United Nations: Permanent members of the UN Security Council and mostly Asian nations held their first ministerial meeting today aimed at pushing for reforms in military-ruled Myanmar.

UN chief Ban Ki-moon chaired the informal talks on the sidelines of the UN General Assembly amid little signs the military junta will embrace political reforms, one year after a bloody crackdown on pro-democracy protests. But officials said the first ministerial meeting of Ban s so-called "group of friends on Myanmar" would raise the profile of the longstanding international demand for the junta to hold a dialogue with the democratic opposition and polish up its human rights record.

"It s an initiative that friends would like to see -- some positive movement, reconciliation forward," said Surin Pitsuwan, secretary general of the Association of Southeast Asian Nations (ASEAN), among those who attended the talks.

Envoys of the "friends on Myanmar" at the UN headquarters in New York had met several times since the group s inauguration in December last year. Aside from ASEAN, which is an observer at the talks, others in the group are permanent Security Council members United States, Britain, France, Russia and China as well as Australia, European Union, India, Norway, Japan and South Korea.

ASEAN member states Indonesia, Singapore, Thailand and Vietnam attended as individual nations. "The fact that these countries are attending at the ministerial level and have agreed to this meeting shows that they are putting the Myanmar issue as a high concern," Ban's spokeswoman Choi Soung said.

Source : PTI