AT STANFORDS IN London’s Covent Garden, reputedly the best map shop in the world, I asked for a map of the island of Timor. ‘Timor?’ said a hesitant sales assistant. ‘Would you please come with me?’ We crossed the floor and stood staring at shelves marked ‘South East Asia’. ‘Forgive me,’ he said, ‘where exactly is it?’
‘Just north of Australia.’
‘Oh yes, of course.’ After a search, all he could find was an aeronautical map with large blank areas stamped ‘Relief Data Incomplete’. More apologies. ‘I have never been asked for Timor,’ he said. ‘Isn’t that extraordinary?’
Such is the depth of the silence that has enveloped Timor, or specifically East Timor, the part of the island under an illegal Indonesian occupation since 1975. Other places on the planet may seem more remote; none has been as defiled and abused by murderous forces or as abandoned by the ‘international community’, whose principals are complicit in one of the great, unrecognised crimes of the twentieth century. I write that carefully; not even Pol Pot succeeded in killing, proportionally, as many Cambodians as the Indonesian dictator, Suharto, and his fellow generals have killed in East Timor.
James Dunn, the former Australian consul in East Timor and adviser to the Australian Parliament, has made a study of census statistics since the Indonesians invaded. ‘Before the invasion,’ he told me, ‘East Timor had a population of 688,000, which was growing at just on 2 per cent per annum. Assuming it didn’t grow any faster, the population today ought to be 980,000 or more, almost a million people. If you look at the recent Indonesian census, the Timorese population is probably 650,000. That means it’s actually less than it was eighteen years ago. I don’t think there is any case in post-World War Two history where such a decline of population has occurred in these circumstances. It’s quite incredible; it’s worse than Cambodia and Ethiopia.’1
Where are all these missing Timorese? The facts ought to be well known, but are not. As a direct result of the Indonesian invasion and occupation, which continues, some 200,000 people, or a third of the population, have died. This estimate was first made in 1983, by the head of the Roman Catholic Church in East Timor, following an admission by the Indonesian Department of Defence and Security that the civilian population of East Timor had halved since the invasion.2 In 1993 the Foreign Affairs Committee of the Australian Parliament reported that ‘at least 200,000’ had died under the Indonesian occupation.3
Moreover, this figure has been secretly accepted by Western governments, as the CIA operations officer in Indonesia at the time of the invasion confirmed to me in 1993.4 What in other countries would have been condemned and punished as an act of barbarism and a crime against humanity has, it seems, been quietly deemed acceptable. When pressed in an interview Gareth Evans, the Australian foreign affairs minister, whose policies have supported the Suharto regime, admitted that the number of East Timorese dead ‘is horrifyingly large’.5
How they died has been Indonesia’s and its allies’ great secret. Western intelligence has documented the unfolding of the genocide since the first Indonesian paratroopers landed in the capital, Dili, on December 7, 1975 – less than two months after two Australian television crews were murdered by the Indonesian military, leaving just one foreign reporter, Roger East, to witness the invasion. He became the sixth journalist to die there, shot through the head with his hands tied behind his back, his body thrown into the sea.
As a result, in the age of television few images and reported words reached the outside world. There was just one radio voice, picked up in Darwin, Australia, 300 miles to the south, rising and falling in the static. ‘The soldiers are killing indiscriminately,’ it said. ‘Women and children are being shot in the streets. We are all going to be killed. I repeat, we are all going to be killed . . . This is an appeal for international help. This is an SOS. We appeal to the Australian people. Please help us . . .’6
No help came. Tens of thousands of people died resisting the invasion, or were slaughtered without reason.7 Or they died in concentration camps where Indonesian troops herded peasants whose villages were razed. Or they starved. ‘I was the CIA desk officer in Jakarta at that time,’ Philip Liechty told me, ‘I saw the intelligence that came from hard, firm sources in East Timor. There were people being herded into school buildings by Indonesian soldiers and the buildings set on fire; anyone trying to get out was shot. There were people herded into fields and machine-gunned, and hunted in the mountains simply because they were there. We knew the place was a free fire zone. None of that got out.’
The Indonesian military all but closed East Timor to the outside world, making it extremely difficult to verify what was happening there and relatively easy for Jakarta and its defenders to plead ignorance of the atrocities. However, information from credible sources did get out. In 1977, two nuns in Lisbon received a letter from a priest in hiding in East Timor. ‘The invaders’, he wrote, ‘have intensified their attacks from land, sea and air. The bombers do not stop all day. Hundreds die every day. The bodies of the victims become food for carnivorous birds. Villages have been completely destroyed. The barbarities, understandable in the Middle Ages, justifiable in the Stone Age, all the organised evil have spread deep roots in Timor. The terror of arbitrary imprisonment is our daily bread. I am on the persona non grata list and any day I could disappear. Genocide will come soon . . .’8 Another survivor wrote, ‘The luck of the Timorese is to be born in tears, to live in tears and to die in tears.’9
‘Anyone can come to East Timor,’ say the Indonesians. According to Amnesty International, at least 33,000 people remain on an official government blacklist restricting entry to and exit from the country.10 Those who are granted visas are shepherded, restricted and watched. Journalists who attempt to enter as tourists are generally discovered and deported. In the week I left London for Sydney, en route to East Timor, an Australian film maker, David Bradbury, was arrested in Dili and his videotape confiscated. In the preceding month, correspondents of the Washington Post, Frankfurter Allgemeine and the Sydney Morning Herald had applied for visas simply to travel to Indonesia; all were refused. In 1994, as the UN Human Rights Commission again considered East Timor and my film, Death of a Nation, was shown in a number of countries, two brief, highly restricted press tours were arranged.
The regime, understandably, is frightened of the media, especially television. On November 12, 1991 a British cameraman, Max Stahl (a pseudonym), recorded Indonesian troops shooting and beating to death scores of young people in the Santa Cruz cemetery in Dili. His videotape, which he buried among the graves before he himself was arrested, was shown around the world. When some, like Foreign Affairs Minister Evans, sought to explain away the massacre – which had left more than 450 people dead and ‘disappeared’11 – as an ‘aberration’,12 their apologetics were undermined not only by the reaction of the Indonesian regime, whose senior military officer said he wished to shoot and ‘wipe out’ more ‘delinquents’,13 but by international revulsion at the pictures of wounded youngsters dying among the gravestones.
If British television ever reclaimed the power of its documentary tradition it was in Max Stahl’s report, made with such skill and bravery. I regret I cannot use his own name; that would identify those of the East Timorese resistance who helped him, and have since helped me.
Max had got in touch with me earlier that year and suggested we go to East Timor together, but events had conspired against my going. For years I had been listening to friends in Australia vent their frustration at not being able to travel freely in East Timor and to film unhindered. Gil Scrine’s Buried Alive and Mandy King’s and James Kesteven’s Shadow over Timor were both fine films that documented the collusive role played by the West, notably Australia, in the suffering of the Timorese. However, the wall that Suharto and his generals had built around Indonesia’s ‘27th province’ remained the obstacle it was intended to be.
For me, the Australian dimension to the genocide in East Timor is especially disturbing. In the Sydney street where I grew up in the years following the Second World War were several ‘diggers’ (veterans) who had fought the Japanese in Asia. One of them, the father of one of my earliest friends, would display a ceremonial sword he had taken from a Japanese he had killed during an ambush on the ‘Portuguese island’. It was common to describe Australia’s neighbours in racist terms; and to him, the Timorese were ‘boongs’ and ‘fuzzy wuzzies’; but he also spoke of them with unusual affection and admiration, and would point in a school atlas to where he had served as a commando and talk of the people he had ‘left behind’. He had regrets.
It was many years before I understood the importance of these regrets. In December 1941, Australian commandos invaded the neutral Portuguese colony of East Timor in an attempt to prevent the Japanese building airfields from which they could launch an invasion of northern Australia. The arrival of the Australians had the effect of drawing the Japanese to island communities they might otherwise have spared. The Australians fought a classic guerrilla campaign, disrupting a numerically superior Japanese force, and their exploits passed into popular legend, dramatised by Damien Parer’s 1942 film, Men of Timor. They were able to achieve this only because of a remarkably close relationship forged with the Timorese, who supplied and protected them and who themselves fought like lions.
As a result of this succour, the Australians lost only forty men. The Timorese, however, paid a dreadful price. As many as 60,000 were killed, or 14 per cent of the population. Many died under torture after the Australians hurriedly withdrew, having promised to take people with them; they took no one.
‘We shared their homes,’ recalled John (‘Paddy’) Kenneally, then a young commando private. ‘You found Australian soldiers sleeping on one side, the fire in the middle, and on the other side would be a granddad and grandmother and all the children and a spare dog or two . . . The night on the beach when we left was heart-breaking. [The Timorese] were crying their eyes out . . . We went to Timor and brought nothing but misery on those poor people. That is all they got out of helping us – misery.’14
In 1943, the Royal Australian Airforce dropped leaflets which began, Os vossos amigos não vos esquecem – your friends do not forget you. When the war ended, the government sent the Timorese a wreath of roses and bougainvillea, then promptly forgot about them for twenty years when the foreign affairs minister was moved to describe their country as ‘an anachronism, not capable of independence’.15
In 1987 I interviewed Arthur (‘Steve’) Stevenson, a former commando. He told the story of Celestino dos Anjos, a Timorese trained by the Australians, whose ingenuity and courage had saved his life, and other Australian lives, behind Japanese lines. Steve Stevenson returned to Timor in 1970 and had an emotional reunion with Celestino. ‘I went to his village,’ he said. ‘We had a son the same age. The bond between us was wonderful. I owed the man the debt of life. When I got back to Australia I tried to get him the military recognition he deserved, but this wasn’t possible as the Timorese were not officially part of the Australian army. I eventually got him one of those loyalty medals they handed out around the islands. To make it special, I arranged for the Governor of Timor to pin it on Celestino. That was 1972. I was there, beside him.’
In 1975 Steve Stevenson heard that Celestino had survived the Indonesian invasion, then heard nothing for almost eleven years. In 1986 he received a letter from Celestino’s son, Virgilio, dated two years earlier. Written in Portuguese, it told of Celestino’s murder. The son wrote that in August 1983 Indonesian forces entered their village of Kraras . . . ‘They looted, burned and devastated everything and massacred over 200 people inside their huts, including old people, the sick and babies . . . four battalions encircled Bibileo and fighter aircraft bombed the area intensively during the following weeks.’ The Indonesians, he wrote, ‘captured about 800 people’ who were ‘massacred by machine-gun fire . . . on 27/9/83 they called my father and my wife, and not far from the camp, they told my father to dig his own grave and when they saw it was deep enough to receive him, they machine-gunned him into the grave. They next told my pregnant wife to dig her own grave but she insisted that she preferred to share my father’s grave. They then pushed her into the grave and killed her in the same manner as my father.’16
Vigilio and his brother, who escaped, joined the Fretilin guerrillas. In 1991 Steve Stevenson learned of their deaths. ‘When Celestino and I were reunited in 1970,’ he said, ‘he didn’t ask me why Australia let him and his people down, why we deserted them. He felt that was a consequence of war. It was as if the Japanese reprisals hadn’t happened! But for us, a free people, to let the Timorese down, to watch while the Indonesians mark their boots on them is intolerable. I dream about that man and his family, all gone . . .’ At the end of our conversation, he turned away and wept. He died in 1992.
The history of East Timor is very different from that of the other islands that make up the volcanic stepping stones, rising from clear deep seas, east of Bali. The Suharto regime has tried to justify its illegal occupation on the grounds of what it calls ‘deeply felt and longstanding ties . . . of common brotherhood’. In fact, the East Timorese have little in common with Indonesia and especially the Javanese who rule it. Descended from the Atoni people of the highlands, Malay and Melanesian immigrants and Chinese, Arab and Gujerati traders, they have over the centuries developed strikingly different languages and culture from what is now Indonesia. Whereas most Indonesians are Muslim or Hindu, the East Timorese are animist or Roman Catholic. Even their colonial experience was different, with the Portuguese ‘latinising’ the eastern half of the island and insulating it from the upheavals of the Dutch colonies, including West Timor, that became Indonesia in 1949.
Unlike the Dutch, the Portuguese were interested in trade, not settlement. They made no attempt to disrupt a civilisation that was divided into kingdoms, or rais, ruled by a king or liurai. The rais were made up of tribal groups which divided into clans, or village units. The thread was kinship; few places on earth have such strong ties of family. Today, exiled Timorese, with feats of memory, can name their hundreds of ‘close’ relatives.
While they competed with the Dutch for the white aromatic sandalwood of the small trees that covered the mountains and which they sold at great profit in India and Persia, the Portuguese adapted their administrative system to the village units. Their rule was benign, neglectful and, as in other Portuguese colonies, multi-racial. ‘What did stick out like a thumb’, recalled Paddy Kenneally, ‘was the lack of racism. The Anglo-Saxons or the Dutch or the Germans would take native mistresses and they might do something for the children without admitting to them openly, but the Portuguese just didn’t seem to have that gulf. It was usual to see a Portuguese properly married to a native wife . . . At gatherings you’d see the full range of mixtures in the colours and looks all talking away happily. Some were a mixture of Chinese, Portuguese, Timorese and there were some Portuguese African and Goan Indian troops . . . So in one family some would be black, some white and everything in between, and you’d get some attractive combinations with a dash of this or a dash of that. I found the Timorese very attractive, with beautiful eyes and teeth, unless they got into the betel nut. It’s a kind of drug. They use lime with it and it can wear their teeth away . . .’17
Not even the Catholic Church, it seems, resorted to forced conversion, which perhaps explains why Christian and animist beliefs and prejudices coexist in harmony. However, the church, as elsewhere, ran the schools and created an elite that was indebted to its liturgy of power. This changed dramatically with the Indonesian invasion. An East Timorese church emerged, similar to that of the popular ‘political’ church of Central America. Its priesthood became more Timorese, and for the first time mass was said not in Portuguese but in Tetum, the Timorese lingua franca. This represented a direct challenge to the Indonesian ban on the institutional use of all languages except that of the state, Bahasa Indonesia. Thus the church forged a solidarity with the people and with the resistance and became, as Peter Carey has written, ‘the only institution capable of communicating independently with the outside world and of articulating the pain of the East Timorese people’.18 In under two decades (from 1975) the proportion of nominal Catholics has shot up from less than 30 per cent to over 80 per cent of the population.
In 1989, Bishop Carlos Felipe Ximenes Belo, the head of the Catholic Church in East Timor and himself a Timorese, appealed directly to the world in a letter to the United Nations Secretary-General. ‘We are dying as a people and as a nation,’ he wrote.19 He received no reply.
In April 1974, Portugal’s old fascist order, established by Antonio de Oliveira Salazar, was swept aside by the Revolucão dos Cravos, the ‘Carnation Revolution’. Events in Lisbon moved quickly and chaotically. The new government, drawn from the left-wing Armed Forces Movement, began to decolonise the last of Europe’s great empires by offering almost immediate independence to the African colonies of Angola, Mozambique and Guinea-Bisseau, which were already in revolt, and to the Cape Verde islands, São Tome and Principe. The tiny ‘overseas province’ of East Timor, ‘asleep at the end of the earth’, as one Portuguese commentator later wrote, ‘was on no one’s list of priorities’.
However, within a month of the revolution in Lisbon, three political groups had formed in East Timor. The Timorese Democratic Union (UDT), led by members of the colonial administrative elite and coffee plantation owners, called for federation with Portugal and eventually independence. The Timorese Social Democratic Association (ASDT), which later became the Revolutionary Front for an Independent East Timor, or Fretilin, comprised most of the younger nationalist opposition who wanted genuine economic reforms. A third party, the Timorese Popular Democratic Association (Apodeti) drew its tiny membership from the border with West Timor and wanted integration with Indonesia.
During the campaign, ‘We criss-crossed the country,’ wrote José Ramos Horta,fn1 who is today Fretilin’s foreign minister in exile. ‘Our theme was simple. We spoke the language of the people: “Are we human beings or a sack of potatoes to be sold to another country?” The Timorese, proud and independent, responded enthusiastically to the cry for independence. A literacy campaign was launched; student brigades taught children and adults to read and write in their own language for the first time ever. They helped the people build schools and health centres, where they taught nutrition and hygiene; paramedics were mobilised for a vaccination campaign . . . Nicolau Lobato [a Fretilin leader who was later killed] inaugurated the co-operative schemes that became so popular . . .’20
In June 1974, José Ramos Horta travelled to Jakarta, where he met the Indonesian foreign minister, Adam Malik. ‘He told me he sympathised “whole-heartedly” with the East Timorese desire for independence,’ said Ramos Horta. ‘He said that Indonesia respected “the right of every nation [to independence] with no exception for the people of Timor”. The Government of Indonesia had “no intention to increase or expand their territory, or to occupy territories other than what is stipulated in the Constitution . . . Whoever will govern East Timor in the future after independence can be assured that the Government of Indonesia will always strive to maintain good relations for the benefit of both countries”.’21
As a piece of deception this has few equals. As James Dunn has pointed out, the conspiracy to integrate East Timor forcibly had already begun when Malik was issuing his reassurances. The Indonesian military dictatorship believed that Fretilin would turn East Timor into a base for communist insurgency, ‘another Cuba’, which was absurd. Although Fretilin included students recently returned from Lisbon with Marxist views, most of the leaders were Catholic socialists who looked to the Cape Verde philosopher Amical Cabral and the Brazilian priest and educator Paulo Friere; or, like José Ramos Horta, they took Swedish social democracy as their model. Above all, they were nationalists who wanted their people to control their own destinies, trade and resources. This was no more than the Indonesian nationalists had demanded for themselves when they threw the Dutch out of their country. The Fretilin leaders had also made clear that they wanted to live at peace with their huge neighbour, the fifth largest nation on earth.
Like all small nations living in the shadow of a regional power, the East Timorese looked to another likely guarantor of their right to independence. Many of Fretilin’s leaders were the sons of Timorese who had fought for the Australians against the Japanese in the Second World War and were confident that their former allies would discharge their moral debt, especially now that the inspiring anti-colonialist Gough Whitlam was prime minister. His government would surely support the rights of the people of East Timor, as it had supported those of other colonised or subjugated nations. The Whitlam government had been among the first to recognise the former Portuguese colony of Guinea-Bisseau; and Whitlam’s personal relationship with Suharto suggested that his views would be taken seriously in Jakarta.
What Fretilin’s leaders could not possibly measure was the depth and complexity of the Australian establishment’s obsession with Indonesia. In recent years deference to Jakarta has become an article of faith second only in importance to a veiled obedience to Washington among the makers of Australian foreign policy. By calling into question the latter Whitlam eventually hastened his own political demise; by acquiescing in a ‘special relationship’ with Jakarta, he appeared to obey the instincts that have dominated Australia’s post-Second World War view of the world, which – and it is a great irony – he had pledged to change.22
Since the Japanese bombed Darwin in 1942 and terrified those of us clinging to the southern seaboard, there has been a fear of Asia: that one day the brown and yellow ‘hordes’ to the north will fall down on under-populated white Australia as if by the force of gravity. This is seldom admitted, of course, and perhaps these days it is no longer widely believed. Strategic studies regularly assure the Australian people that they have nothing to fear from anyone. Yet ‘Asia’ lies deep within the political psyche; and ‘living with Asia’ is often the excuse for some astonishing acts of appeasement, known as realpolitik.
Long before he became prime minister, Gough Whitlam, already an outspoken champion of the rights of small nations, made it clear that the Indonesian archipelago was an exception. In 1963 he said that, although the East Timorese had the right to self-determination, ‘we must not get bogged down in another futile argument over sovereignty’.23 He was referring to West New Guinea, which Indonesia had swallowed in the early 1960s, after a long dispute with Australia and the United Nations. But there were no grounds for a dispute over East Timor. This was a Portuguese colony whose people had the same rights, under the UN Charter, as any other colonial people. Yet, wrote James Dunn, ‘No thought was given to what the East Timorese might want . . . The attitude that this ugly relic of old-world colonialism should not be allowed to get in the way of the urgent task of improving Australia–Indonesian relations came to dominate.’24
By 1966, after the populist Indonesian president Sukarno had been effectively deposed by Suharto, Australian politicians rushed to reward the new regime with their support for a consortium of Western aid. An influential Australian Indonesia specialist, Professor J. A. C. Mackie, expressed this enthusiasm in a eulogy for the Suharto regime’s ‘moderate’ character. The new government, he declared, was ‘clearly anti-communist and committed to a low-key, unassertive foreign policy, with a new stress on regionalism and “good neighbourly” relations with nearby countries. The stage was set for the working out of a new and more constructive, enduring set of links.’25
The fact that Suharto and his generals had, in seizing power, killed between 300,000 and a million Indonesians was not mentioned, as if this was irrelevant to the ‘new and constructive set of links’; and indeed it was.
The United States, to which Australia deferred in strategic matters in its region, had no time for Suharto’s predecessor, ‘Bung’ Sukarno. Under the non-aligned Sukarno, mass trade union, peasant, women’s and cultural movements had flourished. Between 1959 and 1965, more than 15 million people joined political parties or affiliated mass organisations that were encouraged to challenge British and American influence in South East Asia.26 Indonesia had one of the largest communist parties in the world.
None of this was acceptable to Washington which, in 1949, had declared that the ‘major function of the region was as a source of raw materials and a market for Japan and Western Europe’, in an emerging global system managed by the United States and ultimately subordinated to American interests.27 In 1967 Richard Nixon wrote, ‘With its 100 million people and its 300-mile arc of islands containing the region’s richest hoard of natural resources, Indonesia is the greatest prize in South East Asia.’28
A ‘new and constructive set of links’ between the United States and the Indonesian military had long been forged, allowing the generals to receive US equipment in spite of Sukarno’s hostility. In 1965, following rumours of a coup against Sukarno, six generals were murdered in what is often described as a ‘communist coup’. If it was that, it had unique features. None of the middle-ranking military officers who took part was a communist; and the US embassy denied that the Indonesian Communist Party (PKI) had any reason to take part.29
As Noam Chomsky has pointed out, the coup ‘miraculously spared the pro-US Suharto, while targeting elements of the military considered anti-American’ and allowing Suharto to carry out ‘an actual military coup which led to the slaughter of half a million people in a few months, mostly landless peasants, and crushed the popular-based Communist Party; at the same time, incidentally, turning Indonesia into a “paradise for investors”.’30
Declassified American documents have since revealed that the United States not only supported the slaughter but helped the generals to plan and execute it. The CIA gave them a ‘hit list’ of 5,000 Communist Party supporters including party leaders, regional committee members and heads of trade unions and women’s and youth groups, who were hunted down and killed.
In 1990 a former US embassy official in Jakarta disclosed that he had spent two years drawing up the hit list, which was ‘a big help to the army’. ‘I probably have a lot of blood on my hands,’ he said, ‘but that’s not all bad. There’s a time when you have to strike hard at a decisive moment.’ The list had been approved by the US Ambassador, who stated that the US had ‘a lot more information’ on the PKI than the Indonesian army. As people on the list were murdered, their names were crossed off by American officials.31
With the slaughter under way, US Secretary of State Dean Rusk cabled the Jakarta embassy that the ‘campaign against [the] PKI’ must continue and that the military ‘are [the] only force capable of creating order in Indonesia.’ The United States, he said, was prepared to back a ‘major military campaign against [the] PKI’. The US Ambassador passed this on to the generals, making it clear ‘that the Embassy and the US Government are generally sympathetic with and admiring of what the army is doing’. When the military replied that they needed more American weapons to sustain the slaughter, they were told that ‘carefully placed assistance’ – covert aid – would ‘help the army cope . . .’
‘No single American action in the period after 1945’, wrote the historian Gabriel Kolko, ‘was as bloodthirsty as its role in Indonesia, for it tried to initiate the massacre, and it did everything in its power to encourage Suharto.’32
The Congress and the mainstream American press welcomed the bloody events as the ‘gleam of light in Asia’ . . . ‘the West’s best news for years in Asia’ . . . ‘hope where there once was none’. The American land invasion of Vietnam in March of that year, 1965, was now justified as providing a ‘shield’ behind which the Indonesian generals were encouraged to carry out their important anti-communist work.33
The British Labour government did not stand in their way. A year after the extermination campaign, Foreign Secretary Michael Stewart visited Indonesia and reported ‘reach[ing] a good understanding’ with the Foreign Secretary, Adam Malik, a ‘remarkable man’ who was ‘resolved to keep his country at peace’.34 This remarkable man was to play a key role in the events that led to the second great slaughter, in East Timor.
In September 1974 Australia’s prime minister, Gough Whitlam, met President Suharto at the village of Wonosobo in Java. According to well-informed journalists travelling with him, Whitlam’s clear signal to Suharto was that East Timor was his for the taking. Under the headline, ‘Canberra aim for Timor: go Indonesian’, Hugh Armfield of the Melbourne Age conveyed the background briefing he was given by Australian officials. ‘Australia is expected to take a significant step in the next few weeks’, he wrote, ‘towards ensuring that the tiny enclave on Timor becomes part of Indonesia. Australia and Indonesia are likely to make a joint approach to Portugal, urging that this is the only practical solution for its 450-year-old colony . . . Mr. Whitlam and President Suharto agreed last weekend that the best and most realistic future for Timor was association with Indonesia’.35
Peter Hastings of the Sydney Morning Herald, who was close to the Whitlam entourage, reported, ‘Mr. Whitlam went much further, one suspects, than his Indonesian hosts required in publicly announcing, by means of a Foreign Affairs official press briefing, that “an independent Timor would be an unviable state and a potential threat to the area”, even though the AAP report added that the Prime Minister is thought to have made clear that the people of the colony should have the ultimate decision on their future’.36
Some have argued that Whitlam’s extraordinary, contradictory statements stemmed from disinterest, even ignorance. Certainly, applying his reasoning, it could be said that the small independent Pacific states of Nauru, Tonga, Samoa and Papua New Guinea were also ‘unviable’. Peter Hastings later blamed Whitlam’s advisers who, he wrote, ‘furnished the Prime Minister with such an unsophisticated briefing before he left for Central Java to give away, without being asked, what was not his to give away.’37
Yet Gough Whitlam had built a reputation as a politician who did not rely on advisers. His actions remain a puzzle. Here was a man who defended even the right of the Baltic states to independence from the Soviet Union. He was the champion of the weak against the strong: of the Vietnamese against Nixon and Kissinger, of draft resisters at home, of the Palestinians and Cubans, and Polynesians suffering under France’s nuclear tests. He was the first Australian prime minister to give land back to the Aborigines. His breadth of vision and determination to open up new horizons to the Australian people were, to my generation, without precedent; and perhaps here lies part of the explanation.
Whitlam wanted to lead Australia away from its Eurocentricity and give it a new, vital role in its own region. He wanted the great nations of Asia – China and Indonesia – to take white Australia seriously; and he was impatient to achieve this in what he must have known would be only a relatively brief period in office. ‘Perhaps he perceived’, wrote James Dunn who, like me, admired Whitlam, ‘that [Australia] would have become bogged down in an acrimonious and confrontational dispute with Indonesia, which may have revived all the “yellow peril” fears of the past, forcing us back, as it were, into our isolationist and racist shell’.38
Whatever his motives, tiny East Timor became, to paraphrase a remark by the present Indonesian foreign minister, ‘grit in his shoe’. What makes Whitlam even more of an enigma to his admirers is that, as the evidence of his misjudgement has mounted year upon year, he has taken a combative line, even flying to the United Nations in an attempt to get it to drop East Timor as an issue. In an article in the Sydney Morning Herald in 1991 he accused the Australian media of conducting a ‘vendetta against Indonesia since the deaths of two television teams’ and Fretilin of ‘massacres’ and general ‘brutality’ while not once referring to Indonesia’s genocide. On the contrary, he heaped praise upon the Indonesian dictator. ‘President Suharto is a reasonable and honourable man’, he wrote. ‘Every Australian ambassador will confirm that. It is outrageous what Australian newspapers and persons in public positions say about him and his Government . . . In due course our correspondence and the records of our conversations will reveal the range and depth of our relationship’.39 Did this ‘range and depth’ include discussion of Australia’s responsibility towards a small and vulnerable neighbour and the predictable consequences of Indonesian aggression?
Within weeks of the Whitlam/Suharto meeting in Java, a clutch of generals close to Suharto launched a secret intelligence operation, code-named Operasi Komodo, aimed at destroying the East Timorese independence movement, which, far from being ‘unviable’, was then making significant progress.
In January 1975 Fretilin and its main opponent, UDT, established a united front to demand independence. This was short-lived. Agents of Operasi Komodo influenced UDT, creating divisions, distrust and eventually conflict. The UDT leaders were told independence was only possible if the ‘communists’ of Fretilin were ‘neutralised’. Backed by Jakarta, UDT mounted a coup attempt with the Portuguese stepping aside and creating a political vacuum. This led to civil war and between 1,500 and 2,000 deaths. (When Indonesian officials and their foreign supporters attempt to explain the years of slaughter that followed the Indonesian invasion, they often blame the ‘civil war’ that lasted less than a month.)
During the coup attempt the Portuguese governor and administration left Dili for the nearby Atauro Island, to avoid being directly involved in the fighting. Fretilin had recently won a victory in local elections and was now firmly in control. Its popularity was confirmed by two Australian delegations that travelled widely in East Timor following the civil war. James Dunn was a member of a group from the Australian Council for Overseas Aid (ACOA). ‘Whatever the shortcomings of the Fretilin administration’, he reported, ‘it clearly enjoyed widespread support from the population, including many hitherto UDT supporters . . . Australian relief workers visited most parts of Timor and, without exception, they reported that there was no evidence of any insecurity or any hostility towards Fretilin. Indeed, Fretilin leaders were welcomed warmly and spontaneously in all main centres by crowds of Timorese. In my long association with Portuguese Timor, which goes back fourteen years, I had never before witnessed such demonstrations of spontaneous warmth and support from the indigenous population.’40
With Portugal distracted by political upheaval at home and Fretilin the de facto government in East Timor, Western governments became alarmed. In July, the British Ambassador in Jakarta, Sir John Archibald Ford, sent his Head of Chancery to East Timor. ‘The people of Portuguese Timor are in no condition to exercise the right of self-determination,’ he reported. ‘If it comes to the crunch and there is a row in the United Nations we should keep our heads down and avoid siding against the Indonesian Government.’41 Ford recommended to the Foreign Office that it was in Britain’s interests that Indonesia should ‘absorb the territory as soon as and as unobtrusively as possible’.42
The US Secretary of State, Henry Kissinger, having recently watched American power and his own ambitions humiliated in the ‘fall’ of Saigon, signalled to Jakarta that the United States would not object if Indonesia invaded East Timor.43 Within weeks a clandestine invasion began. On September 4, the CIA reported that ‘two Indonesian special forces groups entered Portuguese Timor’. On September 17 the CIA reported, ‘Jakarta is now sending guerrilla units into the Portuguese half of the island in order to engage Fretilin forces, encourage pro-Indonesian elements, and provoke incidents that would provide the Indonesians with an excuse to invade . . .’44
The CIA and other American intelligence agencies intercepted much of Indonesia’s military and intelligence communications at a secret base run by the Australian Defence Signals Directorate (DSD) near Darwin. The information gathered was shared under treaty arrangements with Canberra and London and summarised in the National Intelligence Daily, published by the CIA, which was on President Ford’s desk early each morning in 1975. Thus, Western governments knew well in advance Indonesia’s intentions and the day-by-day detail of its covert operations. Moreover, leaked diplomatic cables from Jakarta, notably those sent by the Australian Ambassador Richard Woolcott, confirmed this.
Ambassador Woolcott reported that two of the principal conspirators, including Suharto’s crony General Benny Murdani, had ‘assured’ him that when Indonesia decided to launch a full-scale invasion, Australia would get ‘not less than two hours’ notice’.45 In one remarkable cable sent to Canberra in August 1975, Woolcott argued Indonesia’s case and how Australian public opinion might be ‘assisted’. ‘What Indonesia now looks to from Australia, in the present situation,’ he wrote, ‘is some understanding of their attitude and possible action to assist public understanding in Australia rather than action on our part which could contribute to criticism of Indonesia’. The government could say publicly, Woolcott advised, that ‘Australia cannot condone the use of force in Timor, nor could we accept the principle that a country can intervene in a neighbouring territory because of concern, however well based that concern might be, over the situation there. At the same time [we] could concede that Indonesia has had a prolonged struggle for national unity and could not be expected to take lightly a breakdown in law and order in Portuguese Timor . . .’
Woolcott proposed that ‘[we] leave events to take their course . . . and act in a way which would be designed to minimise the public impact in Australia and show private understanding to Indonesia of their problems . . . although’, he added, ‘we do not want to become apologists for Indonesia’. He concluded, ‘I know I am recommending a pragmatic rather than a principled stand but that is what national interest and foreign policy is all about . . .’46 There was not a word of concern for the interests or the fate of the East Timorese, who were, it was apparent, expendable.
On November 28, 1975, Fretilin leaders unilaterally declared independence, establishing the Democratic Republic of East Timor. Ministers were sworn in before a cheering crowd in Dili, the Portuguese flag was lowered after 450 years, and a new flag, red, black and yellow with a white star, was raised. Across the border in Indonesian West Timor, foreign minister Adam Malik, the author of ‘whole-hearted’ assurances that Indonesia had no designs on East Timor, said, ‘Diplomacy is finished. The solution to the East Timor problem is now at the front line of battle.’47 There had, of course, been no diplomacy; Indonesian troops were already inside East Timor.
By December 4, foreign aid workers, journalists and some Fretilin members and their families had been evacuated from Dili; the invasion was expected the following day. But that was also the day President Ford and Henry Kissinger were due to arrive in Jakarta on a visit described by a State Department official as ‘the big wink’.48 The Americans demanded that the Indonesians wait to invade until after the President had left; and on December 7, as Air Force One climbed out of Indonesian airspace, the bloodbath began.
fn1 José Ramos Horta is today the Special Representative of the National Council of Maubere Resistance, an umbrella organisation based inside East Timor. It represents the political organisations, guerrilla army and civilian resistance. It describes itself as ‘non-ideological, the equivalent of a coalition government’.