E and OE

17 June 2003

Minister for Foreign Affairs, Alexander Downer

Darwin Doorstop

Downer:    Can I just begin by saying how pleased I am to be in Darwin, albeit very briefly  today, to promote the work that we’ve done on the Timor Sea Treaty and the International  Unitisation Agreement.  I think this is really an extraordinary achievement that in such a short  period of time we and the East Timorese have been able to negotiate such successful  agreements.  The negotiations have been tough, but we do now have a situation where the oil  and gas can be effectively produced, that the resources can be shared and the prosperity of  East Timor can be underwritten.  And of course one of the great issues is going to be how East  Timor uses the monies that become available to them, and that’s an interesting component of  the discussions here today.  So I’m delighted to participate briefly on way to Cambodia.  I’m  going off to Cambodia about 2:30 this afternoon.  So I’m happy to answer any questions.

Journalist:  Inaudible -re security in East Timor Sea.

Downer:    Yes, we as you know have an expression, be alert and not alarmed.  That is that  when we get information we pass that on to the public, where there are particular pieces of  intelligence that may suggest to us that there could be some sort of attack.  On the other  hand we have to understand and look at the broad environment we operate in.  It’s an  environment where we do see terrorist attacks, and we need to express appropriate caution.   And as I say not be alarmed but express caution.  Now it’s conceivable, I don’t have any  information to tell you this is about to happen, but it is conceivable that somebody could  attack offshore oil and gas platforms, offshore oil and gas facilities.  It’s happened in history.   It hasn’t happened to us.  And so it’s just important that we and the East Timorese continue  to monitor the security situation as best we can.  Of course you cover an enormous area  -that’s not necessarily very easy.  But we so what we can.

Journalist:  Inaudible

Downer:    Well we’ve had some preliminary discussions, particularly I have, with the East  Timorese Foreign Minister Jose Ramos Horta, about the possibility of us entering into  surveillance agreements.  I think the reality here us that we have the capabilities to do  surveillance, for example aerial surveillance using aircraft such as the P3C Orion.  East Timor’s  capacity is pretty limited.  I think they’ve got two or three patrol boats and they’re not high  seas patrol boats, not blue water vessels.  They’re coastal vessels.  So they’ve had some  difficulty in doing that with those vessels that they have.  But I think as time goes on we’ll  have to increasingly help them in this area.  And we’ve in-principle said that we’d be  interested in looking at ways we can advance co-operation in the area of surveillance.  But,  we’ll have to work all that out in time.

Journalist:  Inaudible

Downer:    No, not within East Timor.  I think for a lot of reasons I don’t think we’d do that.   And the other thing is you wouldn’t need it because you can do the surveillance of the East  Timor Sea from Australia itself, you’ve got the logistical backup and so on.

Journalist:  Inaudible.

Downer:    It could be, it could be.  I think there would be some logic to that of course,  because you’ve got the infrastructure in Darwin, and you’ve got a lot of military infrastructure  in Darwin.  Darwin is of course the jumping-off point from Australia to East Timor.

Journalist:  Inaudible.

Downer:    Well, whether you would use Coastwatch or whether you would use military  assets, these are things that we haven’t really worked through yet.  We need really to talk to  the East Timorese a bit more about it.  The issue with this is that we had some discussions  with them about it and then we got down to the, sort of, last phase of the negotiations on the  International Unitisation Agreement, which were interesting discussions, and now that we’ve  concluded that, issues like surveillance of the Timor Sea and the broader question, a very  important question, of how we’re going to take forward this issue of a maritime boundary  delimitation, the drawing of the maritime boundaries -we’re still working on that.  We  proposed to them the establishment of some kind of bilateral maritime commission where all  of these issues can be discussed, and they’ve in-principle been quite interested in that.   Though we haven’t taken that forward much in the last few weeks.

Journalist:  Inaudible

Downer:    No, there hasn’t been a specific threat to the Timor Sea.

Journalist:  What would be the obvious targets?

Downer:    It’s a good question.  You could I suppose imagine that a terrorist organisation  might wish to target an oil or gas rig, or something like that.

Journalist:  Inaudible

Downer:    We of course have security operations here in Darwin.  Our intelligence agencies,  the Federal Police and of course the Northern Territory Police, are responsible for monitoring  the situation.  Do I think LNG tankers would increase the security risk in Darwin?  No I don’t.   I don’t think it would lead to a greater security risk.  But, anything could be a target, that’s  the trouble -you don’t really know what the targets are going to be.

Journalist:  Inaudible

Downer:    No they haven’t and they didn’t make that conditional of going ahead, which  suggests that they see it, right or wrong, they see it as very low risk in terms of possible  terrorist attacks.  I think that’s clearly right, the risks are low but the risks are there.  So, no  they didn’t at all.  And our negotiations with them, and our discussions with them, have been  entirely about the fiscals and the boundaries and all those sorts of questions that have made  the project go ahead.

Journalist:  Inaudible

Downer:    I don’t know enough about the Norway Fund to be honest with you, or Norway  Plus.  But I think the notion of putting revenue into a fund for (inaudible) future generations  to be wisely used.  I think all of us can think of examples over the last particularly 50 years of  countries that have enjoyed a great windfall from resource exploitation of one kind or  another.  Not just oil or gas, I can think of examples which are other resources.  And that  money has over a short period of time disappeared.  In some cases the money has gone into  the hands of the elite and the generality of the community has completely missed out.  In  other cases where that has happened, that’s created an enormous amount of tension within  the society and (inaudible) it was one of the causes of the Bougainville civil war.  So, how the  money is managed is a central issue for East Timor.  It’s an issue for East Timor itself of  course.  It’s their sovereign right to determine what they do with it.  But it is a centrally  important issue that a -  the money be kept wisely and managed wisely, and secondly that the  resources be distributed in an equitable sort of way, to the benefit of the whole of society, not  just to the benefit of the elites, which is what as happened in some countries.  Here we have a  new country, it has a great opportunity to do this well, and listening to the speech of the  Secretary earlier this afternoon I can only take encouragement from what he said.  I have  optimism that the East Timorese have learnt from the mistakes of many other countries,  frankly including some in the South Pacific.

Journalist:  Inaudible

Downer:    Well we’re not going to reduce our support proportionately to the increase in their  revenues.  We’ll continue to support East Timor in practical ways through our aid program.  But at the same time, East Timor in per capita terms must be one of the poorest countries in  the world at the moment.  From next year onwards this really, this Timor Sea arrangement  will give East Timor really to build up its per capita GDP, the prosperity of its people.  But I  don’t think it would be right for Australia to scale back its aid program in the short term, just  because East Timor is getting that revenue.  It’s not so much a money issue, it’s areas where  our assistance can be particularly important.  That is in areas such as governance and the way  we’re able to help them develop their police force, which is at the moment a very high priority  for us - to put more resources and more effort into developing an east Timor police force.   Now just withdrawing and saying, we’ll you’ve got money yourself to do that, and we’re not  going to be bothered anymore -to be frank with you I think that would be quite the wrong  approach.  So I think we’re going to have to maintain our aid programs for a long time into  the future.

Journalist:  Inaudible

Downer:    We maintain as you know, through the United Nations Peacekeeping Force,  military support for East Timor.  I think though, let me say this about East Timor -I think the  problems with TNI and with Kopassus, with militias coming over the border from West Timor  are very small problems now.  Though you could have an argument about whether there  would be a problem if the peacekeeping force withdrew -what would then happen?  But there  is no indication that the Indonesian Government or the Indonesian military, the TNI  Headquarters, think that they can roll back history in relation to East Timor, that they would  want to try to do that.  And I’m sure they wouldn’t.  They would understand that the  consequences for Indonesia internationally if they were to do that.  So I don’t think there’s  any danger that at least from Jakarta there’s going to be any strategy to try to destabilise  East Timor, because Indonesia has a vested interest in a stable East Timor.  I think the  problem you have much is a problem of occasional outbreaks of lawlessness, as we saw at the

end of last year and early this year, where there were incidents where people were killed.   And my reaction to that has been that we have a problem with policing here.  And I think the  answer is we do.  I don’t think the East Timorese police force has been sufficiently developed  up until now.  I think donors such as us have to do more to help them develop their police  force to deal with emergencies of one kind or another.  So we’re doing that.  And a lot of  these policing functions aren’t appropriate for the military.  Now when will the military leave?   I think it’s just too early to make a judgement about that.

Journalist:  What’s your response to reports today that you knew about (inaudible) -relating  to the ONA Submission on the Bali bombing.

Downer:    My response is that we had no information at all that there was to be a terrorist  attack on Bali and that’s been demonstrated very clearly by the investigation done by Mr  Blick, the Inspector-General for Intelligence Services.  And we had no information at all.  This  is a reference to a meeting that took place, actually over two days, in my office with ONA  people to talk about terrorism generally in South-East Asia, and during the course of that  meeting at one point I asked the analysts there, where they thought you might get attacks  from Jema’ah Islamiyah.  And in the course of that answer they referred to a number of  places.  They referred to Singapore, Riau and they also referred to Bali.  So given that they  referred to those three places I asked whether they thought in the light of that there should  be any change to our travel advisories.  But remember, our travel advisories were fairly high  at that stage for Indonesia and Singapore.  We’d had a threat already to the Australian  Embassy in Singapore in December the previous year.  And their response was, well we don’t  have any intelligence on this at all.  So it was just one analyst who made this point.  As it  turned out it was quite a prescient point that he made.  But obviously we didn’t have any  intelligence that led me or the Departmental officials who were there, or the intelligence  agencies to want to upgrade travel advisories.  And as you’d I think appreciate, if we’d ever  had any information on a terrorist attack in Bali of the type that actually took place, then we  absolutely would have moved heaven and earth to try to stop people going there.  But  tragically we didn’t have that information.

Journalist:  Were you satisfied with that advice, not to change the travel advisory,  considering that they (inaudible) Jema’ah Islamiyah was active in the region?

Downer:    The discussion of course was about Jema’ah Islamiyah being active in the region.   And one of the things that’s quite interesting is that coming out of these meetings which took  place on two occasions over those two days, I decided to upgrade the public comments that I  made on Jema’ah Islamiyah and made much more strident remarks about the threat of  Jema’ah Islamiyah.  But in the end, well our travel advisory was already drawing people’s  attentions to the risks and dangers of possible terrorist attacks in Indonesia should people go  to Indonesia.  And also by the way, Singapore.  But we didn’t know, or have any information,  any intelligence information, that led us to believe, and by us I mean me, the intelligence  community, the Department of Foreign Affairs and Trade and so on, that there was to be an  attack in Bali, which in any case happened several months later.  I mean it’s an interesting  point this, but I’m told that from that meeting, and this was just one analyst’s comments at a  meeting, this wasn’t a significant component of the discussions, which were on a broader  issue, but from the time of those meetings until the time of the Bali bombing I understand  that the Office of National Assessments produced around twenty reports on the issue of  terrorism in South-East Asia.  And not in any of those reports was there a mention of a  possible attack in Bali, or a mention of Bali.  So, of course when you have 20/20 hindsight we  all wish we could have done something to stop the terrorist attack.  But since we didn’t have  any information, there was no intelligence about a possible terrorist attack, that we failed to  pick up that information.

Journalist:  Nothing more specific about Bali other than this mention in the context of JI’s  (inaudible)?

Downer:    Yes that’s right.  And it wasn’t just Bali, but it was also Singapore and Riau. And  hotels, nightclubs and so on.  So it wasn’t just places, it wasn’t just particular locations.  It  was types of places as well.  It was in the context of a discussion about what types of targets  could you imagine, I asked ONA what types of targets could you imagine that Jema’ah  Islamiyah might strike at.  Now, I don’t remember all the details of this to be honest with you,  I’ve had to refresh my memory in recent times about what happened in these discussions.   But, it was just mentioned in that context, and I think it’s appropriate that ONA make that  public and that’s known to the Senate Committee.  I think that’s the way to go.

Journalist:  So you don’t think there was any conflict between the advice they gave you at  the briefing last June, and what was already in the Australian travel advice?

Downer:    No I don’t, no.  Because, I mean the interesting point here is that their views, I  mean not just ONA’s views of course, but other intelligence agencies, particularly ASIO’s  views, are sought the whole time on the travel advisories.  And the travel advisories are  typically, look they’re adjusted for a lot of reasons, but they are typically adjusted on the  basis of intelligence information that comes forward or open source information that’s made  available to us.  And given that this was hypothesising, it was theorizing by one particular  analyst.  It wasn’t based on any information that he had.  It was of course perceptive as it  turned out, not that we were to know that at the time, but based on theorizing by one  particular analyst, and not based on any hard information.  There was no sense amongst the  officials or ONA that we should upgrade our travel advisories, because remember our travel  advisory was already warning people of possible terrorist attacks in Indonesia. I don’t have it  with me, but it was quite robust.

Journalist:  Inaudible -re ASEAN nations ready to get tough on Burma.

Downer:    Yes, I think is the answer to that question.  I do hope the ASEAN nations continue  to place pressure on Burma.  I think the ASEAN countries have a very significant responsibility  when there are problems within ASEAN countries themselves.  Just as on the issue of  Zimbabwe, I think that the primary responsibility for placing pressure on President Mugabe  rests with surrounding southern African countries.  So too on Burma, I think it’s incumbent on  the other ASEAN countries to do everything they can to try to get political reform in Burma.   And in this specific case we very much hope that the ASEAN countries, whatever they say  publicly that’s one thing, and they have their own traditions in terms of public comment which  are, as you can see from what I’m saying here a little different from ours.  But whatever they  say publicly, we hope that they’ll continue to apply pressure privately right now for the release  of Aung San Suu Kyi and National league for Democracy officials.  I think that’s very  important they do that.  And frankly I think the world is leading to the other ASEAN  governments to exert some pressure there on the SPBC.

Journalist:  What can they do?

Downer:    They can exert diplomatic pressure.  There have been times over the last few  years when they have off and on exerted diplomatic pressure.  You’d be interested to know  and you night be surprised to know that one of the more active advocates of reform in Burma  has been Dr Mahathir, the Prime Minister of Malaysia.  He’s spoken, I know, with the Burmese

leadership on a number of occasions, encouraging reform in Burma.  I thought I might  mention that because you might not be aware of that.  So, we would encourage them to keep  doing that.  Not just him, but other ASEAN leaders and the ASEAN foreign ministers to make  sure, as I understand they have been, that they take this up with their Burmese colleague.  I’ll  be meeting the Foreign Minister of Burma tomorrow or the next day and so I’ll take the  opportunity then of -if Aung San Suu Kyi hasn’t been released by then, of expressing our view  that she should be released, so should National league for Democracy officials be released,  and so too should the SPDC, the Junta in Burma, move into a process of serious negotiations  with the National League for Democracy of constitutional reform.

Journalist:  Inaudible

Downer:    Our judgement is that what we need to do is get the investigation into the nature  of and whereabouts of Saddam Hussein’s weapons of mass destruction programs much further  advanced before we can compare intelligence assessments before the war, and the  conclusions after. We’re nowhere near being able to draw any hard and fast conclusions.  The  best advice we have is that the intelligence communities stand by the assessments they made  before the war, ours do, the Americans and British do.  I have spoken with other countries  intelligence agencies, I haven’t just spoken with our intelligence agencies, and they continue  to maintain their confidence in the (inaudible) Saddam Hussein’s weapons of destruction  programs.  And I think they’re right to be, I know this going to take time and that has two  impacts, one is that it gives a bit of a window of opportunity for people who are politically  motivated to make a lot of noise.  On the other hand I would warn those people not to be too  confident that nothing will be found, I think that’s quite silly of them to go down that path.   And secondly it leads to a sort of understandable impatience from people who are better  motivated.  I can understand that.  But, I think it is very important that this work be done  methodically and cautiously.  And one of the key components of this work is to talk with the  people who were involved in these programs themselves.  Now not all those people have been  detained.  Some of those people who have been detained are not being too talkative and I  think the fact that they think Saddam Hussein might still be alive and his people may make a  comeback one day, is a bit of an issue with those people.  Some of them will be ideologically  committed to the regime of Saddam Hussein.  I also think by the way, that the simply horrific  human rights abuses that have become apparent in Iraq since the war, with the mass graves  that have been found, those human rights abuses are staggeringly worse than I had imagined,  and I had no illusions.  I made speeches about this before the war.  I had no illusions about  Saddam Hussein being an egregious human rights abuser, but as it turns out the scale of the  murders, the scale of the cruelty has turned out to be just horrific.  It’s hardly surprising that,  even in the end the Iraqi people want to run themselves, they don’t want foreigners running  their country, and they’re right about that.  Nevertheless they are obviously delighted to be  liberated.  That was my experience when I went to Baghdad.  With the weapons of mass  destruction, we just have to accept it will take time to work through all of this.  When it’s all  completed, it’ll be possible to compare intelligence reports before and what we’ve found after.   Progress is being made.

Journalist:  Inaudible.

Downer:    I think it was the best decision, to get rid of the regime of Saddam Hussein, let  me tell you.  I think there are a lot of reasons why that was a very good thing to do.  I think  the world is a better place for him being out.  He obviously did have weapons of mass  destruction.  He used them against his own people and his neighbours.  He clearly did  continue to have weapons of mass destruction programs and no doubt weapons of mass  destruction capabilities.  All of the intelligence points to that.  And the details of that, well that  will unfold in the fullness of time.  But the fact that he is not there is good for the Middle East

region more generally.  It’s good for the Arab nations.  It’s good for international stability.   And it certainly eliminated any threat to the region from a man who was committed to  weapons of mass destruction programs.  So, I’m proud of the role we played in getting rid of  the regime of Saddam Hussein.  I think the world is well rid of him.

Journalist:  Inaudible

Downer:    Yes, is the answer to that.  The International Atomic Energy Agency has the  responsibility for conducting inspections in Iran.  I think it’s important that Iran is open in  allowing inspections.  And when I was in Iraq recently I made this point to the Iranians.  I  think they should sign the Optional Protocol to allow for ad-hoc inspections when the IAEA  feels that that’s necessary.  I think they should do that.  There are obviously a lot of concerns  about Iran’s nuclear program, and I’ve raised that with the Iranians myself.  And I think that a  better system of inspections would be a real development, and I think the Iranians should  agree to that.

Journalist:  Inaudible -re Solomon Islands

Downer:    We are still working on this.  And we have had a scoping team over there during  the course of last week.  They’re preparing their conclusions for me.  Obviously I’ve had a bit  of a look at some of the conclusions that they’ve drawn.  They’ve sent some cables back from  Honiara, I’ve had a look at those and a brief report that they’ve sent in since then.  But I’m  going to be in Cambodia for the next three days, but next week the National Security  Committee of Cabinet will be able to sit down and have a look at the conclusions of the  scoping team and make some decisions.  So there’s a bit of a way to go yet.  But if we’re  going to do anything, if we’re going to send in police and to have some military to support the  police, then we need to do it sooner rather than later.  It’s not something we should delay for  too long, if we’re going to do it all.

ENDS

