BY SARAH STEPHEN
Federal Labor leader Kim Beazley has made much of the fact that Indonesian President Megawati Sukarnoputri has so far refused to discuss the issue of asylum seekers with the Howard government.
During the Tampa incident, Megawati refused to return John Howard's phone calls. Then at the recent Asia-Pacific Economic Cooperation summit in Shanghai, Howard was snubbed by Megawati. He was told she was too busy to meet with him, yet she had time to meet with the leaders of South Korea, China, Singapore, Peru and New Zealand.
Beazley described the Australian delegation as "wallflowers". He said on October 23: "I have never seen an Australian prime minister go to APEC and be unable to have a conversation with the US president and the president of Indonesia. We used to run that show. Its agenda was our agenda. Its needs and concerns were reflections of our needs and concerns."
Labor blames this on what it describes as the Coalition's disengagement from the region and its de-prioritisation of good relations with Indonesia. Beazley says that Labor would be capable of doing things very differently. Yet, significantly, Beazley and ALP foreign affairs spokesperson Laurie Brereton have mentioned little about the real nature of the relationship their party had with Indonesia when it was in government between 1983 and 1996.
There are some very good reasons why Labor is keeping quiet about this period of bilateral relations with Indonesia. Labor had a "special relationship" with General Suharto's dictatorship which, in exchange for political and diplomatic support from Canberra, Australian businesses were given preferential access to lucrative markets in Indonesia. But it was a relationship forged at the expense of democracy and human rights, most particularly for the East Timorese people.
Under Labor, Australia signed the Timor Gap treaty with Indonesia to jointly extract oil and gas in the Timor Sea and refused to grant refugee status to 1600 East Timorese asylum seekers living in Australia because of the risk of embarrassing the Suharto regime. Australian troops trained Indonesian special forces in counterinsurgency techniques to defeat East Timorese liberation fighters. This shameful period is not something Labor wants the Australian people to be reminded of.
"The defeat of the Indonesian armed forces by the East Timorese national liberation movement and the international solidarity movement dealt a big blow to conservative and right-wing forces in Indonesia", Max Lane, a long-time Indonesia expert and Socialist Alliance candidate for the NSW seat of Lowe, told Green Left Weekly. "They blame this defeat, wrongly, on the Howard government. Many Indonesian elite politicians also use their criticism of the Howard government as a means of winning support among right-wing nationalist forces in Indonesian society."
Lane doesn't think that Beazley can be so categorical that the relationship with Indonesia would change under a Labor government.
"The Labor Party's image among the Indonesian elite is more positive as most elite politicians in Jakarta concentrate on the record of Hawke and Keating, both of whom worked for a close and supportive alliance with the Indonesian military. However, Beazley has indicated it will carry out the same policies as Howard: namely, the use of force against Indonesian boats bringing in refugees. Any 'honeymoon' that a Beazley ALP government might have due to memories of its Hawke-Keating days would be short-lived."
In an October 23 media interview, Beazley asserted: "We support what John Howard's doing but we've got to have more... The question's got to be asked: if they're still coming, why? And the answer is crystal clear, the answer is the relationship with Indonesia. He [Howard] won't do that [fix the relationship] by finger wagging or blame-shifting... or taking a megaphone to it, he'll only do it by sitting down, presenting the problem as a regional problem, presenting a solution that will work and presenting a picture of our mutual interests, in our mutual security, in seeking a successful outcome."
In an opinion piece in the October 25 Australian, Greg Sheridan suggests an explanation for Beazley's harping on the issue of relations with Indonesia. According to Sheridan, "having so spinelessly capitulated to the substance of Howard's brutish refugee policies he is left with nothing else to say".
In an October 23 media release, Brereton stated: "We will press for Indonesian agreement to accept the return of vessels and people who are trying to use Indonesian territory as a jumping off point to illegally enter Australia. At the same time we must do much more to help Indonesia deal with this national security, law enforcement and humanitarian challenge."
The statement outlines a plan to fund increased technical support for Indonesian law enforcement and defence authorities to disrupt people-smuggling to the tune of $10 million.
Lane disagrees that the return of boats to Indonesia is a solution: "The real solution is to seek agreement with the Indonesian government whereby the Australian government, governing a much richer country, offers assistance to Indonesia in the form of a program of assisted passage for refugees that are currently in Indonesia to come to Australia. Why not? Australia can sustain many more people than it does now."
Labor has in mind the sort of agreement which will see asylum seekers "properly processed through Indonesian camps". This implies a number of things: firstly that Indonesia would be willing to adopt a more consistent policy of detaining people trying to get to Australia, so they are forced to remain in Indonesia for processing; and that the United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees would be willing and able to undertake the processing, as Indonesia is not a signatory to the 1951 UN refugee convention.
It is far from certain that the Indonesian government would agree to such a plan, no matter how well a future Australian government "engages" with Indonesia on the issue. Sections of the military, which continues to wield substantial power, are heavily implicated in the people-smuggling trade.
Sheridan, in the same article, sets out the issue from the Indonesian government's point of view: "Indonesia has well over 1 million internally displaced domestic refugees. It remains one of the poorest countries in the world. It is facing two big secessionist movements. Its survival as a nation is by no means assured... Amid this sea of troubles, why on earth would it make it a priority to help out the Australian government?"
The Labor-Coalition bipartisan strategy fails to take account of the fact that no matter how vile and punitive Australia's laws, no matter how thorough the regional response to people-smuggling, they could never match the horror of conditions that Afghan and Iraqi asylum seekers are fleeing. People smugglers may be greedy, ruthless and willing to risk lives to cut costs, but they fulfil a need which exists because Australia, like most other rich countries, continues to narrow the avenues for refugees arriving legally.
As one corridor is closed, people smugglers will find another, perhaps more dangerous and life threatening for asylum seekers. There are already predictions that people smugglers will start to operate from Cambodia and Vietnam if Indonesia becomes more complicated.
This crisis demands a humanitarian response. Now more than ever, we must demand that the Australian government take in more refugees.