Well may John Howard try to save Australia’s face by the glory of East Timor peace-keeping, but nothing will save Australia’s face over its complicity in Indonesia’s East Timor war-making. The documents released on Tuesday confirm what many people in Australia have long suspected – that successive Australian Governments through a combination of naivety, stupidity and cupidity have been complicit in the violent subjugation of the rights of the people of East Timor by the Java-based Indonesian political-military regime. Australia implicitly encouraged the military takeover. It was forewarned about it. It did nothing on the international stage to prevent it. Worse, it did nothing to warn its own nations – five journalists – who were in the direct line of fire of the Indonesian invaders.
The best light possible to put on these events is naivety. Then Prime Minister Gough Whitlam foolishly thought that an indication that Australia would not resist integration of East Timor into Indonesia without force meant that Indonesia would allow an act of self-determination and that if that act of self-determination opted for integration Australia would welcome it. In fact Indonesia took it as a wink and a nod that Australia would not protest if Indonesia integrated East Timor by coercion. But naivety was followed by foolish complicity. Once Mr Whitlam had suggested that integration would not be opposed by Australia, according to the documents, Indonesian political and military leaders gave Australia on-going information about when, where and how the invasion leading to integration would take place. And Australia did nothing.
Malcolm Fraser who took over as Caretaker Prime Minister on November 11, 1975, says that the invasion has taken place by the time he took office and Department of Foreign Affairs officials did not brief him on the interchange between the previous Government and Indonesia. He therefore argues that he was in the clear. Documents to be released later this month will either verify or contradict this. In any event, the Fraser Government went along with integration and did not change policy even after the December election. Eventually, the Fraser Government gave de-jure recognition of the Indonesian integration, one of the very few countries in the world to do so.
One of the worse elements in the whole 25-year immoral fiasco is that having made the first blunder, no Australian Government had the courage to right the wrong. No government gave formal or even informal support to legitimate aspirations for self-determination by the East Timorese until the Suharto-Habibie regime crumbled last year when it at last became an easy option.
Instead Australian policy was guided by the advice initially given by Australian diplomats and foreign affairs officials, that any advance objection to the invasion or any objection later would require denial of advance warning to Australia by Indonesia. We would have to accuse Indonesia of lying. Australian painted itself into a corner and continued repainting for 25 years while Indonesia committed grave human-rights breaches on the people of East Timor.
In those 25 years, governments from both sides and their diplomatic and bureaucratic advisers gave the constant line that Indonesia was going to invade anyway; that in the light of chaos and cold-war atmosphere of the time integration with Indonesia was the only option; that co-operation with Indonesia was a better way of securing peace and human-rights in East Timor and that oil revenue should be shared between Indonesia and Australia so that the East Timorese could get a share via Indonesia. Each one of these things has been proven a damning lie by the documents released yesterday and the events of the past year.
The lessons must be for greater openness in government, greater questioning of government and for governments in foreign affairs to reject the path of being consistently wrong in favour of one of being inconsistent but ultimately right. But what a ghastly price the people of East Timor have had to pay for those lessons.
And what was the result of all that pro-Indonesian pragmatism? We got no thanks for it in the long run.