---------------------------------------------------------- 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 ---------------------------------------------------------- New Straits Times Press (NSTP), Sept 21 1999 Australian Government Under Attack For Misjudging ETimor Backlash SYDNEY, Sept 21 (AFP) - The Australian government is facing mounting criticism at home over its failure to anticipate the bloody backlash that followed East Timor's August 30 self-rule ballot. Australian National University (ANU) professor of strategic studies Des Ball, one of the country's leading defence analysts, Tuesday added his voice with a strong attack on the intelligence service. Ball said the intelligence gathering establishment had become too politicised to be objective about East Timor. He charged that political considerations were part and parcel of the country's intelligence community, and the problem had been getting worse since the late 1980s. Ball said ministers inevitably chose the intelligence assessments they liked best and that influenced the way reports were presented. "I think one of the unfortunate features of security policy making in this country in the last several years is that it has become very politicised," Ball told ABC radio. "We have a system in which there are very capable bureaucratic political players, very capable managers. "But we don't have much ability for intelligence assessment, national assessments, and for translating those assessments into government policy," he said. His comments came amid mounting criticism of Prime Minister John Howard's government for not pressing the United Nations and Indonesia to approve a peacekeeping force ahead of the ballot after persuading President B. J. Habibie to hold it. Opposition foreign affairs spokesman Laurie Brereton was one of a number of political figures and East Timorese campaigners who had warned for months that a bloodbath was inevitable and a peacekeeping force would be needed to avert it. Brereton accused the government on Monday of forcing intelligence agencies to "radically revise" their assessments about East Timor and the Indonesian military to conform with a more optimistic outlook for the territory. Brereton asked Foreign Minister Alexander Downer on Monday how the government viewed comments in May by Indonesia's military commander in East Timor that "everything was going to be destroyed" if there was a vote for independence. Downer repeated Canberra's view that the violence had always been predicted but he, like everyone else, had underestimated the extent of the violence after the ballot. Downer said conflicting intelligence reports were to be expected in Australia's information gathering agencies, the Office of National Assessments and the Defence Intelligence Organisation. Armed with leaked documentation, Brereton also drew attention to two successive assessments by the Defence Intelligence Organisation, one on March 4 saying the Indonesian military was protecting and working with the militia. The other, two months later, said the military was controlling militia action. He said that between the two assessments Howard had naively declared that there had been "a quantum shift in the Indonesian government's control of the military in East Timor." Former army officer Bob Lowry, a former military attache at the Australian embassy in Jakarta, also backed Brereton's criticism in damning evidence given to a senate committee. He said that if the government had attempted to mobilise a quarter of the international pressure on Indonesia before August 30 that it was able to organise afterwards it was likely "we wouldn't be facing what we're facing now" in East Timor. ++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++ Didistribusikan tgl. 23 Sep 1999 jam 11:58:42 GMT+1 oleh: Indonesia Daily News Online <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> http://www.Indo-News.com/ ++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++
