Australia eyes treaty with Jakarta
SYDNEY, Australia (CNN) -- Australia may try to negotiate a new defense and security treaty with Indonesia, Foreign Minister Alexander Downer said Sunday.
A bilateral security agreeement the two neighbors signed in 1995 lapsed in 1999 when relations cooled after Australia sent peacekeepers into the newly independent state of East Timor.
At the time of the 1995 treaty, military strongman Suharto was in power in Indonesia and Paul Keating was the Australian prime minister.
Keating's Labor administration was defeated by John Howard's conservative Liberal-National coalition in 1996 and Suharto was forced to step down in 1998.
Downer told the Nine television network Sunday that the Howard government would not seek to revive the former treaty because it was a "fairly meaningless document".
Howard, who won a fourth term in a landslide poll victory on October 9, is due to travel to Jakarta for Wednesday's inauguration of Susilo Bambang Yudhoyono as Indonesia's new president.
Howard and Yudhoyono will also meet at the Asia Pacific Economic Cooperation (APEC) forum in Chile next month.
Yudhoyono, who convincingly defeated incumbent Megawati Sukarnoputri in presidential elections last month, said last year he thought the two countries should revive the old agreement.
Australia and Indonesia already cooperate on anti-terrorism matters, particularly in the wake of the October 2002 Bali bombings in which 202 people died, 88 of them Australians.
Australian Federal Police are also working closely with their Indonesian counterparts in investigating the September 9 blast outside the Australian embassy in Jakarta, which killed nine people.
The two countries already have signed a memorandum of understanding on fighting terrorism.
Downer told the Nine network this memorandum should be incorporated into any new agreement. But he said it was unlikely Howard and Yudhoyono would discuss a security agreement in any detail this week.
"We'd be looking at later this year and early next year, working up those issues in a bit more detail with the Indonesians," he said, the Australian Associated Press reported.
Downer said Yudhoyono was committed to taking a strong stand against Jemaah Islamiya, the terrorist group that is regarded as the Southeast Asian arm of the al Qaeda network.
Jemaah Islamiya has been implicated in the Bali bombings, the August 2003 attack on the J.W. Marriott Hotel in Jakarta, in which 14 people died, and the most recent blast outside the Australian embassy last month.
On Friday, Indonesian prosecutors formally charged militant cleric Abu Bakar Ba'ashir with ordering his followers to launch the suicide attack on the Marriott Hotel.
Ba'ashir, 68, is widely seen as the spiritual leader of Jemaah Islamiya, though he denies it. He was in jail at the time of the Marriott attack.
