Flag burnings not fatal to ties: Alatas
JAKARTA (JP): Minister of Foreign Affairs Ali Alatas is confident that the burnings of the Indonesian flag in Australia and a retaliatory incident here last week will not deal a fatal blow to relations between the two countries.
After meeting with President Soeharto yesterday, Alatas said that the general state of relations with Australia would eventually return to normal.
"There is an effect. However it won't be a fatal one because relations are quite strong," Alatas said.
While Indonesia celebrated its independence day last week, demonstrators in several Australian cities burned the Indonesian flag to protest Indonesia's integration of the former Portuguese colony of East Timor.
Youth organizations here reacted angrily to the incident and retaliated by burning two Australian flags in front of the embassy last week.
"(Relations are) quite deep to withstand tremors and shocks from incidents like this," he said, adding that Indonesia and Australia have had strong relations over the past few years.
The recent flag burning incident, however, represents another setback since Jakarta last month withdrew its nomination of retired Lt. Gen. H.B.L. Mantiri as ambassador to Canberra.
Alatas refused to say if Indonesia had selected a new candidate.
Bosnia
Separately yesterday the chief executive assistant to the chairman of the Non-Aligned Movement (NAM), Nana Sutresna, said that the major factions fighting in the former Yugoslavia had agreed to meet here for possible peace talks.
He said Bosnia-Herzegovina President Alija Izetbegovic, Croatian President F. Tudjman of Croatia and Serbian President Slobodan Milosevic had expressed their agreement without setting a tentative date.
"The three heads of state have agreed in principal to attend a meeting in Indonesia to follow up on President Soeharto's proposal," Nana said.
During a visit to Zagreb and Sarajevo earlier this year, Soeharto proposed a comprehensive peace initiative to the warring factions to sit down and try to settle the civil war there.
The President also said that if necessary, Indonesia would be willing to facilitate the talks.
According to Nana the location of Indonesia as the venue was proposed by the leaders themselves. Nana, as President Soeharto's special envoy to the former Yugoslav republic, has made several trips in the past few months.
Meanwhile AFP reported from Belgrade yesterday that Serbian, Croatian and Bosnian officials claim to have no knowledge of an Indonesian plan for a summit on the former Yugoslavia, while the Bosnian Serbs said such a meeting was unlikely.
Izetbegovic's spokesman Kemal Muftic said in Sarajevo that he learned of the plans from calls from journalists. "In other words, it's not our idea," he told AFP. "We don't know about it."
Aleksa Buha, the "foreign minister" of the self-declared Bosnian Serb Republic, said he had not been informed of the Indonesia meeting.
"I don't believe this report which seems unlikely given the geographical distance for holding such a meeting," he told AFP.
The Indonesian foreign ministry's director of information, Irawan Abidin, told The Jakarta Post yesterday that Indonesia's initiative was presented at the highest level and thus "may not have trickled down yet." (mds)