Last I heard, roughly 90 percent of Indonesia’s 215 million people follow Islam and the radical fringe movement therein seems to be gaining steam throughout much of that poor, land-hungry nation. Moreover, news reports today say the U.S. government may urge American citizens to withdraw from Indonesia, given the surge of anti-Americanism evident, especially in Jakarta.
That said, has the purported radicalization of Indonesia become a national issue in Australia–and have the radicals ever articulated territorial/ideological expansionist ambitions re: same?
Indonesia is always of major importance to Australian national security, but the Australian Government tends to worry more about regional instability resulting from turmoil within Indonesia itself than from any actual southward expansionism. Invading Australia would be a logistical nightmare for Indonesia. Sure, they have many times our population, but to get sufficient troops and weaponry onto our shores would be beyond them economically. There’s that pesky several thousand miles of nothingness and desert to cross before they’d be able to reach our cities. The RAAF would be able to pick them off one by one at their leisure as they crossed the arid interior. It’s a bit like saying, if Mexico had many times the US population, could it invade America? Highly doubtful, if you ask me.
But if Indonesia wanted to make things a bit hot for us for a while, then yeah, it could become a bit ugly.
I honestly don’t know but I would assume if Indonesia had made noises in Australia’s direction we would have heard of it by now.
Besides that no matter how much belligerent towards Australia Indonesia became they wouldn’t stand a chance of invading that country and reasonably expect any kind of success. A mere 20 miles or so of water stopped Germany’s war machine cold in the proposed invasion of Great Britain and that was with a highly mobilized army and plenty of equipment ready to go. There’s a lot more than 20 miles separating Indonesia from Australia.
Even China in its desire to take Taiwan (only some what…80 miles from CHina?) and its extremely large army couldn’t currently manage an invasion of that island. Indonesia doesn’t possess anywhere near the capacity for an invasion of Australia and would probably be easily stopped by Australia’s own military. That, of course, doesn’t even take into account how the US would feel about such a thing.
Finally, Indonesia doesn’t have any historical claim to Australia so an invasion would constitute an outright land grab which almost certainly net them outcast status among most nations in the world. Even Saddam Hussein trumped up some historical precedent for invading Kuwait (however thin such an excuse was). Indonesia would find themselves cutoff from the world community and all the trade that brings which would be painful. They’d also probably find a worldwide military coalition formed against them as if facing the US and Australia wasn’t enough.
The only ‘invasion’ I could see would be an attempt to export muslim fanaticism to Australia but somehow I don’t see Australians as the types to buy into that at all. In short, Indonesia will have to make do with what it already has. If they have expansionist plans they’ll have to turn them towards some smaller fish if they have any hope for success.
Just to answer you second question more directly: I’m not aware of any raising of expansionism as a proposal by the Indonesian press or mainstream political parties, although I’m sure it has crossed the minds of the fringe groups from time to time. Similarly, beating up Australian fear of an expansionist Indonesia is a favourite pastime of the extreme right in this country.
Whack-a-Mole makes some good points as well. Indonesia would become a political outcast if it attempted to do anything in that regard. Also, Australia and the United States have a history of coming to each other’s aid quickly in the face of aggression (we were amongst the first to offer assistance to the US in fighting Bin Laden), so they’d most likely be taking on Uncle Sam as well as a superior Australian military.
Given the current instability within Indonesia, and the prevailing mood of separatism in acouple of provinces, I would have thought that Indonnesia was more likely to implode than to expand.
The military have another problem not mentioned above: corruption. A good deal of that was brought to the surface during the transition phase of East Timour’s independence, and is still evident in the people smuggling operations which push refugees at Australia. Surely a succesful invasion would require a cohesive, focussed army?
I don’t think you should draw parallels between SE Asian and Mid-East forms of Islam. Although there has been religious strife in the Philipines and and Indonesia, on the whole, Islam in this region is a much more benevolent form. In Indonesia at the moment, the secularists are very much in control. It’s the same sort of story you can see in Turkey.
Indonesia has so many problems at the moment that the last thing they need is to make even more of an enemy of us than they already have.
I disagree with Mersavets: no-one is very much in control. The situation is fluid. DVous Means is right. It is internal collapse that threatens Indonesia. But to put it mildly, this would be a problem for Australia. After all, Nauru is small. Stability to our North was always the focus of our post-Sukarno foreign policy until our adventurism in (predominantly Catholic) East Timor. The prospect of things running amok (yep, a malay/ indonesian word) in Aceh, Ambon etc is real and would be a humanitarian disaster on our doorstep.
I agree that no ONE is in control. What I meant was that things are pretty dicey for anybody leading Indonesia; Wahid, Suharto, Soekarno or Megawati but about the only thing they all had in common was a secular outlook. Wiranto and the other guys in the Army have never been fundamentalists and I can’t see anybody getting very far in Indonesia against the Army if not with their explicit backing.
The one thing you can be sure of is that the fundamentalists will be about the only group that won’t seize power and they are the only people who would be crazy enough to try it on with us directly.
Is it not true that Wahid was a leader of and backed by one of the two largest Muslim groups in Indonesia, and one with a large faction of fundamentalists (maybe not in the usual sense, but the party(?) isn’t secular by any stretch of the imagination).
While Indonesia is technically Muslim they practice very much there own brand of it. Combining many other elements of animism and local beliefs.
Also should Indonesia be able to get foot on to Aussie it is a long way to Oz’s population centers. Darwin, Cairnes(sp? and Townsville are the only sizeable places very far North. I doubt any have 100,000 people.
The first two big cities are Brisbane and Gold Gold coast.
It’s hard enuff to plan an amphibious landing much less then crossing a HUGE desert to get to anyone.
Presumably, since Australia and New Zealand told the U.S. that they were willing to help out the U.S. under the terms of the ANZUS Treaty, it would be logical to assume that the U.S. would help out Australia with any invasions from Indonesia.
The L.A. Times ran a profile a couple of weeks ago about radical Moslem fundamentalist in Indonesia. He didn’t sound like someone I would want to get angry.
There was an item on this morning’s news saying our government had issued a warning to Aussies in Indonesia to stay indoors, but this seems to revolve around concern that they may be mistaken for Americans and be targetted in anti-US attacks.
While the Indonesians aren’t exactly thrilled with what they perceive as our “interference” in East Timor, they are very dependent on foreign aid. While I don’t have a great deal of faith in Megawati’s ability to maintain control in Indonesia, the major impact which further instability in the region or any uprising would have on Australia is probably that we’d have a huge humanitarian crisis on our doorstep.
Were the Mulsim extremist nations to pour into a radicalised Indonesia the kind of money it currently receives in foreign aid, and to equip it militarily, things might be different - until that happens though, I don’t think too many Aussies are losing any sleep over the new and revised “yellow peril”.
And IIRC, Boyce sold US satellite secrets to the USSR.
It might be true but I don’t think it was very important. You could say the same about the Federal Government here. The coalition would have a large faction of Christian fundamentalists but that doesn’t mean Howard is not secular or even likely to ever head down a fundamentalists path. Wahid is a cleric but there was never any likelihood of him taking an Islamist stance because of it.a
Nitpick: I couldn’t find any good cites on this, but I believe New Zealand is offering help under authority of a UN resolution. Unless I’m mistaken, NZ is no longer a party to the ANZUS treaty, having been suspended from the agreement for refusing port calls of American ships which did not declare whether their armament was nuclear.
The ANZUS treaty also only applies to acts of aggression in the Pacific region, so technically our invoking it is more posturing than anything else - the Sept 11 attacks aren’t covered by the terms of the treaty.
Stability to our North was always the focus of our post-Sukarno foreign policy until our adventurism in (predominantly Catholic) East Timor. The prospect of things running amok (yep, a malay/ indonesian word) in Aceh, Ambon etc is real and would be a humanitarian disaster on our doorstep.