JAKARTA — Southeast Asian foreign ministers issued a joint statement Monday welcoming the ceasefire announced from Islamabad and pledging coordinated logistics for the return of an estimated 1.4 million regional workers stranded across the Gulf since the war’s onset, in a rare display of bloc-wide alignment that diplomats described as overdue but unmistakably useful on the eve of the truce taking effect.

The statement, read out at the close of an extraordinary meeting of the Association of Southeast Asian Nations at the bloc’s secretariat in Jakarta, urged all parties to “honor without exception the commitments undertaken in Islamabad” and committed member states to a phased return program for nationals who had been sheltering in place across Saudi Arabia, the United Arab Emirates, Qatar, Bahrain, Kuwait and Oman during six weeks of strikes, interceptions and intermittent airspace closures. ASEAN officials said the program would draw on civilian charter capacity coordinated through Singapore’s Changi Airport and Kuala Lumpur International, with priority slots reserved for domestic workers, construction laborers and seafarers whose employers had suspended contracts.

The Philippines, whose roughly 540,000 nationals in the Gulf represent the bloc’s largest exposure, pushed hardest for the language on shared logistics, according to two diplomats familiar with the drafting. Manila has already chartered nine repatriation flights since late March under a program run by the Department of Migrant Workers, but officials acknowledged that the scale of demand had outstripped both budget and bilateral landing rights. “We were quietly told by several Gulf hosts that bilateral approval would be faster if requests came through an ASEAN framework rather than as individual asks,” said a Philippine foreign ministry official, speaking on condition of anonymity to discuss diplomatic exchanges. “That was the practical case for moving in Jakarta.”

Indonesian Foreign Minister Retno Marsudi, hosting the session in her final months in office before a planned cabinet reshuffle, framed the statement as a test of the bloc’s relevance in a crisis that has otherwise been managed largely by powers outside the region. “ASEAN does not have warships in the Gulf and does not seek to,” Retno said at a closing press conference. “What ASEAN has is millions of citizens whose remittances sustain villages from Lombok to Leyte, and a responsibility to act when those citizens are at risk. That responsibility is what brought us here today.”

The ministers also endorsed a quieter set of measures aimed at the war’s economic shockwaves. The statement noted “with concern” the disruption to crude tanker traffic through the Strait of Hormuz and committed member states to share real-time vessel-tracking data through an existing maritime coordination mechanism originally built for piracy response in the Sulu Sea. Singapore’s foreign minister, Vivian Balakrishnan, said the city-state would also host a technical working group later this month to review Strait of Hormuz insurance-premium pass-throughs that have raised fuel costs for regional shippers by an estimated 8 to 11 percent since late March.

Malaysia and Brunei, both net energy exporters whose liquefied natural gas contracts have been bid up by Asian buyers seeking to displace Gulf supply, used the meeting to push for the inclusion of language on long-term contract stability. The final statement, in carefully balanced wording, called on producers and consumers alike to “refrain from unilateral re-negotiation of long-term supply arrangements during the post-conflict adjustment period,” language a Malaysian diplomat described as aimed at Japanese and South Korean utilities that had begun probing whether existing LNG contracts could be revised on force majeure grounds.

Thailand and Vietnam, both heavily dependent on Gulf crude imports, focused on the supply-chain dimension. Vietnamese Foreign Minister Bui Thanh Son said Hanoi would convene a separate meeting of ASEAN energy ministers in May to review strategic petroleum stockpile arrangements, an area in which the bloc has historically resisted institutionalization. “We have learned that what is voluntary in normal times becomes inadequate in a crisis,” Bui said. “The question is whether we can build something that does not require a war to demonstrate its value.”

The Jakarta meeting unfolded against a backdrop of last-minute violence in the Gulf, with Iranian launches intercepted overnight and an Israeli strike reported against a nuclear-adjacent facility in Iran’s central plateau hours before the ministers convened. Several ASEAN delegations had arrived in Jakarta uncertain whether the ceasefire would survive to take effect at 00:00 GMT Wednesday, and the final statement was redrafted twice during the morning to reflect the deteriorating overnight picture, according to a Southeast Asian diplomat involved in the process.

For Southeast Asia, the war has been less a strategic dilemma than a logistical and macroeconomic one. None of the bloc’s ten member states have direct security commitments in the Gulf, and ASEAN’s longstanding doctrine of non-interference has made formal positions on the underlying conflict politically awkward. But the region’s exposure runs through three channels — labor migration, energy imports and shipping insurance — that have all been stressed simultaneously, with cumulative costs that regional economists estimate in the low tens of billions of dollars across the first quarter.

“Southeast Asia is a price-taker in this war, not a player,” said Dr. Tan Wei Ming, a senior fellow at the ISEAS-Yusof Ishak Institute in Singapore. “The smart move for ASEAN was always going to be quiet coordination on the practical fallout — workers, ships, fuel — without picking sides on the strategic questions. The Jakarta statement does roughly that, and the fact that it took six weeks tells you something about how hard even practical coordination is for this bloc.”

Diplomats said the statement was negotiated almost entirely at the ministerial level over a single day, with no leaders’ meeting planned in the near term. Several member states resisted suggestions from Indonesia and Malaysia to elevate the discussion to a heads-of-government summit, citing both scheduling difficulties and concern that a leaders’ statement would inevitably attract pressure for sharper language on the underlying conflict. The eventual ministerial format, one diplomat said, was “the most ASEAN could do, on the schedule ASEAN runs on.”

Reaction from outside the region was muted but generally positive. A spokesperson for the European External Action Service in Brussels welcomed the statement as “a constructive contribution to regional stabilization,” and a senior State Department official described the repatriation framework as “a meaningful complement to bilateral consular efforts.” Gulf hosts had been consulted in advance, ASEAN officials said, and broadly indicated they would accommodate the proposed civilian charter slots provided the schedule was agreed bilaterally.

The bloc’s secretariat said working-level coordination on the repatriation program would begin Tuesday and that an initial schedule of flights would be published within ten days. Officials said additional measures, including a possible bloc-wide consular hotline and a review of seafarer welfare arrangements at Gulf ports, would be considered at the energy ministers’ meeting in May.