East Timor crisis strains Australian-Indonesian ties

East Timor crisis strains Australian-Indonesian ties

By Sid Astbury

SYDNEY (DPA): Has Australia humiliated its giant neighbor by raising an international brigade to ensure East Timor gets the freedom it was promised?

Or has Indonesia embarrassed its former defense pact partner by allowing a cataclysm in what is still part of the republic even though the 800,000 East Timorese have voted overwhelmingly to leave?

The answer that analysts in Jakarta and Canberra give to both questions is a resounding "Yes".

Australia stands accused of persuading a lame duck president to go over the heads of his generals and allow a UN-supervised independence referendum in East Timor. It then called in the international cavalry to make sure the vote stuck and the half- island got its freedom.

Jakarta made a mess of East Timor. Australia rubbed its nose in that mess.

For Dewi Fortuna Anwar, President B.J. Habibie's national security adviser, Australia is deserving of the flak it is taking. Fortuna Anwar, a graduate of Melbourne's Monash University, points as evidence to the daily demonstrations outside the Australian Embassy in Jakarta, the flag-burnings and the vitriolic newspaper editorials.

"There's an awful lot of antagonism towards Australia. It's becoming a national issue," she says, arguing that the bad feeling simply reflects the anti-Indonesian sentiment in Australia.

But a lot of the angst is frustration -- frustration at the behavior of the military and how a proud country's international reputation has been laid low. Australia has become a convenient scapegoat for Indonesia's embarrassment over East Timor.

Fortuna Anwar says Jakarta has been let down by Australia, the only Western power to have recognized the incorporation of East Timor into Indonesia and the only country with which Jakarta had signed a defense agreement -- an agreement that Jakarta ripped up last week.

Prime Minister John Howard said the policy of previous Australian governments had been to put good relations with Jakarta above everything else. That meant not giving succor to separatist East Timorese.

But last month's referendum in East Timor changed things irrevocably. Finally, Canberra was obliged to put principles above practical politics.

Said Alexander Downer, Australia's often bristly foreign minister: "It's important we have a constructive relationship with Indonesia. But equally it can't be a relationship at any price."

Downer argues that the old chummy relationship ended when Jakarta failed to deliver on a promise made to the international community: Honoring the outcome of an East Timor referendum no matter how unpalatable.

Said Downer: "You can't expect the Australian people just to ignore that sort of barbaric action in East Timor, to say nothing about it and to say the relationship with Jakarta is more important than expressing any criticism of what's going on."

The abrupt switch in tone helps explain Jakarta's feelings of betrayal.

Former Prime Minister Paul Keating says the relationship with Jakarta has reached an "all-time low" and former ambassador to Jakarta Rawdon Dalrymple warns that ties won't be repaired for a generation.

Prime Minister John Howard doesn't accept this argument, claiming that the relationship is now on a better footing because it is based on honesty and straight talking. There is no "special relationship" as there was under Keating -- a great friend and admirer of former President Soeharto.

Howard better be right: The tiff over Timor has put at risk Australia's A$2.7 billion (US$1.75 billion) in exports to Indonesia. It has also jeopardized the future of the 300 Australian companies who have big investments in Indonesia.