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.