"At the next meeting, both sides will likely present their proposalS about possible joint projects that can be conducted in the South China Sea. ASEAN will propose a search and rescue project while Indonesia may propose one project but we haven`t yet decided what it will be ," Indonesian Director General for ASEAN Cooperation Djauhari Oratmangun said here on Monday after attending an ASEAN senior official meeting in preparation of the 19th ASEAN Summit to be held in Bali.
Djauhari added members of the ASEAN working group on South China Sea issues earlier on Monday met for the first time to discuss elements possibly to included in the South China Sea Code of Conduct.
"Since this is the first meeting of the working group, they only discussed procedural matters and had not yet touched the core of the problem," he said.
China and some ASEAN countries, namely the Philippines, Vietnam, Brunei Darussalam and Malaysia have been in a dispute with regard to their claim to some oil-and-gas-rich islands in the South China Sea including the Spratly and Paracel Islands.
Last July, during the 44th ASEAN Ministerial Meeting in Bali, ASEAN and China reached agreement on the guidelines for the implementation of the Declaration of Conduct (DoC) for South China Sea claimant countries.
"We agree on the guidelines of the implementation of DoC, in addition to that, the foreign ministers of China and ASEAN will soon formally endorse the guidelines," China`s Assistant Foreign Affairs Minister Liu Zhenmin said.
Liu added ASEAN and China were expected to soon start the implementation of the DoC and discuss upcoming projects that they would initiate. "China is going to host the next joint working group meeting with ASEAN some time in November and we are going to articulate areas of cooperation and start the implementation of the projects," he said.
Meanwhile, Indonesian Foreign Affairs Minister Marty Natalegawa welcomed the progress reached in the efforts to solve the South China Sea conflict saying that the next move that needed to be made was trying to restore peace and stability in the situation in the South China Sea. (*)
Editor: Aditia Maruli Radja
Copyright © ANTARA 2011
