုိ ကမာၻသိေအာင္(
အဆုိးနည္းျဖင့္) လုပ္ေပးေနသူ သန္းေရႊ အား တံဆိပ္ကပ္ခဲ႔သည္။ သန္းေရႊ၏
ဤႏွစ္ ပုဒ္မ မွာ နာဂစ္မုန္တုိင္း ေၾကာင့္ လူေပါင္း တသိန္း၄ေသာင္းေက်ာ္
ေသေၾကေပ်ာက္ဆုံးမႈႏွင့္ အုိးမဲ႔အိမ္မဲ႔ ၂သန္းေက်ာ္ အား ႏုိင္ငံတကာမွ
၀ုိင္း၀န္းကူညီရန္ၾကိဳးပမ္းခဲ႔ မႈကုိ အခ်ိန္ဆြဲဖင္ေႏွးခဲ႔ျခင္း ႏွင့္
တခ်ိန္တည္းမွာ ၎၏ ဖြဲ႔စည္းပုံအေျခခံဥပေဒ အတည္ျပဳေရးအတြက္
ျပည္လုံးကြ်တ္ဆႏၵခံယူပြဲကုိမူ ျမန္မာသမုိင္းတြင္ အဆုိး၀ါးဆုံး
မွတ္တမ္း၀င္ခဲ႔ေသာ နာဂစ္မုန္တုိင္း ၾကီး ၾကားမွပင္ ဗႏၶဳလ မုိးတြင္းၾကီး
ရခုိင္ရုိးမကုိျဖတ္ကာ ဓႏုျဖဴဆင္းသကဲ႔သုိ႔ ျပီးေျမာက္ေအာင္
လုပ္ျပခဲ႔ျခင္းအတြက္ ႏုိင္ငံတကာမွ ရင္သပ္ရႈေမာ အံ႔ၾသ ေအာခ်ခဲ့ရသည္။
သန္းေရႊသည္ ယမန္ႏွစ္ လည္း ျငိမ္းခ်မ္းစြာ သပိတ္ေမွာက္ေသာ ေရႊ၀ါေရာင္
ကုိယ္ေတာ္မ်ားအား သုတ္သင္ေခ်မႈန္းမႈ႔ေၾကာင္႔ အဆုိးဆုံး အာဏာရွင္ တတိယေနရာ
ရခဲ႔ပါသည္။

5. King Abdullah
Saudi Arabia
Age: 85
In power since: 1995
Last year's rank: 4

ပဥၥမ အာဏာရွင္ဆုိးၾကီး အျဖစ္ ေဆာ္ဒီအာေရးဗီးယားမွ ဘုရင္ အဗၺဒူလာ အား
သမုတ္ခဲ႔ပါသည္။ ေဆာ္ဒီ ဘုရင္ၾကီးသည္ အမ်ိဳးသမီးအခြင့္အေရးမ်ား ကုိ ဆက္လက္
ပိတ္ပင္ တားျမစ္ေနျခင္း ကုိခြင့္ျပဳထားသျဖင့္ အာဏာရွင္ဆုိးတဦး
စာရင္း၀င္ခဲ႔ျခင္းျဖစ္ပါသည္။ ေဆာ္ဒီအမ်ိဳးသမီးမ်ားမွာ
မွတ္ပုံတင္ကုိင္ေဆာင္ခြင့္ပင္ မရၾကဘဲ ဘယ္သြားသြား၊ဘယ္လာ လာ၊ဘာလုပ္လုပ္
အမ်ိဳးသား မ်ား၏ အုပ္ထိန္းမႈေအာက္မွသာ လုပ္ခြင့္ ရၾကပါသည္။
အမ်ိဳးသမီးမ်ား အတြက္ လူအခြင့္အေရး ေကာ္မရွင္ တခု ကုိ ေဆာ္ဒီအစုိးရမွ
ဖြင္႔လွစ္ေပးခဲ႔ ေသာ္လည္း ထုိရုံး၌ အလုပ္လုပ္သူအားလုံးမွာ
အမ်ိဳးသားမ်ားသာလွ်င္ျဖစ္ပါသည္။ ေဆာ္ဒီဘုရင္ အဗၺဒူလာ သည္ ယမန္ႏွစ္ကလည္း
အာဏာရွင္ဆုိး အျဖစ္ စတုတၳခ်ိတ္ခဲ႔ ပါသည္။

6. Hu Jintao
China
Age: 66
In power since: 2002
Last year's rank: 5

ဆဌမ အဆုိး၀ါးဆုံး အာဏာရွင္အား တရုပ္မွ ဟူဂ်င္းေတာင္ အား ေပးအပ္ခဲ႔ပါသည္။
ဟူဂ်င္းေတာင္ သည္ ၂၀၀၈ အုိလံပစ္ပြဲ ကံထရုိက္ ဆြဲႏုိင္ရန္အတြက္
အေျခခံလူအခြင့္အေရး မ်ား ျမွင့္တင္ သြားမည္ ဟု ႏုိင္ငံတကာ ႏွင့္
အုိလံပစ္ေကာ္မတီကုိ နားလွည့္ ပါးရုိက္ ဂတိေပးခဲ႔ေသာ္လည္း လက္ေတြ႔တြင္မူ
လြတ္လပ္စြာ ကုိးကြယ္ ပုိင္ခြင့္ႏွင့္ ေျပာဆုိပုိင္ခြင့္ တုိ႔အား
ပုိမုိတင္းၾကပ္ ခ်ဳတ္ခ်ယ္လာခဲ႔ပါသည္။ တိဘက္ႏွင့္ တျခား လူနည္းစု
တုိင္းရင္းသား အေပၚ ပုိမုိဖိႏွိပ္လာျပီး ႏုိင္ငံေရး၊ဘာသာေရး အတုိက္အခံ
မ်ားအား တရားစီရင္ခ်က္ မခ်ဘဲ “အလုပ္ၾကမ္းမွျပန္လည္ပညာေပးျခင္း” ရဲဘက္
စခန္းမ်ားသုိ႔ ၄ႏွစ္ထိတုိင္ပုိ႔၍ ေမာင္းျခင္းမ်ား ျပဳလုပ္ခဲ႔ ပါသည္။
ဟူဂ်င္းေတာင္ သည္ ယမန္ႏွစ္က အဆုိး၀ါးဆုံး အာဏာရွင္ နံပါတ္ ၅
ခ်ိတ္ခဲ႔ပါသည္။

7. Sayyid Ali Khamenei
Iran
Age: 69
In power since: 1989
Last year's rank: 7

သတၱမ အဆုိး၀ါးဆုံး အာဏာရွင္အျဖစ္ အီရန္ မွ ဆာရဒ္ အာလီ ခါေမနီ မွ
ရရွိခဲ႔ပါသည္။ ယမန္ႏွစ္ က ခါေမနီသည္ သတၱမပင္ ခ်ိတ္ခဲ႔ပါသည္။
ျငိမ္းခ်မ္းစြာ ဆႏၵျပသူမ်ား၊ အမ်ိဳးသမီးအခြင့္အေရးတုိက္ပဲြ၀င္သူမ်ား၊
လူနည္းစုတုိင္းရင္းသား မ်ား ႏွင့္ ဘာသာေရး အစုအဖြဲ႔ေလးမ်ား၊ သတင္းဂ်ာနယ္
သမားမ်ားကို ဖိႏွိ္ပ္ညွင္းပန္းမႈ မ်ား ေၾကာင့္ ဟုစြဲခ်က္တင္ၾကပါသည္။ ၂၀၀၈
ခုႏွစ္အထိ တကမာၻလုံးတြင္ အီရန္တႏုိင္ငံတည္းသာ ကေလး မ်ား အား
ေသဒဏ္အျပစ္ေပးျခင္း ကုိ လက္ခံက်င့္သုံးေနဆဲျဖစ္ပါသည္။ အီရန္ဥပေဒမွ
ေယာကၤ်ားေလး ၁၅ ႏွစ္ႏွင့္အထက္၊ မိန္းခေလး ၉ႏွစ္ႏွင့္အထက္အား
ေသဒဏ္အျပစ္ေပးႏုိင္ သည္ဟု သတ္မွတ္ထားပါသည္။

8. Isayas Afewerki
Eritrea
Age: 63
In power since: 1991
Last year's rank: 10

အဌမ အဆုိး၀ါးဆုံး အာဏာရွင္အျဖစ္ အီယစ္တရီယား (၁၉၅၂ခုႏွစ္တြင္
အီသီယုိပီးယားမွ ခြဲထြက္လာေသာ ႏုိင္ငံငယ္) မွ အုိင္စာရစ္ အဖီ၀ါကီ အား
ေပးခဲ႔ျပီး ၎သည္ မႏွစ္က အဆင့္၁၀ ခ်ိတ္ခဲ႔ပါသည္။ အဖီ၀ါကီ သည္ ၂၀၀၈ ေမလ
တြင္ ေရြးေကာက္ ပြဲ ျပဳလုပ္ျခင္းေၾကာင့္ တုိင္းျပည္အတြင္း
ကြဲျပားျခားနားမႈမ်ား ေပၚေပါက္ လာေစႏုိင္သည္ ဟူေသာ အေၾကာင္းျပခ်က္ျဖင့္
ေရြးေကာက္ပြဲအား အနဲဆုံး အႏွစ္ ၃၀ မွ ၄၀ ေက်ာ္မွသာ၊ သုိ႔မဟုတ္
ဤထက္ပုိမုိၾကာျမင့္မွသာ ျပဳလုပ္မည္ ဟု ေက်ညာခဲ႔သည္။ သတင္းဌာနမ်ားကုိ
၎အစုိးရမွသာ တုိက္ရုိက္ခ်ဳပ္ကုိင္ခဲ႔ျပီး အနည္းဆုံး သတင္းသမား
၁၀ေယာက္ေက်ာ္အား ၂၀၀၁ ခုမွ စတင္ထိန္းသိမ္းခဲ႔ပါသည္။

9. Gurbanguly Berdymuhammedov
Turkmenistan
Age: 51
In power since: 2006
Last year's rank: Unranked

န၀မ အဆုိး၀ါးဆုံးအာဏာရွင္ အျဖစ္ တာခ္မန္းနိစတင္မွ ဂါဘန္ဂူလီ
ဘာဒီမူဟာမက္ေဒါ႔ ဤႏွစ္မွ စတင္ ရရွိခဲ႔ပါသည္။
ႏုိင္ငံေရးအတုိက္အခံမ်ား၊သတင္းသမားမ်ား၊ ဘာသာေရး သမား မ်ားအား
ဖိႏွိပ္ညွင္းပန္းခဲ႔ျပီး မတ္၊ဧျပီ အစရွိေသာ လ နံမည္မ်ားအား သူနံမည္ ႏွင့္
သူအေမ နံမည္ ေပး၍ ေခၚေ၀ၚေစခဲ႔ျခင္းမ်ား အစရွိသည့္ အလားတူ အာဏာရွင္ရူးမ်ား
ျပဳလုပ္ေနက် အူေၾကာင္ေၾကာင္ အျပဳအမူမ်ားကုိျပဳလုပ္ခဲဲဲ႔ပါသည္။

10. Muammar al-Qaddafi
Libya
Age: 66
In power since: 1969
Last year's rank: 11

ဒႆမ အဆုိး၀ါးဆုံးအာဏာရွင္ၾကီး အျဖစ္ အႏွစ္ ၄၀ အာဏာသက္
ျပည့္လုခါနီးျဖစ္ေသာ လစ္ဗ်ား မွ ကဒါဖီ အား ေပးအပ္ခဲ႔ပါသည္။
သက္ဦးဆံပုိင္ရာဇေသြး မပါ ေသာ အုပ္ခ်ဳပ္သူမ်ား အနက္ ဂါဘြန္ ရွိ အုိမာ
ဘြန္ဂုိ တေယာက္သာ ကဒါဖီ ၏ ေရွ႔၌ ႏွစ္အမ်ားဆုံး အာဏာရွင္သက္တမ္း
ခ်ိဳးထားႏုိင္ခဲ႔ပါသည္။ လစ္ဗ်ားအစုိးရ၏ သတင္းမ်ားကုိ ျဖန္႔ခ်ိပါက
လစ္ဗ်ားႏုိင္ငံ၏ ဂုဏ္သိကၡာ ကုိ ဖ်က္ဆီးေစသည္ ဟူေသာ စြဲခ်က္မ်ား ျဖင့္
ေထာင္ဒဏ္အျပစ္ေပးႏုိင္ပါသည္။ ကဒါဖီ သည္ ယမန္ႏွစ္က အဆင့္ ၁၁ သာ
ခ်ိတ္ခဲ႔ပါသည္။

PARADE's annual World's Worst Dictators list:2009.

အဆုိး၀ါးဆုံး အာဏာရွင္ျဖစ္ေစႏုိင္သည့္ အမွတ္ေပးစည္းမ်ည္းမ်ားမွာ
လူအခြင့္အေရးခ်ိဳး ေဖာက္မႈမ်ား၊ ၎တုိ႔အုပ္ခ်ဳပ္မႈလက္ေအာက္၌
ျပည္သူျပည္သားမ်ား ခံစား ေနရေသာ ဒုကၡအ၀၀မ်ား၊ အာဏာကုိ
တဦးတည္းလက္၀ါးၾကီးအုပ္ခ်ယ္လွယ္မႈမ်ား အစရွိသည္ တုိ႔ပါ၀င္ပါသည္။
အခ်က္အလက္မ်ားကုိ အေမရိကန္ႏုိင္ငံျခားေရးဌာန၊ လူအခြင့္အေရးေစာင္႔ၾကည့္မႈ
ေကာ္မရွင္၊ ႏုိင္ငံတကာလြတ္ျငိမ္းခ်မ္းသာေရး အဖြဲ႔၊ နယ္နိမိတ္မဲ႔
သတင္းေထာက္မ်ား အဖြဲ႔တုိ႔ မွ ရရွိပါသည္။

Joint Communiqué of the 42nd AMM

Joint Communiqué of the 42nd AMM


July 20, 2009

On 20 July 2009, Mr. Kasit Piromya, Minister of Foreign Affairs of Thailand held a press conference on behalf of the ASEAN Chair, on the outcome of the 42nd ASEAN Foreign Ministers' Meeting, which is reflected in the Joint Communiqué of the 42nd AMM. Gist of the Joint Communiqué is as follows:
1. The establishment of the ASEAN Human Rights Body and Dispute Settlement Mechanisms
The ASEAN Foreign Ministers formally adopted the Terms of Reference of the ASEAN Human Rights Body, which will be called "the ASEAN Intergovernmental Commission on Human Rights". They also recommended to the ASEAN Leaders that the Commission be launched during the 15th ASEAN Summit to be held in October this year.
The adoption of the TOR is the beginning of an evolving process. The TOR provides ASEAN with a platform for furthering ASEAN"s efforts in the promotion and protection of human rights. Hence, as part of the review process of the TOR in 5-years" time after it enters into force.
After this, each ASEAN country will proceed to appoint its representative to the Commission so that we can convene the inaugural Commission meeting during the 15th ASEAN Summit.
The Foreign Ministers also endorsed ad referendum the draft agreement on privileges and immunity of ASEAN and agreed to extend the mandate of the High-Level Legal Experts" Group (HLEG) so that they can finalize their work on dispute settlement mechanisms and other legal issues under the ASEAN Charter for the Foreign Ministers" consideration.
2. On regional and international issues
The ASEAN Foreign Ministers discussed, among others, the post Cyclone Nargis situation in Myanmar and the role of the Tripartite Core Group. They also discussed the issue of illegal migrants in the Indian Ocean and the situation in Myanmar, following the recent UN Secretary-General"s visit. From all these discussions, there emerged a general feeling that now that ASEAN has the Charter in place and is moving towards becoming a Community, ASEAN Member States should do more to help one another and to resolve ASEAN"s internal problems within the ASEAN family without recourse to the international community.
Another issue discussed was the situation related to the Korean Peninsula. The ASEAN Foreign Ministers recalled the ASEAN leader"s statement in June 2009 in which they reiterated the condemnation of the recent underground nuclear test and missile launches undertaken by the Democratic People"s Republic of Korea. They urged the DPRK to fully comply with its obligations and relevant UNSC resolutions. At the same time, ASEAN will do what it can to keep the DPRK engaged, particularly through the ASEAN Regional Forum (ARF), and explore how ASEAN could serve as a bridge between the DPRK and the world.
3. On ASEAN Community Building
The ASEAN Foreign Ministers also discussed issues related to the implementation of the ASEAN Charter. These include the division of labour between the existing mechanisms such as the senior officials and the director-generals of ASEAN, and the new mechanisms. The idea is to make ASEAN work more efficiently without duplication of work.

They agreed to work closely together to enable ASEAN to play an increasingly proactive and leading role in the regional architecture.
They will also make greater use of the ASEAN Committees in Third Countries in representing ASEAN and interacting with host countries. The ASEAN Foreign Ministers further agreed to form such a committee in countries where there are five or more ASEAN embassies.
4. On external relations
The ASEAN Foreign Ministers approved the accreditation of 28 Ambassadors from countries outside ASEAN, which include all 10 dialogue partners and other regions. They also endorsed guidelines for the procedures for the accreditation of non-ASEAN Ambassadors to ASEAN prepared by the Committee on Permanent Representatives to ASEAN.
5. On the Treaty of Amity and Cooperation in Southeast Asian (TAC)
The ASEAN Foreign Ministers looked forward to the United States" forthcoming accession to the TAC, which will send a strong signal of its commitment to peace and security in the region.
6. Other matters
The ASEAN Foreign Ministers exchanged views on how to further develop infrastructure linkages among ASEAN countries as well as linkages between ASEAN and India and China to promote connectivity in the region.
Finally, the Ministers noted the tentative dates proposed by Viet Nam for the 43rd AMM next year, which is in July 2010.