Howard fails to consult Indonesia on refugee crisis

Howard fails to consult Indonesia on refugee crisis

By Rob Goodfellow

WOLLONGONG, New South Wales (JP): The refugee crisis off
Christmas Island aboard the Norwegian Container ship M.V Tampa
has demonstrated that the Conservative Government of Prime
Minister John Howard does not understand how to work
cooperatively with Indonesia. By making a unilateral decision to
prevent the entry of Afghan asylum seekers into Australian
territorial waters, Howard's objective was twofold.

First, his appeal was directly to the Australian electorate.
His intention has clearly been to demonstrate that he was
prepared to be tough with "illegal immigration", which has
emerged as a potentially explosive issue in an election year.

There are reports of at least 5,000 Middle Eastern refugees
encamped on Lombok alone, with an inestimable number already in
Jakarta, Bali and in Kupang, West Timor. In addition, various
assessments suggest that there may be up to 100,000 refugees in
various stages of departure, all-heading to Australia via
Indonesian ports. It appears that unchecked, large groups of
refugees could be arriving, "coincidentally", right about the
time that Australians go to the polls for a general election some
time this November.

Howard's uncompromising policy has proven, at least in the
very short term, to be domestically popular, although two days
after Australian Secret Air Service Commandos (SAS) became
involved, the Australian popular press changed tact. At first
articles appeared which demonized refugees as "illegals" who had
flaunted Australian law and carried with them the potential to
spread exotic diseases.

Then in the spirit of generating enough controversy, the press
predictably began to appeal to the refugees' "underdog status", a
powerful sentiment in a country that at least believes in the
myth of egalitarianism.

Time was running out. In the end New Zealand and the tiny
Island of Nauru were essentially bought off to save face for the
Howard Government as pressure was brought to bear by the United
Nations. However, the real issue remains. If the problem is one
that essentially involves two neighbors, Australia and Indonesia,
what went wrong and why? Why did Howard not have a process in
place that involved a dialog with Indonesia over the issue of
people smuggling out of Indonesian ports? Why is President
Megawati Soekarnoputri not returning Howard's telephone calls?
Why is Australia blaming Indonesia for a "lack of cooperation"?

Australians still do not fully appreciate the strong feelings
that sections of the elite in Indonesia, especially the armed
forces, have over East Timor. The well debated issues of militia
violence and Indonesian culpability aside, the Javanese dominated
officer corps of the Indonesian Military (TNI), once offended,
are very patient in getting their revenge. The Australian
government does not appreciate that the Indonesian Military and
the present government have no reason whatsoever to go out of
their way to generate solutions to a situation which has the
potential to embarrass the Howard Government -- the same
administration deemed responsible for "betraying" Indonesia when
the country was most vulnerable during the darkest days of the
Asian monetary crisis.

In fact it is in Indonesia's interests to expedite the
departure of refugees from their shores, to turn a "blind eye" to
the lucrative people smuggling rackets, and to sit back and watch
the show. Furthermore Indonesia is now preoccupied with economic
recovery and territorial integrity. Why should Indonesia want to
use scarce state resources on the issue of illegal immigrants
when the express intention of the refugees is to pass through
Indonesia quickly en route to north Western Australia?

Last year the Australian Immigration Minister Phillip Ruddock
commissioned a foreign language documentary movie which was aired
at Australia's expense in countries like Pakistan. The intention
of what was effectively a propaganda film was to demonstrate to
potential asylum seekers (many of whom were in refugee camps and
did not have access to clean drinking water let alone a
television set) that should they survive the attacks of murderous
pirates, giant mid-ocean whirlpools, and tropical storms, and
arrive in Australia, then they were likely to be eaten by sharks,
mauled by giant crocodiles, bitten by snakes, or left languishing
in dusty refugees camps in the middle of the Simpson Dessert.

The exercise was not only a complete waste of public money but
more importantly it was a lost opportunity to create a
cooperative process with Indonesia, one that would have not only
forestalled the present crisis, but gone part way to mend the
bilateral relationship soured over the Interfet operation in East
Timor.

Such a solution would first have to involve an appropriate
"behind the scenes" dialog, one which demonstrated that Australia
understood the basic modus operandi of census-decision-making in
Indonesian politics, and one that involved an actual relationship
of trust between real people at the level of government, foreign
affairs and the military.

Such a process would have to involve making Indonesia a
partner in generating a solution rather than, as Howard suggests,
just an irritating part of the problem. It would have to seek
ways of working cooperatively with Indonesia so that it was in
Indonesia's best interests to work with Australia. Rather Howard
made the very risky presumption that just because he boldly
declared on national television that "he had placed a telephone
call to Mrs Megawati" that she was in any way obliged to pick up
the phone. Now Howard is looking a little foolish and Megawati is
looking like she has again showed who is really in control and
why her support cannot be taken for granted just because the
white man whistles.

The Howard Government appears to be clueless on how to manage
the Australian-Indonesian relationship, as demonstrated in the
M.V Tampa incident. If Howard survives the November Federal
Election, then the arrival of thousands of Afghans off the Coast
of Western Australia in the next 12 months will certainly cause
him to rethink his approach to Indonesia.

The writer is a cross-cultural specialist based at the University
of Wollongong in New South Wales, Australia.