Right on cue, Scott Burchill calls for the ‘disintegration’ of Indonesia saying

Canberra has reflexively accepted the sanctity and immutability of Indonesia’s boundaries, when recent experience suggests that the lines marked on political maps have a habit of being contested and redrawn.

Well, yes. In the last decade, boundaries have been contested in the former Soviet Union (Georgia and Azerbaijan), in PNG (Bougainville) in the Russian Federation (Chechnya) in the fomer Yugoslavia, in Israel/Palestine, in Kuwait (thanks to Saddam), Kashmir and quite a few other places. And, of course, the former Czechoslovakia broke into the Czech Republic and Slovakia.
In a few of these cases, existing boundaries between components of a federal state have been converted into new national boundaries. In most cases, a great deal of blood has been shed without achieving anything.
So which model is more likely for a breakup of Indonesia – the Czechoslovak peaceful divorce or every other case of this kind in living memory?
The really striking thing about all this is that it’s only the principle that national boundaries are immutable and sacred that saved East Timor. Indonesia’s annexation violated this principle and was therefore never recognised except, to our shame, by Australia.
Argument’s like Burchill’s would be irresponsible at any time, but they could scarcely have been timed to do more damage to our national interests than right now. And by fuelling Indonesian suspicions about our ultimate objectives they reduce our capacity to take any positive steps to improve the situation in places like Aceh and Papua. As I’ve stressed repeatedly in recent posts, I’m totally opposed to political censorship, but that doesn’t stop me wishing some people knew when to shut up.
I searched Burchill’s piece carefully to find any hint that he sees the slightest difference between the current imperfectly democratic government in Indonesia and the Suharto dictatorship, but it’s clear that, like the Bourbons, he has learned nothing and forgotten nothing.