Religion not the issue

Dewi Anggraeni's article Australia and Indonesia: Mutual confusion in the Oct. 7 The Jakarta Post touches on some of the more germane points in this now convoluted relationship, but why, oh why are we treated again to this old saw about Islam?

I, for one, am tired of hearing it said that the West could not give a bottle of pigeon's milk when Muslims are being killed. That is the clear implication of the suggestion, "...many Muslims ... feel that the international community... has only been concerned about human rights violations in East Timor..." What then are the Western troops doing in Bosnia, however belatedly they may have arrived?

If Aceh were where East Timor is geographically and there were communities of Acehnese exiles living in Darwin, Brisbane and Sydney, then Aceh would be an issue, irrespective of the religion of the Acehnese. In other words, proximity is a powerful factor in the matter.

In the small market town of Brampton in the northwest of England, the local community last year rallied round when a local publican, on the prompting of a returning British soldier, ran an appeal for clothes and toys for a Bosnian orphanage. Did the good people of Brampton stop to ask whether the haunted children of Sarajevo were Christian, Muslim or Hindu? They did not (my parents live just down the road from Brampton).

This talk of "They are only doing it because the East Timorese are not Muslims" has behind it the nonsense, which I have seen repeated in Indonesian-language publications, that there is a Western conspiracy against Islam. And that is tosh.

Ask many Serbs and they will say that there is a Western conspiracy against them. What are they? Christians, or at least they say they are.

DAVID JARDINE

Jakarta