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Indonesia Indonesia, ASEAN, and the Third Indochina War
Indonesian Minister of Foreign Affairs Mochtar
Kusumaatmadja
was chairman of the ASEAN Standing Committee in December
1978
when Vietnam invaded Cambodia, initiating what some
observers
called the Third Indochina War (1978-91). Mochtar's
response,
which became the official ASEAN response, was to deplore
the
Vietnamese invasion and call for the withdrawal of foreign
forces
from Cambodia. Indonesia and other ASEAN members
immediately
placed the issue on the agenda of the UN Security Council.
It was
not long after the invasion, however, that deep
differences
between Indonesia and Thailand, the "frontline state,"
regarding
the long-term interests of ASEAN were revealed. Although
compelled to make a show of solidarity with Thailand by
its
interest in sustaining ASEAN itself, Indonesia began to
see the
prolongation of the war in Cambodia, the "bleeding Vietnam
white"
strategy, as not being in its or the region's interests.
Although
never retreating from ASEAN's central demand of Vietnamese
withdrawal from Cambodia and Khmer self-determination,
Indonesia
actively sought to engage the Khmers and Vietnamese and
their
external sponsors in a search for a settlement that would
recognize legitimate interests on all sides. From 1982 to
the
signing of the Final Act of the Paris International
Conference on
Cambodia on October 23, 1991, Indonesian diplomacy played
a
central role in peace negotiations under both Mochtar and
his
successor, Ali Alatas.
Indonesia opened what came to be called "dual-track"
diplomacy, in which it pursued bilateral political
communication
with Vietnam while maintaining its commitment to the ASEAN
formula. By 1986 ASEAN had accepted Indonesia its official
"interlocutor" with Vietnam. The breakthrough came in July
1987,
in the Mochtar-Nguyen Co Thach (Vietnam's minister of
foreign
affairs) communiqué in which Vietnam accepted the idea of
an
informal meeting between the Khmer parties, to which other
concerned countries would be invited. This was the
so-called
"cocktail party" formula. This eventually led to the first
Jakarta Informal Meeting in July 1988, at which the issue
of the
Vietnamese invasion and occupation of Cambodia--the
external
question--was decoupled from the Khmer "civil war"--the
internal
question. The second Jakarta Informal Meeting took place
in
February 1989 after a change of government in Thailand had
radically shifted Bangkok's policy toward a quick
negotiated
settlement. The second Jakarta meeting, chaired by Alatas,
at
which Vietnam accepted the notion of an "international
control
mechanism" for Cambodia, was followed by escalating
diplomatic
activity--efforts that led to the July 1990 Paris
International
Conference on Cambodia cochaired by Indonesia and France.
The
conference adjourned without making great progress, but by
then
international events influencing great power relations had
outpaced ASEAN's and Indonesia's ability to coordinate.
The five
permanent members of the UN Security Council--working
through
Paris International Conference on Cambodia channels--took
up the
challenge of negotiating a peace settlement in Cambodia
and, with
Indonesia assuming a burdensome diplomatic role, fashioned
a
peace agreement that led to the deployment of forces of
the UN
Transitional Authority in Cambodia (UNTAC).
Indonesia's sense of achievement and pride in its role
in
bringing peace to Indochina was reflected in three events.
On
November 12, 1990, Suharto arrived in Hanoi for the first
meeting
between an ASEAN head of government and a Vietnamese
counterpart
since Premier Pham Van Dong visited Thailand's prime
minister
Kriangsak Chomanand in 1977. On March 15, 1992, Japan's
Akashi
Yasushi, the UN undersecretary general for disarmament and
newly
appointed head of UNTAC, arrived in Phnom Penh to be
greeted by a
color guard of Indonesian troops who were part of the
first full
battalion-sized contingent of UNTAC peacekeepers
dispatched to
Cambodia. At the peak deployment of foreign peacekeeping
forces
in late 1992, Indonesia had the largest force in Cambodia
with
nearly 2,000 military and police personnel, representing
10
percent of the total. Finally, in mid-1991, fresh from
diplomatic
success in helping to end the Cambodian civil war,
Indonesia took
the initiative in seeking to open multilateral
negotiations on
competitive South China Sea claims, especially those
claims
involving jurisdictional disputes over the Spratly
Islands.
Indonesia's gradually assertive role in the Cambodian
peace
effort demonstrated that Jakarta was not entirely willing
to
place its commitment to ASEAN solidarity above its own
national
interests. The Jakarta Post, often reflective of
official
positions, thundered in an editorial, "It is high time to
spell
out clearly to our ASEAN partners, as the largest
archipelagic
state in Southeast Asia with a growing national interest
to
protect, that we simply cannot afford the endless
prolonging of
the Kampuchean conflict." A caption in the Far Eastern
Economic Review caught the mood more succinctly:
"Indonesia
in ASEAN: fed up being led by the nose." Less
colloquially,
Indonesian analyst Dewi Fortuna Anwar wrote in the
Review:
"The challenge for Indonesian foreign policy in the future
is how
to maintain a balance between an ASEAN policy which
requires
goodwill and trust of the other members, and satisfying
some of
the internationalist aspirations of a growing number of
the
Indonesian political elite."
The settlement of the Cambodian conflict, Southeast
Asia's
own cold war, combined with the dramatically altered
balance of
power in the region, raised the question of what new
political
cement might hold ASEAN together in the post-Cold War
environment
in the early 1990s. Competitive claims by the nations
involved in
the jurisdictional competition in the South China Sea had
the
potential for conflict but did not pose the direct threat
to
ASEAN's collective security interest, as had the
Vietnamese
invasion and occupation of Cambodia
(see Relations with East Asia
, this ch.). General suspicion about China's long-term
ambitions in the region was too diffuse to generate
consensual
policy. Indonesia, still insisting that ZOPFAN had
validity for
the region, initially looked coolly on United States
efforts to
enhance its military access elsewhere in Southeast Asia
after the
closure of its Philippines' military base. Jakarta did not
want
to create an even more legitimate opportunity for
superpower
intervention in its region.
Indonesia resisted the urging of some ASEAN members
that
ASEAN formally adopt a more explicit common
political-security
identity. Indonesia successfully opposed Singapore's
proposal at
the ASEAN Fourth Summit that would have invited the UN
Security
Council's five permanent members to accede to ASEAN's 1976
Treaty
of Amity and Cooperation in Southeast Asia. Although very
cool to
the notion that some kind of Helsinki-like formula for
regional
peace and security could be extended to Asia, Indonesia
agreed to
a political and security agenda for ASEAN's annual PostMinisterial Conference with its official partners. In
part,
Indonesian ambivalence about an ASEAN security role,
together
with its reluctance to mesh its economy with an ASEAN
regional
economy, arose from Indonesia's desire to keep its options
open
as it pursued its interests, not just as an ASEAN country,
but as
an increasingly important Asia-Pacific regional power.
However,
even as Indonesia looked beyond Southeast Asia to enhance
its
status as an important middle power, ASEAN still provided
a
valuable instrument for wielding noncoercive regional
influence
and gaining attention in the wider international arena.
Data as of November 1992
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