The Spectator
September 26, 2009

Indonesia’s elite has too much to lose
from addressing its actions in East Timor

While defenders of the country’s bloody history remain in
positions of power, justice for the slain Australian journalists
will be slow in coming, says Eric Ellis

A friend, recently visiting Jakarta for the first time, surveyed
this ugly, chaotic and most inappropriate of metropolises. As we
edged our way through the gridlock clogging the fetid sepia
dusk, begging mothers with scrawny babes-in-arms pawed at
oligarchs’ BMWs and Ferraris circling the downtown ‘Welcome
Monument’ fountain, which was dry again. A hawker pushing a sate
trolley disappeared into a pothole, emerging bleeding with his
cart broken. Someone grabbed at loose notes through the driver’s
window, while on the broken footpath in front of a monster mall
touting designer accoutrements, a sad man was prodding a sadder
monkey with a stick to perform for highheeled passers-by who
didn’t care. ‘I don’t know Indonesia at all,’ my friend said,
‘but I’ve always felt there’s a darkness over it.’

His remark betrays an Australian mindset about our northern
neighbour. Australians are suspicious of Indonesia. They don’t
much know what goes on here, but whatever it is, it happens in
the shadows and that can’t be good. Maybe, its because no two
sovereign neighbours are as dissimilar. Australia is temperate,
liberal, mostly white and Christian, lightly populated and
wealthy. Equatorial Indonesia is mostly Muslim, poor,
overcrowded, socially conservative, brown.

It is one of the world’s most corrupt nations, with a history of
brutal dictatorship, while Australia is one of the least
corrupt, and among the most secure democracies. That they are
neighbours is an accident of history. Each can behave as if it
would rather the other not be there. From Schapelle Corby on,
it’s a relationship pregnant with suspicions and
misunderstandings, wilful and bumbling.

And now there’s another one: the Balibo Five, the Australian
Federal Police investigation into the massacre of five
journalists from Australia in a tiny East Timorese hamlet,
killed chronicling an invasion Jakarta insisted it wasn’t making
in 1975. It follows the findings of a Sydney coroner’s hearing,
which ruled the deaths were a breach of the Geneva Convention,
and therefore a war crime.

It would be correct and just, if the world were so, for Jakarta
to offer up the military officers who murdered the defenceless
Balibo Five, the biggest single-incident killing of media
personnel in any war anywhere, killed because they were
journalists and not simply because they were in the right place
at the wrong time. But it’s not going to happen. To the
Indonesian establishment, the unpunished deaths of the five
doesn’t matter. Jakarta effects bemusement to anger when asked
about them, steadfastly rejecting half-hearted Australian
entreaties.

To Indonesia, it’s that inexplicable Australian media obsession
with East Timor again; the Balibo Five are history, denied, gone
and forgotten, their remains buried in a single grave in a
suburban Jakarta cemetery.

And if you want them, says Jakarta, you can have them, but you
bules must ask nicely and not take any Indonesian with you. The
reaction reveals a deep-seated difficulty with due legal
process. Indonesia believes Canberra is able to shut down the
judicial investigations because, through Jakarta’s prism, that’s
what governments do. That powers and institutions are separate
and independent in a democracy is simply not much understood
here. It may come, as Indonesia struggles to become one itself,
but the problem is understandable in this fragmented artifice of
a nation ruled in its first 60 years of independence by two
charismatic dictators, where the rule of law were edicts from
the top, filtered by scheming aides and cronies; the closer to
the palace, the more lawful. Eleven wobbly years of ‘reformasi’
since has done little to secure and insulate institutions.
Indonesians joke they have the best legal system money can buy —
the law is bought and sold by the corrupt, the wealthy and the
powerful, mostly the same people.

Which makes it tricky for the Rudd government and those which
follow it because momentum for justice inexorably gathers from
those demanding closure for the Balibo Five, notably their
long-grieving families, the media and, now, the Australian legal
system. Canberra’s representative in Jakarta is the
hail-fellow-well-met Bill Farmer. It’s his job to explain to his
hosts that Australian justice must be done and he can’t do much
about it. That is, when he’s not cracking gags officiating at
the annual AFL Grand Final bash put on by an expat Aussie Rules
football club — his finest hours as ambassador, say many
Australians here.

Over the years, it has often seemed the job of the Australian
ambassador is to hope for a quiet life, almost apologising for
our feistiness. But Balibo agitators will be disappointed if
they expect Indonesia to offer up the five’s killers. The
massacre is just not something Indonesians, even important ones,
know much about. Headlines that scream across the Australian
media are reduced here, if anything runs at all, to a haughty
brief noting Jakarta’s outrage at Australian rudeness. This is
the same Australia, mind, that locks up Indonesian fishermen
whose boats may or may not have strayed into Australia’s more
bountiful fishing grounds. Jakarta couldn’t care two hoots about
the deaths of five Australian journalists it has never heard of
during an operation it struggles to see as a mistake.

But the real reasons Indonesia won’t revisit the matter have
little to do with the Balibo Five. There are bigger, more
alarming demons lurking deep within the national psyche. Balibo
might open an angst-ridden Pandora’s box of domestic dramas that
scar Indonesia’s past, indeed challenge its very ethos as a
nation.

Not least of these is the CIA-approved massacres across central
Java and Bali by the late dictator Suharto of as many as one
million suspected ‘communists’ through 1965 and 1967. These were
the infamous Years of Living Dangerously that eclipsed the
independence lion Sukarno, playing footsie with Moscow and
Beijing, and ushered in Suharto’s 30 years of military-led
kleptocracy. Indonesia has not undertaken any sort of Truth and
Reconciliation Commission into this dark period, as did
post-Apartheid South Africa. And yet the slaughter, the grief,
the corruption and the abuse was on a far larger, industrial
scale, a political Rwanda. I don’t think I’ve seen a reference
to a TRC anywhere, much less heard a call for one. The 1960s are
not something anyone wants much to talk about.

There are other monumental events still to be reckoned: the 1998
Trisakti University killings when students rose against Suharto
rule, ousting the corrupt old crook but not the crony regime
around him. The Suharto era poses serious questions, with no one
called to account for his looting of the economy.

I was in Jakarta as Suharto was dying last year. He’d ripped
Indonesians off for decades and they knew it. And yet they
responded with love and weeks of mourning at his eventual
passing: an end of certainty, or perhaps a national Stockholm
Syndrome. Indonesians came to love their captors and abusers.

The great and good streamed to his deathbed for weeks to pay
their last respects to a man to whom they owed their sinecures
and their private bank accounts safe in Singapore. His
staggering corruption — $30 billion-plus pillaged by Suharto and
his family — was as if had never happened.

It was impolite to raise it as he was lionised. East Timor too
is a stain — 300,000 killed during a 24-year occupation. The
closest any Indonesian official has come to admitting atrocities
was two years ago when the late foreign minister Ali Alatas was
launching his memoirs, his take on Indonesian history in East
Timor, which he dismissed as a ‘pebble in Indonesia’s shoe’.
Dino Djalal was once one of his bright charges in the ministry.
Now he’s foreign affairs advisor to Susilo Bambang Yudhoyono, an
avuncular ex-general who served as a young officer in East Timor
and became Indonesia’s first democratically elected president in
2004.

‘East Timor became sort of a police state, where intelligence
controlled all activities,’ Djalal said at the Alatas book
launch. ‘Our strategy for winning hearts and minds was bribing
people who we thought were loyal to us and fighting off and
probably doing horrible things to those who were not.’ Djalal’s
take is about as generous as it will get. So where does the
national navelgazing end? Or, more to the point, begin?

There’s the Aceh civil war, too, and the myriad of minor ethnic
and separatist conflicts. And should Indonesia examine why it
allowed a violent Islamist death cult to emerge in its islands?
The authorities have done well to kill its leaders, but they
can’t even bring themselves to call it Jemaah Islamiah, or
‘Islamic Community’. President Yudhoyono simply calls it ‘that
group’.

For Australian journalists of a generation — mine — East Timor
was the defining issue. In a sense it was our Watergate, a story
of rank injustice that outraged and fired us up. That generation
now edit our newspapers and magazines, run our newsrooms, which
explains why the story has been kept aflame for so long. It
happened when I was 14 and I was fascinated by it. Hailing from
the innocent pastures of rural Victoria, it was probably the
first time I had any real sense that a violent world existed
beyond the cricket-playing pink bits of the Commonwealth that
illustrated school maps. Sure there was Vietnam, but Greg
Shackleton was real, and an Australian, one of the first
‘foreign correspondents’ the media presented to me. His death in
some fetid hellhole seemed almost romantic and noble. As it
turned out, he wasn’t one at all. He and his inexperienced
colleagues were simply assigned abroad, ambitious to make their
careers.

They did, tragically, but as is often said in this business, no
story is worth dying for. When I became a cadet journalist at
the old Melbourne Sun in 1982, I became — and remain — close
friends with a fellow cadet called Paul Stewart, younger brother
of the murdered Channel 7 sound recordist Tony. His death in
Balibo spurred Paul to become an eloquent and eccentric activist
for the disenfranchised East Timorese in Australia. A uniquely
Melbourne character, Paul’s way of dealing with the prolonged
grief of his family was to parody the brutal Indonesians, which
the East Timorese loved. Paul became a rock star, almost a
parody of one, first fronting a piss-taking Melbourne band
called the Painters and Dockers and then, with some Timorese
diaspora musicians, the Dili Allstars. I was in Dili when in
front of 20,000 delighted Timorese Paul taunted Indonesia’s
faraway military commander General Wiranto, the man who had
unleashed the pro-Indonesian militias during the independence
ballot in 1999, that he’d soon be ‘going home in the back of a
divvy van’. The crowd crowed in delight.

Paul supports the Balibo Five war crimes push on Jakarta for
justice for his brother, arguing that ‘if we are still going
after Nazis for Holocaust crimes 60 years on, so why should
Indonesian war criminals be any different? I think Indonesia
needs to do it for the sake of its democracy.’ Those who forget
history are condemned to repeat it, as the saying goes, but
nations with recent violent histories sometimes find it
convenient to forget. ‘There is no amnesia about the past in
Indonesia,’ says Dr Jeffery Winters, professor of political
economy at Chicago’s Northwestern University.

‘Instead there is a keen awareness that many of the figures
involved in decades of atrocities are not only still around, but
solidly ensconced in positions of respect and power.’ It is only
when a regime overthrow is profound that criminals from the
previous regime face serious risks. If the incoming government
is a different group of thugs with few leftovers from the old
order, says Winters, there will be show trials, jail sentences
and executions.

‘This has not happened in Indonesia,’ says Winters. ‘The
powerful actors from the past remain fully empowered — both the
criminals and their influential friends. There has been no
justice whatever for past atrocities in any case of
significance. Things are so bad that even extreme cases that
occurred after the fall of Suharto have not been handled
satisfactorily.’

Winters cites Suharto’s son Tommy, who ordered the murder of a
sitting Supreme Court judge because the judge dared to uphold a
corruption conviction. Tommy got 15 years in jail, served a
little over five years and mostly spent it in Jakarta having
‘medical check-ups’. One of Indonesia’s nastier people, Tommy is
now free to dynastically run for leadership of his late father’s
fiefdom, Golkar, which he hopes to rebuild into the force it
once was under his father.

‘The problem is that the perpetrators remain strong and the
government is overflowing with people who not only support them,
but continue to believe that the invasion of East Timor was
fully justified,’ says Winters. ‘Their reaction to opening the
[Balibo] case and others like it tends to be: “You’ve got to be
joking!”.’ Reckoning for the Balibo Five might uncork a very
ugly genie for Indonesia. And Jakarta is not going to go there.