On-going political unrest in the Philippines and Thailand will not hurt solidarity among Southeast Asian countries, Malaysian Foreign Minister Syed Hamid Albar said.

"Ties among member countries are proceeding as normal," he was quoted as saying by Bernama news agency late Saturday.

In Thailand, leaders of a pro-democracy movement are seeking to oust Prime Minister Thaksin Shinawatra while in the Philippines President Gloria Arroyo declared an emergency and ordered the arrest of political opponents to foil an alleged coup plot.

Other member of the 10-member Association of Southeast Asian Nations are: Brunei, Cambodia, Indonesia, Laos, Burma, Singapore and Vietnam.

Syed Hamid also said that the crisis in the Philippines would not derail ongoing peace talks between Arroyo's government and the Moro Islamic Liberation Front (MILF) separatists.

"The latest political crisis has nothing to do with the negotiations. Nevertheless, what's important is that we want to see a strong and stable government in the Philippines," he said.

Act as mediator

Syed Hamid said Malaysia would continue to play the role of "a go-between as negotiations have entered the final stage."

In early February, the Philippine government and Muslim separatist rebel negotiators reached a preliminary deal on the controversial issue of ancestral lands at talks in Malaysia.

Malaysia has been mediating in peace talks between Manila and the 12,000-strong MILF, which has been fighting for over two decades to set up an Islamic state in the southern third of the Philippines.

The MILF has been demanding that it be granted rights over its "ancestral domain" or homeland which traditionally means the entire southern island of Mindanao.

Manila and the MILF signed a ceasefire in 2001 and opened peace talks but one of the stumbling blocks was the rebels' demand for recognition of their ancestral domain.