Truth, West Papua and Indonesia: 2 + 2 really can = 5

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.