Indonesia's critics are also its friends

Indonesia's critics are also its friends

By Damien Kingsbury

VICTORIA, Australia (JP): Australia's relations with Indonesia
has been marked by disagreements and mutual suspicion, only
sometimes leavened with gestures of generosity and goodwill. The
disagreements and suspicion have largely come about from each
being less than frank, and then later wondering why matters were
not more clear.

Despite the apparent rapprochement between Australia and
Indonesia during the Keating era, the substance of that
relationship was predicated on a series of false assumptions.

One assumption was that, as a fait accompli, East Timor had
become a legitimate part of Indonesia. Another assumption was
that Indonesia would retain a political process dominated by
Soeharto or a presidential facsimile thereof.

Yet another assumption was that personal and patron-client
relations were appropriate to both the functioning of Indonesia's
government and to the bilateral relationship. And a final
assumption was that those who were not in favor of the status quo
were, in Indonesia, "bad" Indonesians or, in Australia, "enemies"
of Indonesia.

Since the fall of Soeharto, the deterioration of the bilateral
relationship was largely due to the failure of these assumptions.

Yet at a time when both countries are trying to rebuild
relations, there are moves to return to these past false
assumptions.

As reported by Peter Kerr in The Jakarta Post in his article
on April 6, a two day conference on the bilateral relationship
in Jakarta recently was told that, should Labor win government
later this year, Australia would return to its previous foreign
policy position.

According to Kerr, the ALP's Kevin Rudd told the conference:
"When Labor wins the election there will be regional engagement:
Evanism, Keatingism, Hawkism all wrapped together ... We'll find
some different wrapping paper but essentially that will be it."

Regional engagement is desirable, especially after the flat-
footedness of the Coalition in regional affairs. But "Evanism,
Keatingism, Hawkism" speaks of a type of engagement that led to
the East Timor debacle, not to mention support for the deeply
corrupt and often brutal Soeharto regime.

As Kerr noted, Rudd might yet have to convince probable future
foreign minister, Laurie Brereton, of the value of retreating to
this position.

Yet that one of Labor's rising stars, notably in the foreign
policy field, should support this view indicated that at least
some understanding of contemporary Indonesian politics stopped at
the front door of the conference venue, Jakarta's Centre for
Strategic and International Studies.

A future Australian government is likely to want to initiate
greater links between the two countries, including leadership
visits both to Jakarta and Canberra.

But ignoring the evolving political landscape of the
archipelago would be folly of potentially catastrophic
proportions.

An Australian government need not endorse the dissolution of
Indonesia to recognize that its long term future as a unitary
state is less than completely assured. Like the changed situation
in East Timor, where would Australia be, after years of loudly
endorsing the unitary state, if it becomes a federated state, or
a collection of loosely linked independent states? Successive
Australian governments have claimed that speaking too loudly on
human rights is counter-productive.

Perhaps speaking too loudly in favor of the status quo might,
as it was with Soeharto, also come to be counter-productive.

Kerr reported Australia National University's academic
Emeritus Professor Jamie Mackie telling the conference there had
been a shift in the balance "between the friends of Indonesia and
what I would not call the enemies of Indonesia, but the critics".

Mackie's use of the terms "friends" and "not enemies, but
critics" of Indonesia recalled the logic of the Soeharto era, in
which dissenters were referred as "bad Indonesians". Australian
critics of the Soeharto regime were similarly referred to as
"Indonesia's enemies". This recalls the "integralist", or
fascist, demand that citizens not question the state.

Yet in the post-Soeharto era such "bad Indonesians" have been
at the forefront of the reform movement, even at the CSIS. Having
attended the Jakarta conference and spent time elsewhere, I found
a greater congruence between the views of ordinary Indonesians
and Australia's critics of a still fractious military and the
country's corrupt, self-serving elite.

Contrary to Mackie's assumption, one may be a critic of
Indonesia's -- or Australia's -- government or institutions
while retaining concern and friendship for its people.

Kerr also quoted Murdoch University's Professor Richard
Robison as saying that finding a "new paradigm" for bilateral
relations "should be easier now that we have a commonality in
democracy." This may be, but definitions of "democracy" (e.g.
"Guided Democracy", "Pancasila Democracy") in Indonesia can
quickly slide into meaninglessness.

Australia and Indonesia must move forward, not backwards, and
have broad rather than narrow, non-critical definitions of
"friendship". But above all, both Indonesia and Australia's
relationship with it will progress or fail on calling
developments as they are, not as our respective elites would like
them, often disingenuously, to be portrayed.

Dr Damien Kingsbury is senior lecturer in international
development at Deakin University (dlk@deakin.edu.au) in Victoria,
Australia.