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Australia's East Timor gamble

Source
Sydney Morning Herald - April 17, 1999

Peter Cole-Adams – No strategy is less flattering to a government than playing a waiting game. The appearance of impotence is unbecoming and, if the wait ends in failure, downright humiliating.

John Howard and Alexander Downer are locked into just such a wait-and-pray approach to the East Timor issue. With the security situation in the territory deteriorating, they have invested all their hopes in a United Nations-sponsored process, which is supposed to allow the East Timorese people to decide their future in July. This means they have also invested a lot of their own credibility in the capacity and willingness of the Indonesian Government to maintain security and a semblance of fair play.

Just at the moment, this seems a perilous gamble, and Downer and Howard know it. A note of impatience has crept into their tactful rhetoric, although it has fallen well short of the anger that critics thought appropriate after last week's killings in the East Timor town of Liquica. Indonesian soldiers are reported to have participated in, or at least done nothing to prevent, the violence.

Howard said he hoped the Indonesian Government did not have a sinister agenda ("I prefer to believe now it doesn't," he added), and admitted to a "worry about discipline in sections of ABRI [the armed forces]". Downer said flatly the Indonesian military was not providing sufficient security and called on it to act impartially.

Privately, senior Government sources say that, while they believe President Habibie is sincere about offering the East Timorese autonomy or allowing independence, they fear the Government and the ABRI chief, General Wiranto, have little control over some military elements in East Timor and at the regional command based in Denpasar, Bali.

They suspect Jakarta of being disingenuous in its response, or lack of it, to repeated Australian representations on the issue of disarming the East Timor militias. "In their hearts they think the pro-integrationists need a capacity for self-defence," said one source.

Despite these doubts and fears, and the mounting mayhem in East Timor, Canberra insists there is no sensible alternative to the process put forward by the UN. The next test of that is due on April 22, when the foreign ministers of Indonesia and Portugal meet at the UN in New York.

If they agree on the autonomy proposal that Jakarta is to present to the East Timorese, the way will theoretically be clear to start sending a substantial confidence-building UN presence to help organise and monitor some form of ballot to discover whether the East Timorese want to remain part of Indonesia or be independent.

The role of the UN team, which would involve Australians, would be essentially civilian, although it might include some soldiers or police with specialist qualifications. Preparations are well advanced and the hope is that, once the UN people are on the ground, tensions will ease.

Downer is adamant there is no chance the Indonesians will accept an international peacekeeping force in the territory, at least not unless and until it opts for independence.

As he put it recently: "If you want to send a peacekeeping force you have to have [a country] willing to receive it, otherwise you are going to declare war on them ... Indonesia does not, at the moment, want such a force and would not agree to one."

By Thursday, he was adding a firm rider. Given Indonesia's rejection of any international interference in what it regards as internal affairs, he argued, Jakarta must accept its responsibility to act impartially to restore security in East Timor.

However, apart from stamping its diplomatic foot a little more emphatically, and offering to contribute to the proposed UN presence, the Australian Government gives no sign that it has a Plan B should the security situation in the territory deteriorate to the point where a ballot is not feasible.

A senior official admitted privately this week that this could happen and warned that, if it did, Indonesia, beset by problems elsewhere in the archipelago, might simply walk out, leaving the East Timorese to a civil war.

There is another scenario: instead of packing their kitbags, the local ABRI troops, with or without Jakarta's blessing, might back the pro-integrationist militias in waging all-out war on pro-independence guerillas to ensure that the territory (or at least the part adjoining West Timor) remain part of Indonesia. After all, a lot of their colleagues have died there.

Either way, it doesn't bear thinking about. But Australians may yet have to.

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