1) WHAT INDONESIA’S RISE MEANS FOR AUSTRALIA

2) Body of latest Freeport victim sent home

3) RETURNING  TO THE FOLD –WEST PAPUA SEEKING PERMANENT MEMBERSHIP   STATUS WITH MSG &PIF

4) Live Link To Papuans

5)  4 die in landslide in Intan Jaya, Papua

6) West Papuans given Aboriginal passports

HTTP://WWW.THEMONTHLY.COM.AU/ISSUE/2013/JUNE/1370181600/HUGH-WHITE/WHAT-INDONESIA-S-RISE-MEANS-AUSTRALIA

1) WHAT INDONESIA’S RISE MEANS FOR AUSTRALIA

Northern Exposure

HUGH WHITE   

June, 2013 

PREVIEW 

Medium length read1300 words

Large and close but poor and weak, Indonesia holds a shadowy place in Australia’s world view. We have never known quite what to make of it, or how seriously to take it. Soon there will be no option but to take it very seriously indeed, because Indonesia is changing fast. In the Asian century, it may matter to Australia as much as China and the US. It may even become our most important ally.  Indonesia was barely a blip on Australia’s strategic radar until the Pacific War, when Japan seized it from the Dutch and attacked Australia from bases there. Indonesia won independence after the war and, for the first time, Australia had a neighbour big enough and close enough to threaten it directly.This raised new and unsettling questions about our security. Australia’s distant allies might see a clash with Indonesia as just a little local conflict irrelevant to their interests, so we could not assume they would offer much help. During the 1950s, the possibility that we might need to defend ourselves from our new neighbour unaided became a central issue in Australia’s defence and foreign policy. Fortunately, the threat never materialised. Australia’s relationship with Indonesia was uncomfortable under President Sukarno’s rule, but the country remained poor and militarily weak, especially at sea. Then, after Suharto took over in 1967, he replaced Sukarno’s nationalist adventurism with a more cautious and constructive foreign policy. He fostered regional links through the Association of South East Asian Nations (ASEAN), and encouraged coolly cordial relations with Australia. Even so, Indonesia has never lost its special place in Australian defence planning. In the decade and a half after Vietnam, when the military missions of the Australian Defence Force (ADF) were limited to local defence, Indonesia remained the only conceivable threat. Since the 1970s, Australia’s armed forces have been primarily designed to defend against the kind of pinprick raids on our territory that are all Indonesia’s military could manage. Indeed, behind the diplomatic evasions, the government’s 2013 defence White Paper, released in May, makes clear this is still the ADF’s priority.

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2) Body of latest Freeport victim sent home