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Ambassador Dang Dinh Quy of Vietnam, speaking to media on Jan. 2, 2020, as his country assumes the rotating presidency of the UN Security Council in its first month as an elected member. In the Council, it plans to ally with another current Southeast Asian member, Indonesia.
by Stéphanie Fillion
With tensions becoming more and more serious in the Middle East and with two crucial leadership roles to play internationally, diplomats in Hanoi are probably working hard to make sure Vietnam’s big diplomatic month of January is a success.
Vietnam’s diplomacy has arrived at a critical moment, as it presides over the United Nations Security Council this month while assuming the chair of the Association of Southeast Asian Nations (Asean) for 2020. The two roles will intertwine on Jan. 23, when Vietnam, led by Ambassador Dang Dinh Quy, is scheduled to host an open debate in the Council on the cooperation between the UN and Asean. The two organizations work together on many issues, such as counterterrorism and sustainable development. The secretary-general of Asean, Dato Lim Jock Hoi of Brunei, is expected to be among those attending the debate.
Vietnam is taking Kuwait’s elected seat in the Council as a member of the Asia regional bloc, offering Vietnam a chance to create a tighter alliance with Indonesia, another current elected member from Southeast Asia. This could mean a partnership, or “SEA2,” that mirrors another small, informal bloc on the Council, the “A3” — the African elected members (currently Niger, South Africa and Tunisia).
When asked about the potential Vietnamese-Indonesian alliance at a recent press briefing (see below), Ambassador Dang jokingly said, “It’s a kind of secret between the two missions,” adding that they want to work together to raise Asean’s profile at the UN. The organization was founded in 1967, and Vietnam joined it in 1995.
Vietnam’s other open debate, on Jan. 9, will focus on upholding the UN Charter in the context of international peace and security; the topic is timely, as many UN members are accusing the United States of having violated the Charter by killing the Iranian military commander, Qassim Suleimani, in a drone airstrike on Jan. 3 at the Baghdad airport. Iran’s foreign minister, Javad Zarif, was expected to speak at the Council meeting, but this week the US State Department turned down his visa request.
That’s another item on Vietnam’s agenda: dealing with unexpected events.
Since the killing of General Suleimani, many diplomats at the UN and high-level UN officials have been saying that the Jan. 9 meeting will give diplomats the chance to address the situation in the Middle East and US-Iranian tensions, even though the program of work for the month was adopted before the US operation. (In fact, Zarif applied for a visa on Dec. 20, according to the Iran mission to the UN.)
One issue to watch in the next two years for Vietnam, although Ambassador Dang declined to comment on it, is the one involving South China Sea maritime claims by China, Vietnam, the Philippines, Indonesia and other countries in the region.
“Vietnam, you know, has made a very concerted effort over the past few years to say — despite what China is doing in the South China Sea, and we’re getting our military capabilities together — we still believe that this is ultimately an issue of international law, and the UN matters, in that sense,” Prashanth Parameswaran, a senior editor at The Diplomat magazine and a fellow at the Carter Center, told PassBlue.
Along with regular Council agenda items like the peacekeeping mission in Mali and the conflicts in Yemen and Libya, the Council is likely to focus on a draft resolution to curtail certain UN sanctions against North Korea, a proposal by China and Russia that first surfaced in late December.
Another mandate, on extending the life of several UN humanitarian-aid border crossingsinto Syria, expires on Jan. 10. Negotiations on an extension among the five permanent members — Britain, China, France, Russia and the US — are underway behind closed doors.
Each month, PassBlue profiles UN ambassadors as they assume presidency of the Security Council and highlights important data about their countries, including their carbon emission levels and maternal death rates, which signal their commitments to mitigating climate change and promoting women’s rights. Vietnam’s maternal mortality rate is considered “very low,” for example, totaling 43 deaths per 100,000 live births, based on most recent data from Unicef.
https://www.passblue.com/2020/01/08...e-security-council-and-of-asean-for-2020/amp/
