Hefty price to pay for meddling

Hefty price to pay for meddling

By Richard Woolcott

CANBERRA: I have been sickened by many of the scenes from East
Timor. Nobody can condone the savagery of the anti-independence
militias and any support they have received from the Indonesian
Military (TNI). Many Indonesians will also be shocked by these
acts.

As an Australian who has devoted much of his working life to
strengthening Australia's necessary engagement with East Asia and
its relationship with Indonesia, I am saddened by the situation
in which we now find ourselves.

Foreign and trade policy needs to be aimed at securing
predictable and achievable outcomes which would be in Australia's
national and regional interests. The government's intentions were
no doubt good. It saw an opportunity to resolve the East Timor
situation which had been an irritant in our relations with
Indonesia for 25 years.

But it is time to consider objectively and unemotionally the
grim realities. What are the main outcomes of our recent
policies? There are six.

The situation of the East Timorese -- those we sought to help
-- is horrific; much worse than it was at the beginning of this
year. We now face a devastated East Timor with an unknown number
of casualties, many of whom might otherwise still be alive.

Our relationship with Indonesia -- which the Howard Government
noted in its first ever White Paper on foreign and trade policy
in 1997 would "always be fundamentally important" and one of our
three or four most important relationships -- has been set back
perhaps for a generation. The Australian community is now
alienated toward Indonesia and the Indonesian community now
alienated toward Australia. Despite warnings from a number of
quarters, the government has allowed its policy toward Indonesia
and the region to become a hostage to its policy toward East
Timor.

Our wider engagement with East Asia has also been damaged.
Countries have been surprised by the rush to press for early
independence for East Timor; a rush which Australia led largely
as a combination of domestic pressures and a naive assumption
that we could secure a great diplomatic success. That both Xanana
Gusmao and Bishop Carlos Belo believed that for independence to
work there would need to be a preparatory period of five to 10
years of autonomy seems to have been overlooked.

The efforts we have made over many years to come to terms with
the geopolitical realities of our place in the world and to be
seen as a partner in the East Asian region -- and not as an
Anglo-American outpost in the southern hemisphere -- have also
been set back.

Association of Southeast Asian Nations members agreed to join
a peace force because they wanted to assist Indonesia; not
because Australia pressed them to do so.

The domestic situation in Indonesia is also likely to affect
adversely our interests. The new government in Jakarta, which
will be formed early in November, will probably now be
nationalist and antagonistic to Australia.

Another outcome of the situation is a huge humanitarian and
refugee problem in West Timor, with which Australia will also
have an obligation to assist.

We now face maintaining a peacemaking and later a peacekeeping
force in East Timor, possibly for a decade, which is likely to
sustain casualties in the early stages, as well as an obligation
to support with substantial aid a broken-back independent mini-
state within the Indonesia archipelago. The combined cost is
likely to be at least $500 million a year for the foreseeable
future.

How did we allow all this to happen? The first error was to
assume that President B.J.Habibie, an erratic and transitional
figure whose legitimacy, hold on power and support from the Armed
Forces was always in question in Indonesia, could deliver without
strong opposition on his undertakings to Australian Prime
Minister John Howard.

The second was to overlook the likelihood of a violent
backlash to the expected vote against autonomy on Aug. 30. Many
Indonesians, including East Timorese, warned of this.

The third mistake was the government's response to domestic
pressure groups demanding immediate independence for East Timor,
with which it virtually joined hands. While community feelings
were very strong, it overreacted to the East Timor lobby, a
sometimes hysterical and committed media, the more radical
elements in the Catholic Church and a handful of ex-servicemen
who feel Australia has a debt to the East Timorese who helped
them after Australia had invaded the Portuguese colony in 1942.

But the fourth and, in my view, major misjudgment in terms of
the additional tragedy which has befallen the East Timorese was
to press for an early United Nations Mission to East Timor
presence and referendum. It would clearly have been preferable
from the outset to seek to defer the process until mid-November
when there would have been a constitutionally elected president
and vice-president, whose writ would have been much more likely
to run, including with the Armed Forces.

Finally, there is an important matter of diplomatic style. We
may be doing what we believe to be right in defending democracy;
but in the wrong way. We chose to lead the pack and issue
ultimatums. We would have been more effective and generated less
animosity if our diplomacy had been more persuasive and less
demanding.

The unpalatable fact which Australia needs to face is that to
Asian countries, including Japan, China and India, as well as the
United States, the paramount issue is the successful transition
of 210 million Indonesians to a representative government and the
recovery of the Indonesian economy. Despite justifiable moral
outrage in the community and the almost total preoccupation with
East Timor here, it remains a secondary issue to other countries
compared with the future stability of Indonesia.

The writer is a former secretary for Foreign Affairs and
Trade, and a former Australian ambassador to Indonesia and to the
United Nations.

-- The Australian