1) Elephant in the room: is Papua the next East Timor?
2) Is Papua the next East Timor? Part II
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http://www.aspistrategist.org.au/elephant-in-the-room-is-papua-the-next-east-timor/
1) Elephant in the room: is Papua the next East Timor?
One issue, above all others, starkly differentiates the jobs of Indonesian President and Australian Prime Minister. When our Prime Minister wakes each morning, the first question she asks isn’t: “Do I still have a whole country to govern today?”
The challenge of maintaining national sovereignty and territorial integrity has beset incumbents of Jakarta’s presidential palace since the earliest days of the Indonesian republic. Not all Indonesians were as enthusiastic about a macro Indonesian state as the mostly Javanese and Sumatran nationalist leaders who declared and struggled for independence from 1945. Insurrection and separatism have been constant features of the Indonesian experience since the 1950s.
In the west of the archipelago, disaffected elements of the Indonesian Army formed an anti-Jakarta revolutionary government in Sumatra, which was quashed in 1957. Separate attempts to create an Islamic state in Aceh began in 1953, inflamed as much by oil and gas revenues as by religious zeal—it took the 2004 Boxing Day tsunami, and the persistence of former Vice President Jusuf Kalla, to bring a lasting peace with the Free Aceh Movement.
On Sulawesi, a brief, CIA-backed military rebellion in Manado was defeated in 1958, while communal conflict continues to erupt today around Poso, in the centre of the island. In West Java, the Darul Islam separatist movement expanded steadily in the 1950s to Sumatra, Sulawesi and Kalimantan, being finally brought under control in 1965.
To the east, sporadic fighting to form a breakaway Republic of South Maluku lasted from 1950 to 1963—a self-proclaimed government-in-exile still exists in the Netherlands. Further to the south, FALINTIL guerrillas fought for independence from the moment of Indonesia’s invasion of Timor-Leste in 1975 until the arrival of international troops 24 years later.
In the far eastern end of Indonesia, near its border with Papua New Guinea, the Free Papua Movement, or OPM, has been engaged in secessionist conflict since 1965. Hostilities continue today.
Keeping 250 million citizens, from over 300 ethnic groups, across thousands of islands stretching the distance from Sydney to Perth, aggregated into a single unitary state, still seems a tall order in 2013. But it works. And it’s in our vital national interest that it continues to work. We want our neighbour, the world’s fourth largest polity, to remain stable.
Our decision late last century in assisting East Timor’s independence from Indonesia was taken for all the right altruistic reasons. But the supervening consequences of East Timor still cast shadows over our relations with Indonesia. Our national self-interest was dealt a crushing body blow that we’re slowly recovering from. There’s nothing more sensitive or more sacred to Indonesians than their territorial integrity. In the popular and often-proclaimed phrase, Indonesian unity is considered harga mati – non-negotiable.
In the region around us, there could be only one thing worse for Australia than being viewed by a generation of our neighbours as a conspirator, complicit in the excision of East Timor from the map of Indonesia. And that’s if it happened again in Papua.
Among some observers and commentators, there’s a kind of bleak, almost fatalistic, anticipation that Indonesia is on track to repeat the same mistakes in its provinces of Papua and West Papua that led to overwhelming international support for East Timor’s separation. In the conventional wisdom, Papua will follow a similar path. This would be disastrous for Australia. And there’s a real danger this sense of inevitability could become self-fulfilling. Before that happens, we would do well to take stock of the situation and find ways to halt the runaway train that such thinking could create.
For starters, we need to give the elephant in the room a name and recognise the danger it poses. Yes, there’s risk involved in engaging with Indonesia on sensitive issues. But the risk of not doing so is greater, lest either side misread the interests and misjudge the intentions of the other. How much better to head off the strategic shock of policy failure in Papua, than trying to improvise when the problem becomes a crisis?
In most discussions between Australian and Indonesian officials, trespassing is forbidden on the subject of Papua and Indonesia’s poor handling until now of its social, political, security, economic and cultural challenges. Its sensitivity, especially in the light of the East Timor precedent, makes it a taboo topic. In the next part of this post, I’ll discuss the diplomatic challenges Australia has faced with Indonesia on Papua, point out the biggest hurdle both sides will need to clear in moving forward on the issue, and suggest why Papua isn’t necessarily the next East Timor.
Gary Hogan is a former Professor of Grand Strategy at the US National Defense University. He was the first foreigner to graduate from Indonesia’s Institute of National Governance (Lemhannas) and was Australia’s Defence Attaché to Indonesia 2009 to 2012. Image courtesy of Flickr userAlwita.
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http://www.aspistrategist.org.au/is-papua-the-next-east-timor-part-ii/
2) Is Papua the next East Timor? Part II
In my previous post, I explained how separatist attempts throughout Indonesia’s history have led to Indonesian sensitivities over Papuan separatism today. We take every opportunity to earnestly reassure the Indonesian side of our unwavering support for Indonesian territorial sovereignty, as enshrined in the Lombok Treaty. For their part, the Indonesians pretend to believe us. Of course, they don’t. Why should they? After all, we were the only nation on the planet in 1975 to recognise Indonesian sway over East Timor, a mantra we intoned for more than 20 years, until we were forced to change our tune.
Indonesians see an inherent disconnect between our stated support for Indonesian rule over Papua and our actions, like the granting of asylum to 43 Papuans in 2006, which was enough to see a furious Jakarta recall its ambassador to Canberra. There are sophisticated and educated members of the ruling elite in Jakarta who genuinely believe the bizarre fiction that agents of influence from Australian government agencies are engaged in a covert campaign to destabilise Indonesian rule in Papua.
Incidents like the 2008 detention, trial and jailing by Indonesian officials of five middle-aged Queenslanders who arrived unannounced in Merauke by plane without visas do nothing to dispel such fantasies. Indonesian distrust is also fed by developments like the launch last year in Canberra of the Australia-Pacific chapter of International Parliamentarians for West Papua. Travel to Papua by Australian officials is carefully controlled and closely monitored. For foreign media, Papua is mostly a no-go zone.
Papua isn’t Indonesia’s issue alone. It’s difficult to imagine anything that could do more to knock the current trajectory in Australia-Indonesia relations off its positive path than a catastrophic failure by Jakarta to deal successfully with Papua. Our vital national interest hinges on the quality of leadership, competence of administration and effectiveness of policies in Papua, all of which lie beyond our control. And current indicators aren’t promising.
Leaders of both nations have publicly stated a mutual desire for a strategic partnership. This kind of relationship can only be realised if founded on trust and candour. The only way to influence a solution to the Papua problem is for both sides to air the issues and articulate possible approaches, as strategic partners with a shared stake in the outcome should.
For the record, I don’t subscribe to the deterministic model currently in vogue, which predicts that Papua will, sooner or later, go the way of East Timor. Some key differences between the two cases make comparisons misleading.
First, money matters. In 2011, extractive industries made up 16% of Indonesian GDP and more than 40% of Indonesian exports. The mineral and oil wealth of Papua, current and potential, is a significant proportion of this, especially the huge USA-owned Freeport-McMoRan copper and gold mine at Grasberg. It’s unlikely the USA would play the same peacebroker role in Papua that it did in East Timor, where there was little American capital investment on the line.
Second, the fragmented OPM is nowhere near the organised and unified force that FALINTIL was. The Papuan diaspora lacks the numbers and the clout of its East Timorese equivalent, let alone a Jose Ramos-Horta figure, lobbying world leaders and winning a Nobel Peace Prize into the bargain.
Third, local demographics add further complexity to the issue. Unlike East Timor, where the majority population remained indigenous, decades of transmigration into Papua from other corners of the archipelago have seen indigenous Papuan numbers recently surpassed by non-Melanesian residents. Ironically, a genuine Act of Free Choice today would probably return the same result as that engineered by the Indonesian military in 1969—amalgamation with Indonesia. Not that Jakarta is about to take the same gamble it did in 1999 in East Timor to test that theory.
Finally, the central and ongoing role played by Australia in East Timorese nationhood should be enough to dampen even our most enthusiastic official support for Papuan independence. A hard-nosed cost-benefit analysis of Australia’s involvement in East Timor over the last 13 years should have strategists and taxpayers alike balking at any more of the same—even if it did seem like a good idea at the time.
In assisting the Indonesian side, we should do more than skirt around the elephant in the room, hoping Jakarta will apply the salutary lessons of its disastrous 24 years in East Timor to avoid a similar outcome in Papua. We should feel comfortable and confident enough to raise the issue, promote discussion and explore options for an acceptable and sustainable solution. Genuine strategic partners can do that. Especially when mutual interests hang in the balance.
Gary Hogan is a former Professor of Grand Strategy at the US National Defense University. He was the first foreigner to graduate from Indonesia’s Institute of National Governance (Lemhannas) and was Australia’s Defence Attaché to Indonesia 2009 to 2012. Image courtesy of Department of Defence.
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