Cambodia PM wants to unify dates of regional meets

Cambodia's Prime Minister Hun Sen urged Thailand on Thursday to coordinate the dates of regional meetings it will host because the current schedule inconveniences him and other leaders.
The annual summit of the 10-member Association of Southeast Asian Nations should take place at the same time as other regional get-togethers as has been the practice in the past, Hun Sen said.

"I can't travel to Thailand three times a year to join the ASEAN summit, I have my own work to do too, and I think other leaders also do," he said.

Thai Prime Minister Abhisit Vejjajiva on Wednesday announced that ASEAN's summit will be held Feb. 27 to March 1 at the seaside resort town of Hua Hin.

But he added separate meetings with dialogue partners China, Japan, South Korea, India, Australia and New Zealand would be held in late April because Beijing will be busy with its own ruling party congress at the time of the ASEAN summit.

Hun Sen described the plan to separate the meetings as "a waste of time." He said if the meetings could not be coordinated, then they should be rescheduled for the end of the year.

Thailand had already changed the date and venue of the ASEAN meeting several times because of domestic political turmoil. The summit was originally scheduled for last December in the capital, Bangkok, then changed to the northern city of Chiang Mai.

Hun Sen is often critical of Cambodia's bigger, western neighbor Thailand, with whom it sometimes has frosty relations. Last year, a border dispute led to minor clashes in which several soldiers died.