3. MATERIALES Y MÉTODOS EXPERIMENTALES.
3.2 Métodos experimetales.
3.2.8 Operaciones con ratones.
Relations with Indonesia have been a major target of liberal and Left-wing critiques of Australian foreign policy. The murderous rise of the Suharto regime and its ongoing suppression of political freedoms were starkly at odds with the common sense of liberal Australian political values. The invasion of East Timor not only added to Suharto’s obvious crimes, but served as a focal point for wider criticism of Australia’s support for the regime, which until then had been muted.231
Eventually, Australia’s support for Suharto drew a withering moral critique from a variety of positions. This has included some conservative interest in East Timor. For example, Glover argued in the leading conservative publication Quadrant that
the treatment of the East Timorese by the Indonesians should outrage all Australians concerned about human rights, not just those on the left, but liberals and conservatives as well.232
Lansell Taudevin, a former clergyman and aid worker in East Timor, wrote in 1999 that
The reign of terror unleashed on the East Timorese has cried out for intervention since 1975. It took until 1999 before the world discovered that there was a moral stance required…233
More consistently though, critiques of Australia’s policy towards Indonesia and East Timor have come from the liberal and Left-nationalist positions. The tone was set by
229
Mackie, ‘Australia’s relations with Indonesia: Principles and polices, I,’ p. 4.
230
Ibid., pp. 5-9. See also Mackie, ‘Australia’s relations with Indonesia: Principles and polices, II,’ pp. 175-178.
231
See Catley and Dugis, Australian Indonesian relations, p. 153.
232
Dennis Glover, ‘East Timor: A challenge to conservatives,’ Quadrant 39, no. 12 (1995), p. 30.
233
Dunn’s important 1983 work.234 His critique was simple but effective, arguing that Whitlam had abandoned Australia’s
responsibility towards a small and vulnerable neighbour, one to whom we had a debt to discharge. He failed to take into account the predictable humanitarian consequences of Indonesian aggression against the colony.235 Similarly, Burchill criticises Australia’s support of the Suharto regime in general, commenting that
The moral conscience of the outside world was not just undisturbed by the slaughter. An ethical concern about what happened was portrayed by some as a sign of weakness…236
Burchill goes on to argue that ‘Absolving Suharto of his crimes is a moral crime in itself.’237 Kingsbury likewise denounces Australia’s role in covering up the deaths of possibly hundreds of thousands of civilians in East Timor, as well as broader
corruption and human rights abuses, in order to ‘placate’ the Suharto regime.238 A recurring theme in critical accounts of the relationship has been the idea of Australian ‘appeasement’ or ‘acquiescence’ towards Indonesia’s human rights abuses, particularly the invasion of East Timor.239 This line of argument has effectively exposed the moral vacuousness of the realist approach. But as a critical
234
Dunn, A people betrayed. This work was republished as Dunn, East Timor: A rough passage to independence.
235
Dunn, A people betrayed, p. ix. See also Dunn, East Timor: A rough passage to independence, pp. 112-115, 125-126.
236
Burchill, ‘Absolving the dictator,’ p. 25. See also Burchill, ‘East Timor, Australia and Indonesia,’ pp. 170-171.
237
Burchill, ‘Absolving the dictator,’ p. 29.
238
Damien Kingsbury, ‘The difference between neighbours and friends,’ Arena Magazine 65 (2003), p. 37.
239
Examples of authors using this approach include Jim Aubrey, ‘Canberra: Jakarta’s Trojan horse in East Timor,’ in The East Timor question: The struggle for independence from Indonesia, ed. Paul Hainsworth and Stephen McCloskey, London, I.B. Tauris, 2000, p. 284; John Birmingham,
‘Appeasing Jakarta: Australia’s complicity in the East Timor tragedy,’ Quarterly Essay, no. 2 (2001), pp. 2-3; Burchill, ‘East Timor, Australia and Indonesia,’ p. 181; Matthew Jardine, East Timor: Genocide in paradise, Tuscon, Odonian Press, 1995, p. 45; Jolliffe, East Timor, p. 258; Leaver, ‘Introduction: Australia, East Timor and Indonesia,’ p. 3; William Maley, ‘Australia and the East Timor crisis: Some critical comments,’ Australian Journal of International Affairs 54, no. 2 (2000), pp. 151-152; Salla, ‘Australian foreign policy and East Timor,’ p. 164; David Scott, Last flight out of Dili: memoirs of an accidental activist in the triumph of East Timor, North Melbourne, Pluto Press Australia, 2005, p. 8; Tiffen, Diplomatic deceits: Government, media and East Timor, p. 4. Dunn uses the more nuanced term ‘accommodation’, Dunn, East Timor: A rough passage to independence, p. iv. In a similar vein is the idea of a US ‘green light’ for the Indonesian human rights abuse. See Noam Chomsky, ‘East Timor, the United States, and international responsibility: ‘Green Light’ for war crimes,’ in Bitter flowers, sweet flowers: East Timor, Indonesia, and the world community, ed. Richard Tanter, Mark Selden, and Stephen R. Shalom, Sydney, Pluto Press Australia, 2001.
tool, the idea of appeasement is severely limited, implicitly resting on several flawed assumptions.240
Crucially, the term ‘appeasement’ implies that Australia simply gave in to
Indonesian demands. But this downplays the realists’ positive embrace of Suharto as a means of attaining Australia’s national interests. As we have seen, Australia did not merely accept Suharto’s rise as inevitable, but actually favoured him as a solution to radicalism in Indonesia, and supported him whenever possible. Likewise, while maintaining relations with Indonesia was one policy goal in supporting the invasion of East Timor, of equal importance was Australia’s own desire to avoid the creation of a potentially unstable neighbour. When Indonesia’s policy was not yet fixed, Australia encouraged Suharto to invade.
Once the positive goals of Australian policy are ignored, ‘appeasement’ can appear as a self-defeating mistake on the part of policy makers. At the time of East Timor’s independence ballot, Kingsbury and Burchill wrote
The slaughter in East Timor also represents an enormous moral and strategic failure for Australia. Three decades of obsequious fawning to and
appeasement of Jakarta have resulted in the collapse of Canberra’s foreign and defence policy.241
This reflects the general liberal view that a morally based foreign policy is also more rational, as discussed in the preceding chapter. But because it obscures certain aspects of Australia’s policy, the terminology of appeasement and acquiescence is not unique to critical accounts.242 Goldsworthy, for example, writes that Australia ‘acquiesce[d] in the Indonesian incorporation of nearby East Timor, with what turned out to be tragic results’,243 which minimises Australia’s active role in encouraging the invasion. Hirst likewise embraces the term ‘appeasement’ from a conservative
240
For some similar considerations, see Clinton Fernandes, Reluctant saviour: Australia, Indonesia and the independence of East Timor, Melbourne, Scribe Publications, 2004, pp. 23-25.
241
Damien Kingsbury and Scott Burchill, ‘Stop appeasing the Jakarta lobby,’ The Australian Financial Review, 15 September 1999, p. 18. For other examples, see Birmingham, ‘Appeasing Jakarta: Australia’s complicity in the East Timor tragedy,’ pp. 63-64; Jolliffe, East Timor, p. 258; Tiffen, Diplomatic deceits: Government, media and East Timor.
242
See Nevins, A not-so-distant horror, p. 16.
243
perspective, with its implications that there was no alternative to accepting the Indonesian invasion of East Timor.244
Moreover, a critique of Australian policy which opposes ‘appeasement’ can also pave the way for a strident Australian nationalism. An historical analogy with the British policy of appeasement towards Hitler, which was eventually swept away by the Tory and arch-imperialist Winston Churchill, is inherently risky for Left-wing thinkers. It can imply that Australian policy on East Timor did not truly reflect ‘Australian’ values. Birmingham invokes the precedent of the appeasement of Hitler to condemn Australia’s ‘moral cowardice’ in its support for Suharto, and that this
in fact undermined [Australia’s strategic] interests by creating a totally unsustainable paradigm for a relationship between a liberal democracy and a para-corporate military dictatorship.245
Birmingham goes on to celebrate the fact that Australia’s military strength means there is no need to ignore human rights abuses in Indonesia when framing foreign policy.246 Similarly, for Haigh,
Going into East Timor [in 1999] was never just a matter of peacekeeping, it was also a matter of taking on the TNI [Indonesian Armed Forces] and fronting them down… [Australian General Cosgrove] demonstrated that he wasn’t prepared to stand for any nonsense – a thing which Australian politicians and their representatives overseas had failed to do for 25 years.247
Dunn argues that the underlying problem is ‘our lack of confidence in our capacity to behave as a truly independent nation.’248
But other than the actions of the Australian state itself, what evidence can there be for the existence of underlying ‘Australian’ values in foreign policy, which have been hidden due to national subservience? Appeal can be made to the opposition of the Australian ‘public’ or ‘people’ to government policy on East Timor,249 however
244
John Hirst, ‘In defence of appeasement: Indonesia and Australian foreign policy,’ Quadrant 40, no. 4 (1996), pp. 10-11.
245
Birmingham, ‘Appeasing Jakarta: Australia’s complicity in the East Timor tragedy,’ p. 2.
246
Ibid., pp. 65-80. Birmingham’s ambivalent response to Australian militarism is also displayed in John Birmingham, ‘A time for war: Australia as military power,’ Quarterly Essay, no. 20 (2005).
247
Bruce Haigh, Pillars of fear, Sydney, Otford Press, 2001, p. 71.
248
Dunn, East Timor: A rough passage to independence, p. iii.
249
See Birmingham, ‘Appeasing Jakarta: Australia’s complicity in the East Timor tragedy,’ p. 3; Burchill, ‘East Timor, Australia and Indonesia,’ pp. 176-177; Dunn, East Timor: A rough passage to independence, p. iv; Kingsbury, ‘The difference between neighbours and friends,’ pp. 36-37.
this then requires a more thorough analysis of the relation between the state,
nationalism and domestic political conflicts. These questions, though, have remained under-theorised in critical accounts of the Australia-Indonesia relationship. As examined in Chapter Six, this had important implications for the possibility of a critical response to Australia’s change of policy towards East Timor in 1999. It also prevents liberal critiques from adequately accounting for the dominance of what they consider a mistaken policy. Usually they have blamed the ‘Indonesian lobby’, or ‘Jakarta lobby’, a group of bureaucrats and academics who argue that it is in Australia’s national interest to support the Indonesian government’s domestic and international policy.250 Such a group of policy makers has certainly existed, starting from the decision to support Indonesian independence, and solidifying into a more permanent form after Suharto took power.251 But as an explanation for policy, the idea of the ‘Jakarta lobby’ only poses further questions, such as why such a lobby has arisen, and whose interests they serve. Moreover, it must be recognised that the intellectual and structural coherence of the lobby began to break down with
Suharto’s fall from power, and hence its impact on policy waned.
Indonesia, East Timor and Australian imperialism
At times, realist rhetoric can fetishise certain concepts, such as the need for stability, or the importance of the relationship with Indonesia, making them seem like goals in themselves, rather than means to an end. As McQueen writes,
commentators retreat into an operational code where terms such as ‘stability’ gain a mystical significance. ‘Stability’ is but one of several clichés clogging the gutters of international relations.252
Other such clichés include ‘relationship’ and ‘security’. A critique of realism needs to avoid fetishising these terms further, and instead explain their relation to the real world interests of political actors.
250
Neither term is completely satisfactory. ‘Indonesia lobby’ leaves its users open to charges of being ‘anti-Indonesian’, and in any case does not capture the point that the lobby only supports a tiny elite within Indonesia. ‘Jakarta lobby’ is meant to address this shortcoming (see Fernandes, Reluctant saviour, p. 19.), but is hardly more precise.
251
See Brian Brunton, ‘Australia’s Indonesia lobby observed,’ Inside Indonesia, no. 11 (1987), pp. 23-24; Fernandes, Reluctant saviour, pp. 10-12.
252
Burke ultimately fails to do this, although he provides many insights into the
ideological basis of Whitlam’s support for Suharto.253 He writes that under Whitlam the drive for a new national identity fused with much older – and more
coercive – ways of thinking about security. The fate of the Timorese people hinged on how that security was interpreted and achieved.254
The policy on Timor displayed
an essential continuity with the past – the rhetorical abandonment of racism and a new sensitivity to Asian aspirations was a mere gloss over a power politics structure which had itself been violently achieved.255
This is true enough. But what those who exercised power within this structure hoped to achieve remains a mystery. The discourse of security appears to be self-sufficient and impenetrable. Government policy seems incredible, ‘tearing asunder the already tenuous principle linking language with the world’, such that it can only be met with ‘disbelief’ by its critics.256 Occasional references to processes such as ‘the drive to accelerate the isomorphy of capital’257 do not redress this weakness.
Fernandes employs a more grounded approach.258 His explanation of the relation between the Jakarta lobby, the Australian state more broadly and Australian capitalism, is worth quoting at length:
the Jakarta lobby has not hijacked Australian policy; rather, it operates in harmony with it. There is a strategic convergence between its aims and the ‘national interest’ – unavoidable in capitalist economies – of guaranteeing political and economic control of the Indonesian archipelago… [successive governments supported Suharto] not because they were hypnotized or tricked by a Jakarta lobby, but because the Australian state and much of Australian capital had come to a carefully considered decision that support for the Indonesian military was the best course of action.259
253
Anthony Burke, In fear of security: Australia’s invasion anxiety, Annandale, Pluto Press Australia, 2001, pp. 133-153. For a similar analysis, see S. Philpott, ‘Fear of the dark: Indonesia and the
Australian national imagination,’ Australian Journal of International Affairs 55, no. 3 (2001).
254
Burke, In fear of security, p. 148.
255
Ibid., pp. 152-153. Emphasis in the original
256
Ibid., p. 141.
257
Ibid., p. 166.
258
Fernandes, Reluctant saviour, pp. 21-25.
259
But Fernandes’ formulation does not clarify the aims of Australian capitalism in supporting Suharto. Investment stability and access to labour and resources are certainly general concerns for the capitalist state,260 but as we have seen Indonesia is not particularly important to Australia in this respect. Politically and strategically, it cannot really be said that Australia ‘controls’ the Indonesian archipelago, and Fernandes’ argument that Australia desires ‘an Indonesia that is non-communist and integrated into the Western sphere of influence’261 is outdated. Ultimately, Fernandes continues to fetishise specific aspects of Australia’s foreign policy, such as anti- communism or the relationship with Indonesia. This has important ramifications for his analysis of the events surrounding East Timor’s independence, as discussed in Chapters Four and Six.
What is missing from Fernandes’ account is a more substantial theory of
imperialism. Such a theory was outlined in Chapter One. It was argued there that Australia finds itself inextricably part of a global imperialist system, that is, a system of generalised competition between major states, in which economic and strategic aspects are mutually dependent but irreducible. For Australia, the Indonesian
archipelago, stretching from the Malay peninsular to the Southwest Pacific islands, is the most crucial region where this imperialist competition plays itself out.
This importance is not due to direct Australian economic interests in Indonesia, which are not substantial enough to warrant the angst of Australian policy makers over relations with one country. Australia’s vital trade routes to Northeast Asia do traverse the Indonesian archipelago. But in relations with Indonesia itself, even this appears as a strategic concern. East Timor is of even less economic importance to Australia. Several authors have argued that Australia’s desire for to access oil and gas resources in the Timor Sea were the prime motivation in supporting the Indonesian invasion.262 However, the documentary record does not reveal these interests to be a major concern, although they were noted from time to time.263 Nor is 260 Ibid., p. 22. 261 Ibid., p. 5. 262
For example, George Junus Aditjondro, Is oil thicker than blood? A study of oil companies’ interests and western complicity in Indonesia’s annexation of East Timor, Commack, Nova Science Publishers, 1999, pp. 1, 104-105; Jardine, East Timor, p. 45; John Taylor, East Timor: The price of freedom, London, Zed books, 1999, pp. 75, 170.
263
For example, ‘Document 3, Policy planning paper, 3 May 1974,’ p. 52; ‘Document 169, Cablegram to Canberra, 17 August 1975,’ p. 315; ‘Document 389, Submission to Peacock, 22 December 1975,’ in Documents on Australian Foreign Policy: Australia and the Incorporation of
there any intrinsic reason why an independent East Timor need interfere with these interests, as subsequent developments have shown (see Chapter Five). Nor is there any evidence that Australian or foreign oil corporations attempted to exert pressure over the issue. In this instance, the Australian state’s concern was primarily strategic, rather than directly economic. While subsequently the Australian state naturally attempted to derive maximum economic benefit from Indonesia’s occupation of East Timor, this was not what initially drove Australia’s support of the invasion.
Instead, Australia’s dominant concern in the Indonesian archipelago is strategic. Indonesia itself is no threat. But, as the realists argue, any great power threat to Australia must come through this region. Australian concern for ‘stability’ in and ‘good relations’ with Indonesia ultimately stem from the need to prevent hostile powers gaining a foothold from which they might threaten the Australian mainland or its lines of communications. At times of relative calm in the region, such as during the 1980s and 1990s, Australia’s security concerns can come to seem like paranoia. But Australian policy makers simply cannot dismiss the possibility that Australia will be drawn into a re-eruption of conflict between the major powers in Asia.
East Timor has been a particularly troubling aspect of this problem, both as a site of imperialist competition in itself, and because of its potential to destabilise the rest of the archipelago. The territory’s fate during World War Two is a clear example of how a situation of generalised imperialist conflict means that mutual strategic fears can become self-fulfilling. East Timor was not invaded because of any actual strategic importance, but only the mutual perception of such importance. Yet both Australia and Japan acted logically given the assumption that they were part of a system of unlimited state competition. It is not surprising that the Japanese reluctance to offend Portugal was discounted by Australia, given the latter’s (mistaken)