


The Bali Process, co-chaired by Indonesia and Australia, is a regional forum attended by more than 50 countries and international agencies in order to address the smuggling and trafficking of people and other transnational crimes in the Asia-Pacific region. By almost any measureAustralia has the most at stake, of all the nations gathered: in 2010 alone, more than 6,000 asylum-seekers hailing from South Asia and the Middle East arrived in Australian waters. Most of the refugees came on ramshackle boats that launched from Indonesia, having paid thousands of dollars per head to the smugglers who brought them.

The asylum-seekers have become a major political issue in Australia. Populist sentiment there seems to find the teeming masses less intolerable when they are kept thousands of miles from Sydney, ideally on an island outside Australian territory. The “Pacific Solution” of John Howard's conservative government camped refugees on various islands from 2001-2007, with bipartisan support. The policy has since been scrapped and derided, but evidently its utility lives on.

It didn't pass without notice that Ms Gillard proposed the idea of dumping boat people in Timor-Leste, its tiny neighbour to the north, only in the run-up to parliamentary elections last August. After the polls her proposal drifted aimlessly for some months, but recently both Timorese and Indonesian officials have dismissed the idea as a damp squib. Timor-Leste's parliament has already passed a unanimous resolution against playing host to any such processing centre.

Australian officials however are still trying to project an air of optimism. Or perhaps they are just trying to save face until the whole affair simply goes away. They maintain that the processing-centre proposal is still on the table, citing ongoing talks with Timor-Leste's president, José Ramos-Horta.

However Timor-Leste's prime minister, José Alexandre “Xanana” Gusmão, finally put the idea out of its misery on March 7th, during an interview with The Economist in London. Chief among Mr Gusmão's reasons for opposing the processing centre is the fact that he would not be able to explain to his poor countrymen why foreign asylum-seekers would be entitled to international-grade health care, food, clothing and schooling for their children while so many Timorese do not.

Mr Gusmão has other reasons for blocking the Australian plan. Ms Gillard is reported to have neglected consulting with him before she announced what was in affect a diplomatic bombshell, last July. The snub was compounded by the fact that the Australians then approached Mr Ramos-Horta, whose powers are mainly ceremonial, instead of Mr Gusmão. Only the prime minister's government has the authority to negotiate an international agreement. For his part, Mr Ramos-Horta told The Economist during an interview in Dili on March 3rd that “moral conviction” has persuaded him to support the establishment of the processing centre. He said his staff are continuing talks with officials in Canberra.

There is no doubt that the Timorese president, who is a Nobel peace-prize winner, has a big heart. In August 2001, when Timor-Leste was still under administration by the United Nations, Mr Ramos-Horta, then the de facto foreign minister, offered temporary shelter to 460 asylum-seekers, most of them Afghans, who had been rescued from a sinking Indonesian ferry. A passing container ship, the Tampa, picked up the luckless Afghans near Australia's Christmas Island. (Christmas Island happens to be where Australia stows its asylum-seekers these days.)

The Australians know full well that the authority of government in Timor-Leste lies with Mr Gusmão. That might explain why they approached Mr Ramos-Horta instead, thus ensuring that the processing centre idea might remain alive past the August elections. Which Gillard and her party won, incidentally.