Defense Relations between Australia and Indonesia in the Post-Cold War Era (review)

Australia's most critical regional relationship is that with Indonesia, and historically it is a relationship that has been fraught with difficulties. Strong and consistent advocacy of the Nationalist cause against the Dutch after the end of the Second World War (a position far better remembered in Indonesia than Australia) gave way to suspicion and concern at communist influence over Sukarno during the period of "guided democracy" and culminated in an undeclared war—Konfrontasi—in the early 1960s that contributed directly to the establishment of the "New Order" under Suharto. Whilst the latter imposed stability and some degree of economic betterment during his long period in power, his rule was increasingly characterised by corruption, nepotism, abuse of human rights, and, for the Australian-Indonesian relationship, the thorny problem of Indonesian incorporation of East Timor in 1975.

Singh's book examines the subsequent history of that relationship, and argues that geopolitical considerations have been the dominant influence upon it. He is especially concerned with the defence relationship during the Keating and Howard governments, drawing attention to the attempt to engage Indonesia more closely during the former and contrasting this with the severe decline in this process after Howard came to office in 1996.

The latter, he states, replaced Keating's policy with one of "enragement" (p. 118) and seriously downgraded Indonesia's strategic importance. The author sees the 1995 Agreement on Maintaining Security (AMS) as the high point of the Keating policy, and roundly criticises Howard for its eventual abrogation (by Indonesia), but does convey sufficiently clearly that many elements of the Indonesian armed forces were flatly to opposed to it from the outset. Australian leadership of INTERFET in 1999, following the Howard government's reversal of Australian policy over East Timor, unquestionably caused a deep and serious rupture in relations, but the AMS was probably not a very solid basis for furthering the defence relationship.

As befits a work of political science, the author concludes with some speculative and prognostic suggestions for the future of the relationship that will probably hold little interest for those outside the policy process. The book contains an excellent summary of defence arrangements and military-to-military contacts in the 1990s, but seems keen to avoid engaging with some of the implications of this process, especially the training of KOPASSUS special forces units that earned a questionable record for human rights abuses in Timor and elsewhere. He does not like Howard (many in the region do not), and denies him the benefit of any doubt: it is a little disconcerting to see the government of a western liberal democracy described as a "regime" (p. 1), and the author seems to accept Keating's take on the history of Australian-Indonesian relations and Australian defence and foreign policy a little too uncritically.

Students of recent regional military affairs will find this a useful contribution to the literature whilst accepting that Indonesian-Australian relations, especially over East Timor, allow of other readings than Singh provides here.