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.