Tony Parkinson – The elder statesman of Asian politics, Lee Kuan Yew, has warned Indonesia that it cannot afford to risk making the same mistakes in West Papua that it did in East Timor.
In an interview with The Age, Singapore's senior minister issued a blunt caution to Indonesia, an ASEAN partner and Singapore's biggest neighbor.
Amid fears in the region that Indonesia may be preparing for a military crackdown on West Papuan separatists, Mr Lee said he hoped President Abdurrahman Wahid's advisers were conscious of the potential harm to Indonesia's international standing. "They ought to be telling the President just how risky such unthoughtful acts can be forthe reputation of the country," he said.
He said the images screened worldwide of East Timorese villagers trying to flee militia violence had been horrendous. "I hope they have learnt from what happened in East Timor and don't allow the same syndrome to develop in West Irian," Mr Lee said.
"They must learn the lessons. They must sit back and say, 'What went wrong in East Timor?' They had 25 years, and it all went wrong so decisively? Why? Surely, a lesson can be learnt."
Mr Lee was in Australia to launch the second volume of his memoirs, From Third World to First: The Singapore Story 1965- 2000, a wide-ranging appraisal of the political evolution of South-East Asia.
It is unusual for a senior ASEAN figure to comment on the affairs of another member nation, especially when Singapore, like Australia, firmly supports Indonesia's continued sovereignty over West Papua.
Although a critic of Australia's role in the lead-up to East Timor's independence vote, Mr Lee has since praised its action in leading the UN InterFET forces sent in to stop militia violence.
In the interview, he expressed concern that Australia could again come under pressure from church and aid groups to respond if systematic abuses of human rights occurred in West Papua. "I would be very unhappy to see that happen," he said. "But it is not just Australian non-government organisations and Christan groups. It is worldwide." He said that governments had to recognise that acts of brutality could not be obscured from world scrutiny.
Mr Lee said he only recently came to understand the true extent of the horror of the militia violence in East Timor when he watched a BBC World documentary that tracked events after last year's East Timorese independence referendum with dramatic footage of the rampage by pro-Jakarta militias after UN staff were ordered to evacuate.
"It was horrendous," he said. "The fear, the terror, the throwing of babies over barbed wire fences into the UN compound ... it was heart-rending." He said the impact on the world was devastating, "and it causes so much revulsion that people want their governments to take action that their governments would not like to take normally". "This is Tiananmen plus 11 years."