Human Rights on the Agenda for Kerry Visit

U.S. Secretary of State John Kerry launched a swing through Southeast Asia en route to China on January 24 with visits to Laos and Cambodia, part of a broader U.S. push to improve relations with the region and counterbalance China’s rising influence.

The trip to Vientiane also paves the way for a summit hosted next month by US President Barack Obama in California with the 10 leaders of the Association of Southeast Asian Nations (ASEAN).

Its members are becoming more vocal in complaints about China’s growing assertiveness over competing claims in the South China Sea. Since North Korea’s nuclear test earlier this month, USA officials asserted that China must use its leverage to demand that the Stalinist North Korean leadership end its nuclear weapons program and testing and return to six-nation talks aimed at denuclearizing the Korean peninsula.

Kerry travels to Cambodia on Tuesday for a meeting with Prime Minister Hun Sen.

“The only thing I’m going to say about China is, I look forward to having solid conversations, serious conversations about one of the most serious issues on the planet today, which is a clearly reckless and unsafe evolving security threat in the hands of somebody who is questionable in terms of judgment, and has proven thus to China”, he said, referring to Kim Jong Un, the quixotic supreme leader of the Democratic People’s Republic of Korea.

North Korea said on January 6 it had tested a hydrogen bomb, although Washington voiced scepticism as to whether it was that powerful.

The rights groups said they “respectfully ask you [Kerry] that you take all necessary action to ensure that the United States government discontinue any military trainings and assistance to Cambodia’s abusive armed forces”.

Talks over the North Korea nuclear issue and the South China Sea are reportedly to be high on agenda during his stopover.

Despite the challenges it faces with North Korea, China has told a South Korean official that it is in favor of strengthening sanctions.

When Cambodia chaired ASEAN in 2012, a weakness was seen to be the failure to issue a joint communiqué on the ongoing territorial dispute in the South China Sea between China, Malaysia, the Philippines, Vietnam and Brunei.

“The US is paying close attention to ASEAN, particularly the Mekong Region”, said Chheang Vannarith, a lecturer in Asia-Pacific studies at the University of Leeds, adding that Cambodia and Laos were perceived a “strategic allies” of a rising China.

Besides its China ties, as a landlocked country, Laos has less interest in the maritime disputes several Asean members have with Beijing. In late 2009, Phnom Penh deported 20 ethnic Uighur asylum seekers to China, a day before then-Chinese Vice-President Xi Jinping arrived in Cambodia for a landmark state visit.

Secretary of State John F. Kerry said Monday that the United States is considering increasing financial aid to help Laos clear the countryside of unexploded ordnance left over from the Vietnam War more than four decades ago.

Laos has assumed this year’s chairmanship of the regional bloc and will see a flurry of diplomatic activity culminating in an autumn visit by Obama – the first by a sitting USA leader to the resource-rich but impoverished nation.

Washington has already drawn up a draft resolution, but Beijing has the power to veto sanctions led by the USA or other parties at the U.N. Security Council.