Indonesia back on the world
stage By Michael Vatikiotis
SINGAPORE - It was a potentially sticky
situation. There was Indonesian Foreign Minister
Hassan Wirajuda standing beside Condoleezza Rice,
the US secretary of state, on her recent visit to
Jakarta, and the subject was Iran. The reporter
asked: "Do you think the idea of an eventual
Iranian nuclear bomb is inevitable?" Given
Jakarta's protracted efforts to restore close
relations with Washington so that it may resume
buying state-of-the-art military
equipment and train its
officers in the US, this was a potentially awkward
moment.
But by Indonesia's top diplomat,
it was taken as an opportunity to declare
Indonesia's traditionally strong sense of
independence. Like Iran, Indonesia is a party to
the nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty, he said. The
treaty supports the rights of NPT parties to
develop nuclear technology for peaceful uses, he
added. Then he reminded Rice that he had recently
visited Tehran and that the Iranian foreign
minister had just visited Jakarta. On both
occasions he had told the Iranians that Indonesia
"would be among the first to tell Iran not to put
their peaceful nuclear uses to developing nuclear
weapons".
What on earth is Indonesia doing
going anywhere near the Iran issue at a time when
the United States is cheering, not chiding,
Jakarta's counter-terrorism efforts and is
considering negotiations toward a bilateral
free-trade agreement? Why, too, would Indonesia go
out of its way at a recent meeting of the
International Atomic Energy Agency board of
governors in Vienna to ask that more time be given
Iran to assure concerned parties that its
development of nuclear technology is truly for
peaceful purposes?
Welcome to the brave
new world of Indonesian foreign policy. The
international community has only just started to
focus on Indonesia's successful democratic
transition, the economy is only just recovering
from nearly a decade of malaise and crisis, and
the business community is waiting with genuine
expectation for the government's "war on
corruption" to be won. But President Susilo
Bambang Yudhoyono is an impatient man - he wants
Indonesia to make its mark on the world now.
"We are the fourth-most-populous nation in
the world. We are home to the world's largest
Muslim population. We are the world's
third-largest democracy. We are also a country
where democracy, Islam and modernity go hand in
hand," Yudhoyono declared last May in his first
major foreign-policy speech. "And our heart is
always with the developing world, to which we
belong. These are the things that define who we
are and what we do in the community of nations."
In fact, what Yudhoyono aims to do is
pretty ambitious. Bringing democracy to Myanmar
comes high up the list. So, too, does helping
Palestinians win their statehood from Israel. Then
there is North Korea: the president wants to visit
Pyongyang and has already sent an envoy to the
hermit state to try to restart stalled security
talks between the two Koreas. And if dealing with
one end of the "axis of evil" isn't risky enough,
Indonesia has also flagged its intention to help
reconcile Iran with the West, exemplified by
Wirajuda's visit to Tehran last month, and
thereafter by at least two high-level visits by
Iranian officials to Jakarta.
Talk to many
Indonesians about Yudhoyono's foreign-policy
objectives and they will argue that the country
simply isn't ready to take on the world. There are
too many priorities at home: sorting out the
economy, combating corruption, resolving internal
conflicts and curbing Islamic militancy, to name
just a few. Realists and pragmatists such as
former foreign minister Ali Alatas argue that
Indonesia is weak and has no clout in the
international community. "Who would listen?"
Alatas asks, though he recently served as a
special envoy to UN Secretary General Kofi Annan.
Fortunately for Yudhoyono, the United
States is listening. Indonesia's democratic and
moderate Islamic credentials appeal to Washington,
which is also on the lookout for a strategic
counterbalance to China in the region.
"Your challenge now is to expand the
peace, the opportunity and the freedom that we see
in much of Southeast Asia to all of Southeast
Asia," Rice said in a speech to an Indonesian
international-relations forum during her mid-March
visit to Jakarta. "The United States is eager to
work with ASEAN through our new enhanced
partnership, and we look to Indonesia ... to play
a leadership role in Southeast Asia and in the
dynamic changing East Asia."
Perhaps of
all the remarkable transformations Indonesia has
made over the past six years, its return to the
diplomatic stage is potentially the most
significant for the rest of Asia. Indonesia's
hard-won democratic credentials could help promote
and defend democracy and human rights in the
region, its non-aligned credentials can amplify
the voice of the developing world and, last but by
no means least, Indonesia's status as the largest
Muslim democracy could have a positive impact on
the Islamic world and help bridge the growing
divide with the Western world.
It's often
hard for the outside world to appreciate just how
far Indonesia has come since the 1998 fall of
former president Suharto. The 2004 presidential
election in Indonesia crowned a six-year-long
political transition to democracy. Widespread
fears of communal violence and administrative
chaos proved unfounded. Incoming President
Yudhoyono quickly established a government with
serious policies aimed at tackling corruption,
improving welfare and cementing representative
democracy in place. His ability and resolve to
pursue these goals in the face of the tsunami that
hit Indonesia harder than any other Asian country
and of ongoing terrorist attacks is nothing short
of remarkable.
In his first year in
office, Yudhoyono made several tough policy
choices, among them his decision to pursue peace
in Aceh province. The Helsinki agreement signed
last August brought a halt to almost three decades
of conflict in Aceh and potentially helped to set
a precedent for using local autonomy as a way to
settle protracted irredentist conflicts in the
wider region, including for insurgency-racked
southern Thailand. Less obviously, the new
Indonesian government has set about fashioning an
active foreign policy that, if successfully
implemented, could see Indonesia emerge as a
strong advocate for global peace and other
humanitarian issues. Yudhoyono says he wants to be
"a peacemaker, confidence-builder, problem-solver,
bridge-builder".
This activism is not new
for Indonesia. Although obscured for much of the
past 30 years, Indonesia has historically played a
constructive role in world and regional affairs.
In 1955 Indonesia connected Asia with Africa
through the Bandung Conference, which in effect
elevated the role of the developing world in
international affairs. In 1967, Indonesia was
instrumental in bringing the non-communist
countries of Southeast Asia together to form the
Association of Southeast Asian Nations (ASEAN). In
the 1980s, Indonesia initiated and helped see
through the regional diplomatic effort that
brought peace to Cambodia.
But the world
has tended to view Indonesia through a rather
different lens. The unfortunate history of
Indonesia's occupation of East Timor after 1975
and the rough handling of internal conflicts in
Aceh and Papua have seen tough military crackdowns
on irredentism and widespread human-rights abuses,
for which no one has truly been held responsible.
Although Washington recently restored
military-to-military ties, US officials are still
waiting for Jakarta to prosecute the military
officers culpable for the horrific violence that
attended East Timor's separation from Indonesia in
1999. This kind of record doesn't easily make for
credible peacemaking or bridge-building and the
recent upsurge of unrest in Papua points to
obstacles ahead.
Then, too, there are
plenty of domestic obstacles to effective
policymaking. Yudhoyono's policy advisers are full
of good ideas and intentions but lack the capacity
to implement them. Indonesia's political culture
militates against initiative-taking and effective
delegation. Bureaucratic backbiting and petty
jealousies plague the system and hinder
creativity. Yudhoyono's team of talented advisers
are constantly putting out small domestic fires
and beating off damaging allegations of personal
gain, which at times makes it hard to focus on
complex foreign-policy issues.
However,
there are distinct signs of change. Wirajuda has
helped bring a measure of pride and prestige to
the once-dispirited Foreign Ministry. He has
promoted younger diplomats and given his aides
more responsibility. Plum foreign postings are
advertised and healthy competition for the posts
is encouraged. Indonesia's new ambassadors to
Australia and the United Kingdom are both
relatively young high fliers.
Indonesia's
new-age diplomats are also spending less time
defending the indefensible. The armed forces have
so far stayed out of sensitive political decisions
and supported the Aceh peace process; as a rule
the army and police no longer shoot demonstrators;
and militants held responsible for acts of
violence are being brought to justice through the
courts rather than the streets. Some reflexive
instincts are hard to change, though. The
government is still barring journalists and
human-rights workers from the restive Papua
region.
Some initiatives are bearing fruit
in modest ways. After Yudhoyono's controversial
visit to Myanmar, that country's ruling military
junta has announced that it will send its foreign
minister to a newly established bilateral
commission aimed at expediting Myanmar's slow
progress to democracy.
Human-rights
activists have criticized the Indonesian
government for engaging with the military regime
in Yangon on the grounds that urgent issues such
as the release of opposition leader Aung San Suu
Kyi were not pressed. But the Indonesian Foreign
Ministry argues that engagement and gradual
persuasion are more effective agents of change.
"If we become harder on Myanmar, they [will] close
themselves even more," commented Foreign Ministry
spokesman Desra Percaya.
It's a gamble
because Myanmar's generals have proved skillful at
using engagement as a delaying tactic. But this is
not to say that Jakarta is turning soft on
autocracy. In January Wirajuda called on the
military junta in Myanmar to fulfill its pledge to
introduce democracy. "Myanmar is disturbing the
balance" of ASEAN, Wirajuda told the media in
Jakarta. "And because of that we are asking it to
show concrete steps toward democracy."
Indonesia's advantage as a pressure point
on Myanmar is that it has no strategic interests
at play on mainland Southeast Asia. Other nearby
democracies such as Thailand and India find that
economic and strategic interests inhibit them from
advocating political change in Myanmar. Neither is
Jakarta so closely bound to Beijing economically
and culturally; its sheer size gives Indonesia
something of a license to tweak the dragon's tail.
Non-alignment may be out of fashion, but it was
noticeable how Rice was greeted on her recent
visit to Jakarta by editorials that positioned
Indonesia as a friend, rather than an ally, of the
United States.
Indonesia is also managing
in a modest way to engage constructively with the
more militant Islamic world. In the past few weeks
Jakarta has hosted high-profile visits from the
Iranian vice president and foreign minister. There
are risks and opportunities for Indonesia:
engaging with the militant fringe will fuel
suspicions about Indonesia's own considerable
fundamentalist problem. A recent poll in Jakarta
revealed that more than 11% of people surveyed
believe that suicide bombings against civilian
targets can be justified. The opportunity is for
Indonesia's moderate mainstream to start
influencing the rest of the Muslim world.
On balance the latter is more important,
as Indonesia's own struggle against conservative
Islamic forces lends credibility to its push for
tolerance and reform in the wider Muslim world.
For this reason Indonesia's democratic transition
could potentially be far more important than
anything the administration of US President George
W Bush can do in the Middle East to implant
democracy.
Michael Vatikiotis is
a former editor of the Far Eastern Economic
Review. He is currently a visiting research fellow
at Singapore's Institute of Southeast Asian
Studies.
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