[Kabar-indonesia] Australia's Jakarta Lobby, Truth and W. Papua: 2+2 Can=5

[Joyo3]

Online Opinion [Australia's e-journal of social and
political debate] Thursday, 16 November 2006

Truth, West Papua and Indonesia: 2+2 Really Can=5

By Adam Henry

The enigmatic Jakarta Lobby is "an informal group of like-
minded people who regard Indonesia as a special case". It is
not a clandestine conspiracy, but an alliance of elites
although some would deny the group's very existence.

The Jakarta Lobby operates from a position of privilege
within the Australian establishment. Pro-Jakarta advocates
have long recognised the dangerous potential for human
rights violations in West Papua to become a major diplomatic
issue. Fearful of being placed on the ethical back foot, as
they had been with East Timor, such advocates have been
emerging at regular intervals from within the diplomatic
establishment to deliver their message.

The recent Lowy Institute report Pitfalls of Papua, and its
endorsement by Paul Kelly (The Australian, October 7, 2006)
are but the latest outcomes of the Pro-Jakarta PR campaign.

Cunningly intelligent Pro-Jakarta adherents must condemn the
very notion of West Papuan self-determination, but also
publicly refrain from asking the most basic human rights
questions over the situation in West Papua.

One of the most significant examples of the Pro-Jakarta
call-to-arms was a speech made earlier in 2006 by the
Australian Ambassador to the US, Dennis Richardson. Its
significance is all the more enhanced when one realises that
the very top echelons of the Department of Foreign Affairs
must have vetted its contents.

I believe that the ambassador's speech outlined the tactics
that would be used to defend the unrepresentative vision of
Australian-Indonesian relations constructed by the exclusive
elites of the Jakarta Lobby

The recent past - a call to arms

On March 8, 2006 the Ambassador Richardson who is a former
director-general of ASIO, addressed The US-Indonesia
Society: a group founded in 1994 to counter negative
perceptions after repeated TNI (Indonesian National Defence
Forces) human rights violations in East Timor.

The powerfully connected lobbyists of the US-Indonesia
Society have been described as Indonesia's "second Embassy
in Washington". The former director general of ASIO
ridiculed the existence of any Australian Jakarta lobby. He
said only "some Australian commentators" maintain the
existence of a Jakarta Lobby "who conspire together to
pervert Australia's national interests (this includes) all
government officials who have either served in Indonesia, or
who have worked on Indonesia in Canberra."
To deflect criticism over human rights and corruption
concerns Richardson placed Jakarta in the frontline in the
fight against terrorism and praised the transformation of
Indonesia into an apparently utopian example of
democratisation and cultural tolerance.

Indonesia, in some people's view, becomes a philosophical
ideal beyond the cognitive capacity of critics. Even the
subtext of the word "Indonesia" becomes an unquantifiable
virtue "… beyond government".

Therefore no matter what the situation in West Papua, or for
that matter other eastern islands of the Indonesian
archipelago, Richardson's position means that our political
support should never "… be allowed to be held hostage to
issues such as (Indonesia's) corruption and (West) Papua."

Richardson's commitment to the values of democratic
liberties struggling to take root in Indonesia is required
to balance the negative "voice of critics (which are) always
the loudest". He implies that he, and the audience, are the
true oppositional grouping tasked with rescuing Jakarta from
policies diluted by unsympathetic foreign policy critics.

In the audience was the Indonesian Ambassador to the US,
Sudjadnan Parnohadin-Ingrat, who was previously the
Ambassador to Australia. Sudjadnan was the secretary to the
Indonesian Task Force during the 1999 United Nations
independence ballot in East Timor.

Richardson's pleas for unquestioning support for Indonesia
are essential given the manner in which Indonesian elites
such as Sudjadnan make use of the critical silence from
Australia.

Questioned by The Washington Diplomat on Indonesian human
rights Sudjadnan responded to an estimate that the TNI "…
may have killed up to 200,000 Timorese during Indonesian
rule". Sudjadun made no effort to dispute the figure seeing
them as mere casualties of a secessionist war. As he said "…
If (only) about 200,000 out of 220 million people (wanted to
secede) I don't think this is very serious".

I believe East Timor under Indonesian rule (1975-1999) is
comparable to the Killing Fields of Cambodia. There can be
no doubt that intelligent men like Richardson are not
ignorant of statistics. After independence in 1999 a UN
report concluded "… human rights violations were massive,
systematic and widespread … starvation, arbitrary
executions, routinely inflicted horrific torture, and the
organized sexual enslavement and sexual torture of Timorese
women were the hallmarks of the Indonesian authority and
183,000 est. Timorese starved or died of illness as a
consequence of TNI-Kopassus actions during Indonesian rule."

When a powerful man like Richardson holds that nothing
should hinder the Indonesian dream, we like Sudjadnan,
possess enough understanding of the English language to
comprehend the underlining significance i.e. issues like
corruption and human rights are mere sideshows.

Richardson's style of commitment to Indonesia ignores the
validity of human rights concerns over the actions of the
TNI. Instead of using his speech to separate himself from
Sudjadnan's East Timor 2 + 2 = 5 proposition I believe that,
maybe unwittingly, Richardson urges unquestioning and
principled support of Jakarta Lobby policies. Many efforts
are  now being made to build on his lead.

The present - the Jakarta lobby attacks

Paul Kelly wrote a characteristically expert opinion piece
in The Australian (See "A new diplomacy over Papua", October
7, 2006). Kelly enthusiastically endorsed the Lowy Institute
Report, The Pitfalls of Papua, as the virtual final word on
the West Papua debate.

The main purpose of the article would appear to have been to
discredit grass roots activists and ordinary citizens
motivated by the norms of international law, a concern for
human rights and the ethical quality of Australian
diplomacy.

According to Kelly these are the ignorant people who might
be actually moved to feel sympathy for the plight of Papuans
suffering Indonesian military oppression. As I read it in
Kelly's assessment they are a clear threat to the
unquestioned goal of good relations with Jakarta.

He parrots Rodd McGibbon's conclusion that genocide cannot
be used to describe policies employed by the Indonesians
against Papuans.

Despite Kelly's ringing endorsement of the report it is
interesting to note what he failed to analyse. Rodd McGibbon
at least concedes that there has been a systematic pattern
of human rights violations by Indonesian security forces
since the 1960's.

To place this into perspective Ed McWilliams, a retired US
Senior Foreign Service Officer, believes, "… a death toll of
100,000 (in West Papua) is entirely consistent with the
savage record of this institution (TNI). The murder rate was
augmented in the 1970s by provision of OV-10 Bronco
aircraft, which were employed against civilians in both East
Timor and West Papua." Even in the absence of the smoking
gun of genocide, the Indonesian human rights record in that
province is abysmal.

Kelly rightly points out there are differences between East
Timor and West Papua that deserve analysis, but again fails
to analyse his conclusions correctly.

Due to the presence of the Freeport Mine the scale of TNI
corruption and business interests in the forestry sector is
much greater than in East Timor. The two nationalist
movements also differ in structure, unity and cohesiveness.
The ethnic and linguistic diversity of Papuans is a factor.
In common though is the reality of human rights violations.
This commonality is not due to the loud and unsympathetic
critics, but in my view to the inability of the TNI to not
kill reluctant Indonesian citizens in large numbers.

Rewriting the past - the need to forget

The Jakarta Lobby argued for 25 years of the unending
benefits of an Indonesian East Timor. Human rights concerns
were dismissed as exaggerations or just ignored. When Paul
Keating visited Jakarta in 1991 he praised the rise of
Suharto's "New Order" government as the most beneficial
event to Australian security since World War II.The 1965
massacres that established the New Order were then
presumably beneficial in much the same way as Kokoda.

In 1965 American embassy officials, with the help of the
CIA, compiled lists of suspected high-ranking communists
within Indonesia that were handed to the Indonesian army.
According to the CIA, 1965 was one of greatest massacres and
significant events of the second half of the 20th century to
be compared with Stalin's purges, the mass murder of the
Nazis during World War II and the Maoists in the early
1950's.

Such was the carnage that the US Embassy advised Washington
that it did "not know whether the real figure is closer to
100,000 or 1 million (dead) but believed it wiser to err on
the side of lower estimates, especially when questioned by
the press".

The US attitude toward the mass killings was indifferent.
Howard Federspiel formerly of the Bureau of Intelligence &
Research (US State Department) remembered that: "No one
cared, as long as they were communists. "No one was getting
very worked up about it".

Hundreds and thousands of political prisoners (Tapols) were
also jailed in the years after 1965-66. Historian Gabriel
Kolko compared 1965 with the Nazis during World War II, and
historian Peter Dale Scott has argued that the communist
coup myth rests on many sources with "prominent CIA
connections".

At the end of the bloodletting the Australian Prime Minister
Harold Holt stated, "With 500,000 to a million Communist
sympathisers knocked off. I think it is safe to assume a
reorientation has taken place." At least this truthfully
expressed the scale of death required to create the
preferred western political climate of stability in
Indonesia.

Keating's speech made no reference to the historical
realities of 1965, but it may be speculated that Suharto
understood clearly. Journalist Glen Milne (The Australian,
April 25, 1992) saw that "… Keating had passed the first
test of his leadership, successfully driving Australian-
Indonesian relations beyond the policy straight jacket of
East Timor".

Australian journalists continued to be supportive of the
regime but a year later Suharto was overthrown by a
widespread citizen reform movement.

Political language - it's logic Jim, but not as we know it

Critics of the Jakarta Lobby were labelled anti-Indonesian,
ignorant or just garden-variety racists. Such is the Lobby
group's mentality that NGO's, human rights activists, the
Catholic Church, critical media reportage and even Portugal
were roundly condemned by the group for the violence
perpetrated by the Indonesian military throughout the 80's
and 90's in Timor.

Two Dili massacres occurred in November 1991 and the
commentaries of Pro-Jakarta advocates just demonstrated
their extreme political language and mentality.
The death toll was actively minimised while the second
massacre was ignored. Greg Sheridan and Richard Woolcott, a
former Ambassador to Indonesia, actually blamed Portugal for
provoking the atrocity.

Former ANU Economics Professor Heinz Arndt lamented in The
Australian, "that the massacre was a tragedy, not because of
the loss of life but because it inflamed anti-Indonesian
hate campaigns in Australia".

Such commentaries seemingly implied that the unarmed dead
were an extreme anti-Indonesian stunt by Timorese, who
selfishly placed themselves in the path of innocent
Indonesian automatic gunfire. The entire event of course
staged solely for the domestic benefit of those meddlesome
Australian do gooders who sympathised with the plight of the
East Timorese.

In regard to 1965, Aceh, East Timor and now West Papua, the
Jakarta Lobby lack the moral courage in their ethical
position to acknowledge that one must accept murder and
atrocity so long as it brings about a potential climate of
advantageous diplomatic relations with Jakarta.

To be unquestioning of the merits of the Jakarta Lobby
approach to Indonesia is to suspend belief in logic and to
obscure human suffering. To be critical of the Indonesian
military for its documented and appalling human rights
record is not anti-Indonesian. Its urgent reform is required
as much for ordinary Indonesians, and their fledgling
democracy, as is for the future of human rights in the
eastern Indonesian islands.

When George Orwell noted "Political language is designed to
make lies sound truthful and murder respectable, and to give
an appearance of solidity to pure wind" he highlighted the
ethical blackhole of the so-called necessary or noble lies
used to pursue short-term political gain.

People who support such tactics demonstrate the ongoing
wisdom of Orwell's philosophical insights.

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Joyo Indonesia News Service
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