The debacle that is East Timor

Since the five journalists were killed in Balibo more than 25 years ago it has been almost impossible to read a fair or balanced report on East Timor in an Australian newspaper. Journalists perceive it to be a betrayal of their dead colleagues.

That misguided loyalty, and the refusal to admit the journalists were largely responsible for their own deaths, played right into the hands of people such as Ramos Horta who have been manipulating the Australian public via the media ever since.

Very few Australians are familiar with the hasty creation of Fretilin, the Revolutionary Front for the Independence of East Timor, with Horta as Information Minister, and the subsequent civil war with UDT (Timor Democratic Union) that killed more than 2,000 East Timorese and triggered the intervention of Indonesian military forces.

Indonesia has always been presented as the boogie-man that invaded East Timor for its own nefarious reasons despite the fact Ali Alatas stated he considered it the business of the East Timorese.

Media propaganda

People in Australia have been fed very selective and even untrue information about East Timor. Human rights activists, and others, swallowed any information as long as it supported their pre-conceived ideas that Indonesia was bad.

To human rights activists Xanana Gusmoa, the Fretilin leader, was a 1960’s Marxist-style “Che Guevara” figure, who fulfilled their revolution-that-never-happened fantasies and made them feel as though they were doing something “to make a difference”.

Leftist academics and intellectuals such as Noam Chomsky and John Pilger gave speeches and published books that told only the side of the story that suited their political perspective, and they consistently omitted any facts that they found to be inconvenient.

Free East Timor groups flourished in many countries, particularly in Australia because of its geographical proximity. Japan had more than 40. There were many East Timorese living in Australia who had fled the conflict.

There was never any information about the amount of money the Indonesian Government was pouring into East Timor for development of roads, hospitals, schools, and civil servants wages. The Australian public’s knowledge of East Timor was limited to propaganda.

The Santa Cruz massacre

The Santa Cruz massacre, also known as the Dili massacre, took place in 1991. Protesters, mainly students, launched a demonstration against Indonesian rule at the funeral of a fellow student, Sebastião Gomes, who had been shot dead by Indonesian troops the month before.

A survey of books written about East Timor and the Santa Cruz massacre will reveal most use the words “totally unprovoked” to describe the incident. This is despite the fact two Indonesian soldiers, one of them a major, were stabbed to death just as the procession arrived at the cemetery.

This action sent Indonesian soldiers into a frenzy of killing - which it was intended to do. The massacre was set up in order to be videoed and sent to TV stations around the world to re-ignite the issue. And it worked. Those 245 young people died as martyrs for the media, as they were meant to.

Bishop Belo says in his autobiography, “I must have been the only person in Dili who was unaware of the service or the procession”. However, it is worth noting that the 5,000 people who took part marched just a few hundred metres from his house.

After the images were played on television the Free East Timor campaign took on new life. John Howard changed his government’s position, possibly to save Australia from appearing unfeeling, though I’m sure the official thinking, as it had been since Whitlam, was that East Timor was an artificial colonial entity without the resources necessary to be self-sustaining, and was geographically and historically part of Nusantara Indonesia.

The Santa Cruz massacre was a successful piece of propaganda that did a great deal of harm to the image of Indonesia. Any rational debate on the situation was taken over by emotional cries to free the East Timorese from Indonesia.

The referendum

As the downfall of Suharto became ever more inevitable Horta and Belo felt there was increased urgency to hold a referendum. This was despite the danger of violence that had been building for months. They knew without the New Order regime in power there would be less motivation for East Timor to secede.

In 1999 President Habibie allowed the referendum. Some say he was convinced that the vote would be positive: others say he thought he would be rewarded by being allowed to keep the presidency.

As voting day neared frustration and fear built up into a dangerous situation. After an overwhelmingly high vote in favour of separation and a request for an investigation into the result was denied, violence was inevitable. Gusmoa said, on international TV, “Arm yourselves”.

After initial TV images from East Timor there was no news, leading to wild speculation as to the whereabouts of 180,000 people. Had they gone missing? Did they ever even exist? Several days later the story was dropped and forgotten. Maybe these people were fictitious and only on the rolls.

Calls to check the legitimacy of the referendum were ignored by the United Nations.

The predictions of the border seething with militia, and camps filled with refugees intimidated by militia were, over time, shown to be false.

Christianity

Another major colonial legacy is Christianity. It plays a central role in the separatist movement.

People seem to forget Christianity was a totally foreign concept and has played a large part in destroying traditional cultures, in East Timor, Irian Jaya and many other places. The first thing Indonesia should have done in East Timor is deport the Catholic clergy before they became the underground network that kept the conflict going. They now virtually own East Timor, along with the Portuguese elite.

Maybe Sukarno was the one who should have solved the East Timor question back in 1949 when he declared Indonesia Merdeka, “from Sabang to Merauke”. He was anti-imperialist but he neglected the opportunity to expel the Portuguese who, I’m sure, would have gone without a struggle.

The East Timor debacle was a very bad for Indonesia-Australia relations. The Australian Government didn’t want to change its policy concerning East Timor, but was put in a difficult position by pressure groups in Australia, whose Free East Timor marches were so visible on TV. Unless you really understood what was going on, and the vast majority of Australians didn’t, it seemed the right thing to do.

And John Howard’s priority was to be democratically re-elected.

Events today reinforce my opinion that in 1979 it was East Timorese against East Timorese, as it was during the violence following the referendum, and that is what it continues to be.