APSN Banner

Snuggling up clouds our vision

Source
Sydney Morning Herald - October 30, 1998

Has Australia got the Indonesia relationship right and is it getting it right for the future? We have steered a prudent course but there are times when we must make our voice more clearly heard... especially in military matters. David Jenkins reports.

At a small hill town in East Timor three years ago, the regional military commander, Major-General Adang Ruchiatna, chatted fondly about Adelaide, where he once attended a three-month intelligence course.

At the Jakarta headquarters of the Indonesian special forces unit early this year, a lieutenant-colonel presented his camouflaged calling card and spoke with similar fondness about Perth, where he had trained with the Australian Special Air Service (SAS). Before long, a number of his red beret colleagues had gathered around and were recalling their own visits to Sydney, Melbourne, Brisbane and Darwin.

In Indonesia these days, you don't have to go far to find evidence of the growing ties between the Australian Defence Force (ADF) and the Indonesian Armed Forces (ABRI). Australian units now train regularly in Indonesia. Indonesian units now train regularly here. Thanks to former prime minister Paul Keating, Australia and Indonesia have even signed a defence "treaty".

There is a lot to be said for having close relations with your closest neighbour, especially when the political and cultural gap is so wide and the potential for misunderstanding so considerable. But there can be problems when you get too close to a Third World leader who rules with an iron hand and who is thought by his people to be helping himself to the riches of the state.

There can be problems when you get too close to a South-East Asian army which spends less time time preparing to meet external threats than maintaining order within its own borders, sometimes brutally. At the time that General Adang was sitting in the town of Aileu and reminiscing about Adelaide, the Indonesian army was being blamed for yet another wave of disappearances and killings in East Timor, a territory in which hatred for ABRI knows few bounds.

At the time the Kopassus colonel was talking about Perth, a number of kidnapped opposition figures were out the back in the unit's holding cells. Five months after the overthrow of President Soeharto, Australia's defence links with Indonesia are back in the spotlight following charges that ABRI units, especially Kopassus, have been involved in the abduction and torture of political activists. Canberra has postponed two major military exercises with Kopassus. It is waiting for the storm to pass.

Did Australia get too close to Soeharto, who came to power in a bloodbath in which as many as half a million people died and who ruled, sometimes harshly, for 32 years? Did we get too close to ABRI?

On balance – but with some important caveats – we probably handled the relationship about as well as could be expected in the circumstances. Indonesia is a vast and immensely complex nation, the world's fourth most populous, with 211 million people.

It makes sense to have the best possible relations with Jakarta. For more than 30 years, that meant working with Soeharto. It now means working with President Habibie and whoever follows him. It makes sense to recognise that we often have a limited capacity to influence Indonesia.

That said, there have been times when we would have been wise to display greater caution in our dealings with Jakarta. There have been times when we would have been wise to be less enthusiastic, less willing to please. There have been times when our voice should have been more clearly heard.

Australia said virtually nothing when in 1965-66 the Indonesian army led one of the greatest mass slaughters of the 20th century, an anti-communist sweep in Java and Bali directed by Colonel Sarwo Edhie, an RPKAD (now Kopassus) officer who had just returned from a stint at an Australian Army staff college. Instead, we looked the other way, profoundly relieved that the regime had changed.

Australia did not publicly acknowledge that the Indonesian military was involved when Kopassus troops spearheaded the 1975 Indonesian invasion of Portuguese Timor, a massive air, sea and land operation that flouted international law and paved the way for the deaths of at least 100,000 people. It is true that we supported a UN resolution condemning the invasion. But we also sought to express our "understanding" of the Indonesian position. After 1976, when the people of East Timor were being subjected to dreadful agonies at the hands of ABRI, Australia supported Indonesia at the UN, shielding it from international criticism.

We said not a word implicating the Indonesian military when, in 1975, Kopassus troops killed five Western journalists, two of them Australians. We said not a word when Indonesian green beret troops from Battalion 502 of the Army Strategic Reserve (Kostrad) murdered another Australian journalist on the docks in Dili during a post-invasion orgy of killing and looting.

Twenty years later, we went out of our way to embrace those units. We set up a program under which the SAS has been training regularly with Kopassus. We invited Battalion 502 to "capture" Wyndham in Western Australia in a dawn parachute operation eerily reminiscent of their assault on Dili.

Australia got off to a good start with the infant Indonesian Republic. But strains appeared in the 1950s. "Our relations with Indonesia since 1945 have zigzagged constantly," says Professor Jamie Mackie of the Australian National University in Canberra. "They were very warm, very friendly in the 1945-49 period. Between 1950-65 they were under constant strain because of our disagreement over Indonesia's claim to West New Guinea, over Sukarno's non-alignment at a time when we supported SEATO, and over Indonesia's "confrontation' of Malaysia."

The situation only began to improve after the emergence of Soeharto, who made a sharp turn to the Right in 1966. Even then, relations were little more than satisfactory, rather than close.

Gough Whitlam tried to establish closer relations with Soeharto but that attempt foundered with the 1975 dismissal of the Whitlam Government and the Indonesian invasion of East Timor. Under Malcolm Fraser, there was no warmth in the relationship.

In 1988, following a negative reaction in Jakarta to a 1986 Herald article on the Soeharto family's wealth, Australian foreign minister Gareth Evans and his Indonesian counterpart, Ali Alatas, set out to put "some ballast" in the relationship so that the boat would not tip over with every minor squall.

Evans and Alatas divided up East Timor's offshore oil resources while flying over the disputed region in a RAAF VIP aircraft, champagne corks popping. Many Australians were appalled. To this day, the UN recognises Portugal as the administering power in East Timor.

Prime Minister Keating continued the policy of forging close ties with Jakarta, helped by the rapport he was able to establish with Soeharto. Keating took up two themes that were beginning to enjoy currency in the bureaucracy. From Foreign Affairs came the notion that Soeharto's rise was the best development in Australia's region in 30 years.

From Defence came the line that regional armies were often powerful institutions with close links to government and that it might be useful to get close to them, especially in Indonesia. As former defence minister Robert Ray put it in 1995, diplomats had their uses but could not "prise open the doors of conservative military establishments". Only direct and personal contact by senior officers could do that. Australia came in late on both fronts.

Keating embraced Soeharto when the New Order regime was increasingly on the nose in Indonesia. Defence, having recognised, after 30 years, that the Indonesian generals were important political players, has begun to embrace them just as their dominance looks set to be scaled back, with civilians preparing to rush back on stage.

Canberra was not blind to the changes taking place in Indonesian society. It recognised that the Soeharto regime was in decline. It knew, however, that it had to work with the regime and it could never be sure when it would collapse or what might take its place.

What of the future? "Indonesia in 1998-2003 is going to be such a different animal from the Indonesia we have been talking about for the last 30 years," says Mackie. "Clearly we are going to have an infinitely more pluralist system. We are going to have to relate not just to the government in power but have leads out to the people who might be in power tomorrow. And that will be a lot harder."

For Canberra, the question will be whether that significantly changes the strategic equation. "I think we are at a point where you can't rule out the danger of disintegration or secessionist tendencies becoming much stronger than they have been since 1960," says Mackie. "Instead of one big can of worms, you will have a lot of little cans of worms.

"We would like to be dealing with a nice tidy country where we know what we are dealing with. But we're never going to have tidy solutions in Indonesia."

Country