New Rules of Engagement?
By Scott Burchill

In the first weeks of September last year, 70% of all public buildings and
private residences in East Timor were destroyed. At least 75% of the
population of the territory was displaced, with over 260,000 people being
driven across the border into Indonesian West Timor by TNI and their militia
surrogates. Thousands remain there in appalling conditions in
militia-controlled refugee camps, where hostage taking, killings and sexual
assault are a daily occurrence. Somewhere between 500 and 2000 East Timorese
were slaughtered during this period.

These statistics measure the denouement of 25 years of Indonesian state
terror in occupied East Timor. But they also indicate the scale of Canberra'
s greatest foreign policy failure since federation. At the very least, one
might think that these grim statistics would prompt Australia's foreign
policy elite and its adjunct - the Jakarta lobby - to rethink an approach to
diplomacy with Indonesia which has been so conspicuously discredited.
Incredibly, this hasn't happened. Instead, those want a rapid return to
business as usual with Jakarta are attempting to retrospectively blame the
Howard Government for the collapse of the bilateral relationship.


Blaming John Howard

Within a month of InterFET's deployment in East Timor, which finally brought
the killings to an end, the editor of The Australian believed it was time
for Canberra "to withdraw from the military leadership role" in East Timor
because "an ongoing military presence by Australia could hinder the peace
process by continuing to antagonise militia groups", clearly something
beyond the pale. Fortunately for the people of East Timor, his request was
ignored.

The foreign editor of The Australian, Greg Sheridan, was also keen to "make
up" with Jakarta as soon as possible. Attempting to exculpate Jakarta for
its crimes, Sheridan argued that "the Indonesian people are not the same
thing as the Indonesian military", though it is unclear whether TNI agrees.
Reflecting his employer's distaste for foreign policy driven by
"humanitarian and moralistic concerns" (Rupert Murdoch), Sheridan believes
that the cause of the problem is Mr Howard's regrettable habit of listening
to the views of his constituents: "the Government's worst statement was the
Prime Minister saying in parliament recently that he wanted foreign policy
to be in step with public opinion", an appalling prospect given the
exemplary performance of Australia's foreign policy elite in recent years.

Veteran Indonesian analyst, Bruce Grant, also identifies Mr Howard as the
problem. According to Grant, the Prime Minister is seen as "unsympathetic to
cultures and aspirations other than his own", a character trait that
apparently puts him sharply at odds with leaders in Beijing, Tokyo, and
Kuala Lumpur. Howard is "suspect" in Asia because he is a monarchist, lacks
"an emotional commitment to the fortunes of the region", and loves cricket
"which does not help in Indonesia". Grant doesn't explain the perils
inherent in Indonesia's bilateral relations with other cricket-playing
nations such as India, Pakistan, and Sri Lanka, nor does he note the damage
done to ties with Kuala Lumpur when Malaysia hosted a cricket tournament
during the last Commonwealth Games.

Cultural deference is clearly Grant's recommended strategy for engaging with
Asia. The onus is on Australia, and only Australia, to change its ways.
There is no suggestion of reciprocity from the region, even in the light of
last year's horror in East Timor.

According to ANU Indonesia specialist Harold Crouch, Mr Howard's response to
the terror in East Timor last year, rather than the slaughter itself, "was
offensive to many Indonesians". The Prime Minister has a limited cultural
understanding of Australia's great northern neighbour and "doesn't quite
know how to convey things to Indonesians", he says - true enough as messages
such as "stop the killing" clearly fell on deaf ears in Jakarta last
September.

Former diplomat Tony Kevin also worries about Australia's "provocative"
behaviour last year. "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 its legal responsibility to maintain law and order in
East Timor before, during and after the August ballot - an exclusive right
that the Habibie Government insisted upon in its negotiations with Portugal
and the UN.

If only John Howard stopped basking in "jingoistic self-satisfaction over
East Timor" and said sorry, bridges with Indonesia could be mended. 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 [Indonesia's] president's misjudgment and the TNI's
subsequent brutality". At least the message is clear. The East Timorese
should never have been given the choice of independence and it was Canberra,
rather than Jakarta, that encouraged the Indonesian military to turn the
territory into a charnel house. Howard should say sorry.


Being Left Out

More recently, professional Asianists have sought to engender a moral panic
about the current state of Australia's relationships with the region by
claiming that John Howard's intervention in East Timor is indicative of a
broader rejection of regional engagement. What they really mean is that
Howard is ignoring the specific rules of engagement that they have drafted
for successive Australian governments: and even more disturbing, the
coalition isn't seeking their wise counsel.

According to his critics, Howard has disengaged Australia from the region,
repudiating "the Australia project in Asia" (Stephen Fitzgerald)
painstakingly nurtured by every Australian Prime Minister since Whitlam.
Emblematic of this has been the collapse of bilateral ties with Jakarta:
"forty years of bipartisan effort to build up a relationship with Indonesia
has been seriously eroded by recent events", argues Richard Woolcott without
detailing these "events" or specifying the responsibility Jakarta bares for
the downturn. "The relationship has been destroyed..Indonesians feel
betrayed by Australia", laments Rawdon Dalrymple, who already looks back at
the Suharto years with a nostalgia unlikely to be shared by the victims of
the dictatorship: "I fear we shall not see the like of him [Suharto] again".

According to leading Sinologist Stephen Fitzgerald, "in the game of
self-identifying regions" Australia must "commit to and find acceptance in
Asia". Our "fundamental problem is that while we may have come to mouth the
sentiment of belonging to the region, we have done too little to belong in
human terms or to make the necessary cultural and intellectual adjustment".

Under the old orthodoxy, Asia was seen as an exclusive club which Canberra
must seek to join - being left out would be "a disaster for Australia". Our
need for belonging, however, brings with it obligations of membership which
require us to alter our ethical and cultural outlook. The price of admission
to the Asia club is never explicitly conceded, but by implication it
includes the sublimation of our European political heritage, a less
assertive commitment to universal human rights, and a greater sense of
cultural deference to Asian sensitivities. "We" must become more like
"them". The onus is on us and us alone to change our ways - to adjust to
Asia. Australia's exclusion from the 1996 ASEAN-Europe summit (ASEM) in
Bangkok and, more recently the ASEAN plus three group, should be a cause of
much domestic anxiety.

But does Asia see itself this way, as a club? If not, should we?

An alternative explanation for recent policy changes is that the Howard
Government is reflecting a popular unease with the rules of Asian engagement
previously set by Australia's foreign policy elite - though not the need for
engagement per se. This discomfort dovetails with the Prime Minister's
personal ambivalence about Asia, which is partly based on ignorance and
partly on an exaggerated sense of the importance of cultural differences in
international politics.

Howard believes that Keating Government's style of Asian engagement was both
elitist and lacking in domestic popular support, hence it was ultimately
driven underground. In 1995 both the intention to negotiate and the content
of the Australia-Indonesia security agreement was withheld from the public
until after it was signed - an unusual departure from the concept of 'due
process'. Howard is perhaps understating the need for government leadership
in this area of public policy, but he has correctly identified a widening
cleavage between elite and popular perceptions of how Australia should
present itself to the region.

Many Australians believe they can be equal partners in Asia without
sacrificing their political or cultural identity: they merely ask to be
accepted at face value, rather than what they must change to be accepted.
Adopting the role of a demandeur seems undignified and promises only to lose
the respect of our interlocutors and ourselves. After all, differences
between nations and cultures can be respected, they don't need to be
resolved or dissolved: convergence is unnecessary. Economic ties prompted by
globalising forces, for example, are rarely contingent on shared values.
Australia's most important bilateral trade relationship with Japan was,
after all, formed at a time when anti-Japanese feelings in Australia were
still potent from the Second World War. Many Australians would feel they
have little to learn from the legal and political processes in most East
Asian societies.


The New Orthodoxy

The outlines of a new orthodoxy about events in East Timor last year are
becoming clear, at least as far as the Jakarta lobby is concerned. It's a
strategic mix 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" (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" (Richard Woolcott) in Indonesia's internal
affairs and has been engaged in "gratuitous displays of jingoism" (Peter
Hartcher), "triumphalism", "neo-colonialism" and "latent racism" (Richard
Woolcott).

According to this re-writing of history, Howard is primarily to blame for
the cooling of the bilateral relationship between Canberra and Jakarta
because he abandoned his predecessor's 'special relationship' with Indonesia
and is personally uncomfortable with regional engagement.

An alternative view is that the Howard Government has deliberately distanced
itself from what it regards as the supine posture of its predecessor because
it believes the public disliked the morally dubious relationship struck
between the Keating Government and the New Order regime specifically, and
what it saw as an 'over-accommodation with Asia' more generally. When the
bilateral cheque was cashed by Canberra last September it bounced, despite
claims about the "ballast" which Gareth Evans and Paul Keating allegedly
infused into the relationship. Howard and Downer know what they don't want
and much of their new realism is based on product differentiation from their
predecessors, nevertheless they are struggling to coherently articulate the
type of regional engagement they are seeking. Distinctions between
'practical' and 'emotional and cultural' regionalism (Alexander Downer) are
unhelpful and confusing, not the least because they concede too much
importance to culture differences in diplomatic relations.

For the Jakarta lobby, the bilateral relationship is refracted through the
personalities of Howard and Wahid. Leaders' summits are more important than
building democratic institutions. The lobby is "making a ritual study of the
entrails of Wahid's spasmodic performance - divining how Javanese, and how
much of an expression of Asian values it all is", according to former
diplomat Duncan Campbell. This is simply replacing the Suharto cult with the
Wahid cult, a strategy which promises to repeat the mistakes of the past.

Howard, however,  is unimpressed with Wahid's unpredictable and erratic
performance, and is unsure that he yet commands support across the spectrum
of Javanese elite opinion. The Prime Minister sees no need for an urgent
restoration of good relations and is prepared to wait to deal with Jakarta
on his terms. In the meantime he would be well advised to offer tangible
support to those nascent democratic institutions which will embed a more
liberal political and civic culture in Indonesia. This is much more
important than the atmospherics of leaders' meetings.

Managing complex issues such as the fragmentation of the archipelago, the
future of East Timor, democratic transition, regional identity and the
effects of globalisation will take many years. Howard knows he has more time
than Wahid.