In a move coinciding with a crucial meeting in Ireland in April 17 that could have decided the attitude of Europe and Asia toward the country, the Myanmar leadership approved the re-opening of the opposition National League for Democracy’s headquarters in Yangon, apparently as part of the “Road Map” to democracy presented by the military government in 2003.

Although dominated by their long-standing stalemate over the need to maintain pressure in the Government in Burma/Myanmar to speed up the pace of democratic and human rights reforms, the meeting of Asian and European Foreign Minister in Ireland April 17-18 also touched on the broad range of issues on the ASEM agenda.

Following Indonesian Parliamentary election results in April most attention was being focused on the complex and heated competition in the Presidential elections in July.

At a time when most of his country, as well as much of Europe, was focused on the forthcoming enlargement of the European Union, Polish President Aleksander Kwasniewski symbolically underlined the new EU members’ broader interests in Asia by undertaking a visit to several countries in Southeast Asia in March.