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.