Arrogance and Fear: Australia’s Fraught Relationship With Indonesia.

AUSTRALIA’S RELATIONSHIP with Indonesia has always been a fraught combination of arrogance and fear. From the moment the colonial Dutch forces were defeated by Indonesian nationalists in 1949 the policies of successive Australian Governments have swung wildly between treating their huge northern neighbour as either a dangerous giant to be placated and appeased, or a corrupt cabal of Javanese merchant-generals to be bought and sold according to Australia’s long-term interests.

As the Cold War deepened in the 1950s, Indonesia’s founding president, “Bung” (Brother) Sukano, was forced to steer an ever more dangerous course between the million-strong Communist Party of Indonesia (PKI) and the ambitious young nationalist officers of the Indonesian Armed Forces. Canberra’s concern at the possible emergence of yet another mammoth Asian communist regime (the PKI was second only to the Chinese in terms of both its confidence and size) led the Australians to align themselves ever more closely with Washington’s fast-firming commitment to putting an end to both the PKI and Sukano’s “erratic” (read independent and non-aligned) foreign policy.

In 1965 (“The Year of Living Dangerously”) the Indonesian generals struck, unleashing an orgy of bloodletting against the PKI. Utilising fanatical Muslim death squads and equipped with lists of targets helpfully supplied to them by the Central Intelligence Agency, the military plotters – led by the Army Chief, General Suharto – butchered somewhere between 500,000 and a million PKI members and supporters.

Its primal fears of Asia’s hordes allayed, Australian foreign policy fell effortlessly in step with the marching tunes of its new imperial master in Washington. With Indonesia’s communists slaughtered, the United States was now free to unleash the full force of its military might on the communist insurgents in Vietnam.

Over the course of the following decade the Australians distinguished themselves as the most servile followers of US military and foreign policy in Asia. Thousands of young Australian conscripts were sent to fight alongside hundreds of thousands of conscripts from the USA. They brought with them that curious mixture of vicious anti-Asian racism and Catholic-inspired anti-communism that has long constituted Australia’s distinctive contribution to the history of Anglo-Saxon imperialism.

By the mid-1970s, however, the anti-imperialist tide was running at the full. Not only did the nations of Indo-China finally shrug-off the burdens of Western Imperialism, but so, too, did the peoples of the Portuguese Empire. Mozambique and Angola joined the ranks of independent African states and for a few brief weeks so did the people of the former Portuguese colony of East Timor.

General Suharto was having none of it and in 1975 he ordered his generals to invade and annex the one, tiny and powerless portion of the Indonesian archipelago that Jakarta did not control.

Bloodied and beaten by the Vietnamese, neither the Americans nor the Australians were in any mood to militarily dispute the Indonesians’ claim. Not even the deliberate killing of five ABC journalists (including a New Zealander) by the invading Indonesian army could persuade the Australian Government to confront Suharto’s murderous regime head-on.

Besides, Australia coveted the vast oil and gas reserves of the Timor Gap. Silence and acquiescence in the face of the Indonesian Army’s deadly assault upon East Timor was the price General Suharto set – and Canberra was happy to pay. This toxic brew of arrogance and fear, contempt and greed, would continue to dictate Australian relations with Indonesia right up until the end of the 1990s.

It was the Asian Financial Crisis of 1998-99 that finally brought Suharto’s corrupt regime tumbling down. For the first time since 1965, democracy was back on the Indonesian people’s agenda.

Fully recovered from its beating in Vietnam, and with its great foe, the Soviet Union, consigned to the dustbin of history, the US was now putting a bit of stick about the authoritarian regimes it had formerly relied upon to keep the communists at bay. President Bill Clinton let it be known to the new government in Jakarta that East Timorese independence was also back on the agenda, and that Australia and New Zealand would be the attending mid-wives at this new nation’s birth.

For a little while it seemed that the new, democratic Indonesia and her Australian neighbour might be on the brink of a more mature and much less fraught relationship. Unfortunately, the election of President George W. Bush in November 2000, followed by the terrorist outrages of 11 September 2001 in New York and Washington, and the Kuta Bombings of October 2002 in Bali, saw all the banked fires of Anglo-Saxon imperialism burst into sudden and scorching flame.

Fear and arrogance were once gain driving Australian policy towards its northern neighbour. Not only did the Liberal Australian Prime Minister, John Howard, boast of being the United States’ “Deputy Sheriff” in South-East Asia, but he also transformed the thousands of boat-borne asylum seekers, many of them fleeing the effects of Anglo-Saxon imperialism in Iraq and Afghanistan, into potent symbols of the Asian threat from the North. That the departure-point for most of these “boat people” was Indonesia only served to reinforce the fears and prejudices of “White Australia”.

And now, thanks to Edward Snowden, we are witnesses to the extraordinary spectacle of Australia’s latest Liberal Prime Minister, Tony Abbott, signally failing to cope with the revelation that the Australian government’s spy agencies have been monitoring the phone-calls of the Indonesian President, Susilo Bambang Yudhoyono, his wife, and eight of his leading Cabinet Ministers. The fear and arrogance that has plagued Australia’s relations with its Asian neighbours for more than a century has struck Mr Abbott dumb – to the rising fury of the Indonesian government and people.

Fuelling their rage has been a comment attributed to Liberal Party pollster and adviser, Mark Textor. Speaking in the midst of the diplomatic firestorm ignited by Snowden’s revelations, Textor is said to have compared the Indonesian Foreign Minister, Marty Natalegawa, to “a 1970s Philipino porn star [with] ethics to match.”

This would have been an egregiously insulting remark at the best of times, but to Indonesians familiar with the CIA’s dirty tricks against President Sukano, it could only have been incendiary.

They would be aware that prior to the coup d’état of 1965 the CIA had been actively engaged in blackening President Sukano’s reputation – especially among members of the Non-Aligned Movement which he had helped to found at the Indonesian city of Bandung in 1954. One of the most notorious of these CIA “dirty tricks” was a pornographic film supposedly showing the Indonesian president having sex with a young European woman. Extraordinarily, the film was funded by the American singing-star (and staunch anti-communist) Bing Crosby, who used his Hollywood connections and a Sukano lookalike to carry-off the deception.

This, then, is the legacy of Anglo-Saxon interference in Indonesian affairs which the phone-monitoring scandal – and Textor’s unbelievable insult – has recalled. Somehow, Tony Abbott must find the courage to acknowledge his country’s discourtesy and, re-establish Australian-Indonesian diplomatic relations on a more equal and respectful foundation. Otherwise the arrogance of the nation he leads will make its historical fears of overwhelming Asian enmity all too real.