By Trefor Moss
The President of the Philippines, Benigno Aquino, has a reputation for being a lackadaisical leader in his home country, where Filipinos have embraced the term “noynoy-ing” – coined from Aquino’s nickname, Noynoy – as an irreverent phrase for “doing nothing.”
Perhaps it was Aquino’s sleepy reputation that this week emboldened the Cambodian leadership to push an exclusive agenda at the end of an ASEAN Leaders’ Meeting. Cambodia, as the ASEAN chair, was hosting the event when its officials announced that ASEAN had reached a consensus on an important aspect of the South China Sea disputes involving China and several ASEAN members, namely that the interested parties would not seek to internationalize their disagreements. It sounded fine, except for one small problem: The consensus was a fiction.
Noynoy, to his credit, refused to noynoy. The following day he interrupted Cambodian Prime Minister Hun Sen to insist that no such consensus had been reached, and that, contrary to the Cambodian position, the Philippines – no doubt like other ASEAN members – reserved the right to deal with sovereignty issues in whatever way it pleased.
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