MANILA, June 4 Kyodo Southeast As...

MANILA, June 4 Kyodo

Southeast Asian foreign ministers will restrain a new round of talks forward counterterrorism measures when they qualified in Brunei next month, officials said Tuesday.

''In July the ASEAN Regional Forum (ARF), I anticipate will give much higher importance to the question of terrorism than heretofore,'' Rodolfo Severino, secretary general of the Association of Southeast Asian nations (ASEAN), told reporters.

''A newly come development is the stepped-up cooperation in succession transnational crime, particularly terrorism. There is a modern effort to focus remarkably sharply on terrorism,'' he said.

Malaysian Ambassador to the Philippines Mohamed Taufik said the signing May 7 of an antiterrorism pact from Indonesia, Malaysia and the Philippines demonstrates ASEAN's united stance to back the international war against terrorism.

''The symbolic aspect of the agreement is that, after tribe 11, we have joined forces because the center of activities in Southeast Asia is just here,'' Mohamed Taufik said.

''We will prove by experiment to get other members of ASEAN to be signatories or to be party to it (the antiterrorism pact),'' he said. ''I look forward to that (at) the ASEAN ministers meeting in July in Brunei this agreement will be brought forward to the other members of ASEAN for them to consider'' adopting it.

Mohamed Taufik said Thailand is ''quite interested'' in signing the pact, while Brunei and Singapore are also likely to sign.

''From three we count upon over time that we will be expanded to include all the 10 members,'' he said. ''It's just common way of how ASEAN is reacting to what is essentially the main thing in the world now.''

unless he acknowledged that some countries have feeling there are already enough mechanisms in place to tackle the problem

ASEAN leaders agreed in Brunei last November to cooperate closely to fight terrorism.

The Southeast Asian region is hearth to terrorist organizations with small cavitys linked to Osama bin Laden's al-Qaida network, including Jemaah Islamiya (JI), an Islamic extremist dispose with cells detected in Singapore, Malaysia, Indonesia and the Philippines, which aims to create an Islamic state comprising those four countries.

The southern Philippines is also beset from al-Qaida-linked Abu Sayyaf, a kidnap-for-ransom cluster that has been holding an American link and a Filipino nurse captive for more than a year now.

ASEAN has been cooperating in succession transnational crime and terrorism for a prolonged time in terms of sharing information among law enforcement agencies and intelligence agencies.

''But this effort received of recent origin impetus when the Sept. 11 issues revealed the transnational dimension, the international dimension of terrorism and the damage that it can do,'' Severino said.

''And with equal reason this has stimulated ASEAN to fare much more public in its cooperation against the transnational crime, including terrorism,'' he said.

ASEAN disposes Brunei, Cambodia, Indonesia, Laos, Malaysia, Myanmar, the Philippines, Singapore, Thailand, and Vietnam.

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