Countries with competing territorial claims in the South China Sea - including China - should carry out joint "peace patrols" there to reduce the risk of conflict, Indonesia's defence minister said.
Senior US military officials have recently urged Southeast Asian countries to jointly patrol the waters as it seeks to reassure its allies it will back them against China's assertions to about four-fifths of the sea. But they haven't mentioned China as a potential participant.
The proposed patrols would send a message that no single country should "build up strength or threaten anyone" in the waters, minister Ryamizard Ryacudu said in an interview on Saturday on the sidelines of a regional meeting of defence ministers and military chiefs in Singapore.
Parts of the waters are also claimed by Vietnam, Taiwan, Brunei, the Philippines and Malaysia. Over the last 18 months, China has accelerated reclamation work on reefs, raising alarms regionally and in the US, which in turn has stepped up its aerial and sea patrols of the area.
Indonesia has long said it is a neutral party in the disputes, even as waters off its Natuna archipelago - an area rich in natural gas - appear to overlap slightly with China's claims.
Asked whether he thought China had designs on the Natuna islands, Ryacudu said "not yet" and added China had no right over them. "We have history there," he said.
Joint patrols in the waters would be hard to implement, even assuming countries agree to the idea. The 10-nation Association of Southeast Asian Nations and China have been working toward a "code of conduct" for the waters for more than a decade without major progress.
Still, Malaysia's Defence Minister Hishammuddin Hussein said joint patrols with China were "not an impossibility."
"China has more to lose if the region is unstable," he told reporters on the sidelines of the Singapore forum. Patrols by more than one country have been very effective in other areas, like curbing piracy in the Malacca Strait, he said.
