The raid by police on the Asia-Pacific Solidarity Conference in Jakarta on June 8, the brutal militia attack which followed it and the detention of 32 foreign participants has revealed two disturbing returns to the past.
It has revealed that the real motive behind mounting threats to the presidency of Abdurrahman Wahid is the desire by those who ruled Indonesia during Suharto's 33 years as president to get back into power.
It also revealed that the Australian government has quietly slipped back into its similarly long wrong policy (in John Howard's own words from 18 months ago) of accommodating the anti-democratic Indonesian ruling elite as if the 1998 ouster of Suharto or the 1999 East Timor crisis had never happened.
Indonesian democracy is in serious trouble. Democratic and progressive forces around the world cannot remain neutral, they must take sides against the anti-democratic and deeply corrupt New Order forces, who are gathered behind the push for vice-president Megawati Sukarnoputri to replace Wahid as president.
While maintaining their political independence, the progressive and democratic forces in Indonesia are giving Wahid their critical support in this struggle, because the interests of the great majority of Indonesians will be seriously set back if the anti-Wahid forces prevail.
The People's Democratic Party, one of the components of the newly-formed National Coalition Against New Order, has urged Wahid to mobilise all supporters of democratic reform and to dissolve parliament and call new elections. The coalition has been at the forefront of organising popular protests, even in the last week, against the reactionaries.
Given the urgency of the situation, the knife edge that Indonesia teeters on, the stance of the Australian government is nothing short of shameful.
The federal government gave credence to the police raid on the conference. Even as 20 Australian citizens, including a four-year-old girl, were being wrongfully detained by Indonesian police, it persisted in issuing statements that implied that the police raid was based on the visa irregularities of the foreign participants in the conference.
It was only when political pressure was brought to bear on Canberra, and when the Indonesian media and Indonesian immigration officials had made clear statements that it was the police who were in the wrong, that Australia's Department of Foreign Affairs began to change its tune.
Even the Murdoch and Fairfax press, normally far from critical of Australian policy on Indonesia, editorialised against the federal government's stance during this affair.
In his comment in the June 12 Sydney Morning Herald, Hamish McDonald asked: Did our officials have to give an implicit OK to the police action? Especially when Indonesian human rights groups, and the Jakarta Post in an editorial yesterday, have condemned the raid as an attack on freedom of expression and assembly.
On June 14 the Australian editorial commented: Whether the police were simply mistaken in their belief that the foreigners attending the conference were violating their visa conditions or looking for an excuse to use their muscle power, Australia should demand an apology.
The excessive use of force, the prolonged detention of participants and the delay in informing immigration officials demands that Australia takes the Indonesian police to task.
The Department of Foreign Affairs should also explain why it accepted the police version that the participants were guilty of visa violations when some Indonesian immigration officials say this was never the case. The cause of democratisation in Indonesia will not be served by Australia turning a blind eye to human rights violations.
Indonesia's minister for foreign affairs and its minister for justice have now both expressed their regret at the incident.
But has the Australian government changed its position? All the evidence suggest otherwise.
The Australian government is obviously still trying to cultivate a special relationship with undemocratic elites in Indonesia even when this puts its foreign policy in relation to Indonesia to the right of that of the US State Department and other Western governments.
In doing so it acts against the clear wishes of the people of Australia and Indonesia.