The Age, Melbourne: 15 March 2000
INDONESIA: APOLOGISTS ARE REVISING HISTORY TO ABSOLVE JAKARTA
Indonesia would not have been able to illegally occupy and terrorise East Timor for a quarter of a century without the support it received from the West, particularly Australia. The tactics employed by pro-integrationists in Australia to ensure Canberra's diplomatic collaboration with Jakarta were often crude, but they were remarkably effective.
By SCOTT BURCHILL
INDONESIA would not have been able to illegally occupy and terrorise East
Timor for a quarter of a century without the support it received from the
West, particularly Australia.
The tactics employed by pro-integrationists in Australia to ensure Canberra's
diplomatic collaboration with Jakarta were often crude, but they were
remarkably effective.
Death toll figures in the early years of occupation were revised down to
mitigate Jakarta's crimes - an act of denial that would have made David
Irving blush. Subsequent and regular atrocities, such as the 1991 Dili
massacres, were untruthfully described as "aberrant acts" in an attempt to
hose down public outrage. The victims were blamed for their "tribal war-like
disposition", even as they were being slaughtered by Indonesia's military
forces (TNI).
Canberra claimed that East Timor was entitled to self-determination provided
it was under the umbrella of Indonesian sovereignty, a meaningless and
insulting gesture. When this formula was rejected, the concept of
self-determination itself was attacked as a threat to regional stability and
"not a sacred cow". On its own, East Timor was said to be economically
unviable, a reasonable conclusion if you steal its only significant natural
resources.
As the violence reached a level beyond the apologetics of even the most loyal
commissar, the perpetrators were described as "rogue elements" in an effort
to exculpate the Indonesian state that the "rogues" themselves claimed to be
serving. Meanwhile, critics of ongoing human-rights abuses were branded
"racist" and "anti-Indonesian" by servants of power who inferred the only
alternative to appeasement was estrangement.
Their most recent tactic is even more brazen. Rewriting recent history to
shift the onus of responsibility for the collapse of relations between
Canberra and Jakarta on to the Howard Government has become the latest modus
operandi of the Jakarta lobby.
One might have been forgiven for thinking that, as a consequence of its state
terrorism in East Timor, Indonesia bears most of the blame for the downturn.
Not so.
According to ANU Indonesia specialist Harold Crouch, Howard's response to the
slaughter in East Timor "was offensive to many Indonesians". The Prime
Minister's limited cultural understanding of our northern neighbor means he
"doesn't quite know how to convey things to Indonesians" - true enough given
that messages such as "stop the killing" fell on deaf ears in Jakarta last
September.
Former diplomat Tony Kevin also worries about Australia's "provocative"
behavior. "Indonesian military and strategic elites will not quickly forgive
or forget how Australian foreign policy cynically exploited their weak
interim president in order to manoeuvre Indonesia into a no-win situation,"
says Kevin.
Australians may be surprised to learn they were seeking TNI's forgiveness for
rescuing a defenceless civilian population from yet another Indonesian
military attack. They may also wonder why Jakarta is absolved of the
exclusive legal responsibility it sought to maintain law and order in East
Timor before, during and after the August ballot.
However, raising these questions would only indicate just how "mired in
anti-Indonesian attitudes" the Australian public had become.
If only Howard stopped basking in "jingoistic self-satisfaction over East
Timor" and said sorry, bridges with Indonesia could be repaired. But,
according to Kevin, Canberra isn't up to the task. "This Government would not
know how to apologise for the way in which our diplomacy exploited and
aggravated their president's misjudgment and the TNI's subsequent brutality."
Kevin's message is clear. The East Timorese should never have been given the
choice of independence and it was Canberra, not Jakarta, that encouraged the
TNI to turn the territory into a charnel house.
Support for this revisionism has come from Jakarta's new ambassador to
Australia, Arizal Effendi, whose recent National Press Club address suggests
that Jakarta "doesn't quite know how to convey things to Australians".
Effendi claimed to be concerned about the "jingoism of using the humanitarian
pretext to justify unilateral armed intervention into the internal affairs of
a developing country, including by way of a coalition of nations outside the
framework of the UN".
He didn't apparently know that InterFET was a coalition of 20 nations,
authorised by the UN Security Council and, ultimately, the Government in
Jakarta, and that the issue of "intervention" arose only for those nations
that had granted Indonesia the right of territorial conquest. In the absence
of any legitimate claim to sovereignty by Indonesia, most of the world saw
the UN as finally administering one of its own non-self-governing territories.
Effendi's prescription for improving the bilateral relationship "based on
mutual respect" and a desire "not to dwell further on what or who was to
blame" for the downturn suggests Indonesia has not yet made a successful
transition to democracy. Is there a "Canberra lobby" of Indonesian-based
journalists, bureaucrats and academics, faithfully loyal to their southern
neighbor, who will point out to His Excellency the importance of accounting
for past crimes and media scrutiny of government behavior in a modern
democracy? Perhaps President Wahid's new adviser, Henry Kissinger, can share
his well-known love of democracy with Indonesia's new political elite?
The outlines of a new orthodoxy about events in East Timor last year are
becoming clear. It's a mixture of inverted history and national
self-flagellation. Despite the absence of any alternative regional responses
to the slaughter, Canberra "took too much ownership of the process" (The
Australian's Greg Sheridan), meaning the East Timorese should have been left
to their awful fate. Indonesia has nothing to be sorry about and no
reparations to pay. The Howard Government, on the other hand, was "meddling"
in Indonesia's internal affairs and has been engaged in "triumphalism",
"neo-colonialism" and "latent racism" (former diplomat Richard Woolcott). The
sooner we get back to the "main game" (The Australian's Paul Kelly) the
better.