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The difference between neighbours and friends: Australia and Indonesia need to find a middle ground of understanding within vastly different cultural backgrounds.

Article Excerpt
The sun was slanting under the palm fronds of the roof of Teddy's Bar, overlooking one of the finest anchorages in more than 13,000 islands: Kupang Bay, West Timor. We had fled an East Timor in flames, but an expatriate Australian propping up the bar only grumbled about the inevitable cost for Australia-Indonesia relations. Within weeks, the tide of history had swept the expatriate from West Timor, and Teddy's Bar had become the favoured haunt of East Timor's displaced militias.

Five months later, after Australian soldiers led Interfet into East Timor and military training links between the two countries had ended, I was giving a lecture at Padjadjaran University in West Java on Australian-Indonesian relations. Given that a large proportion of the audience were senior TNI officers from the nearby military (TNI) staff training college, their response was predictable. Yet after the lecture these same officers asked when Australia would again resume training cooperation with the TNI.

A week later I was back in West Timor as an involuntary guest of Kostrad's 3rd airborne brigade at the border crossing of Motaeen, which had previously been the site of a fatal shoot-out between Australian and Indonesian troops. Attitudes there ranged across friendliness, despair, incomprehension and, for some, a murderous rage.

It is now slowly being revealed that the level of conflict in East Timor in 1999 was much greater than officially admitted. The first Australian military engineers to enter the territory were under orders to dispose of the bodies they found. This cover-up was a prime motivating factor in the spate of leaks from army sources soon after. The official estimate of people killed by the militia-TNI rampage in 1999 was less than 2,000. This figure could reasonably be tripled, and some say that figure could be doubled again. But the bodies are unlikely to ever be found, and we will never really know.

Similarly, the brief reports of clashes between Interfet soldiers and Indonesian soldiers and militia along the East-West Timor border officially resulted in a small handful of casualties. But according to a senior military source there at the time, there were many more conflicts,...

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