Making Waves to Help East Timor

SYDNEY, Australia —  If Prime Minister John Howard--the politician who has made a career out of riding the waves of Australian politics by hardly ever making any--turns out to be the savior of East Timor, it will be one of the most remarkable stories to come out of Asia in recent memory. Certainly someone had to do something about Indonesia’s troubled eastern province, to prevent a repeat of the horrors of 1975. That’s when pro-Jakarata forces, representing the Muslim Indonesian majority, invaded the former Portuguese colony that’s largely Christian, massacring approximately 200,000 people before annexing it.

Today, with Indonesia’s central government so weak, a resurgent independence movement in East Timor has triggered a new round of assassinations at the hands of clandestine forces opposed to separatism--and possibly backed by elements of the Indonesian armed forces.

Virtually all of these trend lines were aimed in the direction of a bloody new showdown when, in December, Australia’s owlish prime minister--the one critics say has all the pizazz of flat beer--did something out of character: He took a stand. He sent a secret letter to Indonesian President B.J. Habibie, urging him to do right by troubled East Timor. “It’s time for a change,” said Howard, characterizing his letter in a recent interview in his Sydney office, just days before leaving for a hastily arranged mission to Bali this week. It’s high time for Indonesians to accept, he added, “that there should be some act of self-determination, self-expression by the people of Timor.”

Among the people who took mindful notice of Howard’s unexpected ploy was Habibie. It was only a month later that the leader of the world’s fourth most populated nation stunned the world with the announcement that his government would offer East Timor an autonomy vote.

Until recently, Australia, a largely Anglo-Saxon nation of 19 million and the closest neighbor of East Timor, in many respects might have been on the moon as far as the Indonesian territory’s independence forces were concerned. In fact, in 1975 during the Cold War, the Australian government virtually looked the other way when government forces hacked the Timorese separatist movement to death.

But with the Evil Empire now history, Howard can reflect the decency of Australia, which in recent years has taken in many Asian immigrants and has even offered to accept 4,000 Kosovo refugees. “We’re not an Asian country, that’s all nonsense,” says the former banker, who has been prime minister since 1996. “We’re a nation with Western European roots; we speak the English language. We have a significant, magnificent Asian population, but we’ve moved on from the controversy of whether we’re in Asia or part of Asia.”

Asian or not, the Australian public appears to be backing Howard’s Indonesian intervention. His approach is devoid of shouts and threats; and he rejects any analogy of East Timor to Kosovo: “That’s historically wrong, it’s over the top. There isn’t the same tribal bitterness.” But, he conceded, “If Indonesia gets into further great difficulty, then it has quite an impact on the whole region. It’s the largest Muslim country in the world.”

In Bali, Howard re-endorsed plans for a U.N.-supervised plebiscite on East Timor’s future in the summer, pledged that his country would provide a large contingent of U.N. overseers, offered to pony up many more millions to see that event transpire peacefully and obtained Indonesia’s OK to open a consulate in Dili, East Timor’s capital. Notably, though, he failed to persuade the weak Habibie to issue a public promise to disarm the warring groups of East Timor, including pro-Indonesia militiamen blamed for a recent series of atrocities.

For such a trick, even the muscle of Australia’s top politician seems not to be enough. Does Washington ever listen to you? I asked. “Well, they have on one or two occasions,” he responded, chuckling. “We have shared values and all of that. I must say that in my personal dealings with President Clinton, certainly in this region, he’s always listened.”

But Howard knows America is now preoccupied elsewhere. He says: “I would have to say that in the global reach of American foreign policy, there’s still a little bit of detail deficit in this part of the world. This is not meant critically of the United States; this is just a fact of life.”

So, before the late summer U.N. plebiscite on East Timor’s future, Howard will go to the United States to get Clinton’s ear. For the time being, though, he has done what he thinks he ought. “We are now quietly punching above our weight,” says Howard. Whatever its ultimate impact, Australia’s foreign policy, even if it lacks a knockout punch, offers much more than anything it threw Indonesia’s way before.

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Times contributing editor Tom Plate’s column now runs Wednesdays. The full text of the Howard interview is at https://www.asiamedia.ucla.edu, the Web page of the Asia Pacific Media Network.