Scott Burchill - President Soeharto's sudden fall from power in May last year and East Timor's impending independence together constitute Australia's greatest post-war diplomatic failure. Neither event was anticipated by Canberra: the former came as a complete surprise, the latter has been strenuously opposed for more than two decades.
Primary responsibility for this failure rests with the Jakarta Lobby, an informal group of bureaucrats, academics and journalists who have tightly controlled Australian foreign policy towards Indonesia and East Timor.
The Jakarta Lobby has long regarded Australia's relationship with Indonesia as an exceptional case requiring careful management by "experts" with a proper sympathy for and understanding of Jakarta's difficulties. As former Foreign Affairs head Richard Woolcott said in 1995, "We cannot allow foreign policy [in this area] to be made in the streets, by the media or by the unions." Or it seems, in the case of the secretly negotiated Australia-Indonesia Security Agreement, by the Federal Parliament.
Until recently, the Jakarta Lobby had been remarkably influential. Consider, for example, its success in presenting the Soeharto regime in a favorable light to Australia's political leaders. A CIA report on the purges organised by the Indonesian military against the Indonesian Communist Party (PKI) soon after Soeharto came to power in 1966 claims that "in terms of the numbers killed the anti-PKI massacres in Indonesia rank as one of the worst mass murders of the 20th century, along with the Soviet purges of the 1930s, the Nazi mass murders during the Second World War and the Maoist bloodbaths of the 1930s (sic)".
No one seriously contests Soeharto's responsibility for the bloodbath. He is as clearly culpable for it as Pol Pot was for Year Zero in Cambodia, though no Australian politician has suggested that he be charged with crimes against humanity.
On the contrary, Soeharto has been lauded by the former Prime Minister Paul Keating for producing a "tolerant society" and bringing "stability" to the region, praise that has been echoed by Kim Beazley, who in 1989 claimed that "Australians pay far too little attention to the value to us of the stability" that the Soeharto dictatorship "brought to the Indonesian archipelago". If the PKI "had been victorious in the mid-1960s", said Beazley, "our security prospects over the last two decades would have been very different from the favorable circumstances we enjoy today". Half a million deaths clearly haven't weighed too heavily on the conscience of the Labor Party.
Not to be outdone, the Deputy Prime Minister, Tim Fischer, last year recommended that "when magazines look for the man of the world of the second half of this century, they perhaps should not look much further than Jakarta".
Soeharto's victims, on the other hand, including 200,000 East Timorese in what has been described as the greatest slaughter relative to a population since the Holocaust, may suggest they look elsewhere.
For three decades, Soeharto's human rights "failures" were routinely balanced against his "economic achievements" – now only a fading memory, and which were in truth rather modest by regional standards. Presumably there are still commissars in Russia saying similar things about Stalin's legacy.
Soeharto's regime was characterised as "moderate" by Professor Jaimie Mackie, an Indonesian specialist at the ANU, and in a eulogy that would have made the dictator blush, journalist Greg Sheridan has argued that "even in human rights there is a case for Soeharto".
It shouldn't therefore come as a surprise that in three biographical reviews written in May last year by Mackie, Sheridan and his colleague Paul Kelly in The Australian, Soeharto's role in one of the century's worst bloodbaths was passed over in silence. Can anyone imagine an obituary for Pol Pot that failed to mention the killing fields?
The "friends of Indonesia" regularly demonised Jakarta's critics. The imputation was always clear: Indonesia comprised Soeharto and the military elite that ran the state. No one else mattered. Criticism of them was a slander on the entire Indonesian nation.
Apologising for Soeharto led his Australian supporters into a state of denial. Shortly before the students brought Soeharto down in May last year, Richard Woolcott was arguing that in Indonesia "there will be no 'people power' movement, comparable to that in the Philippines in 1986", a view endorsed by Paul Kelly in The Australian: "Indonesia in the 1990s is not a re-run of the Philippines of the '80s. There is no political reform movement ..."
The Jakarta Lobby was faced with a public relations challenge whenever evidence of another slaughter by the Indonesian military surfaced. Their strategy, as articulated by Woolcott just before Indonesia's invasion of East Timor in 1975, has been to "act in a way which would be designed to minimise the public impact in Australia and show private understanding to Indonesia of their problems".
Predictably, the two separate massacres in Dili, East Timor, in November 1991, resulted in some of the Jakarta Lobby springing into damage-control mode. Concerted efforts to offset community outrage, deflect moral judgment and mute public criticism were made. The number of victims was minimised and evidence of a second massacre dismissed entirely. Sheridan and Woolcott blamed Portugal for the killings, while former ANU Economics Professor Heinz Arndt called the massacre a tragedy, not because of the loss of life but because it inflamed anti-Indonesian hate campaigns in Australia.
Australians were urged to show understanding to the perpetrators of the crimes, rather than the victims. Such was the success of the campaign in exculpating Jakarta, the then Foreign Minister, Gareth Evans, found himself describing the latest in a long list of atrocities as "aberrant acts".
But it's not just the Jakarta Lobby's moral credentials that are in question. As recent events have shown, some of their political assessments were as deeply flawed.
Only three years ago Richard Woolcott claimed that "the East Timor Lobby should accept that the time for an act of self-determination after 20 years has passed and that demanding independence is a lost cause which raises false hopes, prolongs conflict and costs lives".
Similarly, Evans repeatedly argued that Indonesia's takeover of East Timor was "irreversible" and that "it's quite quixotic to think otherwise". The poverty of this analysis is now obvious to all.
However, the political changes that have begun in Indonesia are already proving to be a concern for those who mistakenly equate "stability" in the region with supporting the status quo. Following Soeharto's departure, Woolcott has argued that "it is foolish to suggest the fragmentation of Indonesia into a number of independent states need not concern Australia".
Putting to one side the question of Australia's capacity to prevent such a development, one lesson of the post-Cold War period seems to have been lost on "experts" such as Woolcott: political and territorial boundaries are clearly not immutable.
It is quite normal for nation-states to come into and go out of existence, as it is for their boundaries to shift. The USSR, Yugoslavia, and East Germany are merely recent examples of how transient political communities really are. Woolcott's claim that "historically, no state has willingly accepted dismemberment" will come as a surprise to Czechs and Slovaks.
Far from being a threat to Australia's national security, the partial fragmentation of Indonesia may well defuse tensions that have been simmering in Aceh, West Papua, Kalimantan, East Timor and elsewhere. It is "unrealistic" to believe that Java can thwart these centrifugal forces.
Scare campaigns by the Jakarta Lobby, whether they be attacks on the principle of self-determination, exaggerated prospects for civil war, concerns about the Balkanisation of Indonesia, the fear of Islam, or the cost to the Australian taxpayer, will not forestall these developments.
In the aftermath of the Cold War, some in the Jakarta Lobby frequently excoriated the left in Australia for its support of communist regimes, demanding apologies, corrections and regret. In light of their own enormous failures and moral transgressions, can we now expect the same from them?