UnderstandingTimor-Leste Hatene kona 2019 ba Volume II Compreender

Timor-Leste 1999: 20 Years On

Steven Farram, Dulce Martins da Silva , Leonardo F. Soares, Nuno Canas Mendes, Clinton Fernandes, Mica Barreto Soares, Uka Pinto, Hannah Loney, Robert L Williams, Claudino Ninas Nabais and Michael Leach. tlsa Timor-Leste Studies Association www.tlstudies.org Hatene kona ba Timor-Leste 2019 Compreender Timor-Leste 2019 Understanding Timor-Leste 2019

1999: 20 Years On

Volume II Proceedings of the Understanding Timor-Leste 2019 Conference, Liceu Campus, Universidade Nacional Timor Lorosa’e (UNTL), Avenida Cidade de Lisboa, Dili, Timor-Leste, 27-28 June 2019. Edited by Steven Farram, Dulce Martins da Silva, Leonardo F. Soares, Nuno Canas Mendes, Clinton Fernandes, Mica Barreto Soares, Uka Pinto, Hannah Loney, Robert L Williams, Claudino Ninas Nabais and Michael Leach (eds).

This collection first published in 2020 by the Timor-Leste Studies Association

(www.tlstudies.org). Printed by Swinburne University of Technology.

Copyright © 2020 by Steven Farram, Dulce Martins da Silva, Leonardo F. Soares, Nuno Canas Mendes, Clinton Fernandes, Mica Barreto Soares, Uka Pinto, Hannah Loney, Robert L Williams, Claudino Ninas Nabais, Michael Leach and contributors.

All papers published in this collection have been peer refereed.

All rights reserved. Any reproductions, in whole or in part of this publication must be clearly attributed to the original publication and authors.

Cover photo courtesy of Susana Barnes.

Design and book layout by Susana Barnes.

ISBN: 978-1-925761-26-9 (3 volumes, PDF format)

2 Contents – Volume II

Lia Maklokek – Prefácio – Foreword 4 Lia Maklokek – CNC 6 Foreword – CNC 7 Introduction – 1999: 20 Years On 8

1999: 20 Years On 9

1. The Transnational Timor Solidarity Movement as History: Public Rhetoric and 10 International Clandestinity David Webster 2. Timor Sea Oil and Gas as a Factor in Australia’s Policy Response to an 15 Independent East Timor 1998-1999 Kim McGrath 3. Indonesian Solidarity with the Struggle for Timor-Leste’s Independence in the 1990s 21 Max Lane 4. The Day Hope and History Rhymed in East Timor 27 Patrick Walsh 5. Remembering James Dunn 31 Peter Job 6. Music as a Medium Advocating for Change: The Audio -Visual Pieces of Martin 37 Wesley-Smith, a Musical Protagonist for the East Timorese Roslyn Dunlop 7. Solidariedade iha Kampu – Prosesu Observasaun ba Timor-Leste nia Referendu 44 Charles Scheiner no Pam Sexton 8. Solidarity in the Field -- Observing Timor-Leste’s Consultation 55 Charles Scheiner and Pam Sexton 9. The Victim Interprets History 65 Susan Connelly 10. Norwegian Solidarity in the 1990s 71 Yiannis Tavridis 11. The Collapse of Indonesian Policy in 1999 75 Clinton Fernandes 3 Lia Maklokek – Prefácio – Foreword

Artigu sira ne’ebe tama iha volume ida ne’e aprezenta ona iha Timor-Leste Studies Association (TLSA) nia konferensia Hatene kona ba Timor-Leste 2019 ne'ebé realiza iha Universidade Nacional de Timor Lorosa’e (UNTL) Kampus Liceu, Avenida Cidade de Lisboa, Dili, Timor-Leste, iha 29 no 30 Juñu 2019. Konferensia TLSA nian iha 2019 ne’e ba dala hitu (7), tuir konferensia sira ne’ebé hala’o ona iha Melbourne (2005) no Dili (2009, 2011, 2013, 2015 no 2017). Partisipante Timoroan ho internasional sira 200 resin mak partisipa no apresenta ona sira nia estudus durante loron rua nia laran. Konferensia ida ne’e organiza iha dalen hat: Tetum, Portugues, Bahasa Indonesia no Ingles. Aproximasaun ida ne’e refleta diversidade linguistika iha Timor-Leste, no la’o ho suksesu boot. Iha konferensia 2019 ne’e, iha mos painel espesiais hat mak hanesan: “1999: Hafoin Tinan 20” konvokadu husi Clinton Fernandes no Mica Barreto Soares; “Peskiza Jéneru” organiza husi Hannah Loney no Uka Pinto; “Agrikultura” organiza husi Claudino Ninas Nabais no Robert Williams no “Dekoloniza Koñesimentu” husi Josh Trindade.

Editor sira hakarak hato’o obrigadu barak ba UNTL, Swinburne University of Technology, no Universidade de Lisboa ba parseria ne’ebé halo konferensia ne’e sai posivel. Partikularmente hakarak hato’o ami nia agradesimentu ba Reitor UNTL, Professor Francisco Martins no Centro Nacional Chega! (CNC) ba sira nia apoiu jenerozu no ko-patrosínio ba konferensia 2019 ne’e. Ami mos hakarak hato’o obrigadu ba mica Barreto Soares no Susana Barnes ba sira nia asistensia ba produsaun koleksaun ne’e; Hannah Loney, Michael Leach no Mica Barreto Soares ba sira nia asistensia hodi organiza konferensia ne’e, nunemos ba Uka, Vero no Zairo ba sira nia apoiu tomak durante konforensia iha Dili. Partikularmente ami hato’o obrigadu ba hakerek nain sira, no dala ida tan ami hein katak volume ida ne’e sei asiste estudante no akademiku sira iha Timor-Leste, no mos ba sira ne’ebé iha estranjerru ne’ebé hakarak hatene dezafiu no oportunidade barak ne’ebé nasaun foin sa’e ne’e hasoru.

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As comunicações, revistas por pares, incluídas neste volume foram apresentadas na conferência Compreender Timor-Leste 2019, organizada pela Timor-Leste Studies Association (TLSA), a qual decorreu na Universidade Nacional de Timor-Leste (UNTL), no Campus do Liceu, Avenida Cidade de Lisboa, Díli, Timor-Leste, nos dias 27 e 28 de Junho de 2019. Esta foi a 7.a conferência da TLSA, na sequência das de Melbourne (2005) e das de Díli (2009, 2011, 2013, 2015 e 2017). Mais de 200 conferencistas timorenses e internacionais apresentaram as suas comunicações durante dois dias. A conferência decorreu em três línguas, com painéis em Tétum, Português e Inglês. Esta escolha reflecte a diversidade linguística de Timor-Leste e tem tido grande êxito. A conferência contou ainda com sessões especiais dedicadas aos seguintes temas: “1999: 20 anos depois”, coordenada por Clinton Fernandes e Mica Barreto Soares; “Estudos de Género em Timor-Leste”, coordenada por Hannah Loney e Uka Pinto; “Agricultura”, coordenada por Claudino Ninas Nabais e Robert Williams e ainda dois painéis sobre “Descolonizar o pensamento”, organizados por Josh Trindade.

Os editores gostariam de agradecer à UNTL, à Swinburne Technology University e à Universidade de Lisboa pelas parcerias que tornaram esta conferência possível. Em particular agradecemos ao Reitor da UNTL, Professor Francisco Martins, e ao Centro Nacional Chega! (CNC) pelos seu generoso apoio e co-patrocínio à conferência de 2019. Gostaríamos ainda de agradecer à mica Barreto Soares e à Susana Barnes pela colaboração na organização desta coletânea, à Hannah Loney, ao Michael Leach e à Mica Barreto Soares pela participação na organização do evento, assim como à Uka, Vero e Zairo pela inestimável assistência prestada em Díli. Um agradecimento especial aos autores das comunicações e votos de que estes volumes possam ser úteis aos estudantes e académicos de Timor-Leste e aqueles que fora do país queiram compreender melhor os muitos desafios e oportunidades que esta jovem nação enfrenta.

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4 The peer-reviewed papers included in these volumes were first presented at the Timor-Leste Studies Association (TLSA)’s Understanding Timor-Leste 2019, which was held at the Universidade Nacional Timor-Lorosa’e (UNTL), Liceu Campus, Avenida Cidade de Lisboa, Dili, Timor-Leste, 27–28 June 2019. This was the 7th TLSA conference, following our conferences in Melbourne (2005) and Dili (2009, 2011, 2013, 2015 and 2017). More than 200 East Timorese and international delegates presented papers over two days. The conference was organised into three language streams, with papers presented in Tetum, Portuguese and English. This approach reflects the linguistic diversity of Timor-Leste and proved a great success. The conference also saw special streams on “1999: 20 Years On” convened by Clinton Fernandes and Mica Barreto Soares; “Gender Research in Timor-Leste” convened by Hannah Loney and Uka Pinto; “Agriculture” convened by Claudino Ninas Nabais and Robert Williams; and two panels on “Decolonising Knowledge” organised by Josh Trindade.

The editors would like to thank UNTL, Swinburne University of Technology and the University of Lisbon for the partnerships that made this conference possible. In particular we thank the Rector of UNTL, Professor Francisco Martins, and the Centro Nacional Chega! (CNC) for their generous support and co-sponsorship of the 2019 conference. We also wish to thank mica Barreto Soares and Susana Barnes for their assistance in the production of this collection; Hannah Loney, Michael Leach and Mica Barreto Soares for their assistance in conference organisation; as well as Uka, Vero and Zairo for their wonderful support in Dili. We particularly thank the authors of these papers, and once again hope that these volumes will assist students and academics in Timor-Leste, and also those outside the country who wish to better understand the many challenges and opportunities facing this young nation.

*

Steven Farram, Dulce Martins da Silva, Leonardo F. Soares, Nuno Canas Mendes, Clinton Fernandes, Mica Barreto Soares, Uka Pinto, Hannah Loney, Robert L Williams, Claudino Ninas Nabais and Michael Leach (eds). 5 Lia Maklokek – CNC

Hodi Centro National Chega! I.P. Hosi Memória ba Esperansa (Centro Chega!) nia naran, hau hakarak kongratula Timor-Leste Studies Association (TLSA) ne’ebe organiza ona ho suksesu Konferensia TLSA 2019 iha Dili. Konferensia TLSA 2019 ho tema Hatene kona ba Timor-Leste 2019 no foku ba tema especial konaba 1999 hafoin liu tia tinan 20 ne’e monu-kedas ho tinan ne’ebé ita komemora tinan 20 Konsulta Popular iha Agusto 1999 no selebra vitoria Timor oan sira nian hafoin luta tinan-naran ba autodeterminasaun.

Centro Chega! nia mandatu mak atu preserva memoria pasadu, halo memoria ne’e asesivel ba públiku, no aprende husi istória pasadu atu harii Timor-Leste ida diak liu. Bazeia ba razaun sira ne’e, Centro Chega! simu konvite husi TLSA nudar patrosinador formal ba konferensia 2019. Centro Chega! no TLSA asina Nota Intendementu ida iha Marsu 2019 hodi estabelese Centro Chega! hanesan ko patrosinu ba Konferensia TLSA 2019.

TLSA nia parseria ho Universidade Nasional Timor-Lorosa’e (UNTL) fo kbit institusionalidade ba Centro Chega! atu dezenvolve métodu peskiza istória, frekuenta investigador sira no hala’o peskiza tematiku ho kle’an bazeia ba relatório Chega! no nia rekomendasaun sira.

Centro Chega! sente previlejiu tebes bele partisipa iha Konferensia TLSA 2019 ne’ebé mak explora ona asuntu signifikante sira ba Timor-Leste. Akademista no ativista lubun ida halo ona aprezentasaun peskiza ho kualidade ne’ebe mak a’as tebes. Aprezentador balu involve iha tinan naruk fo apoiu solidariedade ba Timor-Leste nia luta ukun rasik a’an. Hau hakarak hato’o agradesimentu no partikularmente ba Professor Michael Leach no Dr. Hannah Loney ba organiza estrutura konferensia TLSA 2019 ne’e, nomos ba Professor Clinton Fernandes ne’ebé organiza no responsabiliza ba painel espesial 1999 nian. Konferensia TLSA ne’e hatudu katak oinsa akademista internasional sira kontinua la’o hamutuk ho Timor oan sira hafoin tinan 20 Timor-Leste ukun rasik a’an. Hau hein katak ita hotu aprende husi pasadu hodi bele fornese lisaun diak ba futuru nasaun ida ne’e. Hau nia agradesementu mos hato’o ba Prof. Dr. Francisco Miguel Martins, Reitor UNTL ba ko-patrosiniu Konfeensia TLSA 2119 ne’e iha Kampus UNTL. Eventu ne’e fo oportunidade ba estudante Timoroan sira bele asesu kontiudu Konferensia durante loron rua ne’e iha fatin ida deit.

Centro Chega! hein katak publikasaun husi Konferensia TLSA 2019 ne’e, bele kontribui ba dezenvolvimentu kultura investigasaun rigorozu hosi peskizador Timoroan sira. Publikasaun ne’e mos nudar fonte exelente ida atu dezenvolve liu tan politika públiku ida diak ida iha área oin-oin.

Antigo Comarca-Balide – Dili, 24 Julho 2020

Hugo Maria Fernandes Diretur Ekzekutivu Centro Nacional Chega! I.P. Hosi Memoria ba Esperanca Dili

6 Foreword – CNC

On behalf of Centro Nacional Chega! I.P. Da Memoria Á Esperança (Centro Chega!) I would like to congratulate the Timor-Leste Studies Association (TLSA) for successfully organising the 2019 TLSA Conference in Dili. This year’s theme of Understanding Timor-Leste 2019, and the special stream ‘1999: 20 Years On’ is most timely as we commemorate the 20th anniversary of the Popular Consultation in August 1999 and celebrate the Timorese victory after its long struggle for self-determination.

Centro Chega! has a mandate to preserve the memory of the past, make it accessible to the public, and learn from it in order to build a better Timor-Leste. For these reasons, Centro Chega! welcomed an invitation from TLSA to be a formal sponsor of the 2019 conference. Centro Chega! and TLSA signed a Memorandum of Understanding in March 2019, establishing Centro Chega! as the co-host of the 2019 TLSA Conference.

TLSA’s partnership with the National University of Timor-Lorosa’e (UNTL) gives Centro Chega! a much greater institutional ability to develop its historical research methods, mentor researchers and conduct in-depth thematic research based on the Chega! report and recommendations.

Centro Chega! was privileged to participate in the 2019 TLSA Conference, which explored matters of great significance to Timor-Leste. High quality research was presented by a range of scholars and activists. Some of the participants had supported the people of Timor-Leste for decades in their struggle for sovereignty. I would like to thank TLSA and particularly Professor Michael Leach and Dr Hannah Loney for structuring this year’s presentations, and also Professor Clinton Fernandes for convening and editing the special stream on 1999. The conference showed how international academics continue to walk alongside the Timorese people after 20 years. We hope that we all learn from the past and provide better lessons for the future of this nation. Thank you also extend to Prof. Dr. Francisco Miguel Martins, the Rector of UNTL for co-hosting the TLSA 2019 Conference at the UNTL campus. This arrangement gave Timorese students access to the insights of many researchers in a single location.

Centro Chega! hope that the TLSA 2019 Conference publication contributes to the development of a rigorous intellectual culture among Timorese researchers. The publication is also an excellent resource to develop good public policy in a wide variety of areas.

Antigo Comarca Balide - Dili, 24 July 2020

Hugo Maria Fernandes Executive Director Centro Nacional Chega!I.P. Da Memoria Á Esperança Dili

7 Introduction – 1999: 20 Years On

The emergence of Timor-Leste as an independent state after 24 years of occupation is one of the most remarkable events in recent history. Even before the invasion in 1975, conventional wisdom held that Timor-Leste’s independence was highly improbable. After the invasion, independence was regarded as impossible, and Indonesian rule irreversible. For most of its 24-year occupation, the territory did not have a land border with a friendly state or an external supplier of weapons, and its fighters did not have a liberated area in which to recover between guerrilla operations. Given these conditions, Timor-Leste’s successful resistance is perhaps unique in the history of guerilla warfare and independence struggles.

The Timor-Leste Studies Association’s 2019 conference occurred on the 20th anniversary of the Popular Consultation of 30 August 1999. Accordingly, one theme of this conference was the events of 1999. This volume contains edited versions of some of the papers that were presented at the “1999 stream” of the conference. The papers reflect a range of geographic, activist, scholarly, disciplinary and generational perspectives. The presenters offered diverse, sometimes competing, explanations of the events of 1999. No editorial attempt has been made to adjudicate between them. That task belongs to the broader community of Timor-Leste scholars, not an editor. The 2019 conference occurred as preparations for the nation-wide commemorations of the Popular Consultation were underway. Many Timor-Leste civil society organisations were heavily immersed in planning for the anniversary, and were unable to submit a paper in time for publication. Historical sensitivities remain a factor: individuals are sometimes reluctant to tell their own story, preferring to wait until there are collective accounts – but mobilizing the collective voices needed for such an account is no small task.

The papers contained within these proceedings are a valuable reflection on a true modern epic – Timor-Leste’s heroic struggle against aggression. We hope they encourage others to contribute to the historical record.

Clinton Fernandes, UNSW Canberra

8 1999: 20 Years On

Edited by Clinton Fernandes and Mica Barreto-Soares 9 1

The Transnational Timor Solidarity Movement as History: Public Rhetoric and International Clandestinity David Webster

This paper aims to underline the importance of Timor-Leste for the study of international and transnational history, and the importance of seeing the international in the study of Timorese history. It does so through a historical exploration of the transnational solidarity groups in the campaign for the independence of East Timor (1975-99), reading these groups’ activities as “social texts” which amplified the voices and activist performances of the Timorese resistance globally. I analyze solidarity group newsletters – what the groups said publicly – alongside unpublished activist strategies and efforts drawn from newly available private archives – what the groups did not say publicly. Thus, I explore transnational solidarity-movement rhetoric alongside what might be called transnational “clandestine” networks.

The international solidarity movement was an actor in the Timorese liberation struggle. Of course, Timorese actors, both groups and individuals, were the leaders of their own struggle. Still, it is evident from government archives in a number of countries that Timor-Leste solidarity activists did affect government policy in a number of countries in various ways. The solidarity movement should be considered as an actor in Timorese history and in international history.

What is written down: An analysis of solidarity movement newsletters

This paper considers three types of source material on the international solidarity movement: written, unwritten and performed. By 1999, the International Federation for East Timor had close to 30 groups in more than 20 countries, concentrated both in Europe and in Southeast Asia.

Written sources are the historian’s best friend and standard way to find information that can be crafted into a story. Here I will concentrate on newsletters. The form of the newsletter aims to share information and encourage both action and a sense of belonging. The reader, in a pre-internet age, learned information that could not be found elsewhere, boiled down into summary form by an author or a group of authors who knew the situation well. A lot of newsletter content summarizes information from news sources, while other information comes from confidential sources in Timor-Leste before it was officially “opened” in 1989 and afterwards – originally from church and sometimes guerrilla sources, later mostly from the Timorese clandestine front.

Newsletters served an information function. Several started as a collection of clippings from the mainstream press and from other solidarity movement publications. For English-language newsletters, this meant most often the TAPOL Bulletin, published from London. Activists creating their own group newsletter would photocopy the East Timor pages of the TAPOL Bulletin and mail them out to their members. By sharing information from Timor-Leste when it was a closed military operations zone, the newsletters were trying to break silences. So that’s the information function.

Compiling news clippings also has a group-building aspect: it shows group members and supporters that their issue is getting into the newspapers – that they were succeeding in breaking silences. That function was also filled by notices about events, merchandise for sale, stories from travelers about their experiences in Timor-Leste in the 1990s, and reports on group activities. All of this helped form groups and promote them to their local audiences, while also widening the circle of support.

10 Finally, newsletters had a network-building function. By reprinting and sharing each other’s materials, the individual groups started to become more closely networked together. They knew what the others were doing, and they tailored their messages accordingly.

Illustrations come from two newsletters that had staying power, both digitized by Victoria University on the initiative of John Waddingham’s Clearing House for Archival Records on Timor (CHART). The TAPOL Bulletin, authored mainly by Carmel Budiardjo and Liem Soei Liong, became a hub for solidarity movement activities. Initially dedicated to Indonesian political prisoners, it made room for Timor-Leste after the invasion in 1975 (Fernandes 2011) without sacrificing its focus on the tapol, the political prisoners (tahanan politik). By 1985, using word frequency analysis via Voyant Tools, we can see that it had almost as much space for Timor as it did for prisoners.

Timor Link, started in 1985 by the Catholic Institute for International Relations in Britain, makes an interesting comparison. As with TAPOL, its main word terms are Indonesia (or Indonesian), Timor (or Timorese) and people. Individual Timorese actors are identified – these being mainly Fretilin and the church. International is also common, with Portugal (or Portuguese) the major outside country named. And “rights” figure prominently.

By 1990, rights were also a key word in the TAPOL Bulletin, where Timor continues to move ahead. That is even truer after the Santa Cruz massacre in 1992. That year, Timor Link returned after a hiatus. Its 1992 issues centred the words “rights, “People,” “massacre” and “international.” TAPOL also led with “people” and “rights” and placed Timor ahead of prisoners and other human rights issues in Indonesia – but talked much more about the military and Suharto than Timor Link. In terms of geographic coverage, both journals of course give priority to Timor-Leste and Indonesia, but Timor Link continued to stress Portugal, with Britain and Australia following. TAPOL has a focus in one 1992 issue on British policy. British prominence is explained by the fact that both journals were published in London.

What is most striking here is that the United States, or America, or Americans, rate very little coverage. That is not because the US was not important. Indeed, it was probably the most important outside influence on Indonesia. The low coverage may be attributed to the lack of a large solidarity group in the United States prior to 1991, when the East Timor Action Network (ETAN/US) was formed. ETAN’s first newsletter appeared in July 1992 under the name Network News. After 12 issues, Network News became the Estafeta in 1996. Here the focus did lie on US policy, where ETAN campaigned ceaselessly using new tactics in the United States.

ETAN/US became influential internationally partly through the growing centrality of internet communications through PeaceNet, and through production and circulation of printed Document Collections sent around the world. These are still available on ETAN’s web site. PeaceNet groups deepened and intensified existing communications among solidarity groups. Estafeta, a name borrowed from clandestine movement couriers who carried information between the Timorese resistance and the outside, suggest that the Timorese clandestine front had international echoes.

What is not spoken: International clandestine activism

Indonesian integration strategy for Timor-Leste hoped to win the hearts and minds of the younger generation, educated in the Indonesian language in Indonesian schools. Instead, many young Timorese responded by joining the clandestine front of the Timorese resistance that emerged starting in the late 1980s. The clandestine front secretly conveyed information and ideas between armed resistance and diplomatic figures, and thus helped in movement coherence. All took place in secret, even while becoming periodically visible at public demonstrations.

Clandestinity was also a method. It meant information had to be closely guarded by a small number of individuals, as Angie Bexley (2017) points out. The method, Jacqueline Siapno (2017: 80) writes, was to “leave no trace behind,” to move unseen through political manoeuvres.

11 This seems the exact opposite of the sort of public writing seen in newsletters. But “what is not spoken” – clandestine activism – is as important to see as “what is spoken,” the public language of activists.

A number of international activists picked up on elements of Timorese clandestine methods and identity. More than a few overseas activists invented names that became new identities. Academics travelled and published under chosen names in order to protect their access to Indonesian-ruled Timor-Leste, but also to protect their careers at home.

The best-known non-Timorese pseudonyms include Max Stahl, Ruby Blade and Matthew Jardine. I take as one example the first hard-hitting piece in the French-Canadian media, written by a prominent Quebec academic under a pseudonym, titled (loosely) “East Timor confronts the human conscience” (Smith 1991). This piece was influential. The author could have suffered career consequences if they had published under their own name. North American academics who studied Asia in the 1980s and 90s were overwhelmingly pro-Indonesian. This piece was inspired by quiet work by Helen Todd, whose son Kamal Bamadhaj was killed at Santa Cruz, and by Kamal’s sister Li-lien Gibbons. It had a real effect on opinion leaders in Quebec, as we can learn from reading Canadian government documents (Webster, 2020).

The quiet information-sharing function was not new in any of this. Correspondence sharing information quietly in order to inform international solidarity work goes right back to the beginning. A briefing note by Helen Hill, written in 1976, is one example that shows the ways sources move through networks: Hill sent it to the Democratic Republic of East Timor Information Office in New York, which shared a copy with Jacqui Chagnon (who handled East Timor work for the US group Clergy and Laity Concerned). The document eventually passed to Arnold Kohen, who became active in solidarity work in Ithaca, New York, advised by Professor Benedict Anderson of Cornell. Kohen’s papers, now digitized and available on the Timor International Solidarity Archive, are valuable for the early period and for church-based networks. For the post-1991 period, the ETAN/US files should be even more valuable at tracking flows of information and tracing the consolidation of a network that would eventually coalesce as the International Federation of East Timor.

In the earlier period, tight control of information in small circles was a feature. A lot of information flowed through a small circle of people in the United States, such as Kohen, whose work aimed to engage the media and decision makers rather than the general public. Kohen did not organize demonstrations. He wrote endless letters to reporters trying to improve their coverage, and wrote articles published under the names of Timorese bishops and others in mainstream US publications. He moved to Washington to become a full-time lobbyist, in the hopes that steps like Congressional resolutions and open letters would move policy at an elite level. His identity was not a secret, but he was not a public figure.

In the pre-IFET era, solidarity movement structure relied on key nodes – certain groups in Australia, the Commission for the Rights of the Maubere People (CDPM) in Portugal, TAPOL in England, Amnesty International after 1985, a network based in Catholic circles, and others. From the 1980s onwards, TAPOL and CDPM started to host international solidarity groups meetings in Europe, often around the time of the UN Human Rights committee hearings in February. Groups also met around the UN Decolonization committee meetings in New York every August. These encounters helped to consolidate activists working in different countries around common themes and common messages. There was even one meeting that spent half an hour debating what to use as the common figure for how many people had been killed in East Timor, since groups were using several different figures. Everyone present agreed to use the figure of 200,000 and to otherwise consolidate their messaging.

Trying to unearth what was not written down helps us to see the presence of women in the solidarity network. Photographs from solidarity movement consultation meetings in Geneva indicate that the majority of participants were women, as were the meeting’s main conveners, Carmel Budiardjo and Luisa Teotonio Pereira. The East Timor Alert Network (ETAN/Canada) was founded in the 1980s by

12 two women and one man. It succeeded the earlier Indonesia East Timor Programme (IETP), which also founded by two women and one man. Like many solidarity groups, it aimed at a flat, non-hierarchical structure that was inspired by 1970s and 1980s North American feminist organizing principles.

Government records also indicate the prominence of women. One Canadian episode documented in the archives opens with a telegram from the Canadian embassy in Jakarta in 1987, reporting on a conversation with Indonesian foreign minister Mochtar Kusumaatmadja. “I mentioned that one of Indon[esia’]s greatest critics in [Canada] was lady who had lived in E[ast] Timor in early 1970s (Elaine Briere),” Ambassador Jack Whittleton reported. Mochtar said he had agreed to meet a “critical but fair … lady” on a recent visit to Canada, but had run out of time. Mochtar seems to have been referring to either Pauline Jewett of Parliamentarians for East Timor, seen as “reasonable and objective” by the Indonesian embassy, or to Marilyn Wilson of Amnesty International, but to have mixed up his critical Canadian ladies. From Ottawa, the thought of giving credence to Elaine Briere drew a virtual gasp of horror. “We would not classify Briere’s views as being objective or fair,” the Department of External Affairs informed the Canadian embassy in Jakarta. Still, they recommended she be given a visa to visit Timor-Leste. The Indonesian government decided not to approve one. My point is here is less one about Elaine Briere than to underline the prominence of women in the solidarity movement.

Performance as text: “Reading” a demonstration

Solidarity movement structures in North America shifted considerably with the arrival of former clandestine activists including Constancio Pinto, Abé Barreto Soares, and Bella Galhos. They influenced solidarity movement activity through close contact and encouraged duplication of tactics. One demonstration in Ottawa echoed the visual style of the rally on 12 November 1991 in Dili. Both demonstrations aimed to fill the streets with Timorese flags and banners in order to deliver a clear message in support of Timorese independence. The use of the flag first raised in 1975 makes the link clear.

Following Clifford Geertz (1973), we can read a performance or an event as a text. The Ottawa demonstration can be “read.” It was not a newsletter. There were only a few words present. But it still delivered a clear message, using words sparingly and visual imagery abundantly.

Start with the protest date: 7 December 1995, 20 years after the Indonesian invasion of Dili. This meant it would be a cold day in Ottawa and hard to get protesters to brave the weather for a lengthy walk, but the symbolic importance of the date could be harnessed to a news conference to attract attention from the media and the public.

The protest began on a stage in front of the Indonesian Embassy. After a consultation with the local police, Bella Galhos delivered a speech. Protesters then took to the streets. They walked through the city centre to the Canadian Human Rights memorial where Mana Bella spoke again. The crowd grew as it moved back on to the streets. Arriving at Parliament Hill, protesters laid down crosses with the names of people killed at the Santa Cruz massacre on parliament’s front steps, then turned and faced the city with parliament as the backdrop to their banners. The Timorese flag was flown by a Timorese woman at the heart of Canada’s government, who walked the cold pavement alone for a time.

How can we “read” this demonstration? Its date insisted that, in the resistance slogan, “to resist is to win.” Two decades of occupation saw more resistance than ever. Its route mapped the connection between the Indonesian and Canadian governments, from the embassy to parliament. Messages on banners underlined the point: the lead banner declared “East Timor is a Canadian issue,” not a far-away forgotten struggle. A stop at the human rights memorial evoked themes of human rights that are dear to the Canadian self-image.

The Timorese flags, sewn by local activist Tracey Lariault, made the march into a block of vibrant reds with tones of black and yellow, and forced onlookers to ask whose flag that was – an invitation to ask questions. Crosses evoked tragedy and Christian undertones while insisting on speaking the names of 13 the dead – themselves known thanks to clandestine research in Dili and transmitted on new electronic communications networks.

At parliament, the crowd performed mourning – the laying down of the crosses – and then activism, with the display of banners that had been less visible on the streets. Each banner drew a direct Canada Indonesia tie, from arms sales to business handshakes to the use of Canadian tax money to support the Indonesian government. The messaging was immediate, not distant. East Timor mattered, it was here in Ottawa, and its tragedy was directly tied to Canadian support for the Indonesian dictatorship.

The messaging was consistent and the support growing in Canada. By 1995, Canadian government officials were saying they had to do something for Timor-Leste, if only to “get ETAN off our backs.” If nothing else, they hoped that there would be no Timorese protesters entering the Canadian embassy in Jakarta. When ETAN’s Sharon Scharfe offered them an “assurance” that no Timorese activists planned to enter the Canadian embassy “for now,” the Canadian embassy sent a chilly note to Ottawa: “It gives me immense concern to think that a Sharon Scharfe could be orchestrating or controlling whether or not we have potential visitors,” one embassy official commented acidly. “I agree with you,” replied the head of the Southeast Asia division at Foreign Affairs Canada. “It is one of the many joys that we have in dealing with ETAN. It is the most energetic and single minded of NGOs that I have to deal with.”

The exchange underlines growing solidarity movement coordination with Timorese diplomatic front leaders. The same is evident in, for instance, the 1997 APEC summit in Vancouver. An alternative “People’s Summit” invited José Ramos Horta to be keynote speaker, and Bella Galhos released photos – visual messages themselves – to the media. The photo of that event is now itself framed by text in the Chega! exhibit in Dili.

Closing note

The Timor-Leste struggle teaches an important lesson: to persist is to win. To document its success, we need to digitize, describe and disseminate documents that are currently lost or dispersed among scattered archives. Researchers need to conduct collaborative research and share results in open-access formats.

When no one talks about history, false narratives persist. Documents and histories disrupt and help to correct those false narratives. Preserving and sharing historical memory breaks silences. The history of Timor-Leste points to one possible future for oppressed peoples. It is a story worth sharing. Preserving historical memory is not about the past alone: it is activism. We need more of it.

Bibliography

Bexley, Angie, 2017. The Geração Foun and Indonesia. In Fieldwork in Timor-Leste, eds. Maj Nygaard Christensen and Angie Bexley. Copenhagen: NIAS. Fernandes, Clinton, 2011. Independence of East Timor: Multi-Dimensional Perspectives - Occupation, Resistance, and International Political Activism (Sussex Academic Press). Geertz, Clifford, 1973. “Deep Play: Notes on the Balinese Cockfight.” In The Interpretation of Cultures: Selected Essays. New York: Basic Books. Siapno, Jacqueline Aquino, 2017. “Politika Taka Malu, Censorship and Silencing: Virtuosos of Clandestinity and One’s Relationship to Truth and Memory,” in Flowers in the Wall: Truth and Reconciliation in Timor-Leste, Indonesia and Melanesia, ed. David Webster. Calgary: University of Calgary Press. Smith, Aloys [Rodolphe de Konick], 1991. Timor Oriental devant la conscience de l'humanité, Le Devoir, 28 nov. TAPOL Bulletin, London, 1975-1999. Timor International Solidarity Archive, www.timorarchive.ca Timor Link, London, 1985-1999. Webster, David, 2020. Challenge the Strong Wind: Canada and East Timor 1975-1999. Vancouver: University of British Columbia press.

14 2

Timor Sea Oil and Gas as a Factor in Australia’s Policy Response to an Independent East Timor 1998-1999 Kim McGrath

This paper provides an economic explanation for Australia’s hesitance to support an independent East Timor in 1998 and 1999. Many scholars, most notably James Cotton (2001; 2004) and Clinton Fernandes (2004; 2011), have examined Australia’s failure to adequately respond to credible reports that the Indonesian military was orchestrating a campaign of militia violence against independence in the lead up to the 30 August 1999 referendum. The prevailing explanation for Australia’s reluctance is that Canberra prioritised good relations with Indonesia above the human rights of the Timorese. In this paper, I argue that Australia’s economic interest in billions of dollars-worth of oil and gas in disputed areas of the Timor Sea was an even more compelling factor influencing Australia’s foreign policy response to the prospect of an independent East Timor. It is in part based on my book, Crossing the Line, Australia’s Secret History in the Timor Sea (McGrath 2017).

In 2001, Australia’s foreign minister Alexander Downer launched a book written and published by the Department of Foreign Affairs and Trade, East Timor in Transition 1998–2000: An Australian Policy Challenge (DFAT 2001). Downer claimed it was published to provide a ‘full and balanced account of Australia’s response to the extraordinary foreign policy challenge of East Timor’ (Fernandes 2004: 1). The text was far from balanced. As Clinton Fernandes notes, East Timor in Transition, was produced by a ‘team of departmental officers who had worked on East Timor over the period’ so that ‘those who had implemented policy were assessing their own performances within the covers of a book they had themselves written, using material they had themselves selected’ (Fernandes 2004: 1-2).

Australia’s interest in 1998 and 1999 in oil and gas fields, set to deliver $40–50 billion into the Australian treasury, barely rates a mention in East Timor in Transition. There is no discussion of the fact that if East Timor became independent, the Timor Gap Treaty between Australia and Indonesia dividing up oil and gas resources in the Timor Sea would cease to exist. This was the treaty signed in 1989 by Australia and Indonesia’s foreign ministers as they drank champagne in a jet flying over the Timor Sea. Under the treaty Australia secured rights to revenue from oil and gas reserves between Australia and East Timor on East Timor’s side of median line – the line halfway between the coasts of Australia and Timor. The possibility of an independent East Timor threatened Australia’s claim to potentially billions of dollars worth of oil and gas revenue. Australia’s interest in energy resources in the Timor Sea is mentioned once in the 312 pages, in a six-line section titled ‘Timor Gap Treaty’ (DFAT 2001: 171). The brief discussion skates over the enormous diplomatic effort required by Australia’s diplomats and the foreign minister Alexander Downer to keep Australia’s claim to oil and gas reserves north of the median line alive.

The stakes were high. Billions of dollars in taxes and royalties were expected to flow into the Australian treasury when Conoco’s (now ConocoPhillips) Darwin LNG plant was operational and Woodside’s massive Greater Sunrise gas field developed. Both these fields lie north of the median line, much closer to East Timor than Australia.

It is not surprising, therefore, that Australian officials were far from enthusiastic about moves at the UN in 1998 to facilitate negotiations between Portugal and Indonesia about the future of East Timor. Australia had a multi-billion-dollar interest in the status quo.

In January 1998, after successful lobbying by shadow foreign affairs minister, Laurie Brereton, the Australian Labor Party adopted a policy supporting self-determination for the people of East Timor (Fernandes 2011: 170-2). Brereton also recommended renegotiating the revenue-sharing arrangements under the Timor Gap Treaty to provide funds for an independent East Timor (Fernandes 2011: 177).

15 In May 1998 President Suharto resigned. Around the same time, the National Council of Timorese Resistance (CNRT) was formed and jailed resistance leader Xanana Gusmão elected president. Downer visited Indonesia in July and pushed a plan for East Timor’s ‘autonomy’ within Indonesia, to be followed by a review of the status of East Timor at some unspecified point in the future. Downer was not supporting independence and opposed Gusmão’s release from prison, purportedly concerned that the Timorese leadership’s call for a referendum on self-determination would lead to bloodshed (Beanland 1999; DFAT 2001: 25).

A key meeting, not discussed in East Timor in Transition, occurred in August 1998. Gusmão secretly met with BHP’s senior representative in Indonesia. According to petroleum geologist Geoffrey McKee, the meeting was part of a deliberate tactical shift by CNRT to ‘rob the Australian government, editorial writers, and the Timor Gap contractors of reasons for arguing that independence in East Timor would “tear up the Timor Gap Treaty”’ (McKee 2000: 100). Details of the meeting, attributed to a well-placed diplomatic source were reported in the Sydney Morning Herald on 20 August 1998. According to the report, Gusmão agreed that an ‘independent East Timor would honour – during an interim period – the rights awarded to mining companies under the controversial 1989 Timor Gap Treaty’ (Jenkins 1998). Soon after, Downer dropped his opposition to Gusmão’s release (Beanland 1999).

In December 1998 prime minister John Howard wrote to the new Indonesian president, B.J. Habibie. He did not recommend independence for East Timor. He proposed a ‘compromise political solution’ with a ‘built-in review mechanism’ which ‘would allow time to convince the East Timorese of the benefits of autonomy within the Indonesian Republic’ (DFAT 2001: 31). As Fernandes writes, it is ‘a revisionist distortion’ to suggest this letter is evidence of Howard’s support for East Timor’s self determination (Fernandes 2004: 38). Downer’s foreign affairs advisers, Josh Frydenberg and Greg Hunt (both now ministers in the Liberal/National Party Coalition government), wrote an opinion piece in the Australian in mid-January 1999 arguing it was Australia’s role to help encourage the opposition groups in both Indonesia and East Timor ‘to support a staged process rather than to make unrealistic demands for immediate independence’ (Frydenberg and Hunt 1999). Hunt was an adviser to Downer from 1994 to 1998 and Frydenberg from 1999 to 2003.

It was the long-retired Richard Woolcott, Australia’s ambassador in Indonesia from 1975 to 1978, who characteristically stepped back into the limelight and spelt out Australia’s real concerns. In an article in the Australian Financial Review Woolcott argued that a change in the status of East Timor could ‘lead to substantial financial implications for the Government if the Timor Gap Treaty, signed in 1989, were to unravel’. He claimed the Labor Party’s plans to renegotiate the revenue-sharing arrangements under the Timor Gap Treaty could have ‘major legal and commercial implications’. This was presumably a reference to the possibility of legal action from holders of Australian issued Timor Sea permits if Australia was found not to have sovereignty north of the median line. Woolcott concluded that:

Australia’s foreign and security policy interests will be best served by a stable, united, peaceful and prospering Indonesia, improbable as that may seem in present circumstances. Domestically, our economic interests are served by the ability of Australian companies to continue to develop – and benefit – from the seabed resources in our agreed exclusive economic zone. Both these national interests could now be under threat in the present confused and evolving situation (Woolcott 1999).

Woolcott’s reference to Australia’s ‘agreed exclusive economic zone’ is disingenuous. Agreed with who? Under Article 74 of the UN Convention on the Law of the Sea every coastal country has rights of exploitation of seabed resources and living resources in the water column over a 200 nautical mile Exclusive Economic Zone (EEZ). Australia signed the Convention in 1994. The Timor Sea is approximately 350 nautical miles wide, which meant an independent East Timor and Australia would have overlapping EEZ entitlements, in which case, the boundary would be determined by international law in order to achieve an equitable solution. In most cases, an equitable solution is reached by drawing an equidistant line half-way between the coasts of neighbouring states (Cleverly and Fietta 2016: 24- 29).

16 Australia did not have an ‘agreed’ EEZ boundary in the Timor Sea. An independent East Timor would have a claim to the median line and for much wider lateral boundaries that those set out in the 1989 resource sharing Timor Gap Treaty between Australia and Indonesia. Woolcott did however clearly enunciate the economic threat an independent East Timor posed to Australia.

President Habibie rejected Downer and Howard’s staged autonomy proposal, and on 27 January 1999 announced the East Timorese would be granted a referendum on independence. From then on, Fernandes says, ‘Australia’s diplomacy functioned as an obstacle to East Timor’s independence. When the Howard government was eventually forced to send in a peacekeeping force, it did so under the pressure of a tidal wave of public outrage’ (Fernandes 2004: 3)

In a replay of the cover-ups and denials of Indonesian atrocities in East Timor following the invasion in 1975, the Australian government ignored intelligence reports throughout 1998 and 1999 that the Indonesian military was arming militias in East Timor. As Brereton recalls, it was

a matter of record that Mr Downer accepted Indonesian Foreign Minister Alatas’s denials that the Indonesian military were orchestrating militias in East Timor … He did so at a time when the Australian Government knew from its own Defence Intelligence reports that this was a deliberate strategy to sub-contract out violence against pro-independence supporters … It is also a matter of record that the Australian Government actively argued against pressing Jakarta to accept the early deployment of peacekeepers (Brereton 2001).

International pressure led to Xanana Gusmão being released from jail into house detention in February 1999. Downer was one of his first visitors. Gusmão asked for the Australian government’s help to send a peacekeeping force to East Timor (AAP 1999). But Gusmão’s plea fell on deaf ears. The following day secretary of Australia’s Department of Foreign Affairs and Trade, Ashton Calvert disputed the assessment of Stanley Roth, US assistant secretary of state, that a full-scale peacekeeping operation in East Timor was unavoidable. Roth argued that in the absence of international action to push for peacekeepers the territory would descend into violence. Calvert rebuffed him:

One of the central themes to achieving a resolution was to convince the Timorese that they had to sort themselves out, and to dispel the idea that the UN was going to solve all their problems while they indulged in vendetta and bloodletting (Tiffin 2001: 86).

This is a remarkable statement given Calvert would have had access to Australian intelligence linking the violence back to elements within Indonesia.

Just weeks later, on 6 April, about 2000 people gathered in the compound outside the Catholic church in Liquica in East Timor seeking refuge from Indonesian militia targeting independence supporters (Robinson 2003). At midday, Indonesian troops and militia arrived at the church and demanded the pro independence village chief be handed over. Around sixty people were killed as they fled, either shot or hacked to death with machetes. In a subsequent media appearance Downer refused to confirm the Indonesian army’s role in the massacre and then refused to release a report on the incident prepared by Australian diplomats (Downer 1999).

It later emerged that Australia was also refusing to share intelligence about Indonesia’s plans for escalating violence in East Timor with the US. In 1998 and 1999, Australia’s Defence Intelligence Organisation liaison officer to the US Defence Intelligence Agency in Washington, Mervyn Jenkins, was sharing Australian intelligence records with his CIA counterparts as part of his liaison function (Blunn 2000: 121; Fernandes 2011: 187). Jenkins was secretly monitored for months and eventually interviewed by investigators on 11 June 1999. Two days later he committed suicide. We don’t know the substance of the intelligence Jenkins was passing to his American colleagues. Thanks to an ABC 4 Corners investigation we do know that the intelligence related to Indonesian involvement in escalating violence in East Timor (ABC 2000). We also know that there was a policy dispute between Australia

17 and the US about the need for peacekeepers. It is unclear, why Australia was so reluctant to share intelligence about Indonesian military and militia activity with the US. An obvious explanation is that the intelligence undermined Downer and Calvert’s denials that Indonesia was behind the violence. Arguably it may also reflect a concern on the part of Australian officials that securing access to oil and gas in the Timor Sea was a factor motivating US support for East Timor’s independence. In January 1974 Portugal issued a permit to the median line in the Timor Sea to an American company Oceanic Exploration which continued to assert the permit was valid. This potentially gave Oceanic rights to part of Greater Sunrise and all of Bayu-Undan.

On 30 August 1999, the people of East Timor voted 78.5 percent in favour of independence. On Saturday 4 September, when the result was officially announced, Indonesia launched a devastating campaign of destruction. Up to 2000 people were killed in the bloodbath that followed as Indonesian-backed militia killed independence sympathisers, burnt homes and destroyed schools, hospitals and bridges.

Following the referendum, as Woolcott feared, Indonesia immediately lost all sovereignty over East Timor meaning the Timor Gap Treaty ceased to exist. The permits unilaterally issued by Australia north of the median line in the early 1960s were in limbo (Deeley 2001: 25; Ong 2002; Kaye 2008: 78). This was the scenario Australia had been desperate to avoid. With Plan A - East Timor remains part of Indonesia - having failed, Australian officials moved on to Plan B - working with the resource companies to pressure the Timorese to agree to the terms of the 1989 Timor Gap Treaty.

A Senate Committee inquiring into Australia’s relationship with East Timor and the Timor Gap Treaty held hearings in Darwin on 8 and 9 September 1999. While East Timor was burning across the Timor Sea, James Godlove from Phillips (now ConocoPhillips) outlined the company’s position in view of the ‘material change’ in East Timor’s political status (Senate 1999). Phillips was the operator of the Bayu Undan gas field and was ready to invest $US1.4 billion in the first stage of a Darwin LNG plant. Godlove insisted the company could not wait for the new nation to formally come into existence. He said there was a Japanese buyer ready and the project needed certainty now. Under the Timor Gap Treaty, revenue from the field would have been split 50/50 between Indonesia and Australia. Phillips dangled the carrot of a desperately needed revenue stream for the new nation.

On 20 September 1999 after mass protests around Australia, and the intervention of US President Clinton, a United Nations peacekeeping force led by Australia left for East Timor to quell the devastating post-ballot violence. The day before, Gusmão had been released from house arrest in Jakarta and flown to Darwin. There, he was briefed by Australian officials and told it was unsafe for him to return to Timor.

Reluctantly Gusmão travelled to New York for meetings with the United Nations. In New York, he and José Ramos-Horta met with Indonesian foreign minister Ali Alatas, who claimed events in East Timor had been beyond control of the government. The Timor Gap oil and gas fields were also discussed, and Alatas indicated Indonesia would hand over the Indonesian share of the Timor Gap to the Timorese. Gusmão arrived back in Darwin on 6 October 1999, anxious to return to Dili, but a critical meeting had to take place before the Australian military deemed it safe to transport the resistance leader home.

The Timorese diaspora had descended on Darwin, and Gusmão went from meeting to meeting with experts from around the globe, working on how to manage the enormous responsibility of administering a new country. ‘We had so many decisions to make and we didn’t have the time or the expertise to be on top of everything,’ Gusmão recalls (Gusmão 2017). Gusmão appointed criminal lawyer Mari Alkatiri to manage the Timor Sea issue (Munton 2006: 99). On 20 October 1999 Gusmão found himself at a meeting with Alkatiri, Ramos-Horta and James Godlove from Phillips. Godlove pitched the Bayu Undan pipeline and Darwin LNG plant. He talked of billions of dollars that would flow to East Timor. The traumatised Timorese leaders had no independent expert legal advice on the law of the sea. They were desperate to return to East Timor. They signed a statement saying CNRT intended to ‘negotiate appropriate transition arrangements and consequent changes in the current Treaty that maintain its legal authority over petroleum resource development’ (Munton 2006: 1999).

18 After dark on 21 October 1999, wearing his Falintil army uniform and accompanied by four Timorese bodyguards and Australian soldiers in full combat gear, Gusmão boarded a Royal Australian Air Force flight home over the Timor Sea (Niner 2009: 209).

On 26 October 1999 a consortium led by Phillips announced that it would proceed with the $US1.4 billion investment in the first stage of the development of the Bayu-Undan field in the cooperation zone (Senate 2000: 63). In a media release, Phillips said it had received a letter signed by Mr Gusmão, Dr Ramos-Horta and Mr Alkatiri saying they would honour Timor gap petroleum zone arrangements. Plan B had worked.

Gusmão returned to a shattered nation. The people of East Timor were physically and psychologically destroyed. Families were starving, the medical and school systems non-existent, the power, water and road infrastructure in ruins. In the period between the ballot in August 1999 and independence in May 2002, the United Nations Transitional Administration in East Timor (UNTAET) worked with the Timorese to establish the governance framework necessary for a new country. They faced a massive challenge. A constitution had to be agreed. At this point the Australian government could have made the assessment that it was in Australia’s national interest to agree to a median line boundary in the Timor Sea in accordance with the principles of the UN Convention on the Law of the Sea. Australia could have negotiated an agreement with East Timor to protect the interests of the resource companies with Australian issued permits. Under this scenario, East Timor would have had a revenue stream and would not have to rely on the generosity of international donors and the UN. But instead, Australia chose to maintain rights to oil and gas north of the median line, irrespective of international law and the rights of the Timorese. As we now know, Australia’s ruthless tactics extended to installing listening devices in the room being used by Timor-Leste’s team during maritime boundary negotiations in 2004.

Implementing Plan B, Australia urged UNTAET to step into the shoes of Indonesia and accept the terms of the Timor Gap Treaty. UNTAET’s negotiators pushed back, insisting on a treaty reflecting current international law, i.e. the median line and wider lateral boundaries, including all of Greater Sunrise in the east and Laminaria and other fields in the west. Foreign minister Downer personally led the Australian negotiations. UNTAET had some small victories, but when the Democratic Republic of Timor-Leste came into existence on 20 May 2002, the first official act of the newly independent nation was to sign the heads of agreement for the 2002 Timor Sea Treaty with Australia. Like the illegal 1989 Timor Gap Treaty, it was a revenue sharing arrangement. It also copied the boundaries of the Timor Gap Treaty which meant Australia succeeded in its ambition to maintain rights to revenue on the Timor Leste side of the median line. This was a big win for Australia, and a multi-billion dollar loss for the Timorese.

There is no doubt that Australia prioritised good relations with Indonesia above the human rights of the Timorese. However, Australia’s shift in policy response to the prospect of an independent East Timor was dictated by Australia’s economic interest in billions of dollars-worth of oil and gas in disputed areas of the Timor Sea. It was only after it was reported that Gusmão said that an independent East Timor would honour – during an interim period – the rights awarded to mining companies under the 1989 Timor Gap Treaty that Downer dropped his opposition to Gusmão’s release from jail and began supporting the ‘autonomy within Indonesia’ option. Similarly, it was only after Gusmão and his colleagues signed a statement for Bayu Undan’s operator Phillips to that effect, that Australia deemed it was safe for him to return to his devastated homeland. Despite the best efforts of the Australian Department of Foreign Affairs to disguise the fact, preserving the integrity of the illegal Timor Gap Treaty signed with Indonesia in 1989 was the driving factor behind Australia’s reluctance to support Timor-Leste’s independence in 1998 and 1999.

Bibliography

ABC 2000, ‘The ties that bind: The story behind the East Timor crisis and how it plunged Australian Indonesian relations to an all-time low,’ Four Corners, 14 February 2000).

19 AAP, 22 February 1999, ‘Gusmão to ask Downer for peacekeepers’. Beanland, Mike 1999, East Timor & the Politics of Oil,’ www.oilandgasonline.com/doc/east-timor the-politics-of-oil-0001, [accessed 10 October 2018] Blunn, A.S. 2000, Report of the Inquiry of Mr A S Blunn AO On Behalf of the Inspector-General of Intelligence and Security into the Investigation into Alleged Security Breaches by the Late Mervyn Jenkins, Department of Defence, Canberra. Brereton, Laurie 17 July 2001, ‘News Release, East Timor: Selective and partisan publication of DFAT records’. Cleverly, Robin and Fietta, Stephen 2016, A Practitioner's Guide to Maritime Boundary Delimitation, Oxford University Press. Cotton, James 2001, 'Against the Grain: The East Timor Intervention', Survival, 43. Cotton, James 2004, East Timor, Australia and Regional Order: Intervention and Its Aftermath in Southeast Asia, Routledge. Deeley, Neil 2001, ‘The International Boundaries of East Timor’, in International Boundaries Research Unit, ed. Shelagh Furness and Clive Schofield (Durham UK: Department of Geography University of Durham, 2001). Ong, David M 2002, ‘The New Timor Sea Arrangement 2001: Is Joint Development of Common Offshore Oil and Gas Deposits Mandated under International Law?’, The International Journal of Marine and Coastal Law 17, no. 1 (2002). Kaye, Stuart 2008, ‘Australia and East Timor During the Howard Years: An International Law Perspective’, Australian Year Book of International Law 27. Department of Foreign Affairs and Trade 2001, East Timor in Transition, 1998-2000: An Australian Policy Challenge, Department of Foreign Affairs and Trade, Canberra. Downer, Alexander 9 April 1999, Interview with Glen Milne, Channel Seven. Jenkins, David 20 August 1998, ‘BHP talks to jailed guerrilla leader,’ Sydney Morning Herald. Fernandes, Clinton 2011, The Independence of East Timor: Multi-Dimensional Perspectives - Occupation, Resistance, and International Political Activism, Sussex Academic Press, Eastbourne Fernandes, Clinton 2004, Reluctant Saviour: Australia, Indonesia and the Independence of East Timor, Scribe Publications, Carlton North. Frydenberg, Joshua and Hunt, Greg 14 January 1999, ‘Timor plan is more palatable after dinner’ Australian. McGrath, Kim 2017, Crossing the Line, Australia’s Secret History in the Timor Sea, Black Inc, Carlton. McKee, Geoffrey 2000, ‘The new Timor Gap: Will Australia now break with the past?’ in Lansell Taudevin and Jefferson Lee (eds.) East Timor: Making Amends?: Analysing Australia's Role in Reconstructing East Timor, Otford Press, Otford. Gusmão, Xanana 17 March 2017, Interview with Kim McGrath, Dili, Timor-Leste. Munton, Alexander 2006, ‘A Study of the Offshore Petroleum Negotiations between Australia, the UN and East Timor’, PhD thesis, Australian National University. Niner, Sara 2009, Xanana, Leader of the Struggle for Independent Timor-Leste, Australian Scholarly Publishing, North Melbourne. Robinson, Geoffrey 2003, ‘East Timor 1999 Crimes against Humanity’, A Report Commissioned by the United Nations Office of the High Commissioner for Human Rights. Senate Committee on Foreign Affairs Defence and Trade 1999, Interim Report on East Timor, Parliament of Australia. Senate Committee on Foreign Affairs, Defence and Trade 2000, Final Report on the Inquiry into East Timor, Parliament of Australia. Tiffen, Rodney 2001, Diplomatic Deceits: Government, Media, and East Timor, UNSW Press, Sydney. Woolcott, Richard 19 January 1999, ‘It’s time to recall a treaty’, Australian Financial Review.

20 3

Indonesian Solidarity with the Struggle for Timor-Leste’s Independence in the 1990s

Max

Lane

By 1997, the cause of East Timorese independence had made major strides in winning support in world public opinion. Jose Ramos Horta and Bishop Belo winning the Nobel Peace Prize in 1996 and President Nelson Mandela’s request to speak to Xanana Gusmão on a state visit in 1997 symbolised this improved position in world opinion. Even as late as 1998, only the Australian government had formally recognised East Timor as a province of Indonesia. Although in practice many governments accepted de facto the annexation of East Timor as an Indonesian province, all except Australia formally adhered to the United Nations resolutions affirming Timor as a yet to be decolonised Portuguese colony. Despite these advances, the balance of forces on the ground within East Timor and Indonesia still favoured the Suharto regime and its army. The Timorese had no militarily significant forces. Political repression was intense, especially after the uprisings of 1990-1991. There were very few signs of independence being won in the near future. There were talks ongoing with Timorese leaders on the issue of a special status within Indonesia, but while the Timorese saw this as a step on the road to independence, Jakarta was still insisting that a special status should end the matter.

It was events external to Timor and the cause of Timorese independence that opened up the possibility of accelerating the move towards independence: perhaps even being the factors making independence possible at all. These events took place within Indonesia and were related to the struggle against the Suharto dictatorship. There were two primary ways in which the anti-dictatorship or pro-democracy struggle within Indonesia affected the struggle for Timorese independence. The first were the conscious activities of sections of the democratic movement that overtly gave support to the Timorese struggle. This solidarity constituted tactical support helping the effort to win international profile, to strengthen international solidarity generally and especially in Australia and strengthening the morale of the Timorese. The second was in some ways more fundamental: providing a strategic enabling for the Timorese by ending the dictatorial rule of Suharto in a manner that created more democratic and less repressive political conditions.

Solidarity and tactical support

In the immediate aftermath of the invasion and occupation of East Timor in 1975, there was almost no criticism of the invasion from any quarter within Indonesia. Among academics, Dr George Aditjondro was a rather lone and courageous voice in this regard. It had only been ten years since Suharto’s takeover and in 1974 a student movement opposing corruption and abuse of power had been suppressed with hundreds jailed and several newspapers closed. Indonesia had no left wing political groups after the 1965-66 suppression. Repression was tight and dissident political life was minimal. What dissidence there was during the 1965-80 period came from within the political culture established by the coalition supporting Suharto. This 1970s dissidence could be sharp and courageous – many were jailed – but was not yet able to go beyond a framework that did not permit criticism of a major international act of the government, such as the invasion of Timor. In addition, the black propaganda against FRETILIN, depicting it as evil and communist, was very intense and without any counter.

In the early 1980s, author and released political prisoner, Pramoedya Ananta Toer and his close associates, stated their opposition to the annexation of East Timor on the grounds that it was not part of the Dutch East Indies and that the annexation was by force. However, these statements were usually made to young people coming to talk to the released prisoners or to foreign visitors and were not reported in the Indonesian press. These sentiments did have an impact among radicalising university students, however, spreading by word of mouth.

21 There were Indonesians based outside of Indonesia who also criticised the invasion. Liem Soei Liong and Jusfiq Hadjar had been the first Indonesians to openly oppose the invasion when they testified to the Permanent People’s Tribunal in Lisbon in 1981. The Suharto Government declared both persona non grata and banned them from returning to Indonesia. Kusni Sulang in France, Hendrik Amahorseja in Sweden, Ernst Utrecht in the Netherlands and Siauw Tiong Djin and Goei Hok Gie (Andrew Gunawan) in Australia were sympathetic to East Timor before 1990.

It was not until the 1990s that a more full-blooded support for the Timorese struggle emerged. This support was to be found among pro-democracy student activists, human rights activists and a small, but very effective, activist left grouping. In this essay, I will concentrate on describing the actions I knew best as a result of coordinating with the relevant groups internationally. These were not the only Indonesian solidarity activities, but they were the most sustained and visible.

The events described here – both the militant protest actions in Indonesia and the international events – required considerable courage as they were in direct and contemptuous contradiction with the dictatorship’s policies. Their main contribution was to assist the Timorese in tactics aimed at raising the international profile of their struggle, while also acting to boost morale by increasing the legitimacy of Timorese movement generally.

Indonesian people struggle in solidarity with Maubere people (SPRIM) In March 1995, a front was established based on the labour, students, farmers and artists groups affiliated with the Peoples Democratic Party (PRD – Partai Rakyat Democratik). At its founding congress in 1994, the PRD had also adopted a position in support of self-determination for East Timor. SPRIM described its outlook as follows:

SPRIM in its political activities believes in the strength of mass action, and the forms of official national and international negotiations, which have already been established to strengthen the struggle of the Maubere people. The diversity of SPRIM's members proves that the struggle of the Maubere people has already received support not only from students, but also from workers, peasants and the artistic community. SPRIM has already planned an initial work agenda formed of: publications -- primarily large scale information distribution -- campaigns -- most importantly those which push the issue of independence for the Maubere people to become part of the political agenda of the pro-democratic movement, for example its inclusion in the agenda of newly formed alliances, KPRI (the Indonesian Peoples' United Movement) -- and mass actions principally aimed at related institutions, which are bear responsibility for the independence of the Maubere people (ASIET 1996).

SPRIM demanded that the Indonesian New Order regime immediately stop all military operations in East Timor and withdraw all military forces, including police. It called for a referendum on self determination.

Embassy sit-in and asylum actions

The formation of SPRIM, as well as the activities of other solidarity organisations such as SOLIDAMOR (Solidaritas untuk Penyelesaian Damai Timor Timur – Solidarity for Peaceful Resolution for East Timor).) and FORTILOS (Forum Solidaritas Rakyat Timor Lorosae – Solidarity with the People of East Timor), created an atmosphere that enabled an escalation of the use of the tactic of Embassy sit-ins or occupations by pro-Independence Timorese youth (Goodman 1999). There were a significant number of Timorese studying in Indonesian universities on the islands of Java and Bali, including in Jakarta. Some of these students used the tactic of staging sit-ins in embassies in Jakarta, sometimes climbing over fences, demanding asylum (Fernandes 2011: 136-7).

In 1995 there were five more of these protests. Most involved between 5 and 12 Timorese. The last action for the year, on December 7, saw a much larger action involving about 90 people. While the other

22 protests combined the demand for asylum outside of Indonesia with raising the profile of the Timorese struggle, the December 7 had a much more explicitly political character. The participation of a large number of Indonesian activists who participated as an act of political solidarity, underlined this character. Fifty activists jumped the fence of the Dutch Embassy and 40 did the same at the Russian Embassy. This provoked a harsh immediate reaction from the regime with a large number of preman (paid thugs) also going into the Embassy to attack the activists. The Dutch Ambassador was also injured.

This dramatic action drew most of its Indonesian activists from the PRD and its associated student and labor organisations. Still radicals in the 1990s, then prominent PRD activists, Budiman Sujatmiko and Dita Sari, played public prominent roles in the actions. A working relationship between the PRD and Timorese Socialist Party (PST) made the whole action possible. This action was widely reported internationally, especially in East Timor, Portugal and Australia. It was a very useful boost to the struggle’s international profile as well as to morale back in Timor.

There were also regular visits to Australia by Indonesian activists, all of whom urged Australians to support Timorese independence. These took place between 1992 and 1998. Most of these visits were hosted by Action in Solidarity with Indonesia and East Timor (ASIET). The Indonesian speakers spoke at events organised by ASIET and also the socialist youth organisation, Resistance, which was very active in Australia between the 1970s and early 2000s.

One of the biggest of these meetings was on December 2, 1994 at a public forum in Sydney which attracted 450 people, held in Sydney Trades Hall. One keynote speaker was the well-known film-maker, John Pilger, who had made the film Death of a Nation in the aftermath of the 1991 Dili massacre. At that event, for the first time in Australia, there was both an Indonesian and a Timorese speaker speaking in support of Timorese self-determination. Dita Sari, then a member of the PRD and involved in labor organising spoke on the same platform as Gina Soares, a Timorese exile active in the Sydney-based November 12 Committee – a committee that organised the annual large rallies commemorating the Dili massacre.

In July 1995 at a rally, which opened the annual conference of Resistance, an Indonesian PRD speaker, Ria Shanti, spoke on a platform with a Timorese exile, Nunu Santos, from the Timor youth organisation OJETIL. This conference and rally also received a direct message from Xanana Gusmao which was smuggled out of Cipinang prison. This was the first time an Indonesian and Timorese spoke on the same platform in Melbourne in support of Timorese self-determination.

Speaking tours by Indonesian activists who spoke in solidarity with the Timorese struggle continued throughout the 1996-1998 period, including but not only at two large international conferences. These were the 1996 “East Timor: Its Future in the Asia Pacific Conference” held in Sydney and the 1998 Asia Pacific International Solidarity Conference, both attended by several hundred people, and scores of speakers (see below). These were by no means the only international conferences at which Indonesian activists spoke.

Indonesian participation in international solidarity events

The first Asia Pacific Conference on East Timor (APCET), in support of Timorese struggle for self determination, was held at the University of the Philippines in Manila from May 31 to June 4, 1994 (Land 1994). It was initiated by a coalition of Filipino progressive organisations, and involved a global network of support. Although invited, neither Jose Ramos Horta nor Jose Luis Guterres, the chairperson of Fretilin External Delegation nor Joao Carrascalao, chairperson of UDT (Timorese Democratic Union) were allowed to enter the Philippines by the government of General Ramos. However, Ines Almeida, an East Timorese from Australia and representative for the East Timor Relief Association in Sydney, was able to attend and speak. Important among all the international speakers were two Indonesian activists, Rachland Nashidik and Tri Agus Susanto Siswowiharjo, from the pro-Democracy organisation, PIJAR (Pusat Informasi dan Jaringan Aksi Reformasi – Information Centre and Action Network for Reform). Pijar, which translates as “flame”, was the initiating force in establishing SOLIDAMOR, which

23 continued to play an active role in APCET over the next few years. Tri Agus, and another PIJAR activist, Yenny Rosa Damayanti both ended up spending time in prison for their anti-dictatorship activities. Speaking at the APCET conference, they stated:

Our primary reason for coming to this conference is to extend our solidarity to the peoples of the world in winning justice and peace. Our first commitment is to justice: that the people of East Timor should have the opportunity to determine their own fate. Only then can there be peace between Indonesia and East Timor and the violence which has cost so many lives can be ended.

The APCET Conference became the Asia Pacific Coalition on East Timor and held regular meetings over the next five years, always with Indonesian participation.

The East Timor: Its future in the Asia Pacific conference was held June 21-24, 1996 in Sydney Australia (Meckelberg 1996). The initiating organisation was the University of Oporto in Portugal. In Australia, it was also sponsored by the University of Sydney (School of Asian Studies), University of New South Wales (Centre for Human Rights) and University of Technology, Sydney (Institute for International Studies). This conference was attended by all of the Timorese leadership in exile as well as a large number of Timorese who were able to come down via Indonesia. Furthermore, there were also a very broad participation from Indonesian pro-democracy activists. These came from, among others, the Legal Aid Institute, the Workers for Prosperity Union, the Geni Foundation, the Soekarnoist movement, the People's Democratic Party, the Alliance for Independent Journalists, the Pijar Foundation, the Indonesian Centre for Labour Struggles, the Institute for the Study of Information Flow, Students in Solidarity for Democracy in Indonesia and the Nahdlatul Ulama Islamic movement. A Timorese participant, Harold Moucho, a FRETILIN exile in Sydney, stated:

The conference was very positive for us and for all the resistance people who attended, because we were able to have real discussion with Timorese from both outside and inside East Timor, and we could discuss proposals with the Indonesian pro-democracy leaders.

Jose Ramos Horta said:

Our struggle and fate are intertwined not by geography alone, but rather by the nature of the regime that is responsible for the crimes perpetrated against our two peoples. It is only natural therefore that without losing sight of our respective historical and cultural identities and political aims - ours is self- determination, yours is democracy and the rule of law in Indonesia - we seek to join forces, to cooperate wherever we can.

This conference was held 21-24 June 1996. Just a month later, the struggle against the Suharto dictatorship entered its final stage with large demonstrations in Jakarta in defence of the Indonesian Democratic Party’s (PDI) right to choose its own leader, Megawati Sukarnoputri. There was an armed attack on the PDI’s Jakarta offices by pro-government forces when several people were killed or injured. This provoked more demonstrations, followed by rioting. The government used the riots as a pretext to order the arrest of all members of the PRD, who then had to go underground to continue organising. About 18 PRD members were captured and imprisoned. These included I Gusti Astika Anom and Wilson bin Nurtias, both of whom had also been active in SPRIM, and had spoken at the June 1996 Sydney conference. They were not released until after Suharto’s fall.

One PRD member, Nico Warouw, was outside the country at this time, in Australia, and continued the international campaign work in Australia and then in Europe. Resistance and the National Union of Students-sponsored a speaking tour of Nico Warouw around Australia during 1996. Warouw spoke on the Indonesian pro-democracy struggle and the developing links between it and the resistance both inside and outside East Timor. Warouw also later spoke on a panel with Timorese activist and former guerrilla fighter and escapee from arrest in Indonesia, Puto Naldo Rei in July 1997 at a forum “Suharto’s Final Year” – a prediction that turned out to be correct.

24 The East Timor: Its future in the Asia Pacific conference had brought together Timorese and Indonesian activists and leaders just at the time it started to become clearer that the pro-democracy movement in Indonesia was about to take off. This could only have been a positive political boost for the Timorese struggle. Apart from this kind of direct tactical support to the Timorese, the appearance of a large number of Indonesians in solidarity with Timorese strengthened the authority of the movement in Australia itself. Having the strongest possible solidarity movement in the country which was Suharto’s most enthusiastic and oil-hungry supporter would turn out to be very important in 1999. The Indonesian contribution to building solidarity in Australia was very important. The Asia Pacific Solidarity Conference was held in Sydney, April 10-13, 1998 (de Almeida and Hickson 1997). It was organised by the Asia Pacific Institute for Democratisation and Development, drawing on the human and political resources of the Democratic Socialist Party and its supporters. 750 people attended the conference, including more than 50 speakers from around the world, the majority from the Asia Pacific region. While the conference did not have a specific East Timor focus, the Timor struggle figured prominently. Mari Alkatiri, a central leader from Fretilin, was a keynote speaker. A filmed interview with Jose Ramos Horta, who was in Portugal at this time, was also featured. Again, at this conference, there was an Indonesian key-note speaker, Edwin Gozal, who spoke about the struggle for democracy in Indonesia but also the growing solidarity with East Timor among Indonesian democratic activists. Gozal emphasised the relationship between the two struggles:

You were scheduled to speak with East Timorese leaders at the conference. What is the connection between the two struggles?

We have different goals - the East Timorese fight for independence and we fight for democracy. But we have a common enemy and oppressor, so must unite to bring down the dictatorship. The Indonesian people will not win unless we join the struggle of the East Timorese people for their independence. We are fighting together, in particular with East Timorese youth and students in Indonesia and East Timorese workers in Indonesia (Gozal 1998).

Within six weeks of this conference, Suharto had been forced to step down in an atmosphere where the majority of the pro-democracy movement was either in solidarity with the Timorese struggle or for whom it had become an issue about which they were neutral.

Gozal stayed in Australia to campaign on the issue for the coming period. He participated in a joint national speaking tour with Timorese activist, Puto Naldo Rei, visiting most Australian capital cities, starting with a National Conference on Indonesia and East Timor organised by ASIET in Sydney in August 1997. Gozal also spoke on a panel with Indonesian activist academic, Dr George Aditjondro, who was based in Australia in the late 1990s. Aditjondro had been an outspoken supporter of the Timorese struggle since 1974.

His predecessor, Nico Warouw, had travelled to Europe and was campaigning in the Netherlands. Between 1996 and 1998. Indonesian activists also travelled to the Netherlands, which became a base for them to campaign for democracy and in solidarity with East Timor in other European countries, meeting activist groups as well as members of parliament. Indonesian journalists such as Aboeprijadi Santoso and Yoss Wibisono broadcast news and interviews about Timor-Leste via Radio Netherlands, which was received in Indonesia. In particular, a series of visits by members of the PRD took place, supported in the Netherlands by the XminY solidarity organisation, the Socialist Party and the then active Socialist Workers Party. They were also hosted by a grouping of Indonesian political exiles in the Netherlands.

There were also other international solidarity conferences held in Europe, in particular at the University of Oporto. Again, during the 1990 period, both members of the PRD and SPRIM as well as PIJAR participated in these conferences.

25 The attendance of Indonesians supporting the Timorese at international conferences in Manila and other Asian cities as well as in Portugal and Australia indicated the existence of allies and sources of support outside the Suharto government. In the context of the 1990s where there was a clearly strengthening opposition movement to Suharto, the existence of these allies made Independence seem a more realistic option for anybody who could see the writing on the wall.

Strategic enabling

While the activities described above constituted tactical support, the more fundamental achievement of the pro-democracy movement was namely the fall of Suharto and the end to dictatorship. This achievement provided the biggest boon to East Timor, although Timor was not at all central to this achievement.

On 21 May 1998 Suharto was forced to resign from the Presidency and B.J. Habibie became President of Indonesia. As student and mass protest escalated, one by one – sometimes more than one at a time – the political elite around Suharto abandoned him and he had to leave office. Because this happened under mass public pressure which was also demanding democratic reforms, Suharto could not depart in a manner that enabled the remaining elite to maintain the same level of political control. The slogan “reformasi”, indicating reforms deeper than simply ‘reform’ although not revolution, dominated the political discourse. This was a radical opening up of political space and reduced the immediate sway of the military in political discourse. It was the Army that had invested money, emotion and, most importantly, authority in the occupation of East Timor. They were now in a much weaker position. Furthermore, the organised radicalised youth who were the vanguard of the anti-dictatorship movement, were sympathetic with the Timorese cause. The broader forces of the movement had become essentially neutral on the issue. It was very significant that when the Timorese did vote for independence in the 1999 referendum there was no real backlash in Indonesia, apart from noises from some diehard chauvinists, mostly closely associated with old regime.

Ironically, the political forces which had spearheaded building tactical support for the Timorese in Indonesia, such as the PRD, did not play a decisive role on the issue of East Timor after May 1998. They remained active on the issue, mobilising demonstrations to demand the release of Xanana Gusmao and supporting a referendum. But a new dynamic had taken hold. The real, and very crucial and powerful, contribution these groups had made was in spearheading the movement to end the dictatorship itself and to ensure that its end took place under democratic pressure and was not simply a managed succession. If Suharto, or somebody of his ilk, had been able to organise a managed succession without the atmosphere of ‘reformasi’, it is unlikely that a referendum would have happened so easily.

Almost immediately with the fall of Suharto, the prospect of independence became real. The organised forces within Indonesia that spearheaded the movement to force out Suharto opened the door that enabled an accelerated independence.

Bibliography de Almeida, Filomena and Hickson, Jill 1997 August 20, ‘Indonesia, East Timor solidarity conference’, Green Left Weekly. ASIET 1996, Action in Solidarity with Indonesia and East Timor, Fighting Together: Indonesians and East Timorese Join in Struggle, Sydney. https://www.archive.asia-pacific solidarity.net/southeastasia/indonesia/publications/doss3/contents.htm Fernandes, Clinton 2011, The Independence of East Timor, Sussex Academic Press, Eastbourne, UK. Goodman, James 1999, ‘Indonesians for East Timor’, Inside Indonesia, 59/1999 https://www.insideindonesia.org/indonesians-for-east-timor Gozal, Edwin 1998, May 6, ‘PRD: Regional coordination is key’, interview in Green Left Weekly. Lamb, Jon 1994, June 15, ‘East Timor will be free’, Green Left Weekly. Meckelberg, Rebecca 1996 July 3, ‘Hundreds attend East Timor solidarity conference’, Green Left Weekly. 26 4 The Day Hope and History Rhymed in East Timor

Patrick Walsh

Until that longed-for day on 30 August 1999, hope and history had never met in East Timor. Many could see that, like lovers, they were made for each other but outside forces had kept them apart. The boldest bid in modern times to get them together was in 1960 when the UN said their time had come. But, like an interfering parent, Portugal said: ‘Não!’. And when Portugal relented, Indonesia (and its allies) said: ‘Tidak pernah!’.

But on a hot Monday at the end of August 1999, history finally smiled on East Timor. Supported by the UN, and despite intense intimidation by the Indonesian military, the East Timorese got to decide their future in a referendum. The poet Seamus Heaney could have been thinking of that day when he wrote: ‘Once in a lifetime/The longed-for tidal wave/Of justice can rise up/And hope and history rhyme’.

I was one of the 2300 foreigners privileged to observe that unique moment and to ensure, as best we could, that the process was free, fair and peaceful. Being there was a peak experience for both myself and the organisation I represented, the Australian Council for Overseas Aid (ACFOA, now ACFID). It represented the culmination of decades of partnership with the East Timorese and advocacy for self determination, sometimes in near despair and disbelief, in Australia, Indonesia and around the world.

Equally amazing, I was able to witness the historic process as a member of the Australian government’s official delegation. While this may seem unremarkable now, it was a major breakthrough. Civil society and government in Australia had been deadlocked on Timor policy for years. From 1975 Canberra sided with Indonesia; the community with the East Timorese. That I and two civil society colleagues were on the delegation at Canberra’s invitation demonstrated that both sectors had finally found common ground. Both sides now agreed that the way forward was to seize the opportunity presented by President Habibie’s policy change and to support self-determination in East Timor, long recognised by the world as both a right of colonial peoples and the best way to resolve conflicts of interest. What we were about to witness was not only a sea change for East Timor. It was also an important win for the rules-based international order.

Our delegation arrived in Dili on the prime minister’s jet on 26 August 1999 and left on 1 September. During those 7 days, we met with senior East Timorese, UN and Indonesian officials, travelled east and west of Dili to check on polling arrangements, and observed the conduct of the historic ballot on 30 August and vote-counting arrangements. For security reasons, we were whisked back to Canberra before the poll result was announced on 4 September. Like the Timorese, Australian intelligence had a good idea which way the vote would go. They also knew that the Indonesian military and their Timorese militia would cry foul, punish East Timor for its audacity and possibly scapegoat Australians.

We did not have to look far for evidence. On a wall near Hotel Turismo where we stayed, the half-crazed militia leader Eurico Guterres graffitied that his aim was ‘to exterminate and drink the blood of anti integrationists’. The ballot, he declared, was an exercise in ‘UN and Australian deceit’. Tim Fischer, the delegation leader and former Australian Deputy Prime Minister, checked out an escape route from the Turismo in case Eurico acted on his bombast. We should have been able to leave security to Indonesia as agreed in the 5 May Agreement struck at the UN in New York. At our first meeting, the Indonesian chief of police told us Indonesia had deployed 8000 police and 10,000 troops for the ballot. His assurance was cold comfort. These were the same people who’d terrorised the East Timorese for years. That afternoon in Dili, militia organised and bankrolled by the Indonesian military burned down houses and buildings, including the CNRT Resistance office, and killed several people. Bishop Belo told us he did not trust Indonesia to maintain peace, whatever the outcome, and called for an international force. If the vote favoured Indonesia, he believed Falintil would resume the war. If it went the other way, Indonesian-sponsored militia would wreck havoc. Independence leaders made the same point to us. They were right. Only a week later, the Bishop’s house where we had met him was burned to the ground by pro-autonomy forces and the bishop was forced into exile in Australia. An Australian led international force did come later in September but, tragically, much killing and pillaging had been done by then.

Other meetings with Indonesian officials were more comforting. Eurico Guterres was pushing for East Timor to be partitioned if a majority in the western half of the territory abutting the Indonesian border voted to remain part of Indonesia. Agus Tarmidzi, the head of Indonesia’s ballot task force, told us Indonesia would not do that. Our delegation was also told that, in the event of independence, East Timor would take Indonesia’s place in the Timor Sea arrangements with Australia. That was welcome news. Revenue from these deposits of oil and gas was critical to East Timor’s future. The commitment also indicated that Indonesia, propaganda to the contrary notwithstanding, was facing the prospect of an independence outcome.

A high point of the visit was my first ever meeting with Falintil. From detention in Jakarta, Xanana had ordered his troops to disengage and leave security entirely to Indonesia. We visited one of their cantonments about an hour’s drive out of Gleno to meet with Comandante Ular Rihik. Ular, born Virgilio dos Anjos, had an Australian connection. His father, Celestino dos Anjos, had been honoured by Australia for his services during World War II. The wiry, weathered Ular had a formidable reputation in East Timor. He was one of the few original leaders to survive the Indonesian storm. During the civil war in 1975, he supported UDT and had arrested Xanana Gusmao, later his commander. In 1983, he led the uprising that preceded a shocking massacre in Kraras associated with Prabowo Subianto, now Indonesia’s defence minister. Ular’s father, uncles, wife and unborn child had all been massacred.

As our meeting wound up, Laurie Brereton, the deputy leader of our group and the Australian Labor Party’s spokesman on foreign affairs, coaxed a smile out of Ular. He presented the Comandante with two bottles of Australian red wine and a box of Cuban cigars. The gifts were also a birthday present. Ular’s troops had just completed three days of festivities celebrating the 24th anniversary of Falintil’s foundation on 20 August 1975.

The choices facing the East Timorese were spelled out starkly by the UN. In four languages, the ballot paper asked voters to choose one of two options:

Do you ACCEPT the proposed special autonomy for East Timor within the Unitary State of the Republic of Indonesia?

Or, Do you REJECT the proposed special autonomy for East Timor, leading to East Timor’s separation from Indonesia?

Mario Carrascalao commented wryly that the East Timorese were being asked to choose between a pushbike and a Mercedes Benz.

The pushbike option was being pedalled by the pro-autonomy side. It argued that East Timor’s interests would be better served by what it referred to as the freedom, identity, prosperity and peace that post Suharto Indonesia now offered. Its advocates believed that partial autonomy would relax things and mean less interference from Jakarta. Coupled with the stick of violence, this was the carrot that voters would buy. The option was legitimate. Both the UN and the Resistance recognised the right of the pro Indonesian side to participate in the vote and to argue their case. Nevertheless, the pitch was self defeating. It was short on detail, over the top, and contradicted by grim experience. It was also represented by Francisco Lopes da Cruz, an active collaborator with the Indonesian military over many years, who had zero credibility. Its proponents argued, for example, that autonomy would confirm the ‘freedom’ (merdeka) that East Timor had enjoyed since July 1976 when the Indonesian military had orchestrated a fake act of self-determination in Dili similar to that conducted in West Papua in 1969. Meeting on that occasion in the sports hall behind what is now Timor-Leste’s resistance museum, a small group of hand-picked East Timorese unanimously called for integration with Indonesia. The

28 gathering took an hour, was conducted by the occupying power, and boycotted by the UN. Though illegal, Suharto still used it to declare East Timor the 27th province of Indonesia. Australia also boycotted it at the time but later, to its shame, accepted the outcome. In 1983, Prime Minister Bob Hawke formally declared East Timor the 27th province of Indonesia and the East Timorese citizens of Indonesia.

The pro-integration side also argued that a vote for Indonesia would restore the natural order of things and right an historical wrong. East Timor, it was argued, was once part of a greater Indonesia and East Timorese and Indonesians were family (kulit sama, same skin) whose members had been separated by European colonisation. The West was to blame for the mess, not Indonesia. Twenty years on, Indonesia continues to advance this explanation for its intervention.

Not surprisingly, the Mercedes Benz option of independence had far greater appeal to the long-suffering East Timorese than a half-baked arrangement with a partner they had no reason to trust. Who chooses to stay in an abusive relationship when it’s possible to leave? Freedom, after all, was what the war with Indonesia was all about, just as Indonesia’s war with the Dutch had been in the late 1940s. Why fight for freedom at enormous cost then compromise it when the storm clouds part and blue skies can be seen?

The East Timorese also knew their case was backed by international law and morality. It was further strengthened by a new found unity and strong universal support for Xanana Gusmao’s leadership across the resistance spectrum. A Mercedes Benz driven by Xanana was an unbeatable combination. As the ballot approached, Xanana broadcast to East Timor from detention in Jakarta a detailed nine-page statement on what an independent East Timor would look like. Its overall tone was typically inclusive. As the country’s future leader, Xanana reassured all interests, including pro-autonomy supporters, Indonesia and the international community, that a future East Timor would be constructive, modern and non-threatening.

On Monday, 30 August 1999, the sun rose bright and hot over conflicted East Timor. ‘Today marks the end of war in East Timor (Perang di Timtim hari ini berakhir)’, headlined Dili’s local paper, Suara Timor Timur. Long early queues at polling stations confirmed that the East Timorese knew this was it and would walk over broken glass to vote. As our official report to Canberra put it, ‘the delegation was moved by the sight of many elderly and infirm voters in the crowds and considered that these people reflected the determination of the East Timorese people to exercise their right to vote’.

Armed with our code of conduct and 67-point checklist, Team Australia split up and headed to polling stations in Dili, Maliana and Liquiça. As polls closed, I souvenired one of the 6-inch nails that voters used to punch a hole in the box of their choice: autonomy or independence. The nail now sits on a shelf at my home in Melbourne. In a tribute to it, called The Chosen One, I imagined it boasting to other plain 6-inch nails that it had been used to write a nation’s signature and that ‘plain old perpendicular me/ (became) The chosen six inch hero of democracy’.

That night I phoned Kirsty Sword – later, Kirsty Sword-Gusmao – in Jakarta to pass on our impressions of the day and congratulations to Xanana Gusmao. He came on the patchy line and Laurie Brereton, Senator Vicki Bourne of the Australian Democrats and I had the great pleasure of speaking to him briefly. In her biography Xanana: Leader of the Struggle for Independent Timor-Leste, Sara Niner says that they ‘had a low key celebration at Salemba that night… (and that) Xanana seemed genuinely relieved and happy’. She goes on, ‘He gave an impassioned speech for half an hour, talking directly into a microphone, his gaze unfocussed, tears running down his face, immersed in memories of his years in the bush’. The evening, however, was ‘tinged with sadness and a sense of foreboding for the small circle that surrounded him.’

The following night, Tim Fischer shouted us a dinner of fish and rice, supplemented with Australian wine courtesy of DFAT, in what he called a tin shed. ‘The fish was truly excellent’, he reported, ‘the tin shed truly awful’. As the dinner, closely guarded by security, drew to a close, Tim invited each of us to reflect on our experience. He was a bit put out when I commented that we should not forget the West Papuans who would be much encouraged by what we had witnessed.

29 The vote, announced on 4 September, was decisively in favour of Xanana’s Mercedes Benz option. 78.5% of East Timorese had elected to split from Indonesia. An Australian Federal Police police officer working with the United Nations Mission in East Timor (UNAMET), Wayne Sievers, heard it announced on the BBC: ‘There was silence for a minute or so over Dili’, he said. ‘Gradually, however, I heard wild cheering break out all over the city.’ Thirty minutes later it was followed by gunfire. It intensified until the International Force East Timor (InterFET), led by Australia’s Major General Peter Cosgrove, arrived on 20 September. It continued to sputter, though lethally in places like Oecusse, until the Indonesian military had completely withdrawn in October.

At least 1200 people, all but a few of whom were East Timorese, were murdered in 1999, some gruesomely. Tens of thousands of ordinary people were displaced, many forcibly to West Timor where some remain today. Buildings like the church offices in Dili that housed irreplaceable identity documents, were burned to the ground; schools were looted for the tin on their roofs; thousands of homes sprinkled with gasoline and set ablaze. This mindless destruction, it is said, was standard ‘scorched earth’ military doctrine and done to leave ‘ungrateful’ East Timor in the impoverished state Indonesia found it in in 1975. The evidence has been documented in painful detail by Indonesia’s human rights commission and two truth commissions. Each concluded that the death and devastation was systematic and either ordered or accommodated at the top. In its report, the CAVR Timor-Leste truth commission lists the names of some 50 senior Indonesian military and some 30 senior government officials who bear either individual or command responsibility. None has been held accountable.

The ballot was not all about bullets. It was both a rejection of the politics of violence and fear and an exercise in the human rights of free expression, assembly, association, and participation. As such it set the standard for future collective decision-making in East Timor and has been followed to this day. The ballot was also a big moment for the UN and the rules-based international order. In his 2001 study Self Determination in East Timor, Ian Martin who headed up the UN process on the ground, concludes: ‘that without the UN and the principled persistence of committed individuals within it, a fundamental right of the East Timorese might never have been realised’. He goes on to say, however, that ‘the ultimate achievement belongs to the East Timorese people, whose sustained determination would not allow the international community to close the file on the denial of their right to self-determination, and whose determination in 1999 enabled and compelled UNAMET to carry through its task.’ I can’t do any better than that. 30 5 Remembering James Dunn Peter Job James Dunn, who died on 31 January 2020 at the age of 92, was a diplomat, intelligence officer, soldier, researcher for the Parliamentary Library, writer and human rights activist. Over a long and versatile career, his most significant achievement is the crucial role he played in campaigning for the rights of the East Timorese people under Indonesian occupation and bringing their plight to the attention of the world.

Born into a family of six children in Bundaberg, Queensland, Dunn’s humanitarian outlook was strongly influenced by the two years he spent as an Australian soldier in occupied Japan, particularly the six months on the outskirts of the devastated city of Hiroshima. He later described witnessing “children, hundreds of them, dying from atomic radiation”, an experience which “thrust me in the direction of focusing on the lot of ordinary people rather than on governments” (O’Rourke 2011). He returned to Australia to complete an Honours degree in Political Science and Russian at Melbourne University, followed by studies in Indonesian politics and history at the Australian National University (ANU). In a lengthy career in government service he worked first as a defence analyst specialising on Indonesia, then as a diplomat, serving in Paris and Moscow. The posting which would prove most significant, however, was his first, as consul to what was then Portuguese Timor from 1962 to 1964, an experience which led to a lifetime of empathy and engagement with the people of East Timor.

During the years 1970 to 1986 he was Director of the Foreign Affairs Group of the Legislative Research Service of the Federal Parliamentary Library, making him the most senior foreign affairs advisor to the Australian parliament. When the Carnation Revolution in Portugal put the decolonisation of its colonial possession in Timor on the agenda, Dunn was chosen as one of a two-person Department of Foreign Affairs (DFA) research team sent to the territory in June 1974. To the annoyance of many in the department his report broke with DFA orthodoxy to argue that independence was viable. He disparaged “pander[ing] to those influential elements within Indonesia, who may wish to incorporate Portuguese Timor” in order to avoid straining relations with Jakarta, arguing instead for “a more positive course…for Australia to seek Indonesia’s cooperation in helping to bring about the birth of the new state” if it became clear that was what the Timorese wanted. He advocated the reopening of the Australian consulate to monitor developments and recommended a proactive Australian approach, including a joint Australian/Indonesian mission to make recommendations regarding the territory’s economic and social development. Not only would this assist the Portuguese in orderly decolonisation, he argued, but would weaken those Indonesians who might seek to incorporate the territory by force (Dunn 1974). As Dunn later wrote, these recommendations fell “on unresponsive ears, as far as the government was concerned” (Dunn 1996: 124).

Dunn forged a life-long friendship and alliance with East Timorese independence campaigner and later Nobel laureate José Ramos-Horta, whom he first met as a teenager during his posting as consul. Soon after Dunn’s death Horta described him as “a mentor, fatherly figure to me”. When a twenty-five-year old Horta visited Australia in July 1974 as representative of the independence movement that was later to become Fretilin, he made the first of a series of many stays with James and his wife Wendy in their home in Canberra. Dunn assisted his cause by introducing him to sympathetic Australian politicians, including Ken Fry, Gordon McIntosh, Tom Uren, Arthur Gietzelt, and others who would prove vital contacts for Horta and who would later take up the Timorese cause during the Indonesian occupation (Ramos-Horta 2020).

In late 1975, after an Indonesian inspired coup and a brief but brutal civil war left Fretilin as the somewhat reluctant de facto governing body of the territory, Dunn returned as head of an Australian Council for Overseas Aid (ACFOA) delegation in October to determine the humanitarian situation and aid needs of the Timorese people. He later reported Fretilin to be “a sensitive and responsible organization” that “enjoyed widespread support, even from Timorese who had supported UDT before

31 the coup” and was prepared to be flexible in negotiating a return to an orderly decolonisation process under Portuguese auspices (Dunn 1996: 226-29). This position, supported by a number of others who visited the territory during this period, would later provide a rebuttal to those in the Australian government and elsewhere who claimed the Indonesian invasion had come about in response to a situation of intransigence and instability caused by Timorese irresponsibility.

It was during the early years of occupation that Dunn arguably made his strongest contribution by breaking the embargo on information coming from East Timor to make known to the wider world the catastrophe that was occurring there. A year after the full-scale Indonesian invasion, information was trickling out, via elements of the Catholic Church, smuggled letters and a clandestine radio link established by solidarity activists near Darwin, reporting an ongoing conflict, serious human rights abuses and severe food shortages. In this context Dunn, under the auspices of Community Aid Abroad, visited and interviewed Timorese refugees in Portugal who had escaped the territory and could report on the situation.

The Dunn Report on East Timor, published in February 1977, detailed accounts, since largely verified, of severe human rights abuses, including massacres, sexual violence, deliberately induced famine and other abuses. The report contended that claims from Catholic sources of 100,000 deaths were credible due to widespread killings in the mountains. It also reported testimony regarding the fate of the Balibo Five, indicating they had been killed by Indonesian forces. Dunn concluded that the invasion and occupation had been a “bloody operation” which “might well constitute, relatively speaking, the most serious case of contravention of human rights facing the world at this time.” He also stressed that his informants were willing to speak to foreign officials, although under conditions of confidentiality for fear of reprisals against family members (Dunn 1977).

The release of the report brought considerable media attention, with coverage in most major newspapers and on the Australian Broadcasting Corporation. To the chagrin of the Suharto regime and the Jakarta Embassy, Dunn’s allegations were also comprehensively reported on Radio Australia, whose broadcasts reached Indonesia (DFA 1977a). The report’s potential to impede the government’s attempts to marginalise the Timor issue were amplified by the initial attention it received in the broader Australian community, with the Liberal Premier of Victoria Rupert Hamer, for example, stating he would ask Foreign Minister Andrew Peacock what further diplomatic action could be taken. It led to a reawakening of attention on the fate of the Balibo Five, with Shirley Shackleton, the former spouse of the journalist Greg Shackleton, calling for the government to hold a full inquiry (DFA 1977b). Prompted by the Dunn Report, on 10 March 1977 the Federal Opposition moved for the establishment of a Senate Select Committee to enquire into the situation in Timor (Senate Hansard 1977a). The motion was eventually defeated on 26 May along party lines, but with Liberal Senators Missen and Bonner crossing the floor to vote in favour of it (Senate Hansard 1977b).

The Indonesian government soon applied pressure. On 15 March, in a public attack that was reported widely in both the Indonesian and Australian media, Indonesian Foreign Minister Malik threatened to unleash “demonstrations and other mass actions” against the Australian Embassy unless agitation against Indonesian actions in East Timor was stopped (McDonald 1977). A delegation from the Indonesian National Youth Committee, accompanied by members of the Indonesian press, called on the Australian Embassy on 21 March to present a petition protesting Dunn’s activities (DFA 1977g).

In response to a question about the report in parliament on 16 March 1977 Foreign Minister Peacock ignored the actual allegations, warned against allowing the matter to create “misunderstanding between the two countries” and emphasised the report’s unofficial status (HoR Hansard 1977). Several days later he told a group of ANU students that the government had been gathering its own intelligence and was studying Dunn’s report (Canberra Times 1977). There is, however, no evidence of any serious attempt to do so, nor to take advantage of the refugees’ stated willingness to speak to Australian officials. On the contrary, the Fraser government and its foreign affairs department continued to work to support Indonesia, minimise the impact of the report and discredit its claims.

32 In early 1977 Dunn took his message to the international community, visiting Britain, France, Sweden, Portugal, the Netherlands and the United States, where he gained media coverage and met with government officials, activists and concerned politicians (Dunn & Job 2017a). DFA cabled its missions in the countries Dunn visited as to how to discredit his claims, contending the scale of the atrocities to be “highly exaggerated,” the death rate greatly overstated and, despite the fact that Dunn’s information came from direct eye witnesses who he stressed were willing to speak to government officials, his allegations based upon “hearsay and second-hand evidence” (DFA 1977h).

Dunn’s allegations had a significant impact in the Netherlands, with the second chamber of the Dutch parliament voting on 10 March in favour of an international investigation into the human rights and humanitarian situation in East Timor and into the forthcoming sale of three naval corvettes to Indonesia (DFA 1977c). The Dutch Minister of Overseas Development also initially called for a suspension of military sales to Indonesia (Dunn 1996: 333). When the Dutch government considered supporting an international investigation, Australian officials worked to dissuade it, with an Australian diplomat lobbying the Dutch Ambassador in Canberra and the Australian Ambassador in The Hague lobbying the Dutch Foreign Minister. The Dutch subsequently abandoned their support for such an inquiry. The Australian efforts appear to have played a substantial role in the decision, with the Dutch Director General of Political Affairs telling the Australian Ambassador that his government “greatly appreciated” the Australian attitude to East Timor “which was very close to that of the Dutch” (DFA 1977i).

In the wake of his report Dunn was invited to speak at the US Congressional House Committee on International Relations on 23 March 1977. Dunn later recalled Assistant Secretary of State Richard Holbrooke stressing to him the importance of Indonesia due to its strategic position and insisting that “there is no way we would destabilise the regime” (Dunn & Job 2017a). Australian and US officials therefore saw a common interest in working together to minimise the impact of the hearings and of Dunn’s testimony. Indonesian officials also sought Australian help, with Indonesian diplomat Zahar Arifin calling on Australia’s Permanent Representative at the United Nations, Ralph Harry, to ask if Australia could “do more in Washington” (DFA 1977e). In the leadup to the hearings DFA worked with Indonesian and US officials to background against him, contending that his allegations were “hearsay” and claiming, based on little more than briefings from Indonesian officials, that a “thorough study” of all the information available to them had failed to corroborate his claims (DFA 1977f).

At the hearing Dunn tabled his report as a prepared statement. Under questioning he corrected disinformation provided by US State Department official Robert Oakley, describing Indonesian covert intervention prior to December 1975, the nature of the ongoing conflict and the status of the “act of free choice”. He repeated accusations of atrocities and gave a vivid second-hand account of the killings on the Dili waterfront at the invasion. He insisted that his informants “fully support my presence here” and were hopeful of talking to the committee themselves (US Congress 1977).

Despite Australian, US and Indonesian hostility, Dunn’s testimony proved influential. It assisted those few Americans who were East Timor solidarity activists, helped them to lobby a number of prominent US politicians and led to a series of further congressional investigations in subsequent years. In the broader public arena the Dunn Report was crucial, energising the Australian and international Timor solidarity movements and providing an evidence-based tool for long term international campaigns.

Dunn continued to lobby on the issue in subsequent years. In October 1978 he produced Notes on the present situation in Timor, a report which belied the narrative propagated by the Fraser government to document the nature of Indonesian offensives, the targeting of food supplies, the extent of human rights abuses, the misuse of Australian aid and the extent of the death toll (Dunn 1978). Respected for his academic integrity by all sides in the Australian parliament, his efforts were supported by a cross-party parliamentary Timor lobby, including Tom Uren, Ken Fry, Gordon McIntosh, Arthur Gietzelt in the ALP and Alan Missen, Michael Hogman and Neville Bonner in the Liberal Party, who used the evidence Dunn provided to raise the issue in parliament on a regular basis.

33 Dunn testified at the UN Fourth (decolonisation) Committee in October 1980 (UNGA 1980). He later recalled that he was generally well received at the UN but that “our main problem was with the Australians and their allies” (Dunn & Job 2017b). In June 1981, along with fellow Australians Jill Jolliffe, Pat Walsh, Dennis Freney and Ken Fry, Dunn testified at the Permanent People’s Tribunal, an international Rome-based human rights organisation that held hearings into the Timor issue in Lisbon. In a forty-page report the tribunal found the government of Indonesia guilty of violations of international law in relation to acts of aggression, war crimes, genocide, crimes against international peace and the rights of peoples. It also found “every government organisation which has aided and assisted the government of Indonesia” guilty of complicity in the act of aggression, singling out the US and Australia for their provision of military aid (Permanent People’s Tribunal 1981).

In 1983 Dunn published the book, Timor: A people betrayed, a thoroughly researched academic work that challenged the Australian government’s narrative concerning the events leading to the Indonesian invasion and the ongoing situation in East Timor. In it Dunn examined the importance of the meetings Whitlam had with Suharto in 1974 and 1975 in providing the “green light” for the invasion and interrogated the role DFA consultations with Indonesian intelligence played in assisting those in Indonesia advocating for integration. He argued for the viability of East Timor as an independent state and discussed how Australia consistently missed opportunities under both Whitlam and Fraser to support a genuine act of self-determination and transfer of power. He examined the situation under occupation in the early 1980s, including the Indonesian and Fretilin military strategies, the famine and the extensive human rights abuses which occurred during this period. He accused the US and Australia of shielding the Suharto regime from international criticism (Dunn 1983). The book proved highly influential in the following years. It was re-issued in updated editions in 1993 and 1996 and republished with updates under the title East Timor: a rough passage to independence in 2003 (Dunn 2003).

Dunn’s advocacy was not without personal consequences. Officials of the Suharto regime demanded action against him, asking why an employee of an Australian government agency was able to act in contradiction to the expressions of “understanding” it was receiving regarding the Timor issue from the Fraser government. In 1977 the Australian Ambassador to Indonesia Richard Woolcott warned that Dunn’s activities had the potential to “undo much of the good work” achieved by a recent visit by Fraser to Jakarta and create hostility towards Australia within the Suharto regime (DFA 1977d).

It is also clear that the Australian government’s narrative regarding East Timor, which continued to deny the extent of abuses and sought to protect the Suharto regime, had a certain impact. On 24 October 1979 The Herald accused Dunn of “reckless use of dubious information”, depicted the Indonesian military as confronting a difficult situation not of its making and blamed the humanitarian situation on the underdeveloped nature of the territory (The Herald 1979). In November 1979 Peter Rodgers of the Sydney Morning Herald attacked Dunn for allegedly misusing his position in the parliamentary library research service, claiming his objectivity should be questioned for citing anonymous sources and engaging in “exaggeration” with the use of terms such as “genocide” (Hastings 1979). Other journalists and academics supporting the government position attacked Dunn in a similar way on a regular basis, as did parliamentary supporters of the Fraser government’s Timor policy. In 1982 former Prime Minister Gough Whitlam accused Dunn of “waving a flag” for Fretilin and spreading disinformation (Andrews 1982).

Under pressure from the Suharto regime and with complaints from senior echelons of the Fraser government concerning Dunn’s “lack of objectivity”, there was an attempt in April 1980 to transfer him from his research position in the Parliamentary Library. In parliament Dunn was defended by MPs from both major parties, including Opposition leader Bill Hayden who spoke of the “high regard” accorded to him by members from both sides of the house (HoR Hansard 1980b). A letter from him was tabled in which he revealed that in the new position he would not be able to write on East Timor, would not have access to DFA material and would not have contact with MPs (HoR Hansard 1980a). In recent years Dunn recounted to the author how the matter came to a head when he was met on his arrival at work by a group of cross-party parliamentarians and their staffers who in a show of support escorted him to his office. The attempted transfer was abandoned.

34 After leaving his parliamentary library position in 1986 Dunn worked and lobbied on international human rights, amongst other things participating in missions in West Africa and Latin America. He was co-president of the Second World Congress on Human Rights in Dakar, Senegal in 1986. He was president for a time of the Human Rights Council of Australia, an organisation he helped found in 1978. Dunn continued advocating on the Timor issue throughout the occupation. He testified regularly at UN bodies and addressed a variety of international forums, including seminars at Yale, Oxford and McGill University in Canada. In 1995 he was Coventry Peace Lecturer and a key-note speaker at a conference on East Timor in Dublin. He contributed to a number of academic publications during this period, including a paper on East Timor in the 1995 collection Genocide in the Twentieth Century (Totten, Parsons & Charny 1995).

Dunn returned to East Timor during the independence vote in 1999, remaining during the militia violence until evacuation in September. He returned shortly after the INTERFET intervention to work as an advisor to the UNTAET mission. He was commissioned as an expert on crimes against humanity in East Timor by the UN in 2001. In the years leading to independence in 2003 he conducted a course on diplomacy for the new nation’s diplomatic corps. He wrote extensively on foreign policy as a columnist for a number of publications, including The Bulletin, The Age, The Sydney Morning Herald and the Illawarra Mercury.

In 1999 Dunn was awarded the ACFOA human rights award. In 2001 he was invested as member of the Order of Australia. In 2002 he was awarded the Grande Official of the Order of Prince Henry by Portugal. In 2009 President José Ramos-Horta conferred on Dunn the Medal of the Order of Timor Leste.

Coming from a background of Australian public service and diplomacy, Dunn’s involvement on the Timor issue set him on a course of dissidence and political non-conformity, of truth telling and activism in support of human rights in the face of his own government’s policies to the contrary. It was a course which consumed much of his life, and a course for which he paid a price. In a conversation with the author in recent years Dunn discussed how if circumstances had been different he would likely have earned an ambassadorship or higher. My response was what it only could have been. Whatever else he may have been able to achieve, none of it would have been more significant than his role in bringing to the world’s attention the truth about the situation in East Timor and contributing to the birth of a new nation. Whatever its cost, that pathway of integrity and truth telling made a far greater contribution than any other course he could have taken.

Some of the material in this paper was previously published in:

Job, Peter, 2018, ‘The Dunn Report forty years on’ in In New Research on Timor-Leste 2017: Proceedings of the 2017 Timor-Leste Studies Association Conference, Swinburne University of Technology, Hawthorn, Victoria, Vol 1, 234-240.

Bibliography Andrews, Richard 1982, ‘Interview with Gough Whitlam’, Frontline, Radio Australia, 26 March. https://timorarchives.files.wordpress.com/2012/02/eto_w-h_09.pdf. Canberra Times 1977, ‘Gathering own intelligence 1977’, 18 March. DFA 1977a, Cable from Woolcott, Jakarta, to Canberra. East Timor. 28 January 1977. [NAA: A10463 801/13/11/10, i]. DFA 1977b, Cable from Canberra to Jakarta. Timor Allegations: Press reports 28 January. 28 January 1977. [NAA: A10463 801/13/11/10, i]. DFA 1977c, Cable from The Hague to Canberra. Indonesia: East Timor. 11 March 1977. [NAA: A10463, 801/13/11/10, i]. DFA 1977d, Cable from Woolcott, Jakarta, to Canberra. Australian-Indonesian relations-Timor. 14 March 1977. [NAA: A10463, 801/13/11/10, i].

35 DFA 1977e, Cable from Washington to Canberra. Timor. 15 March 1977. [NAA: A10463, 801/13/11/10, i]. DFA 1977f, Cable from Canberra to Washington. East Timor. 16 March 1977. [NAA: A10463, 801/13/11/10, i]. DFA 1977g, Cable from Hogue, Jakarta, to Canberra. Protest delegation. 21 March 1977. [NAA: A10463, 801/13/11/10, i]. DFA 1977h, Cable from Canberra to Stockholm. Visit to Sweden of Mr James Dunn. 25 March 1977. [NAA: A10463, 801/13/11/10, i]. DFA 1977i, Cable from The Hague to Canberra. East Timor. 29 March 1977. [NAA: A10463, 801/13/11/10, i]. Dunn, James 1974, Portuguese Timor before and after the coup. Options for the future. The Parliamentary Library, Legislative Research Service, Parliament of Australia. Dunn, James 1977, ‘The Dunn Report on East Timor’, Journal of Contemporary Asia 7, no. 3, 409-17. Also released as a stand-alone publication 11 February 1977. Dunn, James 1978, Notes on the present situation in Timor, The Parliamentary Library, Legislative Research Service, 12 October. [NAA: A1838, 3038/10/1 lvi]. Dunn, James 1983, Timor: A People Betrayed. Jacaranda Press, Milton, QLD. Dunn, James 1996, Timor: A People Betrayed. ABC Books, Sydney. Dunn, James 2003, East Timor: a rough passage to independence. Longville Books, Double Day, NSW. Dunn & Job 2017a. James Dunn (former Consul to Portuguese Timor, Director of the Foreign Affairs Group, Legislative Research Service, Australian Parliamentary Library) in discussion with the author, 1 April 2017. Dunn & Job 2017b. James Dunn in discussion with the author, 8 October 2017. Hastings, Peter 1979, ‘East Timor: Fact and supposition’, Sydney Morning Herald, 17 November. HoR Hansard, 1977. 16 March 1977. HoR Hansad, 1980a. 15 April 1980. HoR Hansad, 1980b. 15 April 1980. McDonald, Hamish 1977, ‘Indonesia warns Aust over Timor protests’, Sydney Morning Herald, 16 March. Ramos-Horta, José 2020. Facebook post, 1 February 2020. https://www.facebook.com/officialramoshorta/posts/2872715172780348?__tn__=-R O’Rourke, Peter 2011, Canberra Conversations: James Dunn AM. Interview by Alex Sloan, ABC Canberra, 4 April. https://www.abc.net.au/local/stories/2011/03/30/3177728.htm?fbclid=IwAR0ibmaQ32_YXiYB7O IgC5kvREguVutKz4ccA-vbMdG2130pMvbm_QaPlac Permanent People’s Tribunal 1981, Ruling no. 7, Lisbon, 19-21 June 1981. Original in Italian. Republished in English in East Timor News, no. 71-73, Summer 1981-1982. Senate Hansard 1977a. 10 March 1977. Senate Hansard 1977b. 26 May 1977. The Herald 1979, ‘Flare up over Aid to Timor’, 24 October. Totten, William, William Parsons and Israel Charny (eds) 1995, Genocide in the twentieth Century: critical essays and eyewitness accounts, Garland Press, New York. UNGA 1980, United Nations General Assembly. Thirty-fifth session, Forth Committee, Agenda item 85. Question of East Timor. October 1980. [NAA: A1838, 3038/9/1, xii]. United States. Congress. House. Committee on International Relations. Subcommittee on International Organizations (1977). Human rights in East Timor and the question of the use of U.S. equipment by the Indonesian Armed Forces: hearing before the Subcommittees on International Organizations and on Asian and Pacific Affairs of the Committee on International Relations, House of Representatives, Ninety-fifth Congress, first session, March 23, 1977. U.S. Govt. Print Office, Washington. https://babel.hathitrust.org/cgi/pt?id=pur1.32754077263915&view=1up&seq=1

36 6

Music as a Medium Advocating for Change: The Audio -Visual Pieces of Martin Wesley Smith, a Musical Protagonist for the East Timorese

Roslyn Dunlop

Martin Wesley-Smith grew up in Adelaide, the youngest of four brothers. The Vietnam war (1962-1975) was in full swing by the time they were adults. Somehow, they managed to avoid being conscripted. The Wesley-Smith family were concerned with humanitarian issues in the world, politically and as a point of protest. Martin’s elder brother Robert is a passionate champion for the East Timorese and assisted the resistance on many levels. His reputation as an activist put his name on the list of those banned from entering Indonesia during occupation. Martin’s twin brother Peter, wrote the lyrics to many songs Martin put to music.

Martin Wesley-Smith's main interests as a composer were computer music, audio-visual works and choral music. He also composed in other genres, for example; chamber music, orchestral music, children's songs. He was an eclectic composer at home in a diverse range of idioms. Two main themes dominated his music: the life, work and ideas of Lewis Carroll (e.g. Snark-Hunting, Songs for Snark Hunters, and the full-length choral music theatre piece Boojum!) and the plight of the people of East Timor.

On the 7th of December 1975 Indonesia invaded East Timor. The occupation that followed devastated East Timorese society (Briere, 2004; Dunn, 2003; Jardine, 1995; Martin, 2001). Resistance to the Indonesian occupation took many forms, including musical. Martin Wesley-Smith became one of the voices of protest. He wrote letters to newspapers, politicians, attended demonstrations and a Blog about these issues:

To me it was in stark black and white: Indonesia had invaded a poor helpless neighbour in clear contravention of international law and the United Nations Charter…There should have been howls of protest from around the world, but apart from regular United Nations Resolutions condemning the act, few countries protested (Wesley-Smith 2002, 31-33).

From 1977 Martin Wesley-Smith wrote compositions about East Timor, essentially becoming a musical activist for the cause of the East Timorese. The music he wrote documented the plight of the East Timorese people. It alerted his audience to the violation of East Timorese human rights in the struggle for freedom from Indonesian rule. Some of these compositions are audio-visual, highly emotive, delivering a powerful message to audiences. “Some use bullets to promote desired outcomes, others words. Martin Wesley-Smith, uses multimedia art” (Plush 2008, 2). In writing this music Martin hoped viewers would be stirred into action and join those resisting the illegal occupation of East Timor. Reviews in the media gave further exposure to the situation.

Music by Martin Wesley-Smith about East Timor

1977 Kdadalak (for the children of Timor) - tape & transparencies; images by English photojournalist Penny Tweedie 1984 VENCEREMOS! (We shall overcome!) - tape & transparencies, revised 1997 for CD Rom 1986 Silêncio - tape & transparencies 1991 Timor et Tremor - chamber ensemble 1992 Balibo - flute and tape 1992 Kolele Mai - choral 1993 The Fighters Who Fell - choral from an English translation of a poem by Xanana Gusmão 1994 Quito - opera; 1999 revised as an audio-visual piece for a cappella sextet and CD Rom 1995 November 12 1991 an audio-visual chamber work

37 1999 Thank Evans - choral 1999 X (for Xanana) - clarinet and CD Rom 2000 Welcome to the Hotel Turismo - cello and CD Rom, 2002 - version for bass clarinet and CD Rom 2002 Kolele Mai - for classical guitar 2003 Tekee Tokee Tomak - for clarinet and CD Rom 2005 A Luta Continua - baritone, girl’s choir and orchestra 2014 Bondia - piano solo

The contemporary world is bombarded by visual imagery. When music is interwoven with images it provides a powerful means of communication. In 1977 Martin composed Kdadalak 1(for the Children of Timor), for tape and transparencies, with images by English photojournalist Penny Tweedie, who had been in East Timor in 1975. The name came from a song, Kdadalak sulimutuk, suli we inan, composed by Francisco Borja da Costa, East Timor’s unofficial poet laureate, who was brutally executed by Indonesian armed forces during the invasion. Below is an English translation of Kdadalak sulimutuk, suli we inan:

Streams flowing together become rivers Rivers increase, whatever opposes them So must the children of Timor unite, Unite against the wind that blows from the sea. The sea wind whips the kabala Whips our eyes bloody, our backs bloody Makes our tears roll down, our sweat flow down Sucks the fat of our earth, the fat of our bodies Streams flowing together become rivers CHILDREN OF EAST TIMOR – UNITED, RECLAIM OUR LAND! translation Jill Jolliffe (1976)

Martin Wesley-Smith also referenced this poem in VENCEREMOS! and Welcome to the Hotel Turismo. Kdadalak was heard many times in Australia and internationally; including Hong Kong, Tokyo (1978) the USA (1979) Belgium, Amsterdam and Wageningen, Holland (1981) and at the Festival dʼAutomne à Paris. The reality of the tragic situation in East Timor was brought to the attention of audiences through performances of Kdadalak and press reviews suggest that Wesley-Smith had hit the mark with his first audio-visual piece about the situation in East Timor: “The effect is both beautiful and wrenchingly sad” (Morton 1979). Kadadalak is “an effective collage of image and sound …a piece of powerful political art” (Vance 1982). “Kdadalak was one of the most remarkable fusions of sound and image that I’ve witnessed.” (Waterlow 1977). “Kadadalak is an impressionistic opus that exploits the complexities of projection of transparencies and taped music ... Kdadalak vivifies the ugliness of war” (Oberle 1979).

Martin Wesley-Smith’s second piece in the genre of tape & transparencies was VENCEREMOS! (We shall overcome!) was written in 1984 in response to Australia's Hawke Labor government reneging on its promised support for East Timor. In some ways it was a revamp of Kdadalak as explained to me by Martin:

Kdadalak was done in 1977 using a few clapped out tape recorders I’d borrowed from the ABC. The quality was appalling with lots of distortion - but it was played all over the place. As soon as the Conservatorium’s Fairlight CMI arrived, I did Kdadalak again, coming up with a much

1 Literally, ‘Kdadalak Sulimutuk, suli we inan’ means ‘streams meet, flow great rivers.’ Ordinary oppressed people, come together they could make great changes. Kdadalak Sulimutuk is also an Institute built on the fundamental values of humanism, ecological protection and people’s democracy. The basic guiding principles include;solidarity social,social and ecological justice, and constant learning. (Kdadalak Sulimutuk Institute Belun Kamponezes ba Transformasaun 2016)

38 cleaner version: VENCEREMOS! They not exactly the same, but there are enough similarities for me to discard Kdadalak (personal communication, November 7, 2018).

In 1997 VENCEREMOS! was revised for CD-ROM as the technology it was originally written for had become obsolete. Many East Timorese fled to Darwin when Indonesian troops invaded their country in 1975, amongst them a young Timorese male Francisco Pires (nicknamed Quito) who suffered from schizophrenia. In 1987 he was shot through the throat by police in a domestic disturbance. Three years later he was found hanging from his pyjama cord in Royal Darwin Hospital. Pires was accused of shooting a policeman and, ironically, died on the day prosecutors were filing for an acquittal. Martin and Peter Wesley-Smith followed the story of his life and death and in 1994 they wrote Quito “a multi-media documentary music drama for six singers, keyboard and CD-ROM, about schizophrenia and East Timor” (Wesley-Smith, 2007). Quito was produced that year by the Sydney Metropolitan Opera Company. In 1997 it became a radiophonic piece released on CD (Tall Poppies TP111), was nominated for a Prix Italia, and won the 1997 Paul Lowin Composition Award (Song Cycle) and the ABC Classic FM Recording of the Year Award. A live-performance version for The Song Company was performed in Belgium and Holland. Martin added graphics, and in that genre it was performed in 1999 in Sydney, Malaysia and Portugal. It continued being performed for the next decade.

Martin related the following story about a performance of Quito in Malaysia 1999:

While rehearsing Quito an official from the Australian Embassy was watching. He said the torture shots might upset members of the Indonesian Embassy who would be attending and suggested waving some coloured transparencies in front of the projector as a way of disguising the images. I obliged, but, the Embassy official could still recognise the images, so he scuffed the transparencies with his shoes until the desired effect was obtained. After the performance, a member of the U.S.A Embassy came up saying how much he liked the special effects used, as they really helped to accentuate the torture shots (personal communication, January 15, 2002).

As with his other audio-visual pieces there was comment from the press. “Martin Wesley-Smith's music has never been far removed from political or social comment… fear remains, and Timor is not yet free” (Vance 1998). From the Netherlands, Diederik De Jong wrote: “This is a disturbing, chilling, spine shivering work to listen to. The spoken words and lyrics carry all the weight here, the sometimes dissonant singing by the Song Company is effective and dramatic” (De Jong 1998).

It is something of an anomaly that the Australia Council for the Arts sponsored many of Martin Wesley Smith’s audio-visual pieces, as all of them are critical of Australian Governments of the day. Victoria Finlay, picked up on this peculiarity in her comments:

Two years ago it might have seemed ironic that the Australian Government was sponsoring the Sydney-based a cappella group The Song Company to go on international tour with a show like Quito. After all, the hard-hitting piece of music - about a young East Timorese musician and schizophrenic who hanged himself in jail and a foreign policy that many believed was hard hearted and mercenary hardly sings the praises of the Australian administration. But today the piece which uses the true story of Francisco Baptista Pires as a metaphor for the equally painful true story of East Timor itself - is more in line with Australia's change in foreign policy (2000).

X for clarinet and audiovisuals was written in 1999, shortly before Xanana Gusmão’s release from Cipinang prison. It was first performed in Seoul, South Korea in 1999. Subsequently it has been performed many times in the Europe, the United States, Canada, New Zealand, the United Kingdom, the Irish Republic, Hong Kong, East Timor and Australia. The visuals in X are explicit in their portrayal of human rights abuses and the suffering endured by the East Timorese. After I performed X in Darwin in 2001 there was no applause, just the sound of people weeping. Many audience members were East Timorese. I had never had such a reaction to a performance and was stunned. In September 2001 two 39 weeks after the terrorist attacks on 9/11, I undertook a recital tour in the USA. X was in the programmes. The same emotional response to X in Darwin was repeated throughout that concert tour. The comments after performances of X had a commonality; audience members had gained a small insight to the situation in East Timor watching X that they were previously unaware of. They were moved and distressed by what they had seen, particularly that the Timorese were being so brutally treated by a country that had received aid and financial support from their own government.

After hearing X at a concert in London, Carmel Budiardjo of TAPOL – the Indonesian Human Rights Campaign in Britain – emailed Martin Wesley-Smith: “the combination of sound and visuals worked extremely well in helping to give the compositions greater depth and to appeal to a very mixed audience … a powerful tribute to the courageous people of East Timor” (February 6, 2003). After a Sydney concert, reviewer Harriet Cunningham wrote:

Generations of Artists have struggled to find a language to give meaning to the senselessness of war. In X…Wesley-Smith has taken up the challenge with every modern resource available to him… The result is genuinely confronting and moving…one cannot hope (or wish) to recreate the horror of East Timor in 1999, but this work is an important historical document. Perhaps not surprisingly, although the music is a fascinating patchwork of interwoven ideas, the most chilling moments are marked by silence (Cunningham 2002).

East Timor folk melodies were often included in Wesley-Smith’s Timorese compositions. The one used most often was Ko-le le-le mai. “The poem Ko-le le-le mai was written by Francisco Borja da Costa” (Joy 1992). The music was written by Abilio de Araujo.

Ko-le le-le mai

Chorus Ko-le le-le mai Ra-de ko-ko de le-le ko le-le mai untranslatable expression which is used to get the listener's attention Verses 1. Sa sa ha nalo o batar la sulin What's the reason for your corn not growing?

2 Sa sa ha nalo o hare la burit Why doesn't your rice sprout well?

3. Se se ha nalo o kabun la bosu Who is the cause of your empty stomachs?

4. Se se ha nalo o kosar la maran Who is the cause of your never-ending sweat?

5. Balu dehan o barak balu katak o beik Some say (it's because) you're lazy and stupid.

6. Balu ra ak o baruk balu katak o tiak Some say (it's because) you're lazy and poor.

7. Sa sa ha nalo se se los se What's the cause of it?

8. Sa sa sa maka se se los se Who is responsible?

40 translation, Lola Reis, 1992.

Welcome to the Hotel Turismo (2002) for cello and audio-visuals, is a journey through sound over the 24 years of Indonesian occupation. It begins with “the sound of breaking glass, briefly becomes a cabaret song like something by Kurt Weill, and transforms into a rhapsodic cello solo” (Wesley-Smith 2005). The inspiration for Welcome to the Hotel Turismo, came from an article about the Hotel Turismo’s head waiter, Joao Pereira, who had worked at there since Portuguese times. Martin described the piece as follows:

It’s September 1999 in Dili, East Timor. Most of the territory has been destroyed by departing Indonesian troops and their puppet militia. But the Hotel Turismo, remarkably, still stands, although its window are broken and some of its rooms have been torched. Even more remarkably, Joao Pereira, a waiter there when Indonesian troops invade in December 1975, is still welcoming his ‘guests’. these include journalists, InterFET soldiers, and East Timorese people with nowhere else to sleep - refugees in their own country. During a quiet moment, Joao Pereira remembers some of the events at the Hotel Turismo during the past 24 years. When the old piano in the foyer suddenly springs into life, he takes out his metaphysical cello and starts to play (2015).

Tekee Tokee Tomak (2002) for clarinet & CD-ROM, was Martin’s last multimedia piece about East Timor. He explained the genesis for writing the piece:

In 2002 Ros Dunlop and I visited East Timor twice, giving concerts in Dili, Ermera, Hatubuiliku, Laga, Lospalos and Same. Having supported East Timor's struggle for self determination for more than 25 years, it was fascinating to see the country, firstly under UN administration and then as the world’s newest nation. This piece - perhaps my last about East Timor - is intended to be an antidote to the necessarily bleak nature of previous pieces about a country and people subjugated by a brutal colonial regime: it's optimistic, even joyful; a celebration of the truth of Xanana’s slogan “To resist is to win!”

For the final section of Tekee Tokee Tomak Martin used the resistance song “Foho Ramelau” (Mount Ramelau) interlaced with cries of ‘Viva’ and ‘Viva Xanana’ from the Timorese. It is a joyous finale in contrast to his other pieces about East Timor which end in sadness and despair.

In July 2019 the acoustic instruments (clarinet and cello) which play X, Welcome to The Hotel Turismo and Tekee Tokee Tomak were recorded and mixed with the audio-visuals and are now all been uploaded onto YouTube and can be viewed on the following channel: //www.youtube.com/results?search_query=ros+Dunlop.

Concluding observations

The contribution of Martin Wesley-Smith (and his brothers) as part of the resistance to the Indonesian occupation was formally acknowledged by the East Timorese government on September 4, 2014 when they were awarded the Ordem de Timor-Leste for their support for Timor's struggle for independence.

The contemporary world is bombarded by visual imagery, so when music is interwoven with images it can, and often does provide an effective and powerful means of communication, as attested by some of the comments and reviews selected for this paper by those viewing performances of Martin Wesley Smith’s audio-visual pieces.

On his 60th birthday Martin Wesley-Smith summed up his reason for bringing politics into music: I have often been criticised for bringing politics into music [always, as it happens, by people whose political views are vastly different from mine]. My response is usually along the lines of this: [1] why not?;

41 [2] composing a piece of music is already a political act; [3] if the plight of the people in East Timor, say, inspires me to compose, then as a composer trying to reflect in music, as honestly as possible, my relationship to my time and place, I should not ignore that impulse; [4] ... I don’t want to fiddle around writing abstract pieces while the world transforms itself into an ugly authoritarian market place of everything except ideas (but I would love to get back to abstract music, one day, and I applaud those who compose pure, beautiful music, bringing light into the darkness); [5] I still have the right, I think, as a citizen of a democracy, to express my views in whatever forum I can get access to; and [6] I don't see the offending pieces as overtly political but, rather, as pieces that show, or try to show, humanitarian or humanistic concern.

If, through a combination of critical thought and subjective intuition, I've occasionally been able to come up with something that moves people and/or objects to inhuman practices and injustices and/or offends state power then the last sixty years haven't been entirely wasted (2005).

Bibliography

Briere, Elaine 2004, East Timor Testimony, Between the Lines, Toronto. da Costa, Fransisco Borja & Jolliffe, Jill 1945- 1976, Revolutionary poems in the struggle against Colonialism: Timorese Nationalist verse, Wild & Woolley, Sydney. Cunningham, Harriet 2002, ‘Fundraiser concert for East-Timor Leichhardt Town Hall’ Sydney Morning Herald, 28 November. De Jong, Diederik 1998, ‘CD Quito’ American Record Guide, 1 May. Dunlop, Ros 2012, Lian husi klamar: Músika tradisionál husi Timor-Leste. Sounds of the soul: The traditional musical instruments of East Timor, Tekee Media, Sydney. Dunn, James 2003, East Timor: A rough passage to independence, Longueville Books, Double Bay. Finlay, Victoria 2000, ‘Voices for tragic schizophrenic; Australian group on the theme of struggle’, South China Morning Post, 19 March. Jardine, Matthew 1995, East Timor: Genocide in paradise, Odonian Press, Chicago. Joy, Rich 1992, ‘Timorese song: Ko Le Le Mai’, http://mudcat.org/thread.cfm?threadid=92061, viewed 18 May, 2019. Kdadalak Sulimutuk Institute Belun Kamponezes ba Transformasaun, 2016, ‘About’ https://knuaksi.wordpress.com/about/, viewed 20 May. Martin, Ian 2001, Self-determination in East-Timor : The United Nations, the ballot, and international intervention, International Peace Academy Occasional Paper series, Lynne Rienner, London. Molnar, Andrea 2005, ‘East Timor: An introduction to the history, politics and culture of Southeast Asia’s youngest nation’ http://www.seasite.niu.edu/easttimor/, viewed 10 May, 2019. Morton, Tim 1979, ‘Kdadalak: for the Children of Timor, by Martin Wesley-Smith’, The Virginian Pilot, 13 November. Oberle, Grover 1979, ‘Kdadalak: for the Children of Timor by Martin Wesley-Smith’ The Ledger Star, Norfolk, Virginia, 13 November. Plush, Vincent & Wesley-Smith, Martin 2008, Tears for Timor, National Film and Sound Archive, Canberra. Vance, David 1998, ‘No Man is an island, but Timor’s heart beats in Quito by Martin Wesley-Smith’ Sydney Morning Herald, 13 August 13. Waterlow, Nick 1977, ‘Kdadalak: for the Children of Timor, by Martin Wesley-Smith’, Nation Review. Wesley-Smith, Martin 2002, ‘Welcome to the Hotel Turismo’, The Journal of the Music Council of Australia: Music Forum, 8(5): 31-33. Wesley-Smith, Martin 2005, ‘Martin’s general rave’, Musings, blog post, https://shoalhaven.net.au/~mwsmith/60.html/, viewed 10 May 2019. Wesley-Smith, Martin 2007, ‘More media attention to the scandal of my piece Papua Merdeka being dropped from the Asia Pacific Festival in Wellington, New Zealand’, blog post, https://shoalhaven.net.au/~mwsmith/blog2007.html, viewed 11 May 2019.

42 Wesley-Smith, Martin 2007, ‘Papua Merdeka (Free Papua) dropped from Asia Pacific Festival’, blog post, https://shoalhaven.net.au/~mwsmith/blog2007.html, viewed 11 May 2019. Wesley-Smith, Martin 2007, ‘Quito’, https://shoalhaven.net.au/~mwsmith/quito.html#mainbody, viewed 14 May 2019. Wesley-Smith, Martin 2014, ‘Martin Wesley Smith, Musical Activist’, https://shoalhaven.net.au/~mwsmith/mw-s,_musical_activist.pdf, viewed 18 May 2019. Wesley-Smith, Martin 2015, A Concert to honour Martin Wesley-Smith. Concert program, Sydney Conservatorium of Music, University of Sydney. 43 7

Solidariedade iha Kampu – Prosesu Observasaun ba Timor-Leste nia Referendu1

Charles Scheiner2 no Pam Sexton3 Iha fulan-jullu tinan 1991, grupu sira husi Japaun, Europa, no Amérika Norte harii Federasaun Internasionál ba Timor-Leste (IFET) hodi informa no halo advokasia ba ONU hodi suporta auto determinasaun. Bainhira, depois Masakre Santa Cruz, grupu sira iha mundu ne’ebé fó solidariedade ba Timor-Leste haluan ka hahú, IFET halo koordenasaun internasionál ba testemuñu no tau matan ba prosesu sira ONU nian. To’o iha tinan 1999, IFET inklui grupu solidariedade nian tolu-nulu husi kontinente hotu, no kontribui ba kooperasaun ne’ebé fleksivel maibé luan (IFET 1998).

Dalan seluk ba kooperasaun maka liuhosi internet, rede igreja sira no konferénsia rejionál hanesan sira ne’ebé organiza husi Koligasaun Ázia-Pasífika ba Timor-Leste (APCET). Grupu solidariedade nian ida-idak maka ki’ik maibé maka’as. Ida-ida deside ninia públiku, membru sira no estratéjia. Iha Portugál, ativizmu husi baze dudu sira-nia governu atu defende Timor-Leste nia direitu sira iha Europa no sírkulu internasionál sira. Iha Estadus Unidus Amérika (EUA), Rede Asaun ba Timor-Leste (ETAN) foka hodi hakotu EUA nia suporta ba okupasaun.

Bainhira lider timoroan José Ramos-Horta no Bispu Carlos Felipe Ximenes Belo simu Prémiu Nobel da Paz iha rohan tinan 1996, grupu solidariedade nian iha mundu tomak bele utiliza momentu ne’e hodi dada atensaun ba Timor-Leste. Labele fó énfaze demais ba realidade katak rezisténsia timorense nia barani, kompromisu, organizasaun estratéjika, no komunikasaun lais – iha Timor-Leste laran, iha Indonézia no iha li’ur – maka halo solidariedade internasionál posivel no efetivu.

Preparasaun ba eventu

Hafoin Suharto monu tinan 1998, Prezidente foun B. J. Habibie hasoru krize ekonómiku ne’ebé metin. Nia buka atu aumenta suporta internasionál tanba ninia kbiit lametin, no tanba ne’e sujere atu fó lisensa ba povu timoroan halo votasaun kona-ba planu autonomia hodi mantén ho Indonézia. Nia ho ninia Ministru ba Asuntu Estranjeiru Ali Alatas hanoin katak – ho insentivu no ameasa sufisiente sira – votante sira sei suporta planu ne’e, nune’e bele halakon solidariedade internasionál ba Timor-Leste ne’ebé sai problema ba sira. Ba dala dahuluk durante tinan 24, Jakarta tama loloos ba negosiasaun sira ho ONU no Portugál hodi rezolve asuntu Timor-Leste.

Tempu ne’e militár indonézia (TNI) laiha konfiansa hanesan Habibie no Alatas, katak Jakarta bele manán votasaun, entaun aumenta kriasaun grupu paramilitár timoroan sira (milísia) no fó arma ba sira hodi terroriza povu timoroan atu vota ba independénsia. TNI utiliza milísia sira ho esperansa bele pretende katak sira la envolve diretamente iha terrór ne’e. Husi rohan tinan 1998, milísia aumenta sira nia violénsia. To’o inísiu tinan 1999, masakre sai akontesimentu semanál, no ema rihun ba rihun maka dezlokadu husi sira-nia uma.

Nu’udar ativista internasionál, membru IFET sira koko atu lori lala’ok ne’e ba negosiadór sira atu tenke

1 Versaun husi artigu ne’e tama iha livru Bitter Flowers, Sweet Flowers: East Timor, Indonesia, and the World Community (Richard Tanter, Mark Selden and Stephen R. Shalom, Eds.) publika husi Rowman & Littlefield, Lanham, MD, 2001. 2 Charles Scheiner maka Koordenadór Internasionál ba IFET Observer Project. Iha 1999, nia mós sai Koordenadór Nasionál ba East Timor Action Network (ETAN) iha EUA no reprezenta IFET iha ONU, Nova Iorke. Agora nia serbisu ba La’o Hamutuk no nafatin ativu ho ETAN. 3 Pam Sexton, membru ETAN durante tempu naruk, Koordenadóra Nasionál EUA ba IFET Observer Project. haree situasaun atuál. Porezemplu, iha loron 30 fulan-marsu, IFET haruka kasete vídeo ho programa televizaun nian A Licence to Kill (Lisensa para oho- ABC 1999) ba ONU nia Sekretáriu-Jerál Kofi Annan, no hakerek:

Daudaun ne’e, ami preokupa deklarasaun sira foin sai husi Ita-Boot nia eskritóriu no husi governu Indonéziu ne’ebé fó-sai katak dezarma (hasai kilat sira husi) paramilitár sira no hasai soldadu indonéziu sira nian husi Timor-Leste la tama nu’udar prerekizitu sira ba ‘konsulta liu vota’ ne’ebé povu timoroan atu simu ka la simu Indonézia nia proposta ba autonomia. Hanesan programa ne’e halo klaru, se ONU halo votasaun iha Timor-Leste ho ambiente terrór agora nian, ne’e maka sai kontra buat hotu ne’ebé ONU reprezenta (IFET 1999a).

Negosiasaun kontinua, no Indonézia no Portugál hakbesik atu konkorda ho Sekretáriu-Jerál hodi husik Indonézia maka responsavel ba seguransa molok no iha loron votasaun. Iha inísiu fulan-abríl, milísia sira oho ema refujiadu liu na’in-50 iha Liquiçá; tuirfali liutiha loron sanulu-resin-ida, sira oho na’in-12 iha Manuel Carrascalão nia uma, defensór importante ba independénsia.

Iha loron 21 fulan-abríl, Ministru Defeza Indonézia Jenerál Wiranto semo ba Timor-Leste no deklara sesarfogu entre milísia sira no rezisténsia. Milísia sira nunka iha planu atu tuir akordu ne’e; liutiha oras balun hafoin asina akordu, sira viola ona. Forsa pro-independénsia sente obrigasaun atu asina hodi mantén kredibilidade ho komunidade internasionál ne’ebé pro-Jakarta no hodi kontra propaganda Jakarta nian ne’ebé fó-sai katak Timor-Leste sei halo funu sivíl karik TNI maka retira (sai). Dala ida tan, IFET hato’o ami-nia preokupasaun ba Sekretáriu-Jerál no Ministru ba Negósiu Estranjeiru sira Indonézia no Portugál nian, ne’ebé tempu ne’e iha Nova Iorke negosia akordu nia detallu finál ne’ebé sei asina iha loron 5 fulan-maiu:

...violénsia paramilitár kontinua, no Indonézia lahalo esforsu signifikativu hodi kontrola situasaun. Loroloron milísia sira oho ema. Lider milísia sira dudu no obriga nia elementu sira atu oho lider pro-independénsia no defensór direitus umanus sira ho impunidade, no rihun ba rihun refujiadu rai-laran moris ho ta’uk ba sira-nia moris. …

Hafoin asina akordu loron 5 fulan-maiu, ONU tenke foti responsabilidade ba kria no proteje estadu lei no orden iha Timor-Leste no ba proteje seguransa públiku. Militár indonézia okupa ilegalmente Timor-Leste durante tinan 23, no okupasaun ne’e foti ema barak nia moris, liu na’in-200,000.… Imposivel ba ONU atu halo konsulta loloos ba timoroan nia opiniaun públika se forsa indonézia – parte ida iha konflitu ne’e – kontrola hela situasaun iha kampu (IFET 1999b).

Maske Sekretáriu-Jerál no ofisiál ONU sira seluk komprende didi’ak perigu husi milísia sira ne’ebé hetan suporta husi Jakarta, sira labele konvense kualkér governu nasionál atu foti ba asuntu públiku. Akordu ne’ebé asina iha loron 5 fulan-maiu tau fundasaun la’ós de’it ba votasaun iha loron 30 fulan agostu, maibé mós ba terrór no destruisaun molok no depois votasaun.

Ikusmai Sekretáriu-Jerál no sira seluk justifika desizaun atu husik militár indonézia iha kontrolu durante referendu ho dehan katak: Jakarta nunka halo akordu se la’ós hanesan ne’e. Sira fiar katak tempu ne’e karik iha rezolusaun Konsellu Seguransa ida ne’ebé la fó kontrola ba TNI, rai-Xina bele halo veto tuir Indonézia nia pedidu. Maske nune’e, laiha governu ida ne’ebé koko fó presaun ruma ba Indonézia hodi asegura katak forsa internasionál sai responsavel ba seguransa. Se komunidade internasionál ameasa iha fulan-abríl kedas atu foti sai kooperasaun militár no ekonómika husi Indonézia karik, hanesan sira halo iha fulan-setembru laran, sobu-aat barak bele evita.

Dilema Ativista nian

Ativista sira iha mundu tomak ne’ebé servisu hodi proteje Timor-Leste nia direitus umanus no direitu polítiku sira hanoin no tetu oinsá atu responde ho di’ak ba situasaun aat ne’e. Ami suporta povu

45 timoroan nia hakarak (ne’ebé lider CNRT4 Xanana Gusmão espresa) katak referendu la’o, no ami buka maneira atu ajuda halo votasaun ne’ebé livre, justu, (“free and fair”) no dame. Antesipa katak se votasaun livre no justu duni, timoroan sira sei hili independénsia, ativista solidariedade nian barak tama UNAMET, misaun ONU nian ne’ebé organiza referendu.

IFET hili atu apoia no tau matan husi Timor-Leste nia laran ba UNAMET no entidade sira ne’ebé liga ho votasaun. UNAMET nia parámetru sira hetan definisaun husi akordu 5 maiu no ninia rezolusaun Konsellu Seguransa nian; tuir protokolu ONU, pesoál sira UNAMET nian labele halo kritika ho livre ba estadu membru sira ka espresa hodi kontra pozisaun ONU nian ne’ebé estabelese ona.

IFET iha kbiit nu’udar projetu observadór ne’ebé lori organizasaun barak hamutuk, ho estrutura desentralizadu, apartidáriu hodi fahe matenek, esperiénsia no rekursu sira hodi hamutuk sai lian forte ba advokasia. Tanba iha ona sentimentu fiar entre membru IFET sira, bele organiza projetu boot tebes hanesan ne’e iha tempu lalais. Nu’udar esforsu internasionál luan, Projetu Observadór IFET (IFET-OP) dada fundu no suporta husi grupu sira ne’ebé antes ladún envolve iha solidariedade ba Timor-Leste.

IFET-OP sai delegasaun observadór internasionál boot liu husi delegasaun internasionál sanulu-resin rua iha Timor-Leste. Maizumenus grupu observadór husi Indonézia iha sanulu-resin inklui ho tendénsia rua: pro no kontra autonomia. Nu’udar projetu ne’ebé hetan akreditasaun husi ONU, observadór IFET sira mak apartidáriu, atu dehan katak sira laiha pozisaun ba kestaun povu tenke vota ba autonomia ka independénsia. Observadór IFET sira halo kompromisu atu labele uza violénsia no proteje povu nia direitu ba eleisaun livre no justu, lahó intimidasaun.

Observadór voluntáriu IFET sira hahú tama Timor-Leste iha fulan-juñu; ami mai husi kuaze kontinente hotu no hetan treinamentu molok tama ba rai-Timor-Leste. Ekipa sira tun ba kampu hodi tau matan ba faze rejistrasaun no faze kampaña nian, harii relasaun ho povu lokál no koko atu halo komunikasaun ho parte sira hotu (maske milísia sira kuaze lakohi ko’alia ho ami). To’o loron 30 fulan-agostu, númeru totál observadór IFET sira ho akreditasaun husi ONU iha 125, mai husi nasaun 20 no tama ba ekipa 18, halo kobertura ba distritu hotu.

UNAMET iha pesoál internasionál la’ós polísia maizumenus na’in-450 no pesoál lokál besik na’in 4,000, kuaze natoon de’it atubele implementa mekanizmu votasaun ho kalendáriu badak. Misaun ONU ne’e ho limitasaun sira tanba akordu dalan-klaran diplomátiku, meta sira instituisaun nian, falta avontade polítiku internasionál ho nia ierarkia estruturál. IFET-OP, Carter Center no grupu sira seluk mak observadór independente, ho limitasaun menus. Maske membru IFET sira halo kampaña kleur ona kontra okupasaun indonézia ne’ebé ilegál no brutál, ami iha kompromisu moos ba povu Timor-Leste nia auto-determinasaun no atu loke ba mundu problema sira no rekomenda solusaun sira bainhira de’it problema lojístiku, intimidasaun ka polítika ameasa ba prosesu referendu nian.

IFET-OP hato’o saida maka ami ho populasaun lokál haree ba ONU, mídia no governu sira iha mundu. Ekipa IFET-OP sira moris ho komunidade sira, la’o liu aldeia sira no nafatin vizível ho ideia katak ami nia prezensa nu’udar observadór internasionál bele ajuda evita milísia nia violénsia. IFET-OP maka sai matan, lian no liman mundu nian – ligasaun direta entre povu timoroan ho povu baze iha mundu tomak, la’ós liuhosi filtru governu ka jornalista sira. Liuhosi rede grupu solidariedade internasionál ba Timor Leste ne’ebé dezenvolve hori tinan 1991, IFET-OP maka bele informa no halo advokasia ba governu sira hodi halo konsulta livre posível liu.

Observa kampaña

Observadór sira haree lais problema, katak husik Indonézia kaer seguransa la’ós de’it problema teóriku. IFET-OP nia relatóriu dahuluk husi rai-laran deskreve milísia ataka eskoltu umanitáriu – ne’ebé inklui observadór IFET na’in-ida, iha Liquiçá loron 4 fulan-jullu ‘ho polísia no militár sira hamriik haree nonook de’it iha sorin.’ IFET-OP hatudu katak ba krize umanitáriu – iha ema na’in 30,000 to’o 60,000

4 Konsellu Nasionál Rezisténsia Timorense, inklui grupu hotu ne’ebé apoiu ukun rasik aan. 46 dezlokadu husi uma tanba milísia sira-nia violénsia – ‘diretamente afeta validade ba votasaun’; nune’e ezije Indonesia atu dezarma milísia, hodi kumpre kompromisu ‘atu asegura ambiente ne’ebé laiha violénsia ka intimidasaun iha forma seluk’ nu’udar ‘prerekizitu ba halo votasaun ida livre no justu iha Timor-Leste’ (IFET 1999c).

Loron 6 fulan-agostu, iha Same, Manufahi, ekipa IFET-OP haree rasik no halo relatóriu kona-ba milísia asalta sede estudantíl ba kampaña pro-independénsia ne’ebé foin loke.

Ida-ne’e mak dahuluk husi ataka barak hasoru kampaña pro-independénsia; Sede CNRT iha vila balu hetan bombardeia ka buat aat liu. IFET-OP konklui katak eleisaun sei la livre no justu se husi sorin ida labele halo kampaña nakloke (IFET 1999d).

IFET-OP sai hanesan sistema alerta ba Polísia Sivíl ONU nian; dala barak observadór sira husu konsellu-na’in sira ne’ebé lahó kilat atu intervene iha situasaun difisil (sira sempre koopera liu no efisiente, maske sira iha limitasaun barak tuir mandatu no rekursu sira).

Ekipa IFET-OP haruka relatóriu sira ba parte barak: governu voluntáriu sira nian, fonte mídia sira iha lian oioin, no ba ONU nia embaixadór husi nasaun sira iha Konsellu Seguransa. Dala barak IFET-OP fó informasaun ba delegasaun internasionál no jornalista sira iha Timor-Leste. Deputadu balu husi li’ur dehan ba observadór IFET balu katak sira agradese katak fasil atu hetan informasaun ne’ebé kredivel no aberta liuhosi IFET. Jornalista balu apresia ligasaun internasionál, tanba sira hatene katak leitór sira jornál nian bele identifika an ho voluntáriu IFET-OP sira iha kampu.

Projetu Observadór akreditadu husi ONU boot liu mak KIPER, ne’ebé kahur ema indonéziu no timoroan, misaun ne’ebé hahú Solidamor, nu’udar grupu ativista Indonézia ne’ebé barani hodi suporta auto-determinasaun ba povu timoroan. Maske nune’e, voluntáriu KIPER hetan limitasaun balu tanba falta rekursu sira no milisia haree sira nu’udar alvu ba violénsia. Membru KIPER barak ne’ebé timoroan rezigna nu’udar observadór hodi bele halo papél partidáriu iha faze kampaña. Ekipa IFET-OP barak koordena ho KIPER liuhosi prosesu referendu.

Voluntáriu sira husi IFET-OP no KIPER iha spanduk UNAMET nia oin. Foto: Pam Sexton

Liutiha tinan ida ho violénsia milisia nian iha distritu Covalima nia parte súl, Igreja Suai no eskeletu igreja foun ne’ebé sei iha konstrusaun, nakonu família dezlokadu atus ba atus. Loroloron observadór

47 IFET sira halo vizita ba igreja rua ne’e. Tanba milísia fó karimbu nu’udar pro-independénsia ba família dezlokadu hotu, milísia fó ameasa regulár ba sira, ne’ebé nia númeru aumenta beibeik.

Referendu nia parte rua iha akordu kona-ba loron alternativa kampaña nian, maibé parte ne’ebé ‘rejeita’ autonomia (suporta independénsia) atu halo kampaña públika baibain hetan impedimentu husi milísia sira-nia ameasa, hanesan dalabarak IFET-OP fó-sai. Bainhira CNRT hetan lisensa atu halo kampaña, kamioneta indonézia nian nakonu ho militár ho kilat barak maka besik ho hatete katak sira protetór. Maibé observadór sira haree militár halo notas ka hasai foto ho intensaun klaru atu intimida.

Kampaña CNRT nian. Foto: Pam Sexton

Dala barak timoroan fó fiar ba observadór sira ka husu sira-nia ajuda. Iha loron 17 fulan-agostu, bainhira hahú faze kampaña, IFET-OP fó-sai relatóriu kona-ba ‘avizu sira husi ofisiál governu no portavós pro autonomia sira katak sei mosu violénsia boot se povu Timor-Leste rejeita opsaun autonomia ba vota iha loron 30 fulan-agostu. Ami mós fó-sai relatóriu ne’ebé rona husi parte barak katak arma sira tama iha territóriu, no rekomenda ‘katak komunidade internasionál servisu maka’as liuhosi ONU hodi haluan UNAMET nia mandatu liga ho seguransa no hodi aumenta númeru pesoál ba seguransa ONU nian iha Timor-Leste molok vota iha loron 30 fulan-agostu’ (IFET 1999e).

Tanba la haree resposta, IFET-OP hakerek karta públika husi Dili ba ONU nia Sekrétariu-Jerál iha loron 24 fulan-agostu, deskreve ‘ta’uk ne’ebé naklikar iha populasaun Timor-Leste nian katak milísia sira ho reforsa husi militár sei lansa laloran terrór nian, besik ka hafoin loron votasaun nian’ (IFET 1999f).

Ema barak iha projetu IFET-OP maka pasifista ho vizaun ba prinsípiu kontra forsa militár. Bainhira IFET-OP nia karta ba Annan rekomenda ‘prezensa seguransa internasionál boot liu tebes, di’ak liu armadu, hodi mantén seguransa hafoin votasaun’ koordenadór nasionál balu IFET-OP nian (ne’ebé fahe relatóriu IFET-OP ba mídia no ofisiál sira iha sira-nia nasaun, no halo kampaña ba rekomendasaun sira) la partisipa iha desizaun ne’e, atu fó espasu ne’ebé desizaun ne’e bele la’o. Observadór IFET sira iha Timor-Leste no timoroan sira ne’ebé ami konsulta labele haree opsaun seluk.

Ho tempu, relatóriu IFET-OP nian sira aumenta hakerek ho malorek (neon-nakloke) tebetebes; nune’e prezensa observadór sira aumenta doko parte pro-Indonézia nian. Dalabarak, milísia sira ameasa ami; iha okaziaun dalatolu milísia hale’u no see kro’at no kilat ba pesoál IFET-OP iha karreta laran. Milisia sekuestra xofér IFET timoroan ida (no depois liberta nia sein kanek ruma) iha Liquiçá. Ekipa seluk iha

48 Same, rona konversa sira rádiu entre Kopassus no milísia lokál, no rona orden ba sira rasik nia asasíniu (Harpers 1999). Maibé sira evita lasu ne’e, no laiha ema IFET-OP ne’ebé hetan kanek. Sai klaru katak orden jerál ba milísia sira maka halo estranjeiru sira ta’uk, maibé lalika halo aat ba ami.

Loron-kinta antes votasaun, entuziazmu CNRT nian boot liu fali sira-nia kuidadu, no iha komísiu ho ema na’in-2,000 ho karavana kontente tebes hale’u sidade Dili tomak. Maske loron ne’e kuaze dame loos, milísia sira halo retaliasaun iha loron-sesta, ho oho maizumenus ema na’in-12 iha parte oioin sidade nian. Ba dahuluk, reasaun internasionál ho kro’at presiona Indonézia hodi hamenus violénsia, maibé mentalidade atu ataka, tama ba grupu milísia sira iha Dili, no ema barak la sai husi uma to’o loron vota, segunda-feira. Iha loron-sábadu, 28 Agostu, IFET-OP fó-sai katak

Violénsia aumenta durante loron rua ikus halo prosesu konsulta tomak iha risku … Se ONU no komunidade internasionál la foti asaun lais no desiziva hodi hapara violénsia ne’e, rezultadu husi votasaun iha loron-segunda sei hetan kontaminasaun ho ta’uk (IFET 1999g).

Asaun desiziva la mosu. EUA nia Departamentu Estadu responde ba violénsia foin daudaun ne’e hanesan buat foun, espresa sira-nia preokupasaun, no tempu hanesan fó mensajen diferente liuhosi militár EUA. Entre 11 no 25 loron-agostu, EUA nia mariña halo ezersísiu sira hamutuk ho Indonézia nia mariña iha tasi besik Surabaya (Mueller 1999). Simultáneamente, Pentagon (sentru militár EUA nian) halo treinamentu ba soldadu indonéziu sira (tuir sira, kona-ba dixiplina sira ne’ebé la’ós asuntu militár) iha Universidade Nasionál ba Defeza (Ft McNair, DC) no iha California (Chandrasekaran 2000).’

Votasaun – no konsekuénsia sira

30 Agostu maka loron gloriozu. Maioria votante sira bá fatin votasaun molok rai-mutin, ho esperansa katak nakukun bele hamenus posibilidade milísia nia ataka. Sira hein ho pasiénsia oras ba oras hodi vota, hanesan pauza badak depois tinan 23 ho sakrifisiu ne’ebé halo isin-fulun hamriik. Observadór IFET sira, ne’ebé dalaruma vizita sentru-eleitorál liu ida iha loron ne’e, kobre votasaun iha sentru eleitorál 135 husi totál 200 sentru sira iha Timor-Leste.

Maske akontese insidente violentu balu, jerálmente loron ne’e la’o ho dame no kuaze ema hotu vota tiha ona molok meiudia. Bainhira sentru votasaun sira taka, 98.6% husi votante rejistadu hakat liu intimidasaun hodi vota.

Prosesu hodi sura votu presiza loron lima, no durante tempu ne’e, ameasa no violénsia aumenta lais. To’o loron primeiru fulan-setembru, pesoál ONU na’in haat – timoroan hotu -asasinatu, milísia taka dalan aumenta beibeik, no timoroan sira ne’ebé besik IFET sente katak prosimidade ho IFET lori risku liu, la’ós lori seguransa. IFET-OP dada sai ekipa observadór haat husi kampu, no deside dada sai sira seluk ba Dili no Baucau iha loron hirak tuirmai.

Loron votasaun 30 fulan-agostu nafatin nu’udar monumentu dedikasaun nian ba pesoál lokál no internasionál UNAMET sira no barani ne’ebé inkredível husi povu Timor-Leste. Maske nune’e, dezastre ne’ebé tuirmai maka buat ruma ne’ebé ema bele si’ik, no buat ruma ne’ebé nasaun boot sira bele prevene iha tempu saida de’it entre fulan-abríl to’o agostu klaran. Iha loron 2 fulan-setembru, IFET-OP avalia Prosesu Konsulta, no hetan katak UNAMET administra votasaun iha maneira livre no justu, maibé seguransa seidauk adekuada nafatin no povu timoroan moris iha estadu “ta’uk ba sira-nia moris’ (IFET 1999h).

ONU anunsia rezultadu iha sábadu dadeer, loron 4 fulan-setembru: 78.5% hili independénsia. Maioria observadór IFET sira, iha Dili ona, haree iha CNN. Grupu ne’e baku liman dala ida, hanoin-hetan fali ho moe tan la partidáriu. Loron tomak ne’e, IFET-OP simu informasaun kona-ba violénsia ne’ebé aumenta – destruisaun Timor-Leste hahú ona ho sériu.

49 Iha loron-domingu, kondisaun sira sai aat liu, no observadór IFET barak maka sai hamutuk maioria ema estranjeiru sira seluk ho aviaun alugada. Maizumenus na’in-50 sei hela, maske ami tenke abandona uma balu iha Dili tanba kilat-tiru ne’ebé kuaze lapara ho milísia nia atividade hetok luan liután. Loron domingu lokraik, eskritóriu grupu direitu umanus Yayasan HAK hetan ataka; depois oras ida tiru kilat maka polísia halo intervensaun, só nu’udar resposta ba keixa sira husi embaixada EUA nian katak iha observadór IFET ida – sidadaun EUA – iha laran.

Kalan ne’e kedas, polísia indonézia evakua kuartél IFET-OP iha Dili, inklui observadór no pesoál timoroan apoiante sira. Kalan tomak ami hela iha sede Brimob, hafoin dadeer tuirmai metade husi observadór sira sai husi Timor-Leste. Iha observadór na’in rua-nulu-resin sei hela no relata violénsia iha loron ne’e: ema sira asasínadu iha residénsia Bispu Belo nian; ema rihun forsadu husi eskritóriu Krús Vermelha, ida-ne’ebé foin destroi; ataka ba karreta embaixadór austrália; rihun ba rihun timoroan forsadu ho kilat atu sa’e ró no kamioneta sira.

IFET-OP mak ligasaun ida entre Timor-Leste nia destruisaun no mundu ida-ne’ebé halai-sees. Maibé, ho loron be liu, ami hahú atu fiar katak regra sira muda ona, katak estranjeiru sira agora sai alvu. Observadór IFET sira ne’ebé sei hela iha Dili, sa’e aviaun evakuasaun nian ba Darwin iha segunda kalan, hamutuk ho pesoál UNAMET atus ba atus. Loron tuirmai observadór IFET sira ikus evakua husi Baucau. Igreja Ave Maria iha Suai, fatin ba masakre brutál iha loron 6 fulan-setembru 1999. Foto: Pam Sexton

Iha Darwin, IFET-OP halo konferénsia imprensa no fó-sai deklarasaun iha loron 7 fulan-setembru. Parte ida maka tuirmai ne’e:

Ami sai husi Timor-Leste ba seguransa, maibé ho tristeza boot lahalimar. Povu timoroan sira laiha Austrália hodi halai ba, laiha fatin ida hodi subar husi terrór milísia nian. Horikalan, ofisiál militár austrália no indonézia impede ami-nia kolega timoroan ida, pesoál IFET-OP nian, atu sai aviaun ho ami – no nia agora enfrenta orrór aat tebes, hanesan nia maluk timoroan rihun ba rihun…

50 Bainhira ami halai husi Timor-Leste, IFET-OP no povu sira ne’ebé ami husik halo hanoin hela tinan 1975, bainhira komunidade internasionál abandona Timor-Leste, permite militár indonéziu sira hodi invade no oho ema na’in-200,000 ho impunidade, enkuantu nasaun sira iha mundu taka sira-nia matan.

Ida-ne’e komesa atu akontese filafali – no ba dala ida-ne’e labele atu ignora tan… Husi nia asaun sira, militár indonéziu la’ós de’it deklara funu ba povu Timor-Leste, maibé ba ONU – no reprezentante husi nasaun sira hotu iha mundu. Laiha governu ida ne’ebé responde ataka sira hanesan ne’e ho delegasaun no diskusaun sira….

Durante iha fulan hirak, mundu simu fiksaun indonézia nian katak milísia, militár no polísia mak entidade ketak-ketak. Hanesan ami-nia observadór sira haree iha insidente barak, no hanesan kada ema timoroan hatene iha sira-nia ruin, katak farda sira bele troka ba malu ho ema hanesan, fonte kilat ne’ebé hanesan, no meta hanesan…

Timoroan rihun ba rihun halai husi terrór milísia nian ba foho. Kuaze timoroan ho númeru hanesan, sira buka refújiu iha igreja sira, sede-polísia sira, resintu UNAMET nian no fatin seluseluk. Sira enfrenta ataka husi milísia, hamlaha, moras no mate tan falta seguransa, ai-hán, bee no asisténsia saúde nian – maibé, laiha protesaun ida, laiha ajénsia ajuda nian ka apoiu internasionál fiar-metin ne’ebé permitidu atu hakbesik sira.

Hanesan mós relatu (notísia) barak ne’ebé halo ta’uk kona-ba ema sivíl no refujiadu timoroan sira ne’ebé forsadu atu sa’e kamioneta ka ró sira hodi lori sira ba Timór Osidentál ka illa indonézia sira seluk. Lahatene na’in-hira mak ema sekuestra (lori-halai) hanesan ne’e, maibé klaru katak iha liu rihun rua. Ema sira-ne’e lori ba ne’ebé, no saida mak sira hasoru bainhira to’o fatin ne’e? Sein supervizaun, imajen sira husi jenosídiu durante okupasaun indonézia durante tinan 24 – mosu iha neon.

Deklarasaun lei marsiál horisehik hanesan manipulasaun orwelliana (livru ‘1984’ husi Orwell) ba realidade nian. Liras milísia husi militár kuaze kontrola tiha ona Timor-Leste tomak liuhosi sira nia asaun terrorista kontra UNAMET, sivíl sira, estranjeiru sira no, sériu liu, defensór pro independénsia sira – liu porsentu 75 husi populasaun Timor-Leste. … (IFET 1999i).

Iha semana rua molok forsa internasionál sira tama, povu timoroan besik na’in- 400,000 (metade husi populasaun) tenke husik sira-nia uma, no kuaze vila estraga hotu. Besik ema na’in rihun ida hetan oho (Chega, 2013). Besik na’in-290,000 dezloka ba Timor-Osidentál iha Indonézia. Husi sira, ema na’in 150,000 hela iha kampu 200. Investigasaun epidemiolójika konklui katak taxa mortalidade loron-loron mak ema na’in-2.3 mate husi kada na’in-10,000 (Bradt and Drummond 2008). Nu’udar konsekuénsia, bele fiar katak parese liu ema rihun, liuliu labarik sira, mate nu’udar rezultadu husi falta ai-han, kuidadu ba saúde no falta saneamentu. Husi uma rua-nulu ne’ebé IFET-OP aluga, kuaze ema na’ok hotu no hetan sobu, no ami-nia pesoál lokál halai namkari ba Austrália, Indonézia no foho sira iha Timor-Leste. Bainhira observadór IFET balu halo viajen ba Kupang ka parte seluk Indonézia nian hodi apoia esforsu iha baze hodi proteje ativista timoroan sira, maioria husi observadór sira fila lais ba ida-ida nia rai hodi halo lobby/advokasia efetivamente ba intervensaun militár internasionál.

51

Manifestasaun solidariedade besik kuartél-jenerál ONU nian, Setembru 1999. Foto: Charles Scheiner.

Konsekuénsia sira tuirmai

IFET-OP aprezenta informasaun ba Sesaun Emerjénsia husi Komisaun ba Direitus Umanus ONU nian iha Geneva iha fulan-setembru nia rohan. Maske IFET oferese atu fó informasaun detallada ba ekipa investigasaun ONU nian kona-ba krime Indonézia iha Timor-Leste, ONU nunka kontaktu ami (IFET 1999j).

IFET fó testemuña mós iha loron 6 fulan-outubru ba Asembleia Jerál iha Nova Iorke. Ami hatudu katak erru fundamentál husi ONU mak ‘falla atu rona ema timoroan sira. Karik rona ho sériu sira-nia matenek, informasaun no observasaun sira, bele evita dezastre ne’ebé akontese iha fulan hirak ikus’. Karik ida ne’e elementu intrínsiku ONU nian, kompostu husi governu nasionál sira, mak la tau atensaun ba povu nia hakilar ne’ebé laiha governu hodi reprezenta sira (IFET 1999k). Maske hanesan iha Kapítulu XI husi Karta Nasoins Unidas implika ‘fiar sagrada’ hodi tane ‘abitante sira-nia moris di’ak’ ba territóriu sira ne’ebé seidauk ukun rasik-an hanesan Timor Portugés.

Ho dezenvolvimentu ONU nia Administrasaun Tranzitóriu iha Timor-Leste (UNTAET), erru sira hanesan barak maka repetidu. Komunidade internasionál la’ós de’it hakru’uk ba Indonézia nia soberania kona-ba ema timoroan ne’ebé sekuestra no lori ba Timór Osidentál, maibé governu interinu ONU nian hola desizaun autokrátika sira ida-ne’ebé ema timoroan sira hala’o tuir. ONG internasionál barak mai Timor-Leste iha periodu krítiku ne’e sein komprende ba kontestu ka rekoñese katak organizasaun lokál barak eziste no iha kapasidade. Disparidade ka dezigualdade (iha saláriu, kondisaun hela, transportasaun, autoridade) entre pesoál internasionál no lokál kria sensasaun katak tau fali okupasaun foun iha Indonézia nia fatin.

Iha fulan-maiu 2000, observadór IFET-OP balu ho ativista lokál sira harii La’o Hamutuk nu’udar projetu Timor-Leste/internasionál hodi sai ponte ba kuak-leet entre ONU, ajénsia no governu internasionál sira iha sorin ida no povu timoroan sira iha sorin seluk. La’o Hamutuk buka atu esplora modelu alternativu ba dezenvolvimentu no solidariedade ida-ne’ebé bele refleta maioria povu timoroan nia aspirasaun. Tinan 19 liu ona, La’o Hamutuk kontinua hola papél importante hodi oferese lian krítiku no independente (independente signifika apartidáriu ba partidu polítiku, doadór boot sira no governu),

52 ho promove governu nia transparénsia no prátika demokrátika, direitus umanus ba ema hotu no polítika ekitativa bazeia ba evidénsia sira (La’o Hamutuk 2020).

Hamutuk ho sira seluk, La’o Hamutuk halo advokasia ba justisa relasiona ho krime kontra umanidade ne’ebé atór Indonéziu sira komete iha Timor-Leste. Maske Artigu 160 husi Timor-Leste nia Konstituisaun deklara katak krime sira husi pasadu fó fatin ba ‘prosedimentu kriminál iha tribunál nasionál no internasionál’, investigasaun sira paradu hela no adia ba prosesu sira indonézia nian. To’o agora, laiha ema indonézia ida ne’ebé responsabiliza ba krime sira ne’ebé komete durante okupasaun, no balu husi autór polítika militár ne’ebé orkestra jenosídiu sa’e ba kargu polítiku aas iha Indonézia. Dezde 2003, IFET – hamutuk ho ONG lokál sira – dalabarak husu asaun signifikativa sira husi governu Timor-Leste no ONU ba kestaun justisa nian (IFET 2003).

Ba ema indivíduu barak, envolvimentu iha IFET-OP tempu naruk halo impaktu boot ba desizaun pesoál no profisionál. Barak, inklui autór sira ba artigu ne’e, moris kleur iha Timor-Leste no kontinua serbisu ba prinsípiu sira ne’ebé fundamenta movimentu solidariedade internasionál nian. Barak mantén hodi intimamente envolve ho servisu ba direitus umanus internasionál ka hetan maneira kriativa sira hodi soru Timor-Leste iha sira-nia moris, inklui liuhosi servisu ho ONU, ONG sira no kontinua projetu solidariedade nian hanesan sidade biin-alin sira (‘sister cities’). IFET-OP no kazu jerál Timor-Leste nian konfirma ba ami barak katak solidariedade ho prinsípiu no persistente, lapara no bele halo buat boot mezmu bainhira posibilidade ba susesu parese ki’ik.

Referénsia

Autór sira asesu ba ligasaun ba internet hotu iha loron 30 fulan-novembru 2019.

Australian Broadcasting Company (ABC) 1999, ‘A Licence to Kill,’ prodús husi Mark Davis no fahe iha loron 19 fulan-marsu. https://www.abc.net.au/4corners/a-licence-to-kill---1999/2841902 Bradt, David A. and Christina M. Drummond 2008 ‘Delayed recognition of excess mortality in West Timor’, Emergency Medicine Australasia: EMA 20(1):70-77. CAVR (Timor-Leste Commission for Reception, Truth and Reconciliation) 2013, Chega! The Final Report of the Timor-Leste Commission for Reception, Truth and Reconciliation (CAVR), Vol. V, Annexe 1: Timor-Leste 1999: Crimes against Humanity, Volume V, paragraph 150. Chandrasekaran, Rajiv 2000, ‘US Resumes Training Plan For Officers Of Indonesia,’ Washington Post 19 fulan-fevereiru. Harper’s Magazine 1999, ‘Apt Pupils,’ fulan-dezembru, p. 34. IFET (International Federation for East Timor) 1998, Bele hetan relatóriu, komunikadu imprensa, boletin no dokumentu sira seluk husi IFET no IFET-OP durante tinan 1998 to’o 2010 iha internet iha http://www.etan.org/ifet/ IFET (International Federation for East Timor) 1999a, Letter from IFET’s UN Representative to UN Secretary General, 30 fulan-marsu, http://etan.org/ifet/sgletter0.html IFET 1999b, Letter from IFET’s UN Representative to UN Secretary General, 3 fulan-maiu, http://etan.org/etun/ifet.htm IFET 1999c, ‘Report on the Militia Attack on the Humanitarian Team in Liquiça,’ 8 fulan-jullu, https://www.etan.org/ifet/liquica1.html IFET 1999d, ‘Media Alert: More on Militia Attack on Student Group and Refugees in Same; Militias Continue to Run Free in Same’, 8 fulan-agostu, https://www.etan.org/ifet/report4.html IFET 1999e, ‘IFET-OP Report #5: Campaign Period Begins Amidst Widespread Intimidation by Militia and Indonesian Security Forces Follows Generally Successful Voter Registration’, 17 fulan-agostu, https://www.etan.org/ifet/report5.html IFET 1999f, ‘IFET-OP Report #6: Letter to UNSG and Appendix: Recent events in East Timor’, 24 fulan-agostu, https://www.etan.org/ifet/report6.html IFET 1999g, ‘IFET-OP Report #7: Campaign Period Ends in Wave of Pro-Integration Terror’, 28 fulan agostu, https://www.etan.org/ifet/report7.html IFET 1999h, ‘IFET-OP Report #9: Post-Vote Assessment of the Consultation Process’, 2 fulan setembru, https://www.etan.org/ifet/report9.html

53 IFET 1999i, ‘Media Statement: IFET-OP Forced Out of East Timor, Demands International Actions’, 7 fulan-setembru, https://www.etan.org/ifet/media13.html IFET 1999j, IFET testimony to the UN Commission on Human Rights, 24 fulan-setembru, https://www.etan.org/ifet/ifetunhcr1.html IFET 1999k, IFET testimony to the Fourth Committee of the UN General Assembly, 6 fulan-otubru, https://www.etan.org/ifet/ifetun4com1.html IFET 2003, ‘IFET Urges UN Security Council to Create International Tribunal for East Timor’, 20 fulan-maiu, https://www.etan.org/ifet/docs/122004m.htm and https://www.etan.org/ifet/docs/052003.htm La’o Hamutuk 2020, www.laohamutuk.org Mueller, Lt. Cmdr. Cate, 1999, ‘CARAT ‘99 enters final phase in Indonesia,’ US Navy News report #NS3802, 24 fulan-agostu. 54 8

Solidarity in the Field -- Observing Timor-Leste’s Consultation

Charles Scheiner and Pam Sexton

The International Federation for East Timor (IFET) was formed in July 1991 by groups from Japan, Europe, and North America to inform and lobby the UN to support self-determination.1 As groups around the world expanded or began solidarity work following the Santa Cruz Massacre, IFET provided international coordination for UN testimony and monitoring of UN processes. By 1999, IFET included 30 solidarity groups from every continent, offering loose but broad cooperation (IFET 1998).

Other conduits for cooperation included the internet, Christian church networks and regional conferences such as those organized by the Asia-Pacific Coalition on East Timor (APCET). Individual solidarity groups were small but formidable, each independently deciding its audience, constituency and strategy. In Portugal, widespread grassroots activity forced the government to advocate for Timor Leste’s rights in European and international circles. In the US, the East Timor Action Network (ETAN) focused on ending US support for the occupation.

When the Nobel Peace Prize was awarded to Timor-Leste leaders José Ramos Horta and Bishop Carlos Felipe Ximenes Belo at the end of 1996, solidarity groups around the world were able to capitalize on the attention on Timor-Leste. It can’t be over-emphasized how the courage, commitment, strategic organization, and ready communication of the broad-based Timorese resistance – within Timor-Leste, in Indonesia and in exile - made international solidarity possible and effective.

Setting the stage

Following Suharto’s fall in 1998, new President B. J. Habibie was dealing with an intractable economic crisis. His hold on power tenuous, he sought increased international support, and thus suggested allowing the Timorese to vote on an autonomy plan to remain with Indonesia. He and his Foreign Minister Ali Alatas believed that the electorate, with sufficient incentive and threats, would support the plan, and make the nuisance of international solidarity for Timor-Leste disappear. For the first time in 24 years, Jakarta entered substantive negotiations with the UN and Portugal in an effort to resolve the Timor-Leste issue.

The Indonesian military (TNI) did not share this confidence that Jakarta would win the vote, and stepped up its creation and arming of Timorese paramilitary groups (so-called militias) to terrorize the Timorese people from voting for independence. By using militias, the TNI hoped to plausibly deny direct involvement in the terrorism. From late 1998 onward, TNI’s militias escalated their violence. By early 1999, massacres were a weekly occurrence, and tens of thousands were displaced from their homes. As international activists, IFET member groups tried to bring these developments to the attention of the negotiators. On 30 March, for example, IFET sent a videotape of a recent Australian TV program A Licence to Kill to Secretary-General Kofi Annan (ABC 1999), and wrote:

We have been concerned by recent statements by your office and by the Indonesian government that disarmament of the paramilitaries and withdrawal of Indonesian soldiers from Timor-Leste are not seen as prerequisites to the ‘ballot consultation’ in which the Timorese people are to accept or reject Indonesia’s offer of autonomy. As this program makes clear, a UN-conducted

1 Charles Scheiner was International Coordinator for the IFET Observer Project. In 1999, he was also National Coordinator of the East Timor Action Network (ETAN) in the United States and represented IFET at the United Nations in New York. He now works with La’o Hamutuk and remains active with ETAN. Pam Sexton, long-time ETAN member, was the US Coordinator for the IFET Observer Project. An earlier version of this article was in the book Bitter Flowers, Sweet Flowers: East Timor, Indonesia, and the World Community (Richard Tanter, Mark Selden and Stephen R. Shalom, Eds.) published by Rowman & Littlefield, Lanham, MD, 2001. Timorese vote in the current atmosphere of terror would be a mockery of everything the United Nations stands for (IFET 1999a).

Negotiations continued, and Indonesia and Portugal were approaching agreement with the Secretary General on leaving Indonesia responsible for security before and during the vote. In early April, militias massacred more than fifty refugees in Liquiça; eleven days later they murdered a dozen refugees in the home of prominent independence advocate Manuel Carrascalão. On 21 April, Indonesian Defence Minister General Wiranto flew to Timor-Leste and proclaimed a cease fire between militias and the resistance. The militias never intended to honour the agreement; they inflicted new atrocities hours after signing. The pro-independence forces, felt compelled to sign to maintain credibility with the pro-Jakarta international community and to refute Jakarta’s propaganda that Timor-Leste would erupt into civil war if TNI withdrew. IFET again expressed its concern to the Secretary-General and the Indonesian and Portuguese Foreign Ministers, who were in New York negotiating the final details of an agreement scheduled to be signed on 5 May:

... the paramilitary violence persists, and Indonesia has made no significant efforts to control it. Murders continue daily, militia leaders exhort their coerced followers to assassinate pro independence leaders and human rights workers with impunity, and tens of thousands of internal refugees live in fear for their lives. …

As soon as the 5 May accord is signed, the United Nations must assume responsibility for creating and preserving law and order in Timor-Leste, and for protecting public safety. The Indonesian military has been there illegally for 23 years, and their occupation has taken more than 200,000 East Timorese lives. … It will be impossible for the United Nations to conduct a meaningful assessment of East Timorese public opinion if those forces – one party to the conflict – are controlling the situation on the ground (IFET 1999b).

Although the Secretary-General and other UN officials were fully aware of the danger of the Jakarta backed militias, they were unable to persuade any national government to make this issue public. The agreement signed on 5 May set the stage not only for the 30 August vote, but also for the terrorism and destruction that preceded and followed it.

The Secretary-General and others later justified allowing the Indonesian military to retain control during the referendum by saying that Jakarta would not have agreed under any other terms. They believe that China, at Indonesia’s request, would have vetoed any Security Council resolution that did not leave TNI in charge. However, no government put even the slightest pressure on Indonesia to allow international responsibility for security. If the international community had threatened to curtail economic and/or military cooperation with Indonesia in April, as they finally did in mid-September, much devastation could have been avoided.

The activists’ dilemma

People around the world who had worked for years to advance Timor-Leste’s human and political rights pondered how to make the best of a bad situation. We supported the desire of the East Timorese people (as expressed by National Council of Timorese Resistance (CNRT) leader Xanana Gusmão) that the consultation proceed, and sought ways to help make the vote free, fair and peaceful. Anticipating that in a free and fair vote the Timorese people would choose independence, many solidarity activists joined UNAMET, the UN mission organizing the referendum.

IFET chose to support and monitor UNAMET and the parties to the vote from inside Timor-Leste. UNAMET’s parameters were defined by the 5 May agreements and resulting Security Council resolutions; their personnel were constrained by UN protocol to refrain from expressing criticism of member states or public dissent from established UN positions.

56 IFET offered the power of a unified, decentralized, nonpartisan observer project to share expertise, experience and resources, and to present a stronger voice for advocacy. Long-developed trust among IFET members enabled a massive project to be put together very quickly. As a broad international effort, the IFET Observer Project (IFET-OP) attracted funding and support from groups which had previously been less involved in Timor-Leste solidarity.

IFET-OP became the largest of the dozen international observer delegations in Timor-Leste. There were also about a dozen Indonesian observer groups, with both pro- and anti-autonomy biases. As a UN accredited project, IFET Observers were nonpartisan, taking no position on whether people should vote for autonomy or independence. IFET Observers were committed to nonviolence and to people’s right to a free and fair election, without intimidation.

IFET volunteer observers, from almost every continent and trained in advance, began arriving in Timor Leste in June. Field teams monitored the registration and campaign phases, built relationships with the local people, and attempted to communicate with all sides (although the militia were rarely willing to talk). By 30 August, 125 UN-accredited IFET Observers from 20 countries were deployed in 18 teams, covering every district.

UNAMET had about 450 non-police international staff and about 4,000 local staff, barely enough to implement the mechanics of the vote on a very tight timetable. The UN mission was also limited by diplomatic compromises, institutional goals, insufficient international political will and its hierarchical structure. IFET-OP, the Carter Center and other groups were independent observers, with fewer constraints. Although IFET members had long campaigned against the brutal and illegal Indonesian occupation, we were committed to genuine self-determination for the East Timorese people, and to expose problems and recommend solutions whenever logistics, intimidation or politics threatened to undermine the process.

IFET-OP relayed what we and the local population observed to the UN, the media, and world governments. IFET-OP teams lived in communities, walking through villages and staying visible in the hope that the presence of international observers would help deter militia violence. IFET-OP would be global eyes, voices and hands – a direct link between the Timorese people and grassroots people around the world, unmediated by governments or journalists. Through the international network of Timor-Leste support groups that had developed since 1991, IFET-OP would inform and lobby governments to make the consultation as free as possible.

Observing the campaign

Observers quickly saw that the problem of leaving security in Indonesia’s hands was not just theoretical. IFET-OP’s first in-country report described a 4 July militia attack on a humanitarian aid convoy, which included an IFET observer, in Liquiça ‘while the police and military stood idly by.’ IFET-OP pointed out that the humanitarian crisis – 30,000-60,000 people had already been forced from their homes by militias – ‘directly affects the validity of the vote’ and called on Indonesia to disarm the militias, to fulfil its commitment ‘to ensure an ‘environment devoid of violence or other forms of intimidation’ as a ‘prerequisite for the holding of a free and fair ballot in East Timor’ (IFET 1999c).

On 6 August, in Same, Manufahi, the IFET-OP team witnessed and reported a militia assault on a just opened student pro-independence campaign headquarters. This was the first of many attacks on the pro independence campaign; CNRT offices in many towns were fire-bombed or worse. IFET-OP concluded that the election would not be free and fair if one side could not campaign publicly (IFET 1999d).

The IFET-OP served as an alert system for the UN Civilian Police, often asking these unarmed advisors to intervene in difficult situations (they were very cooperative and efficient, given their strict limitations of mandate and resources).

In addition to sending reports to observers’ home governments, to media sources in various languages, 57 and to the UN Ambassadors of the Security Council countries, IFET-OP teams often briefed foreign delegations and reporters in Timor-Leste. Visiting parliamentarians told IFET observers that they appreciated their accessibility and well-informed openness, while journalists appreciated the international connection, as their readers could identify with the grassroots IFET-OP volunteers.

The largest accredited Observer Project was KIPER, a joint Indonesian-East Timorese mission initiated by Solidamor, a group of courageous Indonesians supporting East Timorese self-determination. However, KIPER volunteers were limited by lack of resources and were targeted by militia violence. Many of their Timorese members resigned as observers in order to take a partisan role in the campaign. Many IFET-OP teams coordinated with KIPER throughout the referendum process.

IFET-OP and KIPER volunteers in front of UNAMET banner that says in Indonesian and Tetum ‘UNAMET guarantees the secrecy of your vote’. Photo credit: Pam Sexton

After a year of militia violence in the southern district of Covalima, the Suai Church and nearby skeleton of a new church under construction were filled with hundreds of displaced families. IFET observers made daily visits to both churches. Marked by the militia as supporters of independence, the displaced families, whose numbers grew during the lead-up to the vote, faced regular threats from militias.

The referendum’s two sides agreed to campaign on alternate days, but the ‘reject’ autonomy (support independence) side was usually prevented from public campaigning by militia threats, as IFET-OP repeatedly reported. When allowed to hold a rally, Indonesian trucks filled with heavily armed military personnel – claiming protector status – were close by, taking notes and photos, clearly with intent to intimidate. 58

CNRT Campaign Rally, photo credit: Pam Sexton

The East Timorese often confided in or asked IFET observers for help. On 17 August, at the start of campaigning, IFET-OP reported ‘warnings by government officials and pro-autonomy spokespersons of large-scale violence if the East Timorese people reject the autonomy option in the 30 August vote, along with widespread reports of arms shipments entering the territory’ and recommended ‘that the international community work diligently through the UN to broaden the UNAMET mandate as it relates to security, and to increase significantly the numbers of United Nations security personnel in Timor Leste before the 30 August vote’ (IFET 1999e).

Seeing no response, IFET-OP wrote a public letter from Dili to the UN Secretary-General on 24 August, describing ‘pervasive fears within the East Timorese population that the Indonesian military-backed militias will launch a wave of terror around, or shortly after, the time of the ballot’ (IFET 1999f).

Many in the IFET-OP project were pacifists with principled views against military force. When IFET OP’s letter to Annan recommended ‘a much larger international security presence, preferably armed, to maintain security following the vote’ several of IFET-OP’s country coordinators (who relayed IFET OP reports to media and officials in their own countries, and campaigned for their recommendations) stood aside from the decision. IFET observers in Timor-Leste and the East Timorese we spoke with could see no other choice. As IFET-OP’s reports became more outspoken, the observers’ presence increasingly disturbed the pro Indonesian side. Militias often threatened them; on three occasions they surrounded IFET-OP vehicles, brandishing weapons at the occupants. An East Timorese IFET driver was kidnapped (and later released unharmed) in Liquiça. Another team, in Same, listening to radio conversations between Kopassus and local militia, heard their own murders being ordered (Harpers 1999). But they avoided the trap, and no IFET-OP people were injured. It became clear that the overall militia orders were to scare foreigners, not to harm them.

CNRT’s enthusiasm overcame caution on the Thursday before the vote, and a 20,000-person rally was followed by a joyful caravan all over Dili. Although that day was mostly peaceful, the militias retaliated on Friday, killing about a dozen people in various parts of the city. For the first time, sharp international reaction pressured Indonesia to curtail the violence, but a siege mentality pervaded Dili’s militia groups, and most people stayed home until Monday’s vote. On Saturday, 28 August, IFET-OP reported that

59 The upsurge in violence over the last two days places the entire consultation process in jeopardy. … Unless the United Nations and the international community take quick and decisive action to stem the violence, the results of Monday’s balloting will be contaminated by fear (IFET 1999g).

Decisive action was not forthcoming. The US State Department portrayed the latest violence as a new development, and expressed concerns, while at the same time, a different message was being conveyed by the US military. Between 11 and 25 August, the US Navy conducted joint exercises with the Indonesian Navy off Surabaya (Mueller 1999). The Pentagon was simultaneously training Indonesian soldiers (ostensibly in non-military subjects) at the National Defense University (Ft McNair, DC) and in California (Chandrasekaran 2000).

The vote – and its aftermath

30 August was a glorious day. Most voters went to the polls before dawn, hoping that darkness would reduce the likelihood of militia attack. They waited patiently for hours to cast their ballots, a brief pause after 23 years of horrific sacrifice. IFET observers, sometimes visiting more than one polling center in the day, covered balloting at 135 of the 200 polling centres.

Although there were a few violent incidents, the day was generally peaceful and nearly everyone voted before noon. By the time the polls closed, 98.6% of the registered voters had transcended intimidation. Counting took five days, and the threats and violence mounted rapidly. By 1 September, four East Timorese UN workers had been murdered, militia roadblocks were proliferating, and many East Timorese close to IFET felt that proximity with IFET observers now brought risk, not safety. IFET-OP withdrew four observer teams from the field, and decided to pull the rest back to Dili and Baucau within the next few days.

Although the 30 August vote stands as a monument to the dedication of local and international UNAMET personnel and the incredible courage of the East Timorese people, the ensuing disaster was not only predictable, but could have been prevented by major powers at any time from April to mid August.

On 2 September, IFET-OP assessed the Consultation Process, finding that the voting itself was administered in a free and fair manner, but that security was still inadequate and the East Timorese lived in a state of ‘fear for their lives’ (IFET 1999h).

The result was announced on Saturday morning, 4 September: 78.5% for independence. Most IFET observers, now in Dili, watched it on CNN. The group clapped once, an embarrassed lapse of non partisanship. Throughout the day, IFET-OP received reports of increasing violence – the destruction of Timor-Leste had begun in earnest.

On Sunday, conditions only got worse, and many IFET observers left with most other foreigners on hastily chartered flights. About 50 remained, although virtually continuous gunfire and widespread militia activity forced them to abandon several houses in Dili. Sunday evening, the office of the human rights group Yayasan HAK was attacked; police intervened only after an hour of shooting, and only in response to US embassy complaints that an American IFET observer was inside.

Later that night, Indonesian police evacuated the IFET-OP headquarters in Dili, including all observers and Timorese support staff. Forced to spend the night at Indonesian riot police headquarters, half of the remaining observers left the next morning. Two dozen observers stayed, taking reports of atrocities throughout the day: people murdered in Bishop Belo’s residence; a thousand forced from the Red Cross office, which was then destroyed; attacks on the Australian Ambassador’s car; thousands of East Timorese loaded at gunpoint onto ships and trucks.

60 IFET-OP was one of the last links between the destruction of Timor-Leste and a world that was running away. But, as the day proceeded, we came to believe that the rules had changed, that foreigners were now targets. The IFET observers still in Dili took the Monday night evacuation flight to Darwin, along with some hundred UNAMET personnel. The last IFET observers were evacuated the next day from Baucau.

The Ave Maria Church in Suai was the scene for a brutal massacre on 6 September 1999. Photo Credit: Pam Sexton

In Darwin, IFET-OP held a press conference and issued a statement on 7 September, excerpted here:

We left East Timor for safety, but with tremendous sadness. The East Timorese people have no Australia to run to, no place to hide from militia terror. Last night, Australia and Indonesian military officers prevented one of our East Timorese staff members from boarding the plane with us -- and he faces an unspeakable horror shared by hundreds of thousands of his fellow East Timorese. …

As we escaped East Timor, both IFET-OP and the people we left behind kept thinking of 1975, when the international community abandoned East Timor, allowing the Indonesian military to invade and kill 200,000 people with impunity while the nations of the world closed their eyes.

It is beginning to happen again -- and this time it must not be ignored… By its actions, the Indonesian military has not only declared war on the people of East Timor, but on the United Nations -- the representative of all nations of the world. No government would respond to such attacks with delegations and discussions. …

For months, the world has accepted the Indonesian fiction that the militias, the military, and the police are separate entities. As our observers have seen in numerous incidents, and as virtually every East Timorese person knows in their bones, these are interchangeable uniforms with the same people, the same weapons sources, and the same purpose…

61 Tens of thousands of East Timorese have fled to the mountains to escape militia terror. Nearly as many have sought sanctuary in churches, police stations, UNAMET compounds and elsewhere. They face militia attacks, starvation, disease and death from lack of security, food, water and health care -- and yet no reliable protection, aid agency or international support is allowed near them.

Equally frightening are widespread reports of East Timorese civilians and refugees being forced onto trucks or ships and taken away to West Timor or other Indonesian islands. Nobody knows how many have been abducted, but it is certainly in the thousands. Where are these people taken to, and what will they face upon arrival? Without any oversight, images of genocidal slaughter from Indonesia’s occupation of East Timor 24 years ago spring to mind.

Yesterday’s declaration of martial law is an Orwellian manipulation of reality -- the militia wing of the military already controls nearly all of East Timor by their terrorist actions against UNAMET, civilians, foreigners, and, most seriously, pro-independence advocates -- more than 3/4 of the East Timorese people. … (IFET 1999i).

In the two weeks before international forces arrived, approximately 400,000 East Timorese people (half of the population) were driven from their homes, and nearly all the towns were destroyed. Approximately a thousand people were murdered (Chega, 2013). Approximately 290,000 persons were displaced to West Timor in Indonesia. Of these, 150,000 persons were contained within approximately 200 camps. An epidemiological investigation concluded that the mortality rate was 2.3 persons per 10,000 per day (Bradt and Drummond 2008). As a consequence, more than a thousand people, mostly children, are believed to have died as a result of inadequate food, health care and sanitation. Almost all of the twenty houses IFET-OP rented were looted then demolished, and our local staff dispersed to Australia, Indonesia, and the mountains of Timor-Leste. While some IFET observers travelled to Kupang and other parts of Indonesia to support grassroots efforts to protect Timorese activists, most observers soon returned to their home countries to lobby more effectively for international military intervention. Solidarity protest near UN Headquarters, September 1999. Photo credit: Charles Scheiner

62 Following up

The IFET-OP presented information at the Emergency Session of the UN Human Rights Commission in Geneva in late September. Although IFET offered to provide the UN investigating team with detailed information about Indonesian crimes in Timor-Leste, we were never contacted (IFET 1999j).

IFET also testified on 6 October at the General Assembly in New York. We pointed out that a fundamental error made by the UN was ‘failing to listen to the East Timorese people, whose knowledge and observations, if heeded, would have averted the recent disaster.’ Perhaps it is an intrinsic element of the UN, composed of national governments, not to heed the cries of people who have no government to represent them (IFET 1999k). This despite the fact that Chapter XI of the UN Charter implies ‘a sacred trust’ to uphold ‘the well-being of the inhabitants’ of non-self-governing territories such as Portuguese Timor.

With the subsequent development of the UN Transitional Administration for East Timor, many of the same mistakes were repeated. Not only did the international community defer to Indonesian sovereignty over the East Timorese who were kidnapped and taken to West Timor, but the interim UN government made autocratic decisions which the people of Timor-Leste have had to live with. Many international NGOs came to Timor-Leste at this critical time without understanding the context or recognizing many existing, capable East Timorese organizations. The disparity (in salary, living conditions, transportation, authority) between international and local staff created a sense that a new occupation had replaced the Indonesian one.

In May 2000, returned IFET-OP observers and local activists launched La’o Hamutuk (Tetun for ‘Walking Together’) as a joint East Timorese/international project to bridge the massive gap between international agencies, governments, and the UN on one side and the Timorese people on the other, and to explore alternative models of development and solidarity which would reflect the aspirations of most Timorese. 19 years on, La’o Hamutuk continues to play an important role in offering a critical and independent voice (independent meaning non-partisan to party politics, big donors and government), promoting transparent and democratic practices of government, human rights for all, and equitable evidence-based policy (La’o Hamutuk 2019).

Together with others, La’o Hamutuk has advocated for justice regarding crimes against humanity committed by Indonesian actors in Timor-Leste. While Article 160 of Timor-Leste’s Constitution states that these crimes of the past are subject to ‘criminal proceedings with the national or international courts’, investigations have stalled and been deferred to Indonesian processes. To date, no Indonesians have been held responsible for crimes committed during the occupation, and some of the orchestrators of genocidal military policy have risen to high political office in Indonesia. Since 2003, IFET – alongside local NGOs – has repeatedly called for meaningful action by the Timorese government and the United Nations on the issue of justice (IFET 2003).

For many individuals, involvement in the IFET-OP profoundly impacted long-term personal and professional decisions. Many, including the authors of this paper, have lived for extended periods in Timor-Leste and continued to work for the principles which grounded the international solidarity movement. Many remained closely involved with international human rights work or found creative ways to weave Timor-Leste into their lives, including through work with the UN, NGOs, and continuing solidarity projects such as sister cities. IFET-OP and the overall case of Timor-Leste confirmed for many of us that principled and persistent solidarity can truly pay off, even when the likelihood of success seems small.

Bibliography

All web links were viewed on 30 November 2019.

63 Australian Broadcasting Company (ABC) 1999, ‘A Licence to Kill,’ produced by Mark Davis and broadcast on 19 March. https://www.abc.net.au/4corners/a-licence-to-kill---1999/2841902 Bradt, David and Drummond, Christina 2008, Delayed recognition of excess mortality in West Timor, Emergency Medicine Australasia Vol 20, pp 70-77. doi: 10.1111/j.1742- 6723.2007.01048.x Bradt, David A. and Christina M. Drummond 2008 ‘Delayed recognition of excess mortality in West Timor’, Emergency Medicine Australasia: EMA 20(1):70-77. CAVR (Timor-Leste Commission for Reception, Truth and Reconciliation) 2013, Chega! The Final Report of the Timor-Leste Commission for Reception, Truth and Reconciliation (CAVR), Vol. V, Annexe 1: Timor-Leste 1999: Crimes against Humanity, Volume V, paragraph 150. Chandrasekaran, Rajiv 2000, ‘US Resumes Training Plan for Officers Of Indonesia,’ Washington Post 19 Feb. Harper’s Magazine 1999, ‘Apt Pupils,’ December, p. 34. IFET (International Federation for East Timor) 1998, IFET and IFET-OP reports, press releases, bulletins and other documents from 1998 through 2010 are online at http://www.etan.org/ifet/ IFET (International Federation for East Timor) 1999a, Letter from IFET’s UN Representative to UN Secretary General, 30 March, http://etan.org/ifet/sgletter0.html IFET 1999b, Letter from IFET’s UN Representative to UN Secretary General, 3 May, http://etan.org/etun/ifet.htm IFET 1999c, ‘Report on the Militia Attack on the Humanitarian Team in Liquiça,’ 8 July, https://www.etan.org/ifet/liquica1.html IFET 1999d, ‘Media Alert: More on Militia Attack on Student Group and Refugees in Same; Militias Continue to Run Free in Same’, 8 August, https://www.etan.org/ifet/report4.html IFET 1999e, ‘IFET-OP Report #5: Campaign Period Begins Amidst Widespread Intimidation by Militia and Indonesian Security Forces Follows Generally Successful Voter Registration’, 17 August, https://www.etan.org/ifet/report5.html IFET 1999f, ‘IFET-OP Report #6: Letter to UNSG and Appendix: Recent events in East Timor’, 24 August, https://www.etan.org/ifet/report6.html IFET 1999g, ‘IFET-OP Report #7: Campaign Period Ends in Wave of Pro-Integration Terror’, 28 August, https://www.etan.org/ifet/report7.html IFET 1999h, ‘IFET-OP Report #9: Post-Vote Assessment of the Consultation Process’, 2 September, https://www.etan.org/ifet/report9.html IFET 1999i, ‘Media Statement: IFET-OP Forced Out of East Timor, Demands International Actions’, 7 September, https://www.etan.org/ifet/media13.html IFET 1999j, IFET Testimony to the UN Commission on Human Rights, 24 September, https://www.etan.org/ifet/ifetunhcr1.html IFET 1999k, IFET testimony to the Fourth Committee of the UN General Assembly, 6 October, https://www.etan.org/ifet/ifetun4com1.html IFET 2003, ‘IFET Urges UN Security Council to Create International Tribunal for East Timor’, 20 May, https://www.etan.org/ifet/docs/122004m.htm and https://www.etan.org/ifet/docs/052003.htm La’o Hamutuk 2019, www.laohamutuk.org Mueller, Lt. Cmdr. Cate, 1999, ‘CARAT ‘99 enters final phase in Indonesia,’ US Navy News report #NS3802, 24 August.

64 9

The Victim Interprets History

Susan Connelly

Certain concepts developed by the philosopher René Girard (1923-2015) allow Australian’s fraught relationship with East Timor (Timor-Leste) to be interpreted in an insightful way. Use of his concept of “victim” or “scapegoat” in relation to East Timor provides an analysis which aligns with current understandings of human experience and provides a lens through which to see the events, including those of 1999, from a different angle than is usual.

The victim

The contemporary understanding of “victim” as passive and helpless, or a martyr, is almost universal. In René Girard’s terminology, however, “victim” is a technical term which describes a person or group scapegoated by others to achieve their release from fear or threat.

In ancient times, the violence threatening to weaken or even obliterate ancient communities was solved, in Girard’s view, by blaming and punishing one person or a smaller group (Girard 1988: 8). Pestilence, natural disasters or internal rivalry could devastate human groups, but communal cohesion could be regained through the unanimous sacrifice of a victim, the one sincerely believed to be the cause of the crisis. The scapegoat was always weak, friendless, and unable to retaliate, and so further violence was avoided. “All against all” was successfully replaced by “all against one”. For Girard, ancient societies were dependent on such victims for their very existence. Focussing their rivalries and fears onto a convenient and unprotected victim was indeed violent, but it was a means of avoiding greater violence.

The victim is innocent

However, the whole scapegoating process was a lie. Fundamental to Girard’s theories is the concept of the innocence of the victim. An arbitrary victim, while possibly guilty of some crime, was incapable of being responsible for the plagues and epidemics which threatened societies, or for the internal fighting arising from rivalry and power-plays. The “scapegoat mechanism” was active and successful for millennia and across cultures, but only because it was unconscious.

For Girard, the reality of the true status of the victim was definitively revealed in the Gospel accounts of the death and resurrection of Christ (Girard 2010: 196). Despite superficial resemblances, the accounts of his death in the Gospels are unlike the myths and histories of other ancient societies. Contrary to myth, which always exonerates the scapegoaters, the Gospels place the guilt for Jesus' death on those who were actually guilty – the political and religious leaders, and the crowd. The written accounts of Christ’s persecution and death reveal the lie at the heart of the scapegoating process. Thus the premise on which societies and their religions and cultures had been built - the guilt of the sacrificial victim - was revealed for the first time as false.

Scapegoating continues in our modern world, but humanity’s growing ability to see through it renders it increasingly less effective. Deprived of the scapegoating formula for restoring harmony, humanity is faced with a violence which is “escalating to extremes”, as Girard describes it (Girard 2010: 13).

East Timor as victim

The terms “scapegoat” or “victim” are applicable to East Timor. It was adversely affected by the desires, rivalries and conflicts of larger powers, both in World War II, and during the Indonesian invasion and occupation. It was small, weak and expendable, fulfilling the requirements of Girard’s designation of

65 the terms. Australia sacrificed it to its own commercial, political and security goals, in a pattern of behaviour that extend to the end of the 20th century and beyond.

Yet the Timorese people hold a particular privilege which belongs only to a victim (Hodge 2009). Being the subject of oppression, victims have a special insight into the situation which is denied their persecutors. In their poverty and friendlessness they can see and understand from a unique angle. This does not necessarily endow them with superiority in either morality or insight, but it does mean that their view is different from that of their oppressors (Browning 2013). Their perception lacks the distortion that is inherent in being part of the mob. The mob always claims the high moral ground while its real strength is only in numbers. The mob trumpets its virtue and conceals its crimes. The victim, on the other hand, has an innate authority no mob can ever claim: innocence (Browning 2013).

The victim is judge

The recognition of the innocence of the victim confronts humanity. It consistently undermines conventional morality, politics and cultural logic. The logic of politics – which often involves the sacrifice of scapegoats to maintain order and security – is fundamentally challenged. Once the lie of scapegoating was revealed, not only did its power as an organising force begin to erode, but human values started to change as a result of this new and gradually growing consciousness.

A development of the Girardian analysis maintains that the innocence of the scapegoated victim subverts the whole idea of judgement. Jesus Christ, as the scapegoated victim, was the judge of his judges (Alison 1998: 21).

An obscure scriptural debate of little apparent importance provides a reflection on this concept in regard to the Australian-East Timor relationship.

The nineteenth chapter of St John's Gospel has the judgement scene between Pontius Pilate and Jesus of Nazareth, who stands before him scourged and crowned with thorns. The process of unconscious scapegoating is underway, with the political and religious leaders joining with the crowd in baying for the blood of the innocent; a unanimous chorus of condemnation. Even Jesus' companions, infected by the contagion of blame, have denied him and fled.

The text reads: “Pilate had Jesus brought out, and seated himself on the chair of judgement at a place called the Pavement, in Hebrew Gabbatha” (John 19:13).

In the Greek text there is a grammatical inconsistency concerning the object of the verb “to sit”. Biblical texts are, of course, more theological than historical, and there is the possibility that the verb refers to Jesus, making him the one who is seated. Scholars ask, “Does Pilate sit or does he seat Jesus on the judgement seat?” (Lincoln 2005: 469) The irony gives an insight into the meaning of Jesus' power, authority and judgement.

Pilate had earlier claimed that he had power over life and death. In reply, Jesus said: “You would have no power over me if it had not been given you from above...” (John 19:11). Thus the whole trial is given a “cosmic perspective”. (Lincoln 2005: 468). Jesus then proceeds to make his own judgement as to the relative guilt of those involved by stating: “that is why the one who handed me over to you has the greater guilt” (John 19:11b). Jesus thus points to the ultimate universal authority over life and death and also delivers his own judgement on his accusers (Lincoln 2005: 468).

Here is the trial of the innocent victim who, having identified with all victims (Matt.25) reveals the innocence of all victims. As Girard states, “The protective system of scapegoats is finally destroyed by the Crucifixion narratives as they reveal Jesus' innocence, and, little by little, that of all analogous victims.” (Girard 2010: xiv)

66 Thus a single questionable verb ironically contributes to the larger theological and anthropological perspective that Jesus, as accused victim, is in fact the divine judge and, from his place as victim, passes judgement on the court.

This incongruity between victim and judge throws light on the meaning of the Timorese people's place in the relationship to Australians. The Timorese, as victims, came to be the judges of Australian complicity with Indonesian persecution. Their claim on the conscience of Australians challenged the Australian political mythology that led to the belief that supporting Indonesia was the only politically effective and expedient action to pursue.

Scourged and crowned with thorns, and sacrificed to neighbours’ concerns which were considered of greater importance than their very lives, the Timorese people interpret and judge the history of their relationship with Australia and the world. Throughout the invasions over decades by Australia, Japan and Indonesia they were ignored insofar as their interests were concerned. They were the subject of interest only to the extent that they afforded their neighbours material prospects or strategic advantage. They were treated as pawns in political games of rivalry and the pursuit of security. Their contributions to the welfare of Australian soldiers were - and still are - treated with an official silence bordering on contempt. Their Indonesian murderers were cajoled and fawned upon. They were abandoned, excluded, belittled and ignored. They suffered the classic treatment meted out to scapegoats, and for decades "lacked a champion." (Girard 1988: 14) Having done nothing to merit such treatment, the Timorese people displayed the single feature which marks the true scapegoat: innocence.

In this innocence, the Timorese people thus achieve the status of judge of Australian society. It is the very position of the victim as victim which bestows on them the authority to judge (Alison 2010: 141- 2).

The victim who forgives

But in what does this judgement consist? Disconcertingly, and even disappointingly to our rivalrous and judgemental hearts, it is the approach of the forgiving victim towards the perpetrator that is the ultimate judgement. This is so because Christ - the ultimate scapegoated victim - forgave, and he calls all to forgive with him. The Gospel accounts of Jesus after the resurrection contain no reprimand, no calling to account, no attempts to gloss over or disguise the disciples’ cowardice and no blame by Jesus towards those who had so recently abandoned and denied him (Alison 1998: 74).

These actions introduce the possibility of a complete reversal in human relationships. They "permitted a manner of looking upon reality that had previously been impossible." (Alison 1998: 77) That manner of looking upon reality entails being able to see from the perspective not only of the victim, but of a victim who forgives.

It is this perspective that the Timorese enacted during and after the Indonesian occupation. A forgiving victim of larger powers is rare in the world arena. Timorese forgiveness was specifically expressed in their nonviolent resistance and lack of revenge in what would appear to be a minefield for retaliation. The Timorese forgiveness can be seen not only as an alternative to the lack of justice to their situation, but as a response of an entirely different order. It could be argued that there were mixed motives behind such forgiveness, for example, evasion of responsibility for the unaddressed violence of the civil war prior to the invasion, and the serious crimes committed by Timorese in 1999. Nevertheless, the complicity of geographical neighbours over decades caused greater destruction of Timorese life and property than Timorese internal problems and divisions.

How the Timorese forgive

This distinctive response received the commentary of Sergio Vieira de Mello, the United Nation's Special Representative during East Timor's transitional administration (1999-2002). António Guterres, a past President of Portugal and Secretary-General of the UN, stated in 2010 that de Mello:

67 described the Timorese people’s capacity to forgive as the most surprising thing he encountered there, something he had never seen elsewhere, despite having witnessed a wide variety of conflicts (Neto et al 2011: viii).

The orientation towards forgiveness evident in the attitudes of the Timorese people has been demonstrated by significant leaders, Kay Rala Xanana Gusmão and José Ramos-Horta. Both of these men have had the roles of President and Prime Minister, and have introduced concepts of forgiveness into the political dilemmas associated with their recent history (Braithwaite et al 2012). They have advocated publicly for amnesties and have spoken of reconciliation (Gusmao 2003). They have presented concepts of reconciliation and forgiveness, rather than retributive and adversarial justice.

Yet this immensely difficult task has serious risks. Where a wrongdoer refuses to acknowledge the wrong done, the effort to forgive can seem useless (Schreiter 2000: 55-6). It can also be interpreted as a forgetfulness, even a betrayal of the past and of those who suffered (Schreiter 2000: 55). Both Xanana Gusmão and José Ramos-Horta have spoken of the criticism they have received as a result of their public appeals and personal example that urged the Timorese people to engage in forgiveness for the decades of oppression (Gusmao 2015).

However, the recognition of forgiveness as essential to the future existed not only in the view of the Timorese leaders. In the absence of judicial processes during and immediately after the occupation, and in order to begin to respond to the violence and trauma of the occupation, many Timorese communities responded with their own efforts at truth, reconciliation and forgiveness. Among many examples, in an event at Suai on Christmas Eve 1999, the residents re-enacted the massacre of 6 September, just after the announcement of the result of the vote for independence. It was an opportunity for the survivors to tell the victims’ story (Hodge 2012: 190). It was not used as an opportunity to call for vengeance but rather to begin a process of truth-telling and healing.

It is not right to idealise the Timorese people or to try to give the impression of the existence of an entirely pacific situation. There were actions of vengeance after 1999, and there remain long-term effects of trauma and the prevalence of domestic violence which witness to the complex situation that still exists among the Timorese people (Kovar and Harrington 2013). Violence was committed by Timorese against Timorese, necessitating Community Reconciliation Programs conducted in the first years of independence by the Commission for Reception, Truth and Reconciliation (CAVR 2005). Nevertheless, the people continue to emerge from an unjust and brutal oppression in a non-retaliatory and forgiving manner, refusing to focus solely on the wrongs done to them.

Reconciliation

A possible outcome of forgiveness is reconciliation, which can occur as a result of the forgiving victim's capacity and willingness to restore not only their own humanity, but that of their persecutors (Schreiter 2000: 45-6).

Robert Schreiter writes that forgiveness given freely is an invitation for the wrongdoer to repent so that a new relationship can emerge. The reconciliation needed to restore harmony is not a substitute for liberation from the evil done; rather, it requires an end to the oppression (Schreiter 2000: 21-3). It cannot be done in haste, or by glossing over the enormity of death and destruction. There must be recognition that perpetrators of evil usually whitewash their actions in order to evade the consequences (Schreiter 2000: 19). In its essence, reconciliation is a gift – in the Christian understanding, firstly it is a gift of God, whereby the victim is being brought by God to forgive. In God a victim can discover the existence of his or her capacity to forgive, and the willingness of God to enable such forgiveness.

Inflicting violence robs both the victim and the perpetrator of some measure of their humanity. Paradoxically, this situation ultimately hands the victim the greater power. Doers of evil cannot forgive

68 themselves: only the victim can forgive them. If that gift is given, the perpetrator has the opportunity to repent and thereby to begin rebuilding his or her own humanity (Schreiter 2000: 45). Schreiter presents the insight that in the process of reconciliation, forgiveness precedes repentance. While people normally expect that evildoers repent and make reparation, he states that the Christian understanding works the other way around. Forgiveness is not earned, and it cannot be earned. It is freely and graciously given (Schreiter 2000: 60).

Furthermore, forgiveness cannot be required (Schreiter 2000: 60; 20).The extreme difficulty entailed in forgiveness was expressed by a Religious Sister filmed in the church at Suai, still red from the blood of those who had been massacred there in 1999 (Schreiter 2000: 60). She spoke of how hard it is to forgive, and that no one has the right to tell the Timorese people (nor anyone else) to forgive (Phan 2006).

In engaging in a process which values and enacts forgiveness, the Timorese people have given witness to the abstinence from retaliation which Girard sees as the only solution to violence in the world, a violence which if not renounced "will lead straight to the extinction of all life upon the planet." (Girard 2010: xiv) Demonstrating in detail the disastrous nature of human violence in modernity, Girard identifies the "escalation to extremes" as the tendency for human beings to imitate the violence with which they are confronted, resulting in more and more violence (Girard 2010: 13).

The Timorese people have given the world, including Australians, a lesson of inestimable worth. It embodies the challenge that Girard advocated in the conclusion to his book The Scapegoat: "The time has come for us to forgive one another. If we wait any longer there will not be time enough." (Girard 1986: 212).

Bibliography

Alison, James. The Joy of Being Wrong: Original Sin Through Easter Eyes. New York: The Crossroad Publishing Company, 1998. ______. Raising Abel: the recovery of the eschatological imagination. 2nd ed. London: Society for Promoting Christian Knowledge, 2010. Braithwaite, John, Hilary Charlesworth and Adérito Soares. “Networked Governance of Freedom and Tyranny: Peace in Timor-Leste.” ANU Press Vol. 35 (2012). Accessed September 23, 2016. http://muse.jhu.edu/article/497810 Browning, Melissa. Epistemological Privilege and Collaborative Research: A Reflection on Researching as an Outsider. Chicago: Loyola University, 2013. Accessed August 10, 2017. http://practicalmattersjournal.org/2013/03/01/epistemological-privilege/ Commission for Reception, Truth and Reconciliation Timor-Leste (CAVR). Chega! The Report of the Commission for Reception, Truth and Reconciliation Timor-Leste (CAVR). Dili, TL: CAVR, 2005. Everingham, Sara. “Horta says no to war crimes tribunal.” The World Today (28 August 2009). Accessed 25 January 2017. http://www.abc.net.au/worldtoday/content/2009/s2669794.htm Girard, René. The Scapegoat. Translated by Yvonne Freccero. Baltimore: The Johns Hopkins University Press, 1986. ______. Violence and the Sacred. Translated by Patrick Gregory. London: Continuum, 1988. ______. Battling to the End: conversations with Benoît Chantre. Translated by Mary Baker. East Lansing, Michigan: Michigan State University Press, 2010. Gusmão, Kay Rala (Xanana). “His Excellency Xanana Gusmão accepts Honorary Doctorate and acknowledges Balibo House Trust.” Balibo House Trust, 2015. Accessed January 25, 2017. http://balibohouse.com/his-excellency-xanana-gusmao-accepts-honorary-doctorate-and-acknowledges balibo-house-trust/ Gusmão, Kay Rala (Xanana). Challenges for Peace and Stability. Chancellor's Human Rights Lecture 2003. Accessed January 21, 2017. http://www.unimelb.edu.au/__data/assets/pdf_file/0004/1727572/20030407-gusmao.pdf Joel Hodge. Resisting Violence and Victimisation: Christian Faith and Solidarity in East Timor. Burlington, VT: Ashgate, 2012. ––––––––. “The Transubstantiated Word.” Australian eJournal of Theology Vol.13 No.1 (2009).

69 Accessed December 4, 2014, http://aejt.com.au/2009/issue_13. Kovar, Annika, and Andrew Harrington. “Breaking the cycle of domestic violence in Timor-Leste: access to justice options, barriers, and decision-making processes in the context of legal pluralism.” (October 2013). Accessed September 4, 2017. http://www.undp.org/content/dam/timorleste/docs/reports/DG/Domestic%20Violence%20Report%2 0_with%20cover%20FINAL.pdf Lincoln, Andrew T. A commentary on the Gospel according to St John. London: Continuum, 2005. Linton, Suzannah. "Putting things in perspective: the realities of accountability in East Timor, Indonesia and Cambodia.” Maryland Series in Contemporary Asian Studies No. 3, 2005 (182). Accessed September 4, 2017. http://digitalcommons.law.umaryland.edu/mscas/vol2005/iss3/1/ Neto, Félix, da Conceição Pinto, Maria, and Mullet, Etienne. Forgiveness and Reconciliation in an Inter group Context: East Timor's Perspectives. Hauppauge: Nova Science Publishers, Inc., 2011. Accessed October 20, 2017. ProQuest Ebook Central. Phan, Grace. A Hero’s Journey. Singapore: Madmax Films, 2006. DVD. Schreiter, Robert J. Reconciliation: Mission and Ministry in a Changing Social Order. Maryknoll, NY: Orbis Books, 2000.

70 10

Norwegian Solidarity in the 1990s

Yiannis Tavridis

In the course of the 1990s, Norway appeared in the forefront of international activities in solidarity with the oppressed people of occupied East Timor and reached its climax in 1996, when exiled diplomat Jose Ramos-Horta and Bishop Carlos Filipe Ximenes Belo were given the Nobel Peace prize in Oslo. This short note will try to outline the various activities that were initiated by Norwegian civil society and the synergies that led to the successful campaign for the Nobel Peace prize. It will also question the stance of the government and political milieu in this Scandinavian country.

The dark decade of the 1980s

There is a consensus that the 1980s was the most difficult period for the Timorese people and their struggle, while also the international community nearly wrote off East Timor from the international /UN agenda. This seems to be the case for Norway as well, based on the accounts of central supporters of the Timorese case and my own observations from 1987- the year I started studying in the University of Bergen, onwards.

The most prominent and diachronically active supporter of East Timor in Norway is undoubtedly professor Lars Vikoer of University of Oslo. With studies in both Leiden and Indonesia, he was well informed about the plight of the East Timorese and had met and interviewed Jose Ramos-Horta, already in the late 1970s. During the 1980s, however, his activities subsided and the occasional initiatives of another journalist - in tandem with the only East Timorese refugee in Norway - did not seem to have had any mobilising effect.

New actors in the field 1990-1994

The gradual involvement of a civil society organization from 1990 onwards- the Norwegian Students and Academics International Assistance Fund (abbreviated SAIH in Norwegian) coincided with my personal involvement in the issue, so the accounts below are based on my personal experiences and private archives of central stakeholders in Oslo and Bergen. From 1990 to 1992 SAIH and myself, as a member of its board and later its vice-president, mediated press releases from Fretilin’s office in Lisboa and information from TAPOL in London to academic circles, students at the four university campuses of Norway and the media. Contact was also established with the small but active Swedish Committee for East Timor (Östtimorkommiten) that was based in Stockholm and attracted academics from all over Sweden; the president of the Swedish Committee had visited East Timor in 1991 and proved to be a good source of information and a reference point for the European solidarity movement throughout the 1990s. In 1992 SAIH managed to secure funds from the Norwegian Ministry of Foreign Affairs (MFA) for a limited information campaign and hosted an East Timorese representative from Fretilin in Lisboa, Mr. Jose Maria Sarmento. Sarmento toured the universities of Oslo, Trondheim and Bergen, and also paid a visit to the Norwegian MFA. This first direct contact between SAIH, a Timorese envoy and the MFA Asia desk was a disappointment. The MFA downgraded the whole meeting and we were met by a case worker who was not interesting in taking notes; he rather lectured SAIH and Mr Sarmento on how the island of Timor had been pacified after the capture of the radio station that Falintil was operating from the jungle; he further rejected any hints that there was still active resistance among the East Timorese – civilians or military.

This was somehow awkward and partly unexpected, since Norway had had a positive record in peace mediation for decades; in the 1990s it was also pursuing an independent policy towards Nicaragua and Cuba despite Norway’s membership of NATO. The geographic and cultural distance between Scandinavia and southeast Asia was a contributing factor; in 1991-92 we had looked into the media coverage of the conflict in East Timor from 1974 onwards and could only find sporadic cables about the

71 plight of the East-Timorese. The leftist daily Klassekampen was the most regular host of articles – often authored by either Professor Lars Vikoer or journalist Elisabeth Eide. So there had been limited coverage of the troubled period that led to the Indonesian invasion, and very few news items on the atrocities which followed, or the famine or the rest of the Indonesia occupation.

Moreover, Norway was a young nation without an imperial past, which meant that no entrenched interests could be identified in the same period. The Norwegian Labour government would soon unfold an ambitious plan for business cooperation with Southeast Asia, but we were not aware of that in 1991- 2.

SAIH’s attempts to mobilize some political support in the Parliament were also futile at first. None of the mainstream political parties had an active position on the question of East Timor (despite the efforts of Professor Vikoer in the 1970s, when he had secured some support within the Left Socialist party of Norway.

SAIH decided to go on lobbying and used a specific argument in order to awaken some positive reaction in the Parliament: it was the late Tom Vraalsen, the Norwegian representative in the United Nations, who in 1982 initiated the removal of the question of East Timor from the agenda of the UN General Assembly and placed it within the mandate of the inferior Decolonization Committee. Although this was a tactical move in order for Portugal and the supporters of East Timor to avoid defeat, SAIH used Norway’s role in 1982 to argue that Norway had a responsibility for the fate of the people of East Timor. Gradually in the course of 1993-4, SAIH was able to reactivate the support of the Left Party and also to promote positive standpoints or congress declarations by the Labour Unions and eventually the Christian Democratic party (KrF) – an ally of the Conservative party.

Back in 1992, SAIH’s university campaign for East Timor was noticed by an active group of local politicians in Bergen, who officially nominated Jose Ramos-Horta for the Human Rights Prize of the Rafto Foundation. Christian Democratic politicians from the city of Bergen were prominent in this regional group and this was seen as a positive development, since SAIH was struggling to expand interest on East Timor beyond the usual leftist parties and organizations that were supportive of liberation movements in the Third World. We/SAIH therefore endorsed the nomination of Ramos-Horta actively and mediated all relevant material and contacts to them – while keeping up with public meetings in Bergen and elsewhere. Then, when the Rafto Foundation announced that Ramos-Horta was being awarded the 1993 Human Rights prize, a new and unexpected actor entered the field.

AHA!

On the very day of the ceremony of the 1993 Rafto Human Rights award to Ramos-Horta, SAIH was present with a delegation and we were informed that the internationally acclaimed singer Morten Harket of the pop group “AHA” had been recruited in the campaign for East Timor. Harket had been lobbied about East Timor the previous year by Canadian activist and legal scholar, Maureen Martin (Fernandes 2011: 156). Harket spoke about East Timor at every opportunity, raising the territory’s profile within Norway. Along with the Rafto Foundation, Harket had ready access to the elite establishment in Norway as well as easier access to the mainstream media (Ørjan 2019).

SAIH intensified its activities and joined forces with the Bergen group of supporters whenever possible. SAIH’s tactics were still more directed towards grassroots mobilization. In the winter of 1993 the Norwegian Students Union agreed to join in a nationwide campaign for East Timor that promoted Ramos-Horta and the National Council of Maubere Resistance (CNRM) peace proposal of the period. It was named “East Timor 1994 – from occupation towards a just solution” and involved several academics across the political spectrum in various solidarity activities and information campaigns. These actions attracted popular attention and were supported by the international solidarity movement for East Timor and by CNRM, which was led by Ramos-Horta. Professor Vikoer and Elisabeth Eide (now a journalism academic) joined the inner corps of activists for East Timor in Norway. Max Stahl, 72 who filmed the Santa Cruz massacre in 1991, was then in Oslo editing a film on Timor together with Morten Harket’s friend and manager Sigurjon Einarsson.

This joint movement was now promoting Bishop Belo as a candidate for the Nobel Peace Prize. It engaged popular education and media liaison to influence the political establishment of the country. It also conducted behind-the-scenes lobbying to influence decision-makers through the personal and institutional contacts of the Rafto Foundation, Morten Harket, SAIH and the Catholic Church in Oslo.

Contacts at the MFA were still hesitant to acknowledge that East Timor had not exercised its right to self-determination because Norway was promoting its trade interests in Southeast Asia, where Indonesia was the leading state. Bishop Belo was invited to Oslo and met with prominent politicians and indirectly with the Norwegian Nobel Committee. The Rafto Foundation as well as Morten Harket were able to promote Ramos-Horta’s candidacy along with that of Bishop Belo for the 1996 Nobel Peace Prize. Icelandic parliamentarians were active here. The governing Labour party in Norway and its Prime Minister Mrs. Gro Harlem Brudtland were not actively supportive. The Secretary General of Norway’s MFA Jan Egeland had been gradually drifting towards becoming sympathetic towards the cause of East Timor but the Labour government’s business interests in Indonesia were overriding such voices. SAIH did not have direct contact with the Norwegian embassy but we were told informally that the reporting from Jakarta was negative towards the Timorese case.

The initial disappointment of the failure to secure the Nobel prize in 1995 - despite Bishop Belo being shortlisted - was soon replaced by the sheer joy for the double success of the 1996 Nobel Peace prize being shared by Bishop Belo and Jose Ramos-Horta!

1997-1999, a wind of optimism from Oslo to Dili

The stance of the Norwegian Government changed almost overnight after the announcement that the two representatives of East Timor, Belo and Horta, would receive the 1996 Nobel Peace prize. SAIH and its partners had from now on direct access to the MFA and were given financial support in order to fund civil society organizations in East Timor – because Norway could not yet do so officially. An interesting initiative that was put forward in 1997-8 was the low-key involvement of the Norwegian state oil company, Statoil, in sponsoring Timorese students in petrochemical studies in Norwegian universities. This idea was endorsed by Ramos-Horta, who could now see that as the prospect of an independent East Timor loomed, so too did the need for qualified Timorese professionals in the oil sector. No records of this cooperation exist at SAIH but research at MFA would likely uncover the relevant details.

Contact between SAIH, international organizations and the Timorese leadership in exile intensified further in this period and the flow of updated information was also being published in the Norwegian media; there has always been a positive bias towards the issues associated with the Nobel Peace prize.

SAIH, the Labour Unions’ development agency, the Norwegian People’s Aid, and several other Norwegian organizations created a common platform in 1997, the Norwegian Council for East Timor and Indonesia (NOCETI), with Professor Vikoer as the head of the board of directors. Access to the Norwegian MFA and the Norwegian Parliament was now quite regular and SAIH was being invited for thematic briefs; proposals for NGO support to Dili were being seen favourably, as long as we did not expose direct government involvement that could upset Jakarta. The internal considerations of the Norwegian MFA are still unknown to us.

By the end of 1998, the rapidly evolving crisis in Indonesia allowed NOCETI to draft a new project that received MFA support in April 1999 and allowed for participation in the Observer Project of the International Federation for East Timor (IFET) – with United Nations accreditation. Six Norwegian observers were dispatched from early August 1999 (among them Professor Vikoer and myself) until the eventual evacuation of IFET from Dili to Darwin by the Royal Australian Air Force on 6th September 1999. All but one of the Norwegian observers were safely repatriated by mid-September while one

73 (myself) returned to Timor – Kupang and Dili – and worked undercover to protect and evacuate high profile East Timorese who were sheltering in camps of internally displaced persons. Although this activity was neither financed nor authorized by the Norwegian MFA, regular reports were sent to the ministry. In Dili, the operations were conducted under the name of NOCETI. This last activity of NOCETI ended in early November 1999 and our group submitted a testimonial to the MFA before the end of that year. No new NGO activities would take place in the years to come, but now the official Norway was highly visible in Timor, Norwegian aid and police officers participated in official missions, a Norwegian ambassador was accredited from 2002 and an embassy was operating in Dili from 2007- 2011. Small scale fundraising has continued through the Bergen group of politicians; the group’s secretary Mr Manuel Soosaipillai is still trying to assist Timorese schools with new education projects, mainly through the Caritas office in Timor-Leste.

Concluding observations

2019 was the year that Timor-Leste celebrated the 20th anniversary of the historic Popular Consultation of August 1999 and the overwhelming vote for independence that eventually led to the official establishment of the Democratic Republic of Timor-Leste in 2002. A small delegation from Norway visited the small island republic and took part in the official celebration, among them Mr Soosaipillai of the Bergen group and myself. Besides the great improvements that we were able to observe, we had cordial and interesting meetings with old colleagues – now leading representatives of the East Timorese nation. Upon departure from Dili there was a strange realization that the initial contribution of Norway through the Nobel Peace prize was fading into oblivion and that more contemporary challenges occupied the minds and the agenda of our interlocutors. This is reasonable as the events that followed the struggle of the 1990s – especially the interparty rivalries and the international relations of Timor-Leste with Australia and ASEAN are affecting the present politics and the future of the new state. It is also relieving as well to notice that the society and the institutions of Timor-Leste have started consolidating and may need another kind of assistance in our globalized world.

It is therefore up to the Norwegian actors of the solidarity movement for East Timor to document and mediate a concise historical review of the role that Norway – its people and its institutions – played in the critical decade of the 1990s. This could be part of a research project on Norway’s official policy towards Southeast Asia before 2000 or perhaps a joint effort with academic circles in East Timor and perhaps Australia. By documenting the internal workings of the Norwegian establishment and its relations to the Timorese leaders in exile, we would therefore be able to close this history chapter that has been more significant for Timor-Leste than for Norway.

Bibliography

Fernandes, Clinton 2011. The Independence of East Timor, Sussex Academic Press, Eastbourne. Ørjan, Nilsson 2019. Hjemkomst. Morten Harket 1993-1998, Forlaget Press, Oslo. 74 11

The Collapse of Indonesian Policy in 1999

Clinton Fernandes

With its vast natural resources, a population in excess of 220 million, and strategic location along the main sea and air lanes between the Indian and Pacific Oceans, Indonesia is a country of great geopolitical significance. It invaded the small territory of Portuguese Timor in 1975 and annexed it the next year. Indonesia remained in control for 24 years, repeatedly declaring that the incorporation of what it called the province of Timor Timur (East Timor) was “irreversible” (CAVR 2013: 674). The irreversibility was predicated on three factors: its ability to use coercive force against the East Timorese resistance; its own determination that it should retain the province; and the acquiescence of the international community. This paper traces the collapse of official Indonesian policy towards the Question of East Timor. It shows how Indonesia’s determination to retain the province, long a non-negotiable tenet of its diplomacy, underwent a complete reversal over the course of 1999. While it retained its overwhelming military superiority until the very end, international support for the occupation and Indonesia’s determination to retain the province vaporised over a four day period from 9-12 September 1999, and resulted in the end of Indonesian rule over the province.1

Overwhelming military superiority vis-a-vis the East Timorese resistance

Indonesia enjoyed enormous military superiority over the East Timorese resistance from the very beginning. With a strength of 423,000 Regulars (Army 230,000, Navy 40,000, Air Force 33,000 and Police 120,000), the Indonesian Armed Forces were, on paper at least, one of the largest militaries in the region. Its special forces had been operating in the border areas of East Timor since August 1975. A full-scale invasion beginning on 7 December 1975 resulted in the capture of all major population centres by 7 February 1976. As the conventional war entered its decisive phase in April 1978, Indonesian forces in East Timor swelled to 33,000 troops in 33 Infantry and Marine Corps battalions, another 5,000 in the administrative and territorial infrastructure, more than 3,000 East Timorese partisans, and civil defence personnel (JIO 1978).

By comparison, the East Timorese resistance had no air power, no armored assets, and the only artillery of note were four 75-mm artillery pieces. Thanks to Portugal’s NATO membership, the resistance inherited modern West German infantry weapons including automatic rifles and light machine-guns, and Austrian Unimog cross-country light troop-transport vehicles. Around 15,000 East Timorese had obtained reservist training from the Portuguese military, although not all of them were in the resistance, which was centered around FRETILIN; some had joined the Indonesian forces as partisans (JIO 1975).

Indonesia was therefore able to achieve its war aims by 1979: it defeated FRETILIN in battle, eliminated its leaders, suppressed political organizations associated with it, and extinguished political activity at the village level. It reduced the resistance to a few bands of ill-equipped guerrillas who were confined to the mountains, far away from the majority of the population in the towns and villages. On 26 March 1979, the Indonesian government declared that East Timor had been pacified. Accordingly, it established Sub-regional Military Command 164, which oversaw 13 Military District Commands, 62 Military Sub District Commands, and a military presence in all 464 villages. It created Ratih (Trained Civilians), Hansip (Civil Defense Force) and Wanra (People’s Resistance Force) to assist the army, and Kamra (People’s Security Force) to assist the police. All Ratih, Hansip, Wanra and Kamra were under the military’s command in East Timor, unlike elsewhere in Indonesia, where they were part of the Interior Department. To this highly militarized structure were added two ‘territorial’ infantry battalions (Fernandes 2011: 46).

1 This paper is dedicated to Andrew McNaughtan. The militias in 1999 were part of the coercive apparatus used to suppress the East Timorese population, despite their claims to be independent formations. Neither the clandestine resistance nor the guerrillas could defeat this all-encompassing structure of occupation. The first pillar of Indonesian rule - its military superiority - was never overturned.

The fracturing of elite Indonesian views regarding the province of Timor Timur

Indonesian policymakers agreed that the province should remain part of Indonesia and that the annexation of 1976 was irreversible. This consensus began to erode after the resignation of President Suharto on 21 May 1998. A key group in this erosion was the Association of Indonesian Muslim Intellectuals (ICMI), established in 1990. ICMI’s leaders had varying preferences about the future of Indonesia. Some had a populist vision of the future. Others believed in empowering small businesses. Still others believed in a high-technology future. In this last category was ICMI’s chairman and Suharto’s protégé, B.J. Habibie. On the question of East Timor, however, most senior ICMI personnel shared the view that there was no compelling reason to retain it within Indonesia.

ICMI’s Secretary-General was Adi Sasono, an engineer by training and Habibie’s close ideological ally. He had visited East Timor several times and believed the Indonesian military’s actions had created ‘a totally unacceptable situation’. Expressing his view privately in 1993, he said there had been harm to Indonesia, too: ‘The cost of international criticism, which is justified, is too high for Indonesia to afford. It shames Indonesia and has a negative effect on the international support needed for development.’ He ‘stressed’ that ICMI understood ‘the strength and validity of international opposition to Indonesia’s East Timor policies, and the urgent necessity to remove this seriously high economic, political and social cost, which is unnecessary and only the result of misplaced military policies’ (Sasono 1993).

Habibie himself had encountered the ferocity of international activist campaigns on East Timor. During an official visit to Australia while still Minister for Research and Technology, he had endured repeated questioning about East Timor - including by journalists at the National Press Club in Canberra - almost to the exclusion of any other issue. The East Timor question dogged him wherever he went in Australia. His closest adviser on foreign relations, Dewi Fortuna Anwar, realized in the early 1990s that ‘East Timor had become a real albatross’. Despite ‘Indonesia’s diverse assets, and social, political and economic capital, our diplomats had to spend all the time being defensive’ (Anwar 2015). When Habibie became Vice-President, he was told to take a closer look at Indonesian foreign policy. He was ‘very aware of East Timor but he said that he was not allowed to talk about it and was unwilling to push the envelope’ (Anwar 2015). Habibie saw that Portugal possessed a veto on closer Indonesian relations with the European Union. Upon becoming President in May 1998, he had to deal with the effects of the Asian Financial Crisis. Real GDP was 16.5% below the same period in 1997. The exchange rate was more than four times lower than the previous year. Imported goods had become prohibitively expensive, inflation was sky rocketing, the price of food was soaring and the purchasing power of the rupiah was plummeting. Wage earners had lost more than a third of their real incomes. Domestic unrest was threatening to get out of control. To compound all this, oil prices – a key source of government revenues – were stagnating at $10-12 per barrel. And yet, according to Anwar, ‘the moment he became President, all the questions from international visitors were about East Timor’. This led to the feeling that ‘the mothership is in danger of sinking. We really need to shed the excess baggage’ (Anwar 2015). The technocrats in Habibie’s cabinet were of a similar view. ICMI’s Adi Sasono was now the Minister for Cooperatives. He, like other non-military figures in the Cabinet, had played no part in the decision to invade East Timor. Ginandjar Kartasasmita, the Coordinating Minister for the Economy, also believed that East Timor should be given the right to self-determination. The technocrats resented having to bear the burden of a policy for which they were not responsible, with which they did not agree, and from which they derived no benefit.

Habibie discussed with other influential figures the idea of cutting East Timor loose via a referendum on independence. Two of these figures were senior military personnel: Major General Sintong Panjaitan

76 and Lieutenant General Feisal Tanjung. Both were familiar with the process of engineering desired ballot outcomes. They had been members of the military team that had manipulated the fraudulent Act of Free Choice in West Papua in 1969. Tanjung later said that the Indonesian military believed about 75% of East Timorese would vote to remain in Indonesia (Hisyam 1999: 219-232, 724, 738). The Indonesian regime, like other authoritarian regimes, had underestimated the extent of popular hostility. Encountering no opposition from Cabinet, the Indonesian government announced on 27 January 1999 that the East Timorese would be granted a referendum on independence.

This is how the second pillar of Indonesian rule over East Timor crumbled.

International support for the Indonesian occupation

Indonesia was a founding member of the Non-Aligned Movement. It had the largest Muslim population in the world, and was therefore very influential in the Organisation of Islamic Conference. Neither of these groups took steps to make it withdraw from East Timor. Indonesia was also a member of the Association of South-East Asian Nations, which had a policy of non-interference in one another’s internal affairs. Only four Western states (Cyprus, Greece, Iceland and Portugal) supported East Timor in the General Assembly from 1976 until 1982, when the matter was delegated to the UN Secretary General. Only about one-third of the UN General Assembly, largely Third World states, kept the question of East Timor alive in this period.

For its part, the United States provided military, financial and diplomatic support to Indonesia during the early years of the invasion and for much of the occupation. It provided 90% of the equipment used by Indonesian forcesin the invasion (US Congress 1977: 59-64). Asthe assault on the territory escalated, a western diplomat reported that Indonesian forces were ‘running out of military inventory. The operations on Timor have pushed them to the wall’ (McArthur 1977). The US government stepped in, helping them replenish their arsenal by authorizing weapons sales of $112 million for fiscal year 1978 (Nevins 2005: 53). Vice-President Walter Mondale then flew to Jakarta and announced the sale of A-4 Skyhawk ground-attack aircraft to the Indonesian Air Force (Chomsky and Herman 1979: 191-192).

Perhaps the most helpful supporter was the Australian government, which went out of its way to protect Indonesia from international criticism. Australian diplomats at the United Nations reported that their ‘immediate diplomatic problem and task’ was ‘to do what we can to reduce the pressure on the Indonesians.’ Australia’s Deputy Representative to the United Nations, Duncan Campbell, expressed ‘understanding and sympathy for Indonesia's position’, saying that Indonesia was ‘inevitably touched and troubled by the tragedy in Timor.’ Although Indonesia’s use of force was ‘a matter for deep regret and concern on the part of the Australian government,’ the fault, he said, was with Portugal, which ‘remains responsible’ for the ‘anarchy across the border.’ He said that Portugal’s ‘deficiencies in its role in the territory … have been the basic factor contributing to the present crisis.’ Australia’s Mission to the UN reported that ‘Campbell’s skilled and pertinacious negotiation in the Fourth Committee has kept the “ASEAN plus” group together and a relatively mild resolution seems to be emerging which will … avoid condemnation of Indonesia [and] avoid recognition of the so-called Democratic Republic [of East Timor] (Harry 1975).

Successive Australian Governments continued in this vein. Prime Minister Malcolm Fraser ordered the arrest of activists who tried to communicate by radio with East Timor, the interdiction of supply boats carrying humanitarian aid to Timor, and the denial of a visitor’s visa to East Timorese independence campaigners. Australia became the only western country to officially recognise Indonesia’s annexation of East Timor. The Australian government’s conduct followed a recognizable pattern of behaviour: it denied the severity of the humanitarian crisis in the territory, deflected responsibility away from the Indonesian government, and laid the blame on Portugal and the East Timorese people (Kohen and Quance 1980; Job 2018). A bipartisan consensus took hold in Australia. Regardless of which political party happened to be in power, Australian governments knew that no parliamentary opposition would campaign for East Timor’s self-determination. The bipartisan consensus therefore gave successive governments a margin of comfort necessary to neutralise public opinion. An Indonesian scholar

77 observed that ‘Australian foreign policy changes from one regime to another are largely incremental, not radical’ because both major political parties are ‘willing to cultivate a cordial relationship with Indonesia, regardless of the latter’s position on East Timor. They remain steadfast in their attitude even though local backbenchers and the media are pushing for tougher Australian measures against Indonesia’ (Rezasyah 1996). This bipartisan consensus remained in place until 1997, when it was fractured dramatically and irreversibly by the Australian Labor Party’s spokesperson on Foreign Affairs, Laurie Brereton (Fernandes 2011: 164-174).

Things became more fluid after Indonesia permitted the East Timorese people a referendum on independence. For the first time in more than two decades, a large number of foreign observers established a presence in the territory. The United Nations accredited about 600 journalists, and nearly 2,300 observers to monitor the referendum (CAVR 2013: 288-9). Indonesia’s campaign of terror and intimidation could not achieve its goal of preventing a vote, given their presence. The ballot was held on 30 August 1999. The results were announced on Saturday 4 September 1999. 78.5% of registered voters had opted for independence from Indonesia. The Indonesian authorities claimed the ballot was rigged and made various allegations of bias, all of which were investigated by the United Nations and found to be unjustified. Indonesia then moved swiftly to try to reverse the result of the ballot. It used more violence and intimidation to remove foreign observers from the territory. It drove the local population across the border, and deployed assassination squads to hunt down and kill the leadership of the independence movement.

In an atmosphere of intense pressure and international outrage, the United States finally stepped in and informed the Indonesian generals that the time had come to withdraw. Admiral Dennis Blair, Commander-In-Chief of US forces in the Pacific, met Indonesian Defence Minister and Chief of the Armed Forces, General Wiranto in Jakarta on 8 September 1999. The records of the meeting indicate that Blair urged General Wiranto to ‘pull back from the brink of disaster’ and to provide ‘immediate evidence’ of having done so: Despite repeated assurances that the Indonesian armed forces could fulfill its obligations to maintain security in East Timor, despite sending substantial numbers of new troops to the territory and taking the extraordinary step of imposing martial law, East Timor has descended into anarchy… Further deterioration of the situation will not only cause unnecessary loss of life, it will do potentially irrevocable damage to Indonesia's relationship with the rest of the world, including the US. As you know, a coalition of concerned nations is willing to send a multinational force to East Timor; such a force would aim to stabilize the situation until the MPR [the legislative branch in Indonesia's political system] meets to endorse the outcome of the election, then new arrangements would be made with the UN. The whole world is watching as this tragedy unfolds, and international condemnation of Indonesia has grown to a fever pitch. The window of opportunity in which Indonesia can salvage its relations with the world is rapidly shutting (Barker 2019).

President Bill Clinton was briefed on the East Timor situation by Admiral Dennis Blair, fresh from his meeting with General Wiranto. Clinton then announced that Indonesia ‘must invite – it must invite – the international community to assist in restoring security. It must allow international relief agencies to help people on the ground. It must move forward with the transition to independence. Having allowed the vote and gotten such a clear, unambiguous answer, we cannot have a reversal of course here’ (Clinton 1999a). A few hours later, whilst aboard Air Force One on the final leg of a flight to Auckland for the Asia Pacific Economic Cooperation (APEC) summit, Clinton issued his strongest statement yet, accusing the TNI of direct involvement: ‘It is clear the Indonesian military is aiding and abetting the militia violence… This is simply unacceptable’ (Clinton 1999b). International pressure was mounting on Indonesia from other quarters too. As David Webster has shown, Canadian officials hoped to work with Australia but Australian officials, including foreign minister Alexander Downer, declined Canadian requests that Australia take the lead on several measures designed to pressure Indonesia to accept an international security force able to stop pro-Indonesia killings. Instead, Canada and New Zealand took the lead at APEC (Webster 2020). Concerted and unrelenting international pressure removed all sources of comfort for Indonesian policymakers.

78 The Indonesian military’s resistance ended within hours. On 12 September 1999, Habibie and Wiranto emerged from a special Cabinet meeting and agreed to accept an international peacekeeping force into East Timor. Indonesia made a last-ditch attempt to exclude Australia by seeking to determine the composition of the force, but this was quickly resolved by the US’s public insistence that Indonesia should ‘not be able to say who is in or not in the force and what the structure of the force would be’ (Pickering 1999). All senior Indonesian generals met at the Golf Club at the Armed Forces headquarters in Jakarta immediately afterwards. They decided they would not oppose the lodgment of the peacekeeping force. The International Force - East Timor (InterFET) under Australian leadership entered the territory on 20 September 1999.

To ensure there would be no lower-level initiatives to attack InterFET, US Secretary of Defence William Cohen met General Wiranto shortly afterwards. According to a State Department cable, Wiranto began by claiming the situation in East Timor had been ‘greatly exaggerated by the media’ and that things were now under control. He continued to deny that his military had backed the militias. Cohen responded by saying he would ‘have to be quite direct’. Indonesian dissatisfaction at the results of the polls ‘could never justify the rampage which had followed’. It was widely believed TNI supported the militia, and Cohen was also ‘concerned about indications that the militias in West Timor were considering ways in which they might be able to threaten InterFET. Such actions would be tragic if they were allowed. It was imperative that Wiranto show leadership in preventing such actions’. Cohen warned Wiranto that a ‘positive bilateral relationship … would not be possible unless Indonesia made progress’ (Barker 2019).

Cohen’s reading of the riot act marked the collapse of the third pillar of Indonesian rule over East Timor. The Indonesian high command was made to understand that the game was up. One of the most unlikely eventsin regional history had occurred. During World War II, a senior advisor to US President Roosevelt observed that the territory might eventually achieve self-government, but ‘it would certainly take a thousand years’ (Louis 1978: 237). East Timor’s aspirations for independence were widely regarded as impossible; it did not have a land border with a friendly state or an external supplier of weapons, and its fighters did not have a liberated area in which to recover between guerrilla operations. Given these conditions, its successful resistance is probably unique in the history of guerrilla warfare and independence struggles.

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