Daily Times

Australia and Indonesia are engaged in a dogfight of sorts, with the potential to escalate. Relations between the two countries have punctuated over the years between friendship and open hostility. The worst period in the last few decades was Australia’s championing of East Timor’s struggle for independence from Indonesia. Indeed, without Australia’s active involvement on the side of East Timor at the national and international level, East Timor probably would still be under Indonesia’s rule. It is ironic, though, that the independent state of East Timor is now engaged in a legal battle in the International Court of Justice at The Hague, fighting to get its proper share of oil revenues by having the maritime boundary re-adjudicated, which Australia allegedly rigged in its favour. However, that is a different issue.

Coming to the present tense relationship between the two countries, its trigger is the recent change of government in Australia, with the conservative leader, Tony Abbot, becoming the country’s new prime minister. For Australia’s conservative ruling coalition, the refugees seeking asylum in Australia from different countries is being projected as an avalanche of people likely to swamp the country, posing all sorts of problems. Worse still is that many of them are from Muslim countries, with the potential for terrorism. During the recent elections, Tony Abbot’s party made “stopping the boats” carrying refugees a central issue of its campaign. They played up their previous ‘success’ under the former conservative prime minister John Howard in stopping the flow of refugees through a highly punitive policy. Even the Labour Party government, now in opposition, was quite tough on the refugee issue, but Tony Abbot prevailed, viewed as the toughest and likely to deliver.

Jakarta comes into the picture because many of the “boat people” (as the refugees are called here) use Indonesia as a transit point, hiring unsafe boats and risking their lives to reach Australia. The Abbot government has upped the ante, against the wishes of Jakarta, to push the boats back to Indonesia. To accomplish this, it has set up an operational command centre with an army general, answering to the immigration minister. The whole exercise is called Operation Sovereign Borders, with Australian naval vessels pushing the refugee boats back into Indonesian waters; if considered unsafe, the refugees are transferred into newly bought boats able to make the trip back to Indonesia. In other words, the entire jargon of the operation is straight from a war-fighting manual.

All this is being done against Indonesia’s expressed wishes, with its foreign minister putting it mildly as “unhelpful”. In pushing the boats back, Australian vessels have breached Indonesia’s maritime boundary a few times, acknowledging and apologising for the ‘unintended’ transgression. Not surprisingly, it evoked a harsh response from Indonesia, with the country’s navy increasing patrolling of its maritime border. Australia though, is determined to “stop the boats”, regarding it as a simple matter of protecting its borders from the “illegals”, as the refugees are called here. To consider that these refugees, in their leaky boats, would be a threat to Australia’s sovereignty is stretching the imagination, to put it mildly, but it works well with the domestic political constituency.

Speaking from Switzerland, where he was attending the World Economic Forum, Abbot said, “Stopping the boats is a matter of sovereignty and President Yudhoyono of all people ought to understand…just how seriously countries take their sovereignty” — an apparent reference to Indonesia’s sensitivities about the separatist movement in its restive province of West Papua. In other words, the boat people are threatening Australian sovereignty, and if Indonesia is not prepared to stop them from heading towards Australia, Canberra would be fully entitled to ‘turn back the boats’, the political slogan that won Tony Abbot the elections.

When Tony Abbot came to power a few months ago, he paid his first official visit to Indonesia, which he had described as Australia’s most important neighbour, stressing that Jakarta (Asia) rather then Geneva (Europe) would be the centerpiece of Australia’s foreign policy. During his visit and meetings with Yudhoyono, he apologised about some exuberant election time statements that the opposition, Abbot and his party, had made about returning the boat people, hoping to enlist Indonesia’s help in stopping the boats at their starting point(s) in that country. His visit set a positive tone to build on their bilateral relationship.

However, it was a false start because as soon as it was revealed, through leaks from Edward Snowdon’s material, that Australia (as part of the ‘five eyes’ special intelligence sharing arrangement between the US, UK, Canada, Australia and New Zealand) was involved in tapping the phones of President Yudhoyono, his wife and his inner circle, the goodwill evaporated. The reaction in Jakarta was swift and sharp, leading to a virtual suspension of important aspects of the relationship between the two countries. President Yudhoyono took it quite personally when Tony Abbot came out with the standard response of neither denying nor confirming intelligence matters, studiously avoiding any sort of regret or apology notwithstanding his profuse expression of the ‘special relationship’ with Indonesia during his just-completed Jakarta visit.

Inevitably, when the issue of Australian naval intrusions into Indonesian waters became news, the mix became quite explosive, diplomatically speaking. The Australian naval personnel have now started transferring ‘the illegals’ onto safe boats specially purchased and pushing them towards Indonesian shores. To seek the cooperation of countries like Sri Lanka and Malaysia to prevent refugees sailing from their destinations, Australia is making them a gift of naval vessels to intercept ‘boat people’ heading towards Australia. Its intent is not only to enlist the cooperation of regional countries in Australia’s ‘stop the boats’ policy but also, it would appear, to isolate Indonesia as a “recalcitrant’, a term Paul Keating, a former Australian prime minister, used against Malaysia’s former prime minister Mahathir in a different context.

Australia-Indonesia relations have been difficult at the best of times and when Jakarta senses that Canberra is railroading its strategic objectives, ignoring Indonesian sensitivities, the going gets even tougher. The Australian experience of acting tough during East Timor’s liberation struggle, with Indonesia losing territory, is inspirational and might be a useful guide to deal with Indonesia. It appears that, despite all the huffing and puffing from the Indonesian government, Australia might temporarily achieve the objective of ‘stopping the boats’, as their flow has already turned into a trickle and, in some months, stopped altogether. But in the process, the resultant national humiliation for Indonesia will become a hot issue in the forthcoming elections in that country, further damaging their bilateral relationship.

Indonesia is the world’s largest Muslim country of about 250 million people and Australia needs its cooperation over a wide range of issues, besides immigration control, like drugs, terrorism and so on. To be snubbed and humiliated by a small country like Australia with a population of about 23 million rankles and shapes national attitudes and perceptions over a period. In the meantime, the standstill from the intelligence saga of spying on President Yudhoyono, his wife and his inner circle continues. As the Chinese proverb goes: Australia and Indonesia are going through “interesting times”.

The writer is a senior journalist and academic based in Sydney, Australia. He can be reached at sushilpseth@yahoo.co.au