Informed citizenship in the digital age: no excuses!

A basic Google search will assist me in this effort, i.e. let’s type in “Australia, Indonesia, East Timor, Independence”. I would assume that if I were a journalist and was writing an article, or book, on this particular topic this would be a very easy way to search for important literature on the topic.

This search reveals a number of sources (as they always do), but let’s look more closely at one source which appears more than once on page one of the search results:

Clinton Fernandes, Reluctant Saviour: Australia, Indonesia and the independence of East Timor, Carlton North, Scribe Publications, 2004.

Who then is Clinton Fernandes? The Scribe homepage tells me that he is a:

… senior lecturer in strategic studies at University College, the University of New South Wales. He specialises in international relations and strategy with a focus on the 'national interest' in Australia's external relations.

So what does Fernandes’ book tell you, should you bother to read it?

First, he illustrates that the actions of Howard nor Downer did not work towards securing Timorese independence. In contrast, at almost every stage of the escalating crisis each man publicly favoured integration as the preferred outcome of the referendum. By analysing various primary sources Fernandes highlights that not only did the Howard government resist the American suggestion of peacekeepers for the independence ballot, the Australian intelligence community (AIC) were aware of TNI involvement with the pro-Integrationist militias, i.e. that potential widespread violence was a deliberate pro-Indonesian tactic. Fernandes also indicates that the original ADF military operation (Operation Spitfire) was not designed to liberate East Timor; it was originally only designed to evacuate Australian and other Western nationals from East Timor.

This would seem to be in contrast to the three major claims reported by Kelly in his article “John Howard's covert East Timor independence plan”.

But suppose a covert plan did exist.

Does this then mean that Downer and Howard clearly expected that Timorese would vote for independence? Let’s utilise another basic search term for Google; “Australian, Intelligence, East Timor”. This search is a bonanza if one knows what to look for. Let us choose this one:

Desmond Ball, Silent witness: Australian intelligence and East Timor, The Pacific Review, Vol. 14 No. 1 2001: 35–62.

Who is Desmond Ball?