Foreign ministers from an arc of ten Asian countries of various degrees of political openness are meeting in Laos to drink wine, joke, and maybe sign a few important cooperative agreements at the annual ASEAN summit. Underscoring the whole event, however, is that Burma is next in line to take over the leadership position in 2006. And western governments aren’t happy about it, so after a a lot of discussion, the ASEAN countries asked Burma to step down next year.

Under pressure from both its neighbors and its critics in the West, the military regime in Myanmar agreed with obvious reluctance Tuesday to forgo its turn as chairman of the Association of Southeast Asian Nations next year.

The announcement said Myanmar was deferring its chairmanship of the 10-member association until “it is ready to take its turn.” Its place will be taken by the Philippines in 2006, the next country in the rotation according to alphabetical order.

The decision, announced at an annual meeting of foreign ministers here, was a display of decisiveness within the divided and usually cautious regional association.

It was a particularly painful rebuke, coming not from Myanmar’s usual critics in the West but from the neighboring countries that had welcomed it into their group eight years ago.

Myanmar, formerly called Burma, had for months resisted private and public pressure from its fellow members to step aside, and it was not clear until Tuesday whether it would give in.

In forcing this step, the association, known as Asean, is avoiding an international embarrassment.

The United States and the European Union have said they would not attend normal multinational meetings of the association if they were chaired by a country they have condemned for repression and human rights violations.

As the article notes later on, this decision was particularly hard to come to because ASEAN makes its decisions by full consensus; the problem being that certain member countries such as Vietnam, Laos, and Cambodia don’t exactly have pristine human rights records. Due to this, they were hestitant to make such jump on the bandwagon. Good thing they did, though, or ASEAN would have faced a lot of scrutiny that would have thrown the organization off track.

Not just any diplomatic pressure, though. I’m talking about an outright snub, with Condoleezza Rice threatening to boycott the summit altogether — the first time ever that a Secretary of State from the U.S. would have not shown up. Similar voices of concern were coming from the EU, in particular Britain. It’s a good thing that Burma decided to drop its leadership role next year, because according to the rules it didn’t have to. Also, it’s a good thing that the ASEAN countries as a whole made the right decision in asking it to step down.