APEC summit disrupted by North Korean ICBM test
BANGKOK: Several Asia-pacific leaders gathered for an economic summit in the Thai capital broke away from their meeting on Friday to condemn North Korea after it test-fired an intercontinental ballistic missile.
Separately, police fired rubber bullets to disperse antigovernment protesters in Bangkok as the host of the Asia-pacific Economic Cooperation (APEC) summit, Thai Prime Minister Prayuth Chan-ocha, was opening the conference.
US Vice President Kamala Harris called an emergency gathering of leaders from Australia, Japan, South Korea, Canada and New Zealand on the sidelines of the summit after North Korea carried out the missile test just an hour before its inauguration.
“This conduct by North Korea most recently is a brazen violation of multiple UN Security Council resolutions,” she said. “It destabilises security in the region, and unnecessarily raises tensions.
Thailand’s Prayuth earlier urged participants at the summit to seek sustainable growth and development after economic and social challenges from Covid, climate change and geopolitical rivalries. “We can no longer live like we did. We need to adjust our perspective, ways of life and ways of doing business,” he said to an audience that included Harris and
China’s President Xi Jinping.
Established to promote economic integration, APEC groups 21 countries that account for 38% of the global population, and 62% of gross domestic product and 48% of trade.
Prayuth did not refer to North Korea’s missile, which Japanese officials said landed just 200 km off Japan and had sufficient range to reach the United States mainland.
Japanese Prime Minister Fumio Kishida, who is in Bangkok for the APEC meeting, told reporters North Korea had “repeated its provocations with unprecedented frequency”.
The APEC gathering is the third summit in the region in the past week. A Southeast Asian summit that included China, Japan and the United States was held in Cambodia while the Group of 20 (G20) nations met on the Indonesian island of Bali.
The earlier meetings were dominated by the war in Ukraine as well as tensions over Taiwan and the Korean peninsula.
Campaigners are keen to see leaders address food insecurity, surging inflation, climate change and human rights.
A reminder of grassroots demands came as Thai prodemocracy protesters clashed with police about 10 km from the central Bangkok summit venue.