Indonesia, Australia and East Timor must work together

Indonesia, Australia and East Timor must work together

By Richard Woolcott

CANBERRA: Early in the new year, it is timely to review realistically the outcomes of our policies towards Indonesia and East Timor.

Foreign policy must be judged unemotionally by its outcomes; not by its aspirations, however well intentioned those aspirations might be. As the old adage puts it, "the road to hell is often paved with good intentions."

Like most Australians I am appalled by the tragedies that the East Timorese people have endured during 23 years of often insensitive and cruel Indonesian administration, and including the violence that erupted in 199.

Judged by outcomes, Indonesian and Australian policies since 1974 seem flawed. But Australia cannot be held responsible for a course of events over which it had no control.

We would all like to be on the side of what one judges to be morality, to defend the rights of the weak against the strong and to support our definition of freedom against repression.

These are natural attitudes in free, stable, unthreatened and democratic societies like Australia.

But as the Vare quotation goes, "diplomacy must carry on in the world as it is, and not in the world as it should be."

Many Australians consider that in 1975 and 1976, the Whitlam and Fraser governments were weak in the face of an expansionist, undemocratic Indonesia.

Some critics have also argued that the Australian Embassy in Jakarta, at which I was the ambassador, had excessive influence on government policy at that time.

It is also suggested that if Australia had been firmer with Indonesia in 1975, the Indonesian invasion and two decades of East Timorese suffering -- particularly abuses of their human rights -- under Indonesian administration, and especially the predictable and destructive reaction in September 1999 of the East Timorese militias to the vote for independence, could have been avoided.

These views are largely the result of hindsight and ill- founded feelings of guilt. They take little account of the realities of the global and regional situations in 1975.

These popular attitudes are, I believe, misguided, as revealed by the publication last September of Australia and the Indonesian Incorporation of Portuguese Timor 1974-1976, which includes a comprehensive selection of formerly classified policy documents. This volume should dispel much of the mythology about East Timor for historians and, hopefully, serious journalists. The truth will come out and, in time, the record will be put right.

This process has already started with several academic seminars, including two at the Australian National University and with the December issue of the Australian Review of Books, which has published the first definitive examination of these issues.

The fall of Soeharto, whom Prime Minister John Howard and Foreign Minister Alexander Downer had supported throughout 1996 and 1997 as strongly as their predecessors had done, changed everything.

The Howard government saw in President B.J. Habibie's interim presidency an opportunity to change policy and redress what many Australians considered to be the denial of a proper act of self- determination since Indonesia's incorporation of East Timor in 1976.

It is timely to examine the outcomes of the changed Indonesian and Australian policies since 1998. The first and obvious consequence is the coming emergence later this year of an independent East Timor in the Indonesian archipelago that will alter the map of Southeast Asia.

The second major foreign policy consequence is that our relationship with Indonesia, described in the government's first White Paper on foreign and trade policy, published in August 1997, as one of our four most fundamentally important bilateral relationships, is now at its lowest ebb since Indonesia's independence.

Former prime minister Paul Keating has argued that this is a result of the most "disastrous" piece of Australian diplomacy since our decision to enter the Vietnam War.

In wider policy terms, it is indeed a major setback that may take years to correct. Australia had benefited from supportive Indonesian policies and actions until 1998, including support for our initiatives on the formation of the Asia Pacific Economic Cooperation forum, the peace settlement in Cambodia, the Chemical Weapons Convention and the Regional Security Dialog to mention only four.

Now we find ourselves shut out of the Association of Southeast Asian Nations plus three dialog which includes China, Korea and Japan, and excluded from the Asia-Europe summit meetings.

Thirdly, there is a legal consequence in that the Timor Gap Treaty will need to be renegotiated with East Timor when an independent government is elected.

This could be a complex legal process. It could also prove costly to the government and Australian exploration companies.

Fourth, Australia now faces an indefinite period of substantially increased expenditure related to East Timor especially after the United Nations Transitional Authority in East Timor departs.

This is expected to be sometime between August and December and after elections are held.

In military terms, Australia has funded most of the International Force for East Timor mission and the military component of the transitional authority, at a cost expected to be in the vicinity of A$$ billion over five years.

At best, we might see in the future an economically, quasi- democratic state with a benign relationship with Indonesia.

There is danger, however, that we could find ourselves supporting indefinitely an unstable mini state of chronic dependency with on-going problems with its larger neighbor.

This would mean continuing tensions between Australia and Indonesia, something our policy in 1999 was supposed to avoid.

Australia, having adopted the policies it has and having injected itself as a party principal into the Timor issue, has now a clear, moral obligation to support, possibly indefinitely, an independent East Timor.

However, our enthusiasm for military intervention in 1999 is unlikely to be matched by the sustained enthusiasm and aid funding that will be needed to keep an independent East Timor going in the future.

As a senior official just appointed to the Bush administration told me in Washington last July, "East Timor will be your Haiti."

Evangelical liberalism can have a high price, as the United States found in that unfortunate island.

Fifth, our standing with some other regional neighbors, especially Malaysia, has been damaged by their perceptions of our style and impetuosity. The government did what it believed to be right. But this is not how some other countries see our role.

We chose to take the lead, to force the pace and to issue ultimatums. I have made seven visits to Asia since mid last year and found that a distaste for what many in the region see as jingoism and triumphalism associated with our recent role in Interfet and East Timor, especially on the part of our media and some politicians.

Sixth, our East Timor policy will affect adversely our national security environment for some years to come. It is one of the reasons why the government has found it necessary to commit $23 billion to defense, money that otherwise could be available for health, education and scientific research.

Our former valuable security relationship with Indonesia no longer exists in any meaningful sense. The 1995 Agreement on Mutual Security between Australia and Indonesia has been abrogated.

This was essentially a useful confidence-building measure between the two countries that both Howard and Downer had endorsed when in opposition and in 1996 when they came into government, but later dismissed disingenuously as "unimportant."

Seventh, our defense cooperation with Indonesia has also been set back. It was a mistake to present our troop deployment to East Timor as a repudiation of previous cooperation between our armed forces.

As Lt.Gen. Peter Cosgrove said in a recent speech to the Sydney Institute, his mission in East Timor was accomplished with the cooperation of the Indonesian armed forces, not in opposition to them as has been wrongly suggested by some commentators.

Cosgrove added, "We were helped by knowing each other and having gained respect for each other" through past military contacts.

Thus Cosgrove has put his authority behind past and, hopefully, future policies of renewed cooperation with the Indonesian armed forces.

An eighth consequence affects our wider region. The major country in Southeast Asia, Indonesia, is now less stable than it was in 1998 and faces an unpredictable immediate future. This is having a debilitating impact on ASEAN and APEC.

While this is a result of a number of factors, of which East Timor is only one, Indonesians, including President Abdurrahman Wahid, believe that the way in which the East Timor issue was handled in 1999 has contributed to destabilizing the country.

Although the Australian government would not have intended it, our policy towards East Timor has had a catalytic effect on other secessionist movements in the region that has increased the level of instability in Indonesia and elsewhere in Asia.

I was surprised to find in a private talk with Wahid last July, as well as in talks with other prominent Indonesians, how deep is the suspicion, despite government assurances to the contrary, that Australia will come to support the secession of West Papua.

To conclude, the reality we now face is how to rebuild our relationship with Indonesia and to accommodate an independent East Timor in the existing regional architecture.

The new East Timorese government, when elected, will need to seek to join ASEAN. After all, it is surrounded, except to the South, by the major ASEAN country, Indonesia.

It is true that in 1975 none of the ASEAN members wanted to see a small independent state within the Indonesian archipelago.

At that time, they all favored East Timor becoming part of Indonesia as another small neglected Portuguese colony, Goa, had become part of India and as yet another small neglected Portuguese colony, Goa, had become part of India and as yet another, Macao, would become part of China.

But the global and regional situation has been transformed since 1975 and the people of Eat Timor voted in 1999 against autonomy within Indonesia.

In these circumstances ASEAN membership could strengthen an independent East Timor's security and regional standing. In pursuing such an objective, it would be a major mistake to persist with Portuguese as the official language of East Timor, as has been proposed.

Ultimately, the measure of an independent East Timor's success will be its capacity to govern itself. The main objective now should be for Indonesia, Australia and East Timor, as immediate regional neighbors, to work together to underpin East Timor's independence and to maintain as close, cooperative and cordial a triangular relationship as possible.

This view is also shared by Wahid and (Timorese leader) Xanana Gusmao.

The three governments will all need to strive with sustained goodwill and diplomatic sensitivity to make an independent East Timor a viable country within the Southeast Asian community and not a client state of Australia. This will take time, it will still be costly for our taxpayers and it will not be readily achieved. But such is the reality with which we must deal in the years ahead.

The writer is among others former envoy to Indonesia and the United Nations, and is the founding director of the AustralAsia Center of the Asia Society. This article first appeared in The Canberra Times.