The Age

The trail from Balibo to Bali

May 26, 2005

Thirty years after the Timor killings, ties with Indonesia are again in serious jeopardy, warns Stephen Senise

October 16 marks the 30th anniversary of the slaying of five Australian-based journalists during an Indonesian assault on the East Timorese border village of Balibo in 1975. They are the Balibo Five, and they have become part of the Australian mainstream consciousness.

Schapelle Corby, Gold Coast resident and trainee beauty therapist, is set to emulate them. Not in deed, but in effect.

The proposition is not as strange as it may sound. Like the Balibo incident, the Corby affair has the potential to set Australian public sentiment crashing against the best-laid diplomatic plans of Australian and Indonesian officialdom, in their attempts to restore closer ties. Indications that Corby's plight is having just that effect are already there. Media coverage has been intense, and the Australian public is squarely on her side. That is now not just a fact, it is a political reality.

The emergence of grassroots support campaigns and talk of travel agents boycotting Bali are just the tip of the iceberg. The potential harm that pro-Corby sentiment, by implication antagonistic towards Indonesia, could
unleash on the Australian and Indonesian governments' efforts to mend the old fence is what is at stake.
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After the upheavals typified by the Australian-led international military intervention in East Timor in 1999, and the shock of bombs exploding in Bali nightclubs in 2002, relations between Australia and Indonesia have been returning, slowly, very slowly, to a somewhat even keel. It has taken some effort on both sides, encouraged by the weight of the relationship. Testament to that, John Howard's visits to Indonesia average about one a year as Prime Minister. Australia's response to the tsunami disaster has also helped play out a vital diplomatic initiative by way of a welcome injection of goodwill, and by emphasising the positive capacity inherent in friendly ties.
Like the Balibo incident, the Corby case has the potential to set Australian public sentiment crashing against the best-laid diplomatic plans."

But for all Howard's, and Indonesian president Susilo Bambang Yudhoyono's talk about heralding a new era of Indonesia-Australia relations, they both know that the Australian public will have a telling say on the matter, as
it has so often before.

As a reference, the Balibo affair is a good example. For nearly a quarter of a century important components of Australian public sentiment would not let the issue rest. Australia's public conscience was reminded via every
possible medium, in manner both organised and spontaneous. Ultimately this interest reflected a genuine concern for what had happened at Balibo, and its aftermath, by Australians at large. Further, it was the cause celebre by which, often, the broader issue of East Timorese independence was kept alive in Australia. Such was its power. A pebble in the shoe was the metaphor long used to describe how events in East Timor had the capacity, time and again, to negatively affect Australia-Indonesian relations. To extend the metaphor, it is right to say that the pebble became lodged at Balibo.

And the Balibo affair returned, time and again, to irritate Indonesian and Australian governments alike. Particularly in the days of Australian de jure recognition of Indonesia's annexation of East Timor. Indeed, any move to further relations with Indonesia during this period was potentially liable to be seen through the prism of East Timor, of which Balibo was an essential component in the minds of many Australians.

As an example, when former prime minister Paul Keating was discreetly putting the finishing touches on a security pact with Indonesian president Soeharto in late 1995, there were MPs of all persuasions publicly
criticising Indonesia over the Balibo incident. This, 20 years after the journalists' deaths. At least one Keating government MP was at the forefront of public calls for a royal commission on the Balibo affair, and there had been moves to that end in Parliament.

That such calls could no longer be ignored became clear when, on November 29, 1995, foreign minister Gareth Evans announced an investigation to be headed by National Crime Authority chairman Tom Sherman. However, neither it, nor a second Sherman Inquiry, commissioned by the Howard Government three years later, could stop calls for a full royal commission.

Ultimately, nothing short of a dramatic Australian-led military intervention in East Timor in 1999 was able to quell the feelings of injustice that much of the Australian public had long come to attach to Balibo.

It serves to remind us how prone to festering irritation the Australian-Indonesian relationship can be. Such are the lessons of recent history, and the not-to-be-ignored role of feeling on the street.

Writing in 2001 in Quarterly Essay, John Birmingham summed it up: "Much as the Department of Foreign Affairs would love to be left alone to reconstruct the relationship as they think best, they cannot operate without reference to some base level of public assent. On any given day the electorate is most likely to be profoundly uninterested in foreign policy, but there does come a time at which their lack of engagement ceases, their
minds and, more importantly, their passions are aroused, and at that time no government can hope to make policy in the quiet cloisters of some diplomatic arcadia. If they wish to survive as a government, they will have
no choice but to prosecute the issue in line with popular feeling, as distasteful and inconvenient as that almost always proves to be."

Like the fates of the Balibo Five, Schapelle Corby's may well force national policymakers to be reminded of that essential dynamic for time to come.

Stephen Senise is a member of the Brisbane Institute.

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