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KUALA LUMPUR: The bloc of Southeast Asian nations will host world leaders at a summit this weekend that will run alongside pivotal trade talks between the United States and China and serve as the first stop for US President Donald Trump’s swing through Asia. The Association of Southeast Asian Nations will press for trade multilateralism and deeper ties with new partners, while managing the fallout from Trump’s global tariff offensive at its annual meeting in Malaysia’s capital. Trump will be in Kuala Lumpur on Sunday to begin a five-day trip through Malaysia, Japan and South Korea, aimed at bolstering his diplomatic credentials, as US and Chinese officials work to avert a trade war escalation ahead of his planned meeting with China’s President Xi Jinping in South Korea next week.

WHO’S WHO AT ASEAN SUMMIT?
Leaders will gather on Sunday ahead of engagements with partners including Trump, Chinese Premier Li Qiang, Brazilian President Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva, South Africa’s Cyril Ramaphosa and Japan’s newly elected Prime Minister Sanae Takaichi.
“This represents a new strategic direction for Malaysia and ASEAN in expanding diplomatic and trade ties with other regions, including Africa and Latin America,” Malaysian Prime Minister Anwar Ibrahim, the summit’s host, said on Wednesday.
ASEAN, which also includes Brunei, Cambodia, Indonesia, Laos, Myanmar, the Philippines, Singapore, Thailand, and Vietnam, will formally welcome East Timor as its 11th member on Sunday. Commonly known as Timor-Leste, its accession to ASEAN is seen as a political win for one of the world’s poorest countries, though analysts say the economic benefits remain uncertain.

TRUMP TO WITNESS THAI-CAMBODIA CEASEFIRE DEAL
ASEAN’s regional outreach comes even as its unity remains tested by internal disputes. Border tensions between Thailand and Cambodia erupted into a deadly five-day conflict in July, killing dozens of people and temporarily displacing about 300,000 in their most intense fighting in recent history.
Malaysia helped secure an initial ceasefire on July 28, aided by decisive calls from Trump to the leaders of both countries.
Thai Defense Minister Natthaphon Narkphanit said this week the two countries have made “meaningful progress” on a broader ceasefire agreement, which will require both sides to remove all mines and heavy artillery from their borders. The deal is expected to be signed on Sunday in the presence of Trump, Malaysian officials said.

SPLIT OVER MYANMAR
ASEAN, however, remains split over how to end a deadly civil war in Myanmar sparked by a military coup in 2021.
Fighting has intensified despite repeated calls for de-escalation, with ASEAN making little progress in getting Myanmar’s military rulers to adhere to a peace plan it agreed to months after the coup.
ASEAN foreign ministers will discuss on Friday whether to send regional observers to Myanmar’s general election, Malaysia’s Foreign Minister Mohamad Hasan said this week.
Critics have derided the election, set to begin in December, as a sham exercise to legitimize military rule.

US-CHINA TRADE TALKS, TARIFFS IN FOCUS
Trump is expected to be accompanied on his Asia trip by top US officials, including Secretary of State Marco Rubio, Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent and Trade Representative Jamieson Greer. Bessent and Greer plan to hold talks with Chinese officials in Malaysia to iron out issues ahead of the meeting between Trump and Xi, after Beijing expanded export curbs on rare earths. China said the talks with its vice premier He Lifeng will run until October 27.
Trump said he expected to reach agreements with Xi that could range from resumed soybean purchases by China to limits on nuclear weapons. Trump could also meet with Brazil’s Lula in Malaysia, sources have said, as Rio looks to lower hefty US tariffs on Brazilian goods.
Washington’s levies are expected to remain high on the ASEAN summit agenda, with Southeast Asian foreign and economic ministers due to hold a joint meeting for the first time in the bloc’s history on Saturday. The United States has imposed tariffs of between 10 percent and 40 percent on Southeast Asian imports, with the majority of ASEAN countries hit with a 19 percent rate.
The countries will seek to formalize trade deals with the United States with Trump present, Malaysian officials said. Malaysia also plans to host a gathering of leaders of the Regional Comprehensive Economic Partnership, the world’s largest trading bloc, on the sidelines of the ASEAN summit.
The RCEP, which includes all ASEAN members as well as China, Japan, South Korea, Australia and New Zealand, is touted by some analysts as a potential counter to US tariffs, but it is considered weaker than some other regional trade deals due to competing interests among its members.

LAGOS: Nnimmo Bassey, a prominent figure in the decades-long environmental struggles in Africa’s largest oil-producing country, will next month attend yet another UN climate summit, this time in Brazil.
“Unfortunately!” smiles the Nigerian 67-year-old, who harbors little hope for the outcomes of this “ritual” in which states participate “while knowing that nothing serious will come of it.”
Bassey, a longtime environmentalist, will only attend meetings among environmental activists on the sidelines of the official COP30 talks.
“For us as activists, the COP provides spaces for solidarity, for meeting other people, sharing ideas, and organizing in a different way,” he told AFP in an interview in Nigeria’s commercial capital, Lagos.
Yet he is hopeful that one day “the outside space may become the real decision-making space, while the politicians become the observers.”
Oil pollution that has ravaged the Niger Delta for decades is a textbook example of environmental struggles against extractivism and fossil fuels.
Since the 1950s, when crude was first discovered in southern Nigeria, between nine and 13 million barrels of oil have been spilled into the Delta, according to an independent group of experts who conducted a study in 2006.
Between 2006 and last year, the Nigerian National Oil Spill Detection and Response Agency reported over 130 million liters of crude oil spilled in what Bassey describes as the “sacrifice zone.”
That is not enough to deter Nigerian authorities, who want to increase national production. The government early this month announced that the number of active drilling rigs rose from 31 to 50 between January and July.
“I believe that oil should be kept in the ground, that nobody should extract not even one drop of oil,” said Bassey.

- ‘Young people rising up’ -

Africa’s most populous country is vulnerable to climate change, even though the continent as a whole only contributes about four percent of global greenhouse gas emissions, according to the World Meteorological Organization.
“Every region has peculiar environmental issues,” said Bassey, who won the 2012 Rafto Prize, a Norwegian award given to human rights defenders.
He lamented “increased desertification” in Nigeria’s north; “gully erosion” in the south, “deforestation” and an “environmental crisis from illegal mining” across the country.
“Everything is really horrible.”
“The seeds for the degradation that we’re seeing today, especially in the oil fields and the mining fields, were sown even while I was a child,” said Bassey, who was born the same year Nigeria exported its first crude oil, marking the start of “a continuum of disaster upon disaster.”
Bassey grew up in a small village in southeastern Nigeria, in a family of farmers and traders. His childhood was marked by the “horrors” of the civil war, commonly called the Biafra War, which ravaged the region between 1967 and 1970 and claimed at least one million civilian lives.
An architect by training, the writer and poet first became involved in defending human rights and opposing the country’s military authorities before working hand-in-hand with Ken Saro-Wiwa, a “martyr for environmental justice” who was executed by hanging by Sani Abacha’s military regime in 1995 for his fight against the abuses of oil companies in the Delta.
After more than three decades of activism, the demands remain the same: hold governments and the polluting companies “responsible,” restore the environment and pay reparations to affected people.
With his nearly 30-year-old foundation, Health of Mother Earth, Bassey is backing a lawsuit filed by a traditional monarch against the British oil giant Shell, demanding $2 billion in damages.
King Bubaraye Dakolo is also seeking to stop Shell from divesting from its Nigerian assets without fixing decades of pollution.
Oil companies always deny allegations of pollution, arguing that oil spills were caused by sabotage by local criminals.
Despite believing the situation worsens by the day, Bassey maintains there is still hope, thanks to a new crop of budding young activists.
“There’s a big groundswell of people who are rising up... young people rising up,” he said.
“I’m really very inspired. That’s positive.”