RI-Aussie Security
RI-Aussie Security
A new security treaty between Indonesia and Australia would
symbolise the increasingly close relationship between the two
countries. The question is whether we really need such a symbol,
when practical co-operation has yielded excellent results in the
absence of one. Thanks to the joint work of Indonesian
authorities and the Australian Federal Police, 30 of the key
Jamaah Islamiyah (JI) operatives who planned and perpetrated the
Bali bombing on Oct. 12, 2002, have been rounded up, tried and
sentenced. In a piece of especially good news on this front, we
learned over the weekend that JI's spiritual leader, Abu Bakar
Bashir, will be charged in connection with the Bali blasts --
which killed 202 innocent people, including 88 Australians --
along with the bombing outside the Jakarta Marriott last year,
which claimed a further 12 lives. Australia's security co-
operation with Indonesia includes $10 million in annual counter-
terrorism aid, as well as education aid focused on countering the
influence of radical Islamist colleges like the one run by
Bashir.
As a piece of grand symbolism, a treaty is a good idea. And if
the idea emanates from Indonesian president-elect Susilo Bambang
Yudhoyono, whose inauguration John Howard will attend on
Wednesday, it would be churlish to resist the advance. But as the
history of the last attempt to forge such an agreement between
the two nations, which foundered on the shoals of Indonesia's
brutality in East Timor, demonstrates, there are risks in
attempting to steer two such different political cultures in the
same direction. Rebels in the Aceh and Papua provinces still have
the potential to arouse Indonesia's notorious Kopassus special
forces to action that Australia would find unacceptable. While
that can be contained under the present pragmatic relationship,
under a treaty it could result in a full-blown diplomatic crisis.
The big difference between the context in which a treaty was
envisaged during the 1990s, and now, is that Indonesia is a
democracy. Partly as a result of that, instead of being sprung on
us fully formed like the secret agreement nutted out between Paul
Keating and president Suharto, this one can emerge naturally from
the ongoing dialogue and co-operation between the two countries.
An argument for a security treaty is that, like a trade
agreement, it encourages the kinds of cultural and political
exchange that will hasten the flowering of liberalism in
Indonesia. Contrary to those who claimed the Howard Government
could not chew gum with Washington and walk a co-operative road
with Jakarta at the same time, relations between the two
countries have gone from strength to strength. The question is
whether trying too hard to speed that development carries a minor
risk of derailing it.
-- The Australia, Sydney