1 Introduction East Timor: an Australian battleground In December 1975, Alarico Fernandes, a Minister in the government of the Democratic Republic of East Timor, broadcast a desperate radio message to Darwin, pleading for international assistance. He reported that Indonesian forces have been landed in Dili by sea… They are flying over Dili dropping out paratroopers… A lot of people have been killed indiscriminately… Women and children are going to be killed by Indonesian forces… we are going to be killed! SOS, we call for your help, this is an urgent call…1 Fernandes’ pleas went unheeded, and perhaps 200,000 of his compatriots would die as a result of the Indonesian occupation. Nearly a quarter of a century later, in September 1999, a distressingly familiar message was delivered by Joao Carrascalao, a representative of the East Timorese independence movement in Australia. He argued that because the East Timorese population had decisively voted for independence from Indonesia, they were now being systematically murdered and that the fascist Indonesian military machine and its civil government collaborators… are well on their way to their target of exterminating 344,580 East Timorese… These people will die, shot, hacked, tortured, raped and starved to death, unless the free, democratic nations of the world confront Indonesia today… please help now. If you don’t, there will be no East Timor tomorrow.2 1 Cited in Jill Jolliffe, East Timor: Nationalism and colonialism, St Lucia, University of Queensland Press, 1978, p. 232. 2 344,580 was the number of ballots cast for independence. Joao Carrascalao, Media release: Indonesia’s ethnic cleansing target: kill 344,580 East Timorese, National Council for Timorese Resistance, 08.09.1999 (accessed 29.05.2006, http://www.labournet.de/internationales/crnt.html). 2 This time though, the response from Australia was very different.3 By the end of September the Australian military had taken control of East Timor. They failed to prevent the deaths of around 1,500 East Timorese, the forced deportation of several hundred thousand people, and widespread physical destruction. But their presence had served as guarantee that East Timor would finally become an independent nation. It is the central concern of this thesis to explain this dramatic change in Australia’s response to East Timor’s suffering. For decades, the half-island of East Timor has been a battleground of Australian foreign policy, both literally and figuratively. Its position in the national consciousness was secured during World War Two, when Australia launched a pre- emptive invasion of the then Portuguese controlled territory, and subsequently engaged in guerilla fighting with Japanese forces. Amidst a chaotic decolonisation process, Indonesia invaded East Timor in 1975. Australia supported the Indonesian occupation until 1999, but it was a bitterly divisive policy domestically, attracting unusually vocal and long-lasting criticism. Indeed, East Timor became emblematic of debates over whether Australian foreign policy should pursue moral goals, or whether it should be conducted according to considerations of pure realpolitik. Australia’s 1999 military intervention provided a far more unifying and positive narrative about its foreign relations. To be sure, there have been debates about exactly why Australia intervened. There has also been no shortage of political recriminations about who might be responsible for the violence and destruction which accompanied East Timor’s independence ballot. Nonetheless, there is a near uniform consensus among commentators that the military deployment was a self- evidently positive development, which represented a fundamental break with previous Australian policy. Moreover, most existing accounts explain this change through the impact of ethical factors arising from outside the normal foreign policy making processes, although a range of differing political actors are ultimately identified as being responsible for the new policy. This consensus makes a fresh assessment of the East Timor intervention an important task for critical scholars of Australian international relations. General popular support for the deployment stood in marked contrast to the political polarisation and 3 The convention of using the country’s name as representative of policy makers is adhered to throughout, except where internal divisions are being emphasised. 3 at times overwhelming opposition with which other aspects of the Howard government’s foreign policy was met, notably its strong support for the United States’ invasion of Iraq. If the intervention in East Timor was indeed driven by substantially different interests to Canberra’s usual international realpolitik, then it would suggest a model for the more general reform of Australian foreign policy. If, however, as this thesis argues, the intervention represented a continuation of previous Australian policy in East Timor by other means, then the Howard government engineered a remarkable political victory, pursuing its own preferred policy while drawing support from those who were more normally its critics. Main argument of the thesis Currently, there are two main explanations of why Australia intervened in East Timor. The first, mainstream explanation is that Australia was motivated by natural and obvious humanitarian concerns for the East Timorese population. A second, more Left-wing position, holds that the Howard government was forced to act against its own wishes by a mass popular campaign, which demanded intervention. In contrast, it is argued here that Canberra’s dispatching of troops to East Timor can be more satisfactorily explained as an act of Australian imperialism, designed to protect Australia’s own security interests. It ensured that East Timor’s transition to independence went as smoothly as possible from that point onwards, and that the new state was relatively stable and friendly towards Australia. As such, while at one level obviously a repudiation of past policy, Australia’s military deployment more fundamentally pursued the same objectives as its earlier support for the Indonesian occupation. Crucial to this argument is a wider understanding of the historical development of Australia’s position within global affairs. To provide this context, this thesis employs a Marxist theory of imperialism, in which the international system is seen as being characterised by unavoidable economic and strategic competition among the major capitalist powers. As a middle ranking power, Australian policy makers are forced to accept the logic of this systematic rivalry, and take for granted that Australia may be drawn into wider conflicts between major powers in the Asia-Pacific region. Nonetheless, Australia is also an imperialist power in its own right, with its 4 significant economic and military power providing a substantial capacity to defend its interests in Southeast Asia and the Southwest Pacific. Most importantly, Australia has sought to ensure the existence of friendly and stable regimes in the Indonesian archipelago. Successive Australian governments have been driven by a fear that if a major power such as Japan or China gained a foothold in this region, it could then threaten Australia’s territory, or sever vital trade and communications routes. Australia’s relations with Indonesia since World War Two have been dominated by this concern, leading to policies as diverse as qualified support for Indonesian independence and strong backing for the Suharto dictatorship. The question of East Timor was subsumed within these wider security interests. Australia supported Indonesia’s invasion of the territory in 1975 not only to further the relationship with Jakarta, but also due to Australia’s own aversion to the creation of a small, strategically vulnerable neighbour. This strategy was reasonably successful as long as the Suharto dictatorship remained intact. By September 1999, however, Indonesian authoritarianism could no longer be relied upon to protect Australia’s strategic interests. Indonesia’s economy was decimated by the Asian financial crisis of 1997-1998, leading to a mass popular movement which forced Suharto to resign in May 1998. At the same time, a new wave of resistance within East Timor itself challenged Jakarta’s control of the territory. Faced with increasing political and financial pressures to resolve the East Timor question, Suharto’s successor BJ Habibie granted an independence referendum. The Indonesian military responded to their defeat in this ballot with a wave of mass killings, physical destruction and forced deportations. Their purpose, however, was not to retain the territory, but to punish the East Timorese population and warn other Indonesian provinces not to challenge Jakarta’s centralised rule. As the ballot approached, Australia was forced to confront the unwelcome reality that East Timor would soon become an independent nation. This was particularly troubling given the uncertain regional situation at the time, which came to be known as the ‘arc of instability’ across Australia’s northern approaches. The possibility that East Timor might become a weak or failed state, vulnerable to great power manipulation or causing further regional unrest, was no more attractive in 1999 than in 1975. 5 From early 1999, the Howard government therefore sought to reconcile two sometimes contradictory interests. On the one hand, Australia wanted the transition to independence to proceed as smoothly as possible, and to ensure that its own interests