Rowan Callick/Melbourne and John McBeth/Jakarta – Fresh from a re-election victory, Australian Prime Minister John Howard's government is raising the prospect of stronger security cooperation with Indonesia's new administration to boost anti-terrorism efforts – and even formalizing that cooperation in a comprehensive new defence treaty.
Three days before Howard attended the October 20 inauguration of Susilo Bambang Yudhoyono as Indonesia's new president, Australian Foreign Minister Alexander Downer said that while the government had not yet committed itself to negotiating a defence treaty with Indonesia, "it's something we are giving consideration to."
Such a treaty was needed to improve the effectiveness of the war against terrorism and should incorporate a memorandum of understanding on fighting terrorism signed by the two countries in 2002, Downer said in the October 17 television interview. He added: "Obviously, 50% of this is going to depend on the extent to which the Indonesians would want to do it."
The Indonesians, however, don't appear to want anything as formal as a treaty. "A defence pact is a nonstarter as far as we are concerned," says Foreign Ministry spokesman Marty Natalagawa in Jakarta. "Our foreign policy doesn't allow us to enter into [defence] pacts with other countries. The only thing that's possible is security cooperation."
Indonesian officials say Canberra has yet to make a formal proposal and the lack of detail makes it difficult to know how the Yudhoyono administration and the often-nationalist House of Representatives will view the Australian initiative. But many people in the world's most populous Muslim country are likely to object to closer links with the United States' staunchest ally in Asia.
Natalagawa says a more relevant way for Australia to show positive intent towards Indonesia and the region would be for Canberra to sign Asean's Treaty of Amity and Cooperation. China, India, Japan and Pakistan have signed the nonaggression treaty over the past 18 months and Russia and South Korea have signalled their intention to do so.
Australia and Indonesia secretly negotiated and signed an Agreement on Maintaining Security in 1995 when Prime Minister Paul Keating and President Suharto were in office. It was abrogated by Indonesia four years later, when Australia sent troops to protect newly independent East Timor.
The 1995 agreement covered consultation, training and technical exchange, but did not impose a mutual defence obligation, though the two countries agreed to "consult each other" if they came under threat. That agreement was "a fairly meaningless document," Downer said. Any new treaty would take a different direction and would not be negotiated in secret, but "in a normal diplomatic way," he said.
Dino Djalal, a senior Indonesian Foreign Ministry official and Yudhoyono's adviser on foreign affairs, concurs that any new security document would probably not be like the 1995 agreement, which Foreign Minister Hassan Wirayuda regards as far too vague.
"We're open-minded about it as long as it is nothing like a defence pact. That would never fly," says Djalal. "A broader format would be workable, something general like the Asean regional-security agreement, which binds us to codes of conduct. We can certainly go in that direction."
Canberra's hopes that Jakarta's response to a new defence arrangement would be positive are based on statements Yudhoyono made a year ago when he was coordinating minister for security in the government of Megawati Sukarnoputri. On a visit to Canberra and Melbourne in October 2003, the former four-star general said that he supported a return to a defence pact between the two countries.
Referring to terrorist attacks in the US and Indonesia, Yudhoyono told his Australian audience: "In the age of [September 11, 2001] and Bali and the Jakarta Marriott, security can best be promoted through cooperation. This is leading us to change in our security culture. We can ensure our security only by sharing our intelligence with each other."
Howard told reporters travelling with him to Jakarta for the presidential inauguration that he would not raise the defence-pact proposal with Yudhoyono on this visit. But the two leaders will have further meetings over the next six weeks – in Chile for a summit of the Asia-Pacific Economic Cooperation forum, and in Laos for an Asean summit. These meetings will give their top officials the chance to discuss a framework for getting any new security talks under way.
Australia and Indonesia already have stepped up security cooperation since the Bali bombing in October 2002, which killed 202 people, 88 of them Australian. The two governments signed a memorandum of understanding on counter-terrorism in January 2002, and a second agreement on transnational crime in June 2003 to deal mostly with Afghan, Iraqi and Pakistani refugees smuggled from Indonesia into Australia. They've also signed a technical agreement that allows Australian police to play a significant role in the hunt for terrorist fugitives in Indonesia.
Domestic opposition
The Howard government is halfway through a four-year counter-terrorism package for Indonesia costing $7 million. It is spending another $28 million over five years on the Jakarta Centre for Law Enforcement Cooperation, which opened in July, to provide training in counter-terrorism skills. It has also funded a police intelligence training school in Semarang, Central Java.
But Howard, too, would have to overcome domestic opposition to any new security arrangement with Indonesia. In Australia, much of the coalition of lobby groups that eventually won support for an independent East Timor has since taken on the cause of independence for other parts of Indonesia, such as Aceh and Papua. They would strongly oppose formal ties with Indonesia's national security apparatus.