Lincoln Wright – To avoid provoking Indonesia, Australia should pull its 1450 troops out of East Timor after the United Nations leaves in 2004, according to a new defence report.
But the Howard Government should help upgrade East Timor's police force to improve security.
The new Australian Strategic Policy Institute, a government-funded think-tank, concluded in its first report yesterday that many Indonesians were highly suspicious of Australia's motives in East Timor and allaying their concerns was a major priority.
The director of the institute, Hugh White, described Australia's strategic interests in East Timor as a balancing act between not scaring Indonesia and ensuring East Timor's security.
"We obviously need to be very conscious of the way what we do in East Timor is read in Jakarta. If we're not careful, our actions to build a strong defence relationship with East Timor will be misread in Jakarta as an attempt to make East Timor a strategic asset for Australia."
On the one hand, Mr White said it would be "unthinkable" to allow military aggression against East Timor to go unchallenged. The 2001 Defence White Paper had indicated Australia would support any nation in the south-west Pacific if it were attacked, and that principle should apply to East Timor.
That did not mean a bilateral agreement should be reached with East Timor, however, or even a security guarantee. A trilateral agreement with Indonesia and East Timor would be preferable, he said.
Instead of troops, the report said the Government needed to give East Timor more internal security support to control the growing rascal element and the threat of militias on the border with West Timor.
The UN is expected to leave East Timor in two years' time. Mr White said ultimately that could mean leaving behind between 30 and 50 Defence Force personnel, but they would be in training roles, and not on operational missions.
"Australia's key policy challenge is to help East Timor meet its urgent security problems, and to encourage other countries to do the same," the report said.
Economic growth was the solution in the long term, but better policing was the key aim at this stage. Better policing was needed to tackle organised gangs, increased smuggling, and the latent threat of militia from West Timor.
"The new East Timor Government's security apparatus is ill-equipped to deal with these problems. The police are poorly trained, have almost no equipment, and are severely under-funded," the report said.
When asked about several Indonesian warships sent to Dili Harbour during the visit there by Indonesia's President Megawati Sukarnoputri, Mr White said the ships had probably sent a message to President Megawati and East Timor.
Yet East Timor had found a way out of the problem, and that was good news. "Indonesians and East Timorese managed to sort it out ... These things are going to happen all the time. And they'd better get used to building the mechanisms to work it out," Mr White said.