AUSTRALIA AND INDONESIA GET IT TOGETHER

I was not able to interest any mainstream opinion page in running the following piece, which unstintingly commends the Howard Government $1 billion tsunami relief fund for Indonesia. Many of its themes are already familiar in media, but given my fairly well-known anti-Howard stance on most Australian foreign policy issues, I thought it important to give credit where I think it is due – and say a few words about future risks.

After writing this I was interested in Geoff Barker’s piece in ‘Australian Financial Review’ today contrasting the high morality of the tsunami fund with the cruel immorality of the treatment of the Bakhtiari family, Hicks and Habib (Barker could have added the illegal Iraq War and the SIEV X cover-up).

I did not go in for such comparisons in the piece below – I guess we should be glad when something as important as the Australian Government’s tsunami aid fund for Indonesia is handled well, when so much in our regional diplomacy of recent years has been handled so badly.

TK, 10 January 2005

 

John Howard’s government quickly sensed that the Indian Ocean tsunami was a special kind of natural disaster, resonating with Western populations as well as in the affected Indian Ocean countries, and is responding with vision and generosity. Australia is "doing well by doing good".

In philosophy and scale, the Australian response to our neighbour Indonesia’s plight, and the example it sets for Western donor help to the other affected countries, compare well with our post-WW2 Colombo Plan initiative that helped rebuild the war-damaged newly-independent nations of Southeast Asia.

There was an initial misstep – a brief attempt to launch an Anglo-American led regional response based on the core membership of the Iraq War coalition. That was sensibly jettisoned, when it became clear that Indonesia would not have it, and that the UN was keen to assume its regular coordination role in global disaster relief.

Australia then moved quickly into a bilateral neighbour-focussed response, which advances Australian interests far more effectively than either the Anglo-American coalition model or the UN-based channel for assistance. Going it alone with a $1 billion Australian aid package to Indonesia under the two countries’ joint sole management is far-sighted diplomacy.

At home in Australia, the fund’s bilateral hands-on management through the two countries’ foreign ministries reassures Australians that taxpayer money will not be wasted or corruptly diverted from tsunami relief and reconstruction. – we share in direct management of how monies will be spent to help the people rebuild their homes and local communities. And there will be money and policy direction for proper regional tsunami public warning systems in future.

The scheme represents sensible international division of labour. It sends a message that Australia wants to help the moderate democratically inclined leadership of Indonesia’s new President get our large neighbour back on course. This is sensibly Australia’s top priority, in the knowledge that others would offer the same kind of help to Thailand and Sri Lanka.

Engaging our ADF strongly in humanitarian relief and emergency infrastructure rebuilding in Aceh – there are now more ADF serving in Indonesia than on military duty in and around Iraq, and in a project entirely independent of the United States - sends a popular message to many in Australia including, one suspects, many within the ADF itself. One sees the joy and pride in the ADF in doing good things to help people in need of help.

This project answers a growing disquiet that the Australian Government was progressively withdrawing Australians from unreserved engagement with our region. It corrects the dissonance between, at the public human level, continuing large Australian reservoirs of warmth and familiarity towards our region and its peoples, as manifested in the large number of Australians visiting and working in South East Asia, and the less positive messages coming from our government that this was becoming a region of risk and threat to Australians.

There had been a succession of negative events and policy tendencies: Australia’s mishandled triumphalism in the Asian economic crisis of the late 1990s; our provocative role in the earlier stages of East Timor’s independence transition in 1999; the covert, potentially criminal Australian people smuggling disruption activities in Indonesia in 2000-2001 that may have helped generate the shameful sinking of SIEV X; an over-emphasis on Australia-US military alliance ties in the War on Terror; an associated sequence of inept and aggressive diplomatic messages casting Australia as the US’s regional deputy, ready to police local seas and undertake pre-emptive strikes against suspected terrorist sites in regional countries with or without local consent; a DFAT travel warning program that effectively was advising Australians to cut back on engaging with Asian neighbouring countries; declining funding and enrolments in Asian studies and languages.

All this was putting a lot of lead-weight in the saddlebags of Australia’s regional relationships, however much lobbyists of the "all is well" school tried to shrug it off.

THE $1 billion aid package to Indonesia is so big and unstintingly generous, that it cuts through and can surmount much of that negative history. As a profound act of Australian engagement to help a neighbour in need, it will change for the better the parameters of our regional relationships with and beyond Indonesia.

Because it is tsunami-focussed, distributional issues do not arise – Australia’s money and on-the-ground ADF and civilian agency help is simply going where the human need it greatest – into the damaged coastal areas of Aceh, which province happens also to be a centre of both political separatism and fervent Islamic faith.

The package is structured in a way that is sensitive to Indonesian sovereignty – the joint management philosophy is clearly neither paternalistic nor neo-colonialist in spirit or execution.

Indonesians can see that the program enjoys grassroots support in Australian popular culture. The large amounts collected by our charities and the runaway success of the $20 million raised by the commercial television networks’ "Australia Unites - Reach Out to Asia" telecast on Saturday night, and the evident warmth shown by all participants in that fundraising exercise, testify to this.

WHAT are the risks from now on? I see two kinds of risks – of Australian immodest self-congratulation souring the present soup of goodwill, and of Australians on the ground in the Aceh disaster area being sucked into conflicting centralist and separatist political-military agendas, as Aceh begins to get back on its feet. It will take deft Australian hands-on decisions, at the level of overall program management and on-the-ground management, to contain such risks and to hose down the inevitable incidents and misunderstandings that will occur.

I am confident that DFAT, AUSAID, ADF and AFP between them will find enough managers with the necessary judgement skills, as we did during the very different kinds of military and political management challenges of Cambodia in the UNTAC period 1991-94, and again in East Timor after INTERFET moved in.

Some in Indonesia will exploit the Australian military aid presence in Aceh, in ways both good and bad. The manifest decency and kindness of our ADF people may help heal the wounds of a brutal civil war, and by reflection and example humanise the conduct of Indonesian army elements working alongside them. The ADF may teach the Indonesian army useful lessons about how to rebuild the confidence of a fearful and resentful populace – how to recapture hearts and minds broken by years of repression.

The danger is that the ADF or civilian Australians may become embroiled – e.g., in dissident movement (GAM) foreign hostage-taking, or in Indonesian Army shootouts with GAM elements. Australia cannot afford ever to be seen by Acehnese as an ally in resumed military oppression. This is going to involve tough diplomatic calls.

Aceh is not the Solomons where Australia has an almost free hand. In Aceh our ADF and aid personnel will have to work alongside and respect the sovereignty of a prickly, and sometimes tending to brutal, central Indonesian power. Sustaining the trust and goodwill that clearly now exists between John Howard and Indonesia’s President will require great resources of judgement and diplomacy at all levels, if the inevitable small frictions are not to escalate into something worse.

Australia has taken on a brave and noble challenge. I feel a unfamiliar reawakening of pride in my country. This is Australia’s opportunity to redress mistakes made in recent years and to transcend them, and to rebuild our human engagement with our region. In the words of the diplomatic cliche – on this occasion, entirely apt – this program opens a new chapter in Australia’s relationships with our region.

There will be a lot of Australian boots and shoes on the ground in Indonesia, helping Aceh rebuild and heal the wounds. I salute John Howard for his big vision here. This is his version of Richard Casey’s Colombo Plan – it is Australian, it is sovereign, and it is focussed on our region. It is good.

[Tony Kevin, a Visiting Fellow at the Australian National University’s Research School of Pacific and Asian Studies, is a former Australian ambassador to Cambodia 1994-97 and the author of A Certain Maritime Incident – the Sinking of SIEV X (Scribe, 2004)] .