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With international leaders gathered in Bali this week for the annual Asean summit and the East Asia Summit, Asean secretary general Surin Pitsuwan is playing host to big names, major interests and often-conflicting agendas.

As Asean’s first secretary general with what he calls a “real political background,” the former Thai Foreign Minister seems resigned to the often slow and laborious nature of negotiations.

Now in the fourth year of a five-year term, he sat down with the Jakarta Globe just ahead of this week’s summit to discuss his work and his broader views on Asean’s past and future.

Asean “started off as a vision, as a dream,” he said, reflecting on the 1967 founding of the body in the shadow of the Vietnam War and bitter ideological battles.

“These small countries of southeast Asia thought they needed a forum for themselves.”

But the rituals of diplomacy have “lacked the human touch.”

He said he has focused his work as secretary general on giving the alliance that human dimension.

The son of rural Islamic teachers in Thailand who ran a pesantren boarding school (now in its 72nd year), he was eventually educated in the United States, earning a Ph.D. from Harvard University before beginning a political career back home in 1986.

Surin took on a leadership role with the organization when Thailand was Asean’s chair during the East Timor crisis in 1999-2000.

At that time, he recalled, he helped convince Asean to informally endorse the involvement of foreign troops in the former Indonesian province following the mayhem of 1999.

At the time, Australia was ready to send troops but needed a cover. In September 1999, when former President B.J. Habibie said Indonesia would welcome international help to restore order in East Timor, Surin flew immediately to Jakarta. He was taken to see Gen. Wiranto, then the commander of the Indonesian armed forces.

“Wiranto said, ‘Mr. Foreign Minister, please come. We’d love to see many of your faces here. Come in large numbers. We need you,’ ” Surin said.

It was understood, he said, that if Australia came alone, it would cause enormous disturbances in Indonesia. As a result of Wiranto’s endorsement, Surin said, he was able to secure troop commitments from Thailand and the Philippines.

“It was a fantastic jigsaw,” he said of that time.

As secretary general, he has tried to bring the same flair for active diplomacy to the office.

“I am proactive by nature, committed — fully 100 percent committed — to pursuing whatever I think is best for the region as chair of Asean and now as secretary general of Asean,” he said.

Discussing this week’s events, he said he was proud of ongoing efforts to boost Asean’s capacity to respond as a group to natural disasters and to bring the benefits of an integrated regional community to the people of Asean.

He praised Asean’s ability to keep lines of communication open between China and Asean members states on the South China Sea dispute, saying Asean can “impress on everyone that peace, security, stability, and open freedom of navigation benefit everyone.”

He also said Asean had played a positive role in pushing Burma to make the kind of reforms that will allow it to take a chair at the 2014 summit.

Surin praised the Indonesia’s “diplomacy of defiance” rooted in the anti-colonial struggle and former President Sukarno’s leadership of the fledgling non-aligned m ovement starting in 1954.

This past year, he cited Foreign Minister Marty Natalegawa’s aggressive — if ultimately ineffective — effort to intervene in the border dispute between Thailand and Cambodia.

He said when the United Nations mandated Asean to settle the bilateral dispute, it changed the nature of the alliance permanently, even if Thailand and Cambodia ultimately refused the help.

“We have to give the credit to the chair, to Marty,” he said. “Asean has been recognized as a regional mechanism for settling disputes” — a fact, he said, that has permanently altered the “non-interference mind-set” that formerly defined Asean’s relationships.

His praise seemed to carry a hint of nostalgia for the time when he was an action-oriented foreign minister from 1997 to 2001.

Asked to assess the role of secretary general, he said, “It is extremely fulfilling to be able to articulate the vision and the dream... but it’s a rather slow process.”

Dealing with “layers and layers of bosses” makes it hard to get things done quickly, he admitted.

“As much as you are committed to move, you are constrained by the reality of an intergovernmental organization which represents sometimes conflicting agendas, conflicting interests. I find my solace... In engaging with the people.”