Vaudine England, Jakarta – When Indonesia-backed militias go on the rampage in East Timor, threatening the United Nations, the East Timorese and local and foreign observers, reactions in Jakarta vary from outright denial to ashamed recognition of national failure.
But at an international level Jakarta plays a knife-edge game of appeasing foreign critics while insisting on control of the increasingly flawed security situation on the ground.
State Secretary Muladi's statement yesterday that a peacekeeping force might have to be considered at some point for East Timor is at once an admission of the failure of Indonesian police and soldiers to keep the peace, and a deft concession to international opinion. But it may be no more than that.
Even if a peacekeeping force was considered, such talk would mean nothing to those people in East Timor, who are being terrorised and attacked.
The main issue for most observers is the way local gangs of pro-Indonesia militia can walk around freely with the open acceptance, if not support, of Indonesian soldiers and police.
This allegation, of Indonesian military support for the thuggery in East Timor, is supported by all independent eye-witness accounts of the violence.
Examples given by respected commentators on the ground have included militia members at Dili airport preventing Timorese and Indonesian families from leaving, while Indonesian airport police simply watched.
When a prisoner of a militia group in Dili fled to the army barracks for shelter, the army let the militia in to retrieve the man.
When militias in Ermera district fired at a UN helicopter trying to take out ballot boxes for counting and pointed an M-16 assault rifle at an unarmed UN policeman, Indonesian police stood by and watched.
BBC reporters, who were beaten by militias during Wednesday's violence, insisted yesterday the military not only stood by and watched, but actively helped organise militia activity.
But in Jakarta, army spokesman Brigadier-General Sudrajat denied the evidence of military complicity and said the situation was not as bad as reported, while Foreign Ministry spokesman Sulaiman Abdulmanan said: "It is not policy to help the militias."
Members of the Jakarta political elite see the latest developments in East Timor as both humiliating and damaging to the Government of President Bacharuddin Habibie.
"Such statements are increasingly hard to swallow," said a former cabinet minister, who is now aligned with the reform movement in Indonesia, of the military's denials.
"The TNI [Indonesian armed forces] is forever saying one thing and doing another. They are looking like a bunch of compulsive liars – both Habibie and the military. Indonesia has to take a major part of the blame for what's happening," the former minister said.
A large part of the problem remains the political stalemate in Jakarta. President Habibie could well be out of his job in two months' time, and armed forces chief General Wiranto would like his job, or the vice-presidency.
Mr Habibie needs military compliance to stay in office and must balance that against loss of face abroad, while General Wiranto needs to keep his troops united and supported if he is to have any political future at home.
The question is whether the cost of international condemnation will be higher for these two men than the cost of altering the delicate power balance between them.