This week Cambodia marks the 50th anniversary of the fall of Phnom Penh to the murderous Khmer Rouge, and Vietnam celebrates the fall of Saigon to North Vietnamese forces in April 1975.

They are being commemorated very differently; after all, there’s nothing to celebrate in Cambodia. Its capital Phnom Penh was emptied, and its people had to then endure the “killing fields” and the darkest years of its modern existence under Khmer Rouge rule.

Over the border in Vietnam, however, there will be modest celebrations for their victory against US (and Australian) forces at the end of this month.

Yet, this week’s news of Indonesia considering a Russian request to base aircraft at the Biak airbase in West Papua throws in stark relief a troubling question I have long asked — did Australia back the wrong war 63 years ago? These different areas — and histories — of Southeast Asia may seem disconnected, but allow me to draw some links.

Through the 1950s until the early 1960s, it was official Australian policy under the Menzies government to support The Netherlands as it prepared West Papua for independence, knowing its people were ethnically and religiously different from the rest of Indonesia.

They are a Christian Melanesian people who look east to Papua New Guinea (PNG) and the Pacific, not west to Muslim Asia. Australia at the time was administering and beginning to prepare PNG for self-rule.

The Second World War had shown the importance of West Papua (then part of Dutch New Guinea) to Australian security, as it had been a base for Japanese air raids over northern Australia.

Japanese beeline to Sorong
Early in the war, Japanese forces made a beeline to Sorong on the Bird’s Head Peninsula of West Papua for its abundance of high-quality oil. Former Australian prime minister Gough Whitlam served in a RAAF unit briefly stationed in Merauke in West Papua.

By 1962, the US wanted Indonesia to annex West Papua as a way of splitting Chinese and Russian influence in the region, as well as getting at the biggest gold deposit on earth at the Grasberg mine, something which US company Freeport continues to mine, controversially, today.

Following the so-called Bunker Agreement signed in New York in 1962, The Netherlands reluctantly agreed to relinquish West Papua to Indonesia under US pressure. Australia, too, folded in line with US interests.

That would also be the year when Australia sent its first group of 30 military advisers to Vietnam. Instead of backing West Papuan nationhood, Australia joined the US in suppressing Vietnam’s.

As a result of US arm-twisting, Australia ceded its own strategic interests in allowing Indonesia to expand eastwards into Pacific territories by swallowing West Papua. Instead, Australians trooped off to fight the unwinnable wars of Indochina.

To me, it remains one of the great what-ifs of Australian strategic history — if Australia had held the line with the Dutch against US moves, then West Papua today would be free, the East Timor invasion of 1975 was unlikely to have ever happened and Australia might not have been dragged into the Vietnam War.

Instead, as Cambodia and Vietnam mark their anniversaries this month, Australia continues to be reminded of the potential threat Indonesian-controlled West Papua has posed to Australia and the Pacific since it gave way to US interests in 1962.

Russian space agency plans
Nor is this the first time Russia has deployed assets to West Papua. Last year, Russian media reported plans under way for the Russian space agency Roscosmos to help Indonesia build a space base on Biak island.

In 2017, RAAF Tindal was scrambled just before Christmas to monitor Russian Tu95 nuclear “Bear” bombers doing their first-ever sorties in the South Pacific, flying between Australia and Papua New Guinea. I wrote not long afterwards how Australia was becoming “caught in a pincer” between Indonesian and Russian interests on Indonesia’s side and Chinese moves coming through the Pacific on the other.

All because we have abandoned the West Papuans to endure their own “slow-motion genocide” under Indonesian rule. Church groups and NGOs estimate up to 500,000 Papuans have perished under 60 years of Indonesian military rule, while Jakarta refuses to allow international media and the UN High Commissioner for Human Rights to visit.

Alex Sobel, an MP in the UK Parliament, last week called on Indonesia to allow the UN High Commissioner to visit but it is exceedingly rare to hear any Australian MPs ask questions about our neighbour West Papua in the Australian Parliament.

Canberra continues to enhance security relations with Indonesia in a naive belief that the nation is our ally against an assertive China. This ignores Jakarta’s deepening relations with both Russia and China, and avoids any mention of ongoing atrocities in West Papua or the fact that jihadi groups are operating close to Australia’s border.

Indonesia’s militarisation of West Papua, jihadi infiltration and now the potential for Russia to use airbases or space bases on Biak should all be “red lines” for Australia, yet successive governments remain desperate not to criticise Indonesia.

Ignoring actual ‘hot war’
Australia’s national security establishment remains focused on grand global strategy and acquiring over-priced gear, while ignoring the only actual “hot war” in our region.

Our geography has not changed; the most important line of defence for Australia remains the islands of Melanesia to our north and the co-operation and friendship of its peoples.

Strong independence movements in West Papua, Bougainville and New Caledonia all materially affect Australian security but Canberra can always be relied on to defer to Indonesian, American and French interests in these places, rather than what is ultimately in Australian — and Pacific Islander — interests.

Australia needs to develop a defence policy centred on a “Melanesia First” strategy from Timor to Fiji, radiating outwards. Yet Australia keeps deferring to external interests, to our cost, as history continues to remind us.

Ben Bohane is a Vanuatu-based photojournalist and policy analyst who has reported across Asia and the Pacific for the past 36 years. His website is benbohane.com  This article was first published by The Sydney Morning Herald and is republished with the author’s permission.

Article by AsiaPacificReport.nz

ANALYSIS: By Graeme Dobell

Australia’s polity grapples with the need to remake and rebuild our media voice in the South Pacific.

Domestic political battles and budget cuts have degraded the central role Australia played in islands journalism in the 20th century. Australia’s media voice in the South Pacific is at its weakest since Robert Menzies launched the shortwave radio service in 1939.

Now we must reimagine that role and empower that voice for the 21st century — a new model of talking with, not to, the South Pacific.

The policy failure that has so weakened our voice in the past decade had one deeply familiar element — recurring Oz amnesia about our interests, influence and values in the islands.

See the amnesia lament offered by a Canberra wise owl, Nick Warner, in his Financial Review op-ed about “Australia’s long Pacific stupor’”: “For two generations, since the end of World War II, Australia has squandered the chance to build deep and enduring relations with our neighbours in the South Pacific. And now it’s almost too late.”

This is a candid view from the heart of the Canberra system. You don’t get much more plugged in and powerful than Warner, who served as our top diplomat in Papua New Guinea, led the Regional Assistance Mission to Solomon Islands, and then headed the Department of Defence, the Australian Secret Intelligence Service and the Office of National Assessments.

‘Stupor’ history framing
Warner’s “stupor” history frames his diagnosis of how China could clinch a security treaty with Solomon Islands:

“China is now seemingly entrenched in Solomons and will also be looking for other opportunities for a base elsewhere in the Pacific. But, for better or worse, Pacific politics seldom provide certainty. It’s not too late for Australia to shore up its place in the South Pacific and to protect its strategic interests.”

The need to “shore up our place” that Warner points to brings us back to a specific example of the stupor/amnesia — the degrading of our media voice in the islands and the role of the Australian Broadcasting Corporation.

In the South Pacific, Radio Australia and the international television service, ABC Australia, still do great work. But they have only a third of the budget they enjoyed a decade ago. Underline that stupor/amnesia fact: spending on the ABC as our Indo-Pacific media voice has been cut by two- thirds.

In 2014, the Abbott government hacked into the ABC by killing funding for international television, a sad, bad and dumb decision that also decimated Radio Australia.

Political payback in Canberra produced a gang-that-couldn’t-shoot-straight tragedy in the South Pacific. The Abbott aim was to scratch the anti-Aunty itch, but he badly wounded a major instrument of Australian foreign policy. The damage was compounded when the ABC turned off shortwave in 2017; here again was a domestic focus that damaged our regional interests.

For an account of all this, see ASPI’s “Hard news and free media as the sharp edge of Australia’s soft power“.

Aunty as the villain
In this long-running melodrama with elements of dark comedy, a valiant ABC is also a victim — with foes instead seeing Aunty as villain. What a long run the drama has had: three generations of Murdochs have warred with Aunty, starting in the 1930s with Keith Murdoch’s bitter fight against the creation of an independent ABC news service.

A re-run of the domestic battle devaluing our international voice happened with Labor’s election campaign launch last month of its Indo-Pacific broadcasting strategy, promising the ABC an extra $8 million a year for international programmes, plus a review of whether shortwave should be restored.

Labor’s idea is a good first step to restart Australia’s conversation with the islands, Jemima Garrett writes, but it “seems to be simply pushing out more ‘Australian content’ and crowding the regional airwaves with ‘Australian voices’. This is ‘soft power’ in a crude form – a one-way monologue when what is needed is a dialogue — a 21st century conversation in which Australia and Australians talk ‘with’ and not ‘to’ our Pacific neighbours.”

Preferring hard power to soft power, Prime Minister Scott Morrison called Labor’s policy “farcical”, saying that in the South Pacific, “I sent in the AFP [Australian Federal Police]. The Labor Party wants to send in the ABC, when it comes to their Pacific solution.”

Australia, of course, needs it all—the AFP and the Australian Defence Force, but also the ABC.

In this argument, I declare my love of Aunty. I worked as a journalist for Radio Australia and the ABC (1975–2008) and had the huge privilege of spending much time as a correspondent in Southeast Asia and the South Pacific.

I did break the habit of a lifetime by putting the boot into Aunty when it switched off shortwave. The ABC had damaged its international role, set by parliamentary charter, in favour of its domestic responsibilities.

Soft-power thinking
Labor’s soft-power thinking is work in the minor key compared to the recent effort of parliament’s Joint Standing Committee on Foreign Affairs, Defence and Trade.

In the final sitting week before the start of the election campaign, the committee issued its report “Strengthening Australia’s relationships in the Pacific”. The media recommendations were the most ambitious to come out of Canberra in many a day:

“The Committee notes the media environment within the Pacific is becoming more contested, and recognises Australia has a national interest in maintaining a visible and active media and broadcasting presence there. The Committee recommends the Australian Government considers steps necessary to expand Australia’s media footprint in the Pacific, including through:

– expanding the provision of Australian public and commercial television and digital content across the Pacific, noting existing efforts by the PacificAus TV initiative and Pacific Australia;

– reinvigorating Radio Australia, which is well regarded in the region, to boost its digital appeal; and

– consider[ing] governance arrangements for an Australian International Media Corporation to formulate and oversee the strategic direction of Australia’s international media presence in the Pacific.’

I own up to the idea for the creation of an Australian international media corporation, contained in my submission [No 21] to the inquiry. The committee’s findings and the idea of a new international body, to build on the ABC foundations, will be the next column in these musings on the Oz media voice in the South Pacific.

This article was first published in The Strategist journal of the Australian Strategic Policy Institute (ASPI). Graeme Dobell is ASPI’s journalist fellow and this is republished with the author’s permission.

Article by AsiaPacificReport.nz