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