Security issues dominates RI, Australia ties

Security issues dominates RI, Australia ties

Berni K. Moestafa, The Jakarta Post, Jakarta

Security issues would likely dominate this week's consultation
forum meeting between Indonesia and Australia, the first such
gathering for two years and one which comes amid a rise in the
terrorist threat and a looming war in Iraq, foreign affairs
analysts said.

Officially, the agenda is economics-heavy. Thirteen working
groups met Sunday to iron out the details of cooperation in the
areas of agriculture, fisheries, investment, tourism and
education.

But how effective these economic cooperation initiatives would
be is a question of security, according to the analysts.

One example is Australia's travel advisory to its citizens
against visiting Indonesia.

"How can anybody expect economic or social cooperation if
Australians cannot even come to Indonesia," asked foreign affairs
analyst Dewi Fortuna Anwar of the Indonesian Institute of
Sciences (LIPI) on Sunday.

The consultation forum will bring together 14 ministers from
both countries. Indonesia and Australia have been holding
consultation meetings since 1992.

But the upcoming forum, which will start on Monday and end
with a ministerial meeting on Tuesday, is the first following a
two-year break due in part to the political upheaval surrounding
the ouster of then president Abdurrahman Wahid.

The last meeting was held in Canberra in December 2000. At
that time, Indonesia took particular issue with Australia's role
in helping East Timor secede in 1999, while Australia was
concerned about its unstable giant neighbor, brimming with
hundreds of thousands of potential refugees.

These issues have since been overshadowed by the threat of
terrorism. Security cooperation between the two countries has
improved since the Oct. 12 Bali bombings last year, which claimed
202 lives, 89 of them Australians.

But the terrorist strike has dealt a blow in other areas of
cooperation. Canberra imposed the travel warning in response to
the attacks.

Tourism, one of the areas of cooperation to be discussed at
the forum, is the one most hurt by the travel warning. It has
kept Australian tourists away, helping prolong the slump in the
tourism sector.

Bali accounts for about one third of total revenue in the
tourism sector, the country's biggest foreign exchange earner
outside of oil and gas.

LIPI analyst Dewi said other areas of cooperation outside
security would find it hard to develop if the travel warning was
not lifted.

While Canberra praised Indonesia's progress in capturing the
Bali bomb suspects, this did little to convince the country to
revoke the travel advisory.

Indonesia has griped at this reluctance, suspecting that
Australia feared a backlash against its citizens here due to the
latter's support for a possible U.S.-led war in Iraq.

"It's more complex now, the interface between global problems,
regional problems and domestic problems is far more frequent,"
explained Dewi.

She said Indonesia's policy on Australia was moving on the
right path. Some of the pressing issues in their ties, like the
travel warning, were the consequence of Australia's position on
the Iraqi issue, she said. "I would say it is more up to
Australia ... it is a matter of choice."

Centre for Strategic and International Studies (CSIS) foreign
affairs analyst Rizal Sukma agreed, saying Indonesia was less
concerned about Australia than it was the other way around.

Australia, he said, saw itself positioned under an "arch of
instability" in the form of its northern neighbor Indonesia.

In that sense, he said, increasing security cooperation could
do a great deal to improve bilateral ties.

"There is much potential in cooperation on transnational crime
issues," he said.

Successful efforts in the past to reduce people-smuggling and
the progress made in the Bali bombing investigation could pave
the way for more cooperation, he suggested.