Summit on Timor tips issue back in UN's lap

By John Armstrong

Political editor

"This issue is much bigger than Apec," shrugged Don McKinnon yesterday as fellow Foreign Ministers bowed to the depressingly obvious: no one will rush to the immediate rescue of the East Timorese and halt the Indonesian-sanctioned killings.

Despite the presence of four out of five permanent members of the Security Council, the emergency summit of Foreign Ministers in Auckland foundered on the impotence or apathy of its participants and shoved the problem off Apec's informal agenda and back to the United Nations in New York.

The official line is that yesterday's meeting, by the very fact it took place, has strengthened the UN's arm by presenting a unified regional face to an intransigent Indonesia.

Unified? The meeting could not even agree to issue a formal statement of its position. Jenny Shipley's "coalition of the willing" appears as stillborn as East Timor's independence.

To put it crudely, Apec is split between an occasionally bellicose-sounding white man's club and financially weak Southeast Asian nations nervous of getting offside with an unstable neighbour.

At yesterday's meeting, those Asean nations warned that external pressure on the intensely nationalistic Indonesians would only prove counter-productive.

Australia already knows that, having discovered that years of patient bridge-building with Jakarta count for nothing when it really matters.

Australia quietly argued that it should be allowed to send in some troops to protect its consulate and the United Nations compound in Dili. The Indonesians refused point-blank.

That left one big unanswered question amid yesterday's diplomatic manoeuvres and pleadings: does the assembly of an international peace-keeping force in the region foreshadow intervention without Indonesia's consent?

Senior officials, speaking on the understanding they were not identified, said the chances of that happening are zero and there is nothing the international community can do.

With between 25,000 to 35,000 Indonesian soldiers on the island and the United States refusing to commit troops, no one else will go into East Timor without Security Council endorsement and Indonesian agreement. Neither is likely.

The Security Council, awaiting a report from its special mission to Jakarta, is anyway unlikely to meet again before tomorrow.

Getting any sort of peacekeeping force into East Timor is now at least three weeks away - and contingent on Indonesia's Legislative Assembly ratifying the referendum vote.

What diplomats do not know is whether the Indonesian military intends keeping East Timor within Indonesia and is eradicating all elements of opposition - or whether it will allow independence once it has burned and pillaged everything in sight.

Officials are cautioning that something might happen in volatile Jakarta to alter this bleak picture. But they admit securing East Timor's independence now depends - as it always has - on sustained diplomacy which carefully mixes persuasion with pressure.