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.