Indonesia-Australia relations: After fear, before justice
Indonesia-Australia relations: After fear, before justice
By Richard Tanter
This is the first of two articles on RI-Australia relations.
ALICE SPRINGS, Australia: It's a bad time to talk about
relations between Indonesia and Australia as if ethics were
important. Over the bodies of East Timorese, Australian and
Indonesian political leaders matched each other, measure for
repulsive measure, each marked by racialised nationalism, self-
interest and brazen hypocrisy.
Even as United Nations teams began their investigations of
Indonesian atrocities in East Timor, the country's soon-to-be
fourth president Abdurrahman Wahid declared that Australian
pressure on Indonesia to fulfill its international obligations in
East Timor amounted to "pissing in our face".
This was no isolated remark by a politician with an eye to
a domestic audience. With an astonishingly small number of
honorable exceptions such as Onghokham and brave little groups
like Kiper and Solidamor, Indonesian intellectuals were paralyzed
by the nationalism that saturates political thinking in that
country.
Nationalism in denial prevented them from seeing the truth of
the quarter century-long Indonesian colonial project in East
Timor.
Yet the Australian government was no less hypocritical than
the Indonesian -- if anything, more egregiously so. John Howard,
a man who proudly displays his 1950s white Australian fantasies,
accepted a journalist's summary of his position on East Timor as
one where Australia was the 'deputy sheriff' of the United
States.
More importantly, he used the catastrophic end of Indonesian
colonialism in East Timor to recycle populist Anglo-Australian
images of Australia as an outpost of civilization perennially
faced with always potentially barbaric peoples to our north. The
constantly reiterated phrases of "Australian values" and
'European civilization' were carefully spoken, but in the codes
of Australian politics after Pauline Hanson, the message was
clear.
The Indonesian reaction was understandable. After all, the two
governments had been partners in crime for more than two decades.
Moreover, Australian politicians and media commentators seem to
have a talent for hypocrisy. The same people who less than a few
months earlier were still denouncing any possibility of Timorese
self-determination or substantial Australian pressure on the
Soeharto dictatorship, overnight discovered the cause of freedom
and democracy.
So it may well be a bad time to talk about exploring a
completely different kind of long-term relation between these two
peoples. Yet that makes it all the more important to do exactly
that. I want to imagine a relationship between these two
societies in the lifetime of my now young children -- a
relationship built on the assumption that ethics and
justice mattered.
We think ethically about all the rest of our lives.
Why should international relations alone be severed from the
mutual expectations of fairness and right that even children
possess?
The core ethical assumption must surely be that what applies
to me applies to the other person. What do East Timor and Kosovo
show us if not the fact that moral communities do not stop at
borders?
Indonesia and Australia are today part of the same global
social and economic system. The hurricane of the Southeast Asian
currency crisis arose from the same forces of globalising capital
that induced the Hawke, Keating, and Howard governments to
transform the industrial structure of Australia in the 1980s and
1990s in the name of "deregulation".
Indeed the two countries were formed by the same social forces
that are still transforming the world today. A 100 years ago the
now neighboring states of Indonesia and Australia did not exist.
Extraordinary violence, as well as periods of great hope and
sacrifice, accompanied their formation into two nation states. A
century ago the armies and capital of the Netherlands and Britain
were still conquering the Malay archipelago.
Ten years before Australian federation in 1901, Dutch imperial
forces were in the last stages of invading Aceh. Until the coming
of a new wave of imperialists in January 1942, Dutch
imperialism broke the frame of indigenous Indonesian society and
reworked it, at grotesque human cost, to Dutch advantage.
The new post-war Indonesian state followed exactly the
outlines of the state the Dutch had carved out in blood. It was
marked at its birth and for the next 50 years by the Cold War,
and never quite recovered.
Always it was a partial state and a dependent economy. Thirty
years of Soeharto's militarization was built on oil, American and
Japanese economic aid, and American strategic hegemony.
For the indigenous peoples of Australia meanwhile, the British
invasion which began in 1788, and which was still in process of
unfolding in the north and center within living memory, brought
almost every form of desolation imaginable.
The invading settlers from two small islands in
the North Sea built a new colonial society founded on
extraordinary state violence towards the lower orders, and on a
callous solidarity of a caste of all "white men" over all others,
indigenous and foreign.
By slim good fortune, the new Australian settler capitalism
was characterized by a continuously expanding imperial need for
agricultural commodities, and by a perennial labor shortage
throughout the 19th century.
As a result the scales of class conflict were weighted
sufficiently to the left to generate at least an appearance of
social democracy, at least for those whose skin was pale enough.
These shared imperial origins extend into the twentieth
century. Australian soldiers died in Southeast Asia in their
thousands to defend European empires against a newer imperialism,
thinking they were defending themselves.
The next generation fought in Korea and Vietnam for a cause no
less imperial.
Today we stand at the beginning of the 21st century. If we
look forward in time for comparable periods, what can we see for
these entities we call "Indonesia" and "Australia"?
In 1933 the German literary critic Walter Benjamin wrote a
terse set of theses on the philosophy of history. In one,
Benjamin meditated on Paul Klee painting he owned and kept with
him in his harried exile from Nazi Germany.
"A Klee painting named Angelus Novus shows an angel looking as
though he is about to move away from something he is fixedly
contemplating. His eyes are staring, his mouth is open, his wings
are spread. This is how one pictures the angel of history. His
face is turned toward the past. Where we perceive a chain of
events, he sees a single catastrophe which keeps piling wreckage
upon wreckage and hurls it in front of his feet.
"The angel would like to stay, awaken the dead, and make whole
what has been smashed. But a storm is blowing from Paradise; it
has got caught in his wings with such violence that the angel can
no longer close them. This storm irresistibly propels him into
the future to which his back is turned, while the debris before
him grows skywards. This storm is what we call progress."
This storm shaped our countries, and has not abated; there are
more dead, and yet more to make whole. After the linked
catastrophic pasts of Australia and Indonesia and East Timor,
there is a possibility of a shared future, if we can find it and
face it.
Let me start with an extreme proposition. Unless there is some
radical change in political dynamics, there will be war between
Indonesia and Australia in the lifetime of my young children.
This is not a matter of extrapolation of domestic trends visible
at the moment, but of normal politics between neighbors with deep
differences in a highly militarized world system in which war is
normal over the long term.
Unless something surprisingly new happens, the two societies
will continue to misrecognise each other. Each will still see the
other through unacknowledged racist stereotypes. Australia will
still suffer from a deeply deforming misperception of Islam that
has deep roots in unexamined but ancient European ideas.
John Marsden is undoubtedly Australia's most popular fiction
writer of recent years. A remarkable talent, Marsden has just
published the last in a seven-book series of novels for young
people known as the Tomorrow series, beginning with Tomorrow,
when the war began.
This is the story of a group of teenagers in a rural area of
south-eastern Australia who return from a remote bush camping
trip to find their country successfully invaded, and all adults,
including their parents, brutally imprisoned.
A writer of subtly delineated character and strong narrative,
Marsden's series is the story of the group's fight to survive,
resist, and help turn back the invasion.
For our purposes what is important is the setting of invasion,
the sense of violation of a relationship with land and space,
that Marsden handles equally well, but with a curious and
probably deliberate lack of precision.
The invaders are unnamed. Their language is not English. Many
of their soldiers have darker skins than most of the Australians,
though they are in fact a varied lot. Their army is brutal.
Though the invader is not named, the friends of Australia are
firstly New Zealand and Papua New Guinea; somewhat more
hesitantly, the United States.
Who then is the unnamed enemy? It is unlikely that many in his
huge audience would have considered too many alternatives to
Soeharto's Indonesia.
For all Marsden's considerable achievement and his attempt to
avoid the worst aspects of the genre, the Tomorrow series is the
latest and most successful example of the long-running Australian
genre of invasion novels, of which there have been hundreds over
the past century or longer.
To be a little unfair to Marsden, who is so much better than
this suggests, the basic confrontation remains pacific white
Australia versus the invading brutal non-whites from the north.
Marsden is at pains to acknowledge and hence neutralize the
worst of this. His wonderful protagonist Ellie is well aware that
she is the beneficiary of an earlier invasion, and wonders about
the ghosts of the losers as she moves through the bush she knows
and loves. Most importantly, she thinks about one of the basic
moral issues: by what right do we monopolize this continent?
If I sit in the bush, and try to catch an imaginative glimpse
of what it may have been like for people of another culture to
have lived there, I cannot fail to wonder what it will be like
for yet another culture to make the same attempt. For we must
surely accept that there will be another shift at some point. For
me, the important question is whether the next great historical
transformation visited on the Australian landscape will be as
violent and bloody, as ecologically ruthless, as the last.
Quite likely, the Southeast Asians will indeed come. But
perhaps, too, that coming will be, not the stuff of a 'yellow
peril' nightmare, but in some sense a return to the pre-imperial
Southeast Asia in which borders mattered less.
The writer teaches at Kyoto Seika University, and often writes
about Indonesian military politics. His co-edited collection East
Timor, Indonesia and the World Community: Repression, Resistance
and Responsibility will appear in book form in October from
Rowman and Littlefield (New York). (rtanter@hotmail.com). This
article first appeared in Inside Indonesia magazine.