---------------------------------------------------------- FREE for JOIN Indonesia Daily News Online via EMAIL: go to: http://www.indo-news.com/subscribe.html - FREE - FREE - FREE - FREE - FREE - FREE - Please Visit Our Sponsor http://www.indo-news.com/cgi-bin/ads1 ---------------------------------------------------------- Australian Financial Review Wednesday, August 11, 1999 Good policy loses out to saving a neck Comment, By Brian Toohey Saving Alexander Downer's neck is now taking precedence over good policy making on East Timor. After he was again embarrassed in Parliament yesterday, the Foreign Minister brandished supportive comments from the US Assistant Secretary of State for East Asian and Pacific Affairs, Stanley Roth. Unfortunately, Roth's support comes at the price of abandoning "at Australia's urging" his initial enthusiasm for sending a peace-keeping force to East Timor. For the second day in a row, Labor's shadow Foreign Minister, Laurie Brereton, demonstrated in Parliament yesterday that Downer had wrongly denied that a senior Australian military officer had been approached by his US counterparts about a possible military deploy-ment in East Timor. On Monday, Brereton also used a leaked document to rebut Downer's earlier denials of policy differences between Roth and his department head, Dr Ashton Calvert. Although having to admit in Parliament yesterday that he had not read a crucial cable, Downer was able to quote a comforting statement which he said Roth made on Monday to the Australian Ambassador in Washington, Andrew Peacock. Roth's timely assistance is little more than can be expected from a senior US diplomat in the circum-stances. Unhappily, it also under-lines how Roth has abandoned his earlier view that the safety of the people of East Timor would be best served by a peacekeeping force. Roth is now locked into support-ing Australia's position that no peacekeepers are needed imm-ediately after the August 30 ballot on independence. Despite predictions by senior Indonesian military officials that a bloodbath could occur at this stage, Australia has successfully opposed dispatching peacekeepers until after the Indonesian parliament considers the outcome of the ballot, probably in November. Until then, East Timorese independence supporters will remain under the dubious protection of Indonesian security forces. Downer's parliament problems stem from his eagerness to endorse a statement from his department on August 2 which "categorically denied" a report in this newspaper on July 31 about policy differences between Roth and Calvert over East Timor. Contrary to the sweeping denial, the record of conversation of a February meeting says there was a significant difference over "our approaches concerning the security dimension of East Timor's trans-ition". Unlike Calvert, Roth re-garded the early implementation of a full-scale peacekeeping operation as unavoidable and described the Australian position as "defeatist". Downer says Roth was only expressing a personal view, rather than US policy as it now stands. This may be true, but could easily turn out to be a tragedy for the East Timorese. But Downer looks like escaping from his parliamentary predicament with his job intact. ++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++ Didistribusikan tgl. 10 Aug 1999 jam 22:12:03 GMT+1 oleh: Indonesia Daily News Online <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> http://www.Indo-News.com/ ++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++
