jakarta lobby

* theres a very odd story thats been floating round these parts since 1999.
the indonesian forces carried out a massacre agasint the east timorese during the election there - from memory, the australian security forces were supposed to be there monitoring the elction or some (my memory about the details is a bit hazy). anyways, just as the massacre was ramping up, the communications link for the Australian Defence Forces and Canberra inexplicably failed for 26 hours. it was widely rumoured that an "Indonesian Lobby" in canberra had orchestrated the comms failure so that the indonesians could carry out a massacre and prevent the secession of east timor (literally one of the poorest countries in the world). there have been four inquiries trying to ascertain what the hell happened - all of them looked like whitewashes.

an inquiry has just been completed and 2 "military intelligence officers have been disciplined for misleading a top-level inquiry" - you wont be surprised to learn that their evidence was key in 'proving' that the comms shutdown was accidental.

the secession vote was eventually successful - and australian forces have been there for years, proudly spreading freedom (tm). despite being nominally really poor, east timor has a whole bunch of oil sitting off the coast - and not surprisingly, australia thought that it was really bad that australia couldnt get her hands on east timor's oil - so they went about changing international law so they could steal it. international law, as it stood, was that you draw a line halfway between the borders of each country and the spoils belong to the closest country. sounds straight forward, right? the australian government then pulled a neato trick, and somehow 'moved' their long-established border way out to the edge of the continental shelf, so that now when you draw a line halfway between resource-rich australia, and the poorest country on the planet, lots of the oilfields fall into australia's purview.

im not really sure how this falls into the facts about the latest comms inquiry - its not too difficult to imagine that there was a deal between (some parts of the) evil australian regime and the evil murderous indonesian regime where australian oil companies would be given extraction rights and the indonesian regime would get the royalties, so long as the east timorese seccession movement failed. 'luckily' for australia, they had a plan b, which was to steal the oil from the east timorese instead. the poor indonesians got the short straw, as did the east timorese (altho they will get some bargain-basement-level royalties/bribes)

viewed though this prism, the machinations behind the latest aceh peace accord are probably fascinating, altho i doubt we'll learn the details for a decade or two (aceh is also dripping with the black gold)