Martin Woollacott – When the Seaforth Highlanders set off for Jakarta docks in November, 1946, after months of coping with the Indonesian liberation movement on behalf of the absent Dutch, they passed contingents of troops just in from Holland. With one accord, the British soldiers raised clenched fists and shouted "Merdeka!" ("Freedom!"). Liberation salute and slogan were more than just a joke at Dutch expense. They were a recognition by men of what was still an imperial army that empire was not going to survive long in the Indies – something which the young Dutchmen in the lorries going the other way did not yet understand.
It is an unhappy parallel with those times that the Indonesians are proving in some ways as obtuse as the Dutch in dealing today with the problems created by their own quasi-imperial style of government. While the Indonesians won their freedom from the Dutch, they did not win freedom from ideas that sustained Dutch power, notably that the most important instruments of rule were force and guile. Dutch power at an earlier stage had been based on an array of special agreements with local rulers. The result was a diverse, proto-federal polity. But, later, after the conquest of rebellious Aceh, the Dutch used their largely native troops to impose a uniform political pattern on the archipelago. They also continued to manipulate local politics by intrigue and by what today would be called covert action.
It is these traditions which the Indonesian armed forces inherited and exaggerated, which have caused much violence and suffering over the years in many parts of Indonesia, and which have now led to the tragic situation in East Timor. That situation is full of danger not only for the East Timorese but for Indonesians: if their elite continues to make the wrong decisions, the chance the country seemed to have only a few months ago of repudiating the mistakes of the past may be lost.
It is hard to understand East Timor unless it is grasped that the Indonesian military regarded it as a success and not as a failure.
After all, "roads, schools, and cathedrals" had been built, as one officer told a Guardian reporter. More important, a significant Indonesian constituency had been built up over the years since annexation in 1976. Some of the figures recently reported on the large number of East Timorese in regular army and national police units in the territory, as well as those in the civil service, illuminate the nature of the conflict there. This client community was used by men like General Zacky Anwar Makarim, the intelligence and covert action specialist who, incredibly, was given a senior command in East Timor during the period leading up to the referendum.
His brief, self-appointed or otherwise, can be guessed at: utilise these loyalists to produce a vote for autonomy or at least so narrow a vote for independence as to induce second thoughts. What we are now seeing in East Timor, apart from the murky manoeuvres of the military, are the desperate throes of this client class after the collapse of that strategy.
The independence leader Xanana Gusmao sees that reconciliation with this large group, perhaps a quarter of the population, fearful not only that it will lose its privileges but that it may be punished, harried, and expelled, is his central political problem. "They will be forgiven," he says, "and East Timor will also be theirs."
Men like Gusmao, it may be hazarded, understand not only that reconciliation is necessary in East Timor if it is to avoid being burdened by a permanently angry and alienated minority, but that a broader reconciliation with Indonesia is also vital. Formal independence is one thing. But there must also be a sense in which East Timor is recognised as a partly Indonesian society which needs to find some halfway house in its relationship with the great state that surrounds it. Such a reconciliation, of course, is hard to imagine now as East Timor burns.
In retrospect, the decision to hold an East Timor referendum was taken in an unforgivably light-hearted way. BJ Habibie, the interim president who succeeded Suharto, tossed it off in January, seemingly without considering whether he had the authority to persuade the armed forces to accept it.
The hard work which would have made it a real policy rather than a tragedy in the making was never done. Habibie did not prepare the way with the military, with his own party, or with the other parties. If the policy had been seriously weighed, it would have been immediately grasped that what was needed was not just a vote but a negotiation between East Timorese. The vote would inevitably be for independence, the negotiation should have been about guarantees for the pro-Indonesian element. It would also have been about Indonesia's own future influence in an independent East Timor, an influence based in part on that protected client class and in part on the gratitude of the independence movement for a clean break with the past.
Instead, some in the armed forces used the very assets that could have assured a trouble-free transition to ensure the exact opposite. It is not so much that the Habibie government is not in control of the military but rather that nobody in today's Indonesia is fully in control of anything. The old ruling party is split, the new parties are inexperienced and not in government and the officer corps is racked by its own internal politics.
This is hard to read, but senior figures can be presumed to be desperate not to be the ones who gave up East Timor. The only way to have avoided this situation, in which even the sensible men want to be on the sidelines, would have been to involve everybody in the decision to get out. The painful creation of such a consensus was beyond either Habibie or Wiranto, the armed forces chief, with the results we now see. Without it, the way was open for mischief of the worst kind.
To ask what is the policy now being pursued in East Timor is thus probably the wrong question. Is the policy to somehow retain the territory? Is it to accept its independence, but only after destroying its assets and dispersing its people, both as revenge and as a warning to other separatists? Is it partition? Is it to seek leverage in an independent state by entrenching the integration forces? The likelihood is that there is no one policy, however malign, but simply a chaos produced by the actions of the militias and the plots of some officers, compounded by the cowardice of decision makers, military and civilian. The Indonesian establishment has to grasp that its foolishness is profoundly damaging to Indonesia as well as East Timor. It is time to live up to the responsibilities that the word "Merdeka" implies.