After Timor, everything is changed

By Greg Ansley

As Sunday night became Monday morning and the decision-makers of the Pacific Rim gathered around TV sets in their Auckland hotel suites, it became clear that Apec had clicked into a new and uncertain future.

A decade ago, when the Australian Prime Minister of the day, Bob Hawke, launched it in Canberra, Apec was a strictly defined economic forum attempting to nudge the Pacific clear of the mistrust and animosities left by the Cold War.

Early yesterday, Indonesian President Jusuf Habibie walked briskly to a podium flanked by generals, announced his acceptance of peacekeepers for East Timor and irrevocably redrew the borders.

Apec is no longer a pure forum of trade and economics. Through a process of evolution accelerated by the first leaders' summit in Seattle in 1993, it has become much more.

From 12 founding members, it has gathered economic and political momentum, picking up the two Chinas in 1991 and the former hostile states of Russia and Vietnam last year, and engaging head to head the 21 leaders of 2.4 billion people, most of the global nuclear arsenal, and almost half the world's trade.

The crisis over East Timor, and the even greater issues that it clouded, banished the quaint mythology that, in such a gathering, trade and economics can be quarantined from the wider complexities of regional interaction.

United States President Bill Clinton did not come to Auckland to talk about abolishing export subsidies or the details of world trade negotiations, matters quite properly left to Trade Representative Charlene Barshefsky and her officials.

He came to talk to Chinese President Jiang Zemin in the hope of repairing the damage done to Sino-US relations by a series of mishaps, mistakes and miscalculations, capped by the almost impossibly stupid, if unintended, bombing of Beijing's Belgrade Embassy.

The two leaders were equally keen to initiate a process of reconciliation, because the potential costs of failure are so high. Taiwan, military rivalry, the Korean peninsula are matters that demand careful, sensitive and cooperative handling.

The political difficulties of a face-to-face meeting in such a climate all but ruled out a summit between the two Presidents.

Apec offered the chance to meet as a byproduct of a broad regional conference on trade at which consensus rather than division - no matter how illusory - was the common goal. That the public focus of the Clinton-Jiang meetings outside Apec was Chinese membership of the World Trade Organisation was both a bonus and a demonstration of the interaction of trade and diplomacy.

By restarting the stalled WTO negotiating process, the two Presidents were able gently to thaw the frost extending across the broader relationship.

There is no similar opportunity for the leaders of the region. Security can be discussed at official and ministerial level at the Asean Regional Forum, but there is nothing like Apec, with its private programmes of off-the-agenda discussions, cocktail diplomacy and corridor wheeler-dealing.

Apec is also developing, as East Timor has shown, as a valuable platform for regional crisis management.

Timor was never on the agenda - but it was handled on the peripheries through the ability of leaders, ministers and officials to meet and make decisions face to face, collectively and separately.

The US arrived with no intention of becoming involved. China did not want to know. Indonesia's neighbours and fellow members of the Association of Southeast Asian Nations would brook no breach of their tradition of non-interference in one another's affairs.

But in a remarkable achievement, Australia, with help from New Zealand and Canada, used the intimacy of Anzus and a history of loyalty to the US to turn American indifference to outrage and action, brought Asean into a coalition demanding the acceptance of peacekeepers, and won China's involvement.

Had the leaders of the region not been together in Auckland, it is doubtful if such a weight of influence could have been assembled.

The uncertainty for Apec is how the balance of diplomatic and trade and economic interests should now be addressed, and how the forum should be managed to maintain a workable focus.