Susilo could yield thaw in ties for Australian poll winner
Susilo could yield thaw in ties for Australian poll winner
Chris McCall, Agence France-Presse/Sydney, Australia
Australia's oft-troubled relations with Indonesia will pose an early foreign policy challenge for whatever government emerges from Saturday's election, which coincides with a change of regimes in Jakarta.
Analysts say the Sept. 20 election of Susilo Bambang Yudhoyono as Indonesia's president could lead to a warming in ties between Australia and its giant neighbor to the north.
Susilo, a retired general popularly known as SBY, is a man familiar with the West.
He once studied in the United States, has been to Australia several times and has his own contacts among the Canberra elite.
Susilo, who is expected to be sworn in as president later this month, has already promised an investment-friendly climate that should help Australian mining firms and other business which have struggled to keep Indonesian operations solvent in the face of rampant corruption.
He is also sympathetic to Australian concerns about security and is expected to deal firmly with religious extremists -- a key for Australia following last month's suicide bombing in front of its embassy in Jakarta by suspected members of the al-Qaeda linked group Jamaah Islamiyah.
The issue will come to the forefront immediately after Saturday's election when Australians and Indonesians mark the second anniversary of the Oct. 12, 2002, Jamaah Islamiyah bombing on the resort island of Bali which killed 202 people, 88 of them Australians.
As former chief security minister under outgoing President Megawati Soekarnoputri, Susilo was the point man for Australia to deal with after the Bali bombings.
"On the Indonesian side there is no doubt we could not have asked for a better outcome in terms of an Indonesian leader who is well disposed to Australia," Alan Dupont, a political analyst with the Lowy Institute, told AFP.
Prime Minister John Howard said on Thursday that meeting the new Indonesian leader would be a foreign policy priority if he is reelected.
"I want to have an early meeting with the newly elected president," Howard said, calling Susilo "a very even man" and "somebody who will be very important to Australia in the years ahead".
The leader of the opposition Labor Party, Mark Latham, has for his part vowed to refocus foreign policy on Australia's regional neighbors if elected, a stance likely to be welcomed in Jakarta.
But Dupont cautioned that any warming in bilateral relations between the two nations would be a gradual process, whoever is Australia's leader.
Like other Indonesian presidents, Susilo will be constrained by the political realities of Muslim-dominated Indonesia, where the motives of predominantly white, Christian Australia are regarded with suspicion, he said.
Susilo will not want to be seen at home as the West's stooge.
"The political reality in Indonesia is that you cannot move quickly. It has got to be a very softly, softly approach," he said.
"There are some unrealistic expectations about what Susilo will do on that front."
If Howard is reelected on Saturday as recent opinion polls suggest, it could take longer to see a warming in ties, Dupont suggested, noting that the conservative leader had frequently alienated Indonesians during his eight years in office.
He infuriated many in Jakarta by leading the international intervention in East Timor in 1999 as the province sought independence from Jakarta.
His hard-line crackdown on asylum seekers before the previous election in 2001 then drew widespread criticism as did a wave of raids on Indonesian Muslim homes in Australia that followed the Bali bombing.
At the height of sour relations after Megawati became president in 2001, she refused to even take phone calls from Howard.
"They do not like Howard. That is a reality," Dupont said.