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30 years and no change: Australia's pragmatic approach to foreign diplomacy
The Australian government has again used Australian lives to its own advantage, but this time weâve fallen for it; hook, line and sinker
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he Australian government has again used Australian lives to its own advantage, but this time we've fallen for it; hook, line and sinker.
In 1975, the Australian ambassador to Jakarta, Richard Woolcott, sent a cable to Canberra, writing, 'I know I am recommending a pragmatic rather than a principled stand, but that is what national interest and foreign policy is all about'.
The 'pragmatic stand' that Woolcott was advocating for was for the Australian government to look the other way while Indonesia annexed the former Portuguese colony of East Timor. This annexation resulted in the deaths of an estimated 200,000 Timorese and five Australian journalists, at the hands of the Indonesian military.
It also paved the way for the signing of the Timor Gap Treaty between Australia and Indonesia in 1989, allowing for the joint exploitation of petroleum resources in a mutually owned part of the Timor Sea seabed, generating billions of dollars in oil and gas revenue for Australia.
This 'pragmatic' decision paid off, at the cost of five Australian lives and a third of East Timor's population.
Why then, 30 years on, is it so hard to accept that an Australian prime minister has again sacrificed the lives of two Australian citizens ' that of convicted drug smugglers Andrew Chan and Myuran Sukumaran ' for 'pragmatic' reasons?
On May 5, an article by Pierre Marthinus argued that Prime Minister Tony Abbott's and Foreign Minister Julie Bishop's pleas for clemency failed due to Canberra's lack of 'sufficient intellectual and cultural competence to understand, communicate and respectfully engage with Indonesian sensibilities', and indeed, the sensibilities of the rest of the Asian region.
As one of more than 40 Australian students currently studying in Yogyakarta, Indonesia, as part of the Australian Consortium for In-Country Indonesian Studies program, I find this supposed lack of Indonesian knowledge in Canberra hard to swallow.
When Abbott toured China, Japan and South Korea in early 2014, he travelled with an entourage of business elites and South Asian specialists, including James Packer, Kerry Stokes, and Andrew Forrest. Abbott is not above seeking assistance where assistance is needed, especially in moments of sensitive diplomacy.
Furthermore, Canberra is home to the Australian National University, arguably the biggest hub for Indonesian specialists in the country. Not forgetting the significant number of Indonesianists publishing and working within other Australian universities.
To believe that this 'subtle' diplomacy was not at Abbott's disposal during the clemency process leaves us with a distasteful alternative ' that saving Sukumaran and Chan from the firing squad was not the prime minister's goal in his negotiations with Indonesia.
The death of these two men and their colleagues by execution is extremely regrettable.
But what has Abbott gained from the ordeal, and what has President Joko 'Jokowi' Widodo lost, in the eyes of Australians?
Indonesia and Australia's relationship has been fragile over the past several years. In addition to the spying debacle, which led to Indonesia recalling its ambassador to Australia, the biggest sore point between the two nations being Australia's Operation Sovereign Borders, a full-scale military operation that involves intercepting boats carrying asylum seekers found anywhere between the two countries, and returning them to Indonesia before reaching Australian soil, whereupon passengers can legally claim asylum.
This diplomatic gripe was one reason Australia held its breath during the Indonesian elections of 2014.
Australia initially welcomed Jokowi's candidacy in the election, believing he would be more approachable on the topic of border control than his hardliner opponent Prabowo Subianto. However, Jokowi was not the leader to sweep Operation Sovereign Borders under the rug.
In a pre-election debate with his opponent, Jokowi asserted that the fickleness of Indonesian-Australian relations was caused by Australia's lack of trust and respect for the nation: 'We are regarded [by Australia] as a weak nation. It's a matter of national respect, a matter of integrity,' he said.
Combined with the pre-election coverage heralding Jokowi as 'Indonesia's Obama'' a down-to-earth man who despises corruption and prefers problem-solving via dialogue rather than the top-down approach of previous presidents, as well as Australia's new image as the brutish neighbor who spies on friends and puts innocent lives in the unforgiving hands of the Indian Ocean, Australia has lost significant ground as the civilized voice of reason in the Asia-Pacific.
What better way to return the relationship to the accepted status quo, than a doomed-to-failure public debate that sets the 'civilized' apart from the 'savages': capital punishment? Abbott and Bishop's unwavering support of Sukumaran and Chan in the lead up to the execution is commendable from the standpoint of an Australian citizen ' and that's exactly who it needed to be commended by.
Meanwhile, if these same citizens now view the Indonesian President as a man without principle who executes two fully reformed Christian men just to prove a point (and judging by domestic headlines and opinion columns, they do) well, it won't be hard to convince them of negative motives in any of Jokowi's later decisions, even those as unrelated as sovereignty and border control.
Is Abbott a man so compassionate about the right for those two men to live that he was willing to risk one of Australia's most important international relationships?
Or was he merely acting pragmatically, sacrificing two Australian lives by being diplomatically fumble-footed to garner favorable public opinion against a strong opponent, who happens to hold the keys to the domestic policy that won Abbott's last election?
Let's recall, for a second, that the Abbott government is clearly a government that plays hard and fast with human rights on its own soil ' ignoring reports of psychological and sexual abuse of children in Australian detention centers, restricting the Australian public's right to information regarding the treatment of asylum seekers detained offshore, meta-data laws that forgo the right to privacy in the name of a so far unrealized terrorism threat ' the list goes on.
Thus it must be asked: do we really believe the Abbott government to be above using Australian lives to tug at the heartstrings of Australians and gain political ground in a region that is of utmost importance to the policy that was responsible for its election? After all, in Woolcott's words, pragmatic use of human life is what 'national interest and foreign policy is all about'.
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The writer is a journalism and Asian studies student from the University of Sydney, currently studying at Gadjah Mada University in Yogyakarta.
