Asean acts over its jargon tangle

Philippine leader Gloria Arroyo is hosting this year's summit

Baffling jargon at the Association of South East Asian Nations (Asean) is about to be demystified - with a guide to its daunting abbreviations.

Officials have compiled a list with dozens of entries - from AADCP to Zopfan - to help confused observers.

But the guide holds just a fraction of all the abbreviations on Asean's official website - with a full 244 entries for "A" alone.

And officials did not include the most vital acronym of all - Asean.

Necessary abbreviations?

Some of the entries on the website are clearly designed to roll off the tongue - such as Promeec, Oshnet, Nectec or Jafta.

ASEAN TERMS AADCP Asean Australia Development Co-operation Aasroc Asian-African Sub-Regional Organizations Conference Nectec National Electronics and Computer Technology Centre Oshnet Asean Occupational Safety and Health Network Promeec Promotion of Energy Efficiency and Conservation WWTTT-CPD Waste Water Treatment Technology Transfer and Cleaner Production Demonstration Zopfan Zone of Peace Freedom and Neutrality Source: Asean website

And the inventively titled Bimp-Eaga is easier to remember than its full name of Brunei Darussalam-Indonesia-Malaysia-Philippines East Asean Growth Area.

Other entries are little more than streams of letters - for example, RBAAIJV, ACCICG or WWTTT-CPD.

And many others prompt the question - does that body really need an abbreviation?

A case in point is ISG-CBM, which stands for Intersessional Support Group on Confidence-Building Measures.

Asean's list includes many terms not exclusive to the association - such as the United Nations bodies Unesco and Unicef.

Also included are organisations relating to specific counties, such as the Korean Advance Institute of Science and Technology (Kaist).

But the entries on the list have one thing in common - they are all common parlance in Asean bureaucrat circles.

So observers at this week's summit in the Philippine capital, Manila, no longer have an excuse to ignore the latest findings from Fifsta, or the most up-to-date Aasroc report.