When this is questioned, ministers have said that the Defence Department has been directed to undertake ‘a substantial program of reform, efficiencies and savings’ which are expected to yield $22.7 billion of savings during the next decade. However, that only allows internal changes of priority: these so called savings will simply be used for building up other areas of military activity, whereas other areas of government which are subject to an ‘efficiency dividend’, like the CSIRO and the National Library, lose funds every year.

Supporters could also argue that the promised increases are not likely to substantially increase the proportion of military spending in national income and that would be true. Real national income may well grow by an average of around 3 per cent a year and inflation is unlikely to be less than 2 per cent a year. But that is not the point. Guaranteeing military spending each year for the next 20 involves abandoning careful analysis of requirements. It assumes that the international military situation will steadily deteriorate and that purchases of more weapons and employment of more military personnel will be essential. This is a doctrine of despair, and is consistent with weakness of discussion about means which could contribute to strengthening security.

An early expression of the White Paper’s plans was the Defence budget for 2010–11, in which spending was increased by $1.57 billion to $26.8 billion. In the same budget the allocation for the Department of Foreign Affairs and Trade was $1.1 billion. So the increase in Australian military spending in 2010–11 is 50 per cent greater than the total allocation for diplomacy. This is simply irresponsible at a time when we have 18 per cent fewer diplomats posted overseas than in 1996 (due to the depredations of the Howard government). Australia has fewer overseas diplomatic missions than any other member of the G20. Yet diplomacy is the prime means of avoiding conflict as well as of representing Australian interests overseas.

This is happening at a time when the government’s principal commitment is to achieving a balanced budget by 2013. Such fiscal austerity requires spending cuts in many high priority activities, and constraints are being imposed on most. Why should defence be immune from those? It is also happening at a time when all other developed countries are searching for ways of reducing their military spending and many have already announced major cuts. The United States announced plans in January 2011 to slash $78 billion from the Pentagon’s budget during the next five years including by cancelling orders for new weapons. The British conservative government announced in October 2010 that defence spending would fall by 8 per cent over the next four years. ‘Harrier jump jets, the Navy’s flagship HMS Ark Royal and planned Nimrod spy planes are to be axed and 42,000 MoD and armed forces jobs cut by 2015’, reports the BBC.

The Australian increases are also happening at a time when there is no electoral pressure for increased military spending. Public opinion does not support the White Paper’s plans. The Australian Strategic Policy Institute Special Report on Public Opinion in Australia towards Defence, Security and Terrorism, Issue 16 concludes that ‘support for more defence spending has dropped to its lowest level since the end of the Cold War’. The reason is that ‘The proportion of voters seeing a security threat to Australia has declined consistently since the late 1960s’. Most voters are far more concerned with employment and living standards, health services and education than with defence. The Medicare card is of greater importance to the security of most Australians than increased military spending.

Why then have these perverse and sectorally skewed plans been made? Governments are necessarily in the business of prediction and no more so than on issues of defence and national security. So they turn to ‘defence planners’, who predict the future in order to enable governments to decide on defence policy. Those people, by training and environment, are pessimistic about what is going to happen. Their task is to warn of possible threats to national security, and when they sit down to think up threats and spend their professional lives discussing threats with their colleagues they end up with a long list of things that might just conceivably happen.

From a theoretical point of view, their starting point is the nation-state, and the assumption that nation-states are armed against each other in a global anarchy: best, therefore, to arm one’s own state to the teeth lest some other state invade. Never mind that the end of the Cold War, the emergence of globalisation and the development of new international norms about peacemaking and peacekeeping render such a view simplistic.

Unlike an earlier generation of Labor ministers in the Hawke and Keating governments, the Rudd government did not resist demands from the Defence Department, the weapons manufacturers, and the other members of military-industrial complex. In place of a focus on ‘defensive defence’, low-level threats and regional peacekeeping, they opted for ‘offensive defence’. The 2009 White Paper intensified key elements of Howard government defence policy, that is, forward projection of forces, strike capability, and high technology weapons systems, and, like the Coalition, promised increased real spending on defence every year.

In detail, the White Paper proposes buying: twelve submarines, which would be Australia’s largest ever single defence project; air-warfare destroyers and a new class of frigates to replace the ANZAC class ships; maritime-based land-attack cruise missiles; naval combat helicopters; 100 F-35 joint strike fighters; Wedgetail early warning and control aircraft; maritime surveillance and response aircraft; and around 1100 armoured combat vehicles. The period of acquisition is long, twenty years, but the costs are unprecedented in Australian peacetime defence spending.

The Military Silo

The White Paper discusses Australian defence as if it is in a silo, which enables defence to be planned in isolation from other dimensions of global affairs. The isolation of military strategy prevents discussion of the relative priority and weight given to other aspects of foreign policy such as comprehensive reviews of bilateral, regional and multilateral relations and alliances; political contact and discussions; diplomatic activity; multilateral engagement; peacemaking, peacekeeping and peacebuilding, especially negotiation, mediation and conciliation; development policy including official development assistance; international economic, financial, social (including human rights) and environmental relations; and global governance including its economic, social and environmental dimensions. Although the White Paper does mention some of these, they are not incorporated into the analysis.

A more holistic approach to national security would reflect a qualitative improvement in strategic thinking. Such a change would require a creative re-evaluation of Australia’s security requirements for a new Asia-Pacific century. This would entail the recognition that conventional military forces are commonly ill-suited to achieving desirable international outcomes. This in turn would require a considerable reallocation of human and financial resources to increase the capabilities of other national departments and national and multilateral agencies. The White Paper even acknowledges that many ‘argue that Defence should be considered in a whole-of-government security context that includes aid programs and diplomacy and contributions to non-government organisations’ (WP: 18) but explicitly chooses not to do this, instead treating military spending as if it is a closed world which can be considered in isolation from other factors which determine the degree of co-operation or hostility between countries.

In the wider world, political and social attention has turned to issues such as humanitarian emergencies, mass human rights abuses, intra-state conflict, state failure, terrorism and proliferation of weapons of mass destruction. Militaries are frequently required to play a key role in responding to potential conflict and its consequences and to natural disasters. So the range of activities that the military may be required to undertake has expanded substantially. This security-centred paradigm requires a reinvention of the roles for which the military prepare.

The largest single deployment of Australian troops in recent times has not been to our northern borders to protect the country from invasion or even to Iraq and Afghanistan, but rather to East Timor at the head of INTERFET, a coalition of the willing with UN authority. The interventions in East Timor and the Solomon Islands brought together the Australian Defence Force and the Australian Federal Police in joint projects for restoring law and order while building the state. The determining consideration in Australia’s defence planning should be likely contingencies of this and other kinds, not the remote possibility of international conflict or invasion.

Misjudging Threats

The Minister’s preface to the White Paper begins ‘There is no greater responsibility for a national government than the defence of the nation, its people and their interests’. This familiar claim for the pre-eminence of defence needs to be put in context. Protection from external threats is certainly one aspect of national and personal security but so are economic stability, opportunities for employment, environmental sustainability, high quality health and education services, safety on the streets and much more. The Minister’s claim exaggerates the importance of defence in peacetime and lays a foundation for the misleadingly narrow analysis. National security is only one aspect of national wellbeing.

The White Paper asserts that the ‘primary obligation [of defence] is to deter and defeat attack on Australia’ and moves straight on to address force structure, rather than discussing whether resisting a threat of invasion is currently or foreseeably the highest realistic priority. So the principal issue which the comment raises is neglected. It also works against the White Paper’s own assessment that there is neither currently nor foreseeably any power in the region capable of mounting such operations. The fear of invasion is close to fantasy: there is no credible interest anywhere in attacking this country nor has there been for two thirds of a century. As Kim Beazley said when tabling a committee report on threats to Australia over three decades ago, only one country has the capacity to invade Australia, the United States, and it is able to obtain all it wants from Australia without such action!

The White Paper points out that China will become the strongest Asian military power ‘by a considerable margin’ and that the Chinese military modernisation which is under way ‘appears potentially to be beyond the scope of what would be required for a conflict over Taiwan’. The implication is that Australia needs to prepare for Chinese aggression. China may or may not become a military threat as it expands economically, but to posture against it before evidence justifying this emerges risks encouraging aggressive Chinese preparation in return. Allan Behm writes: ‘Quite simply, in the timeframes considered by this White Paper, China will have neither the intention nor the power to mount a direct attack against Australia. The chapter’s key judgement is breathtaking in its naivety and lack of nuance’.

The White Paper recognises that ‘The enduring reality of our strategic outlook is that Australia will most likely remain, by virtue of our geostrategic location, a secure country over the period to 2030’ yet it fails to plan on that reasonable conclusion. Geoff Miller, the former Director-General of the Office of National Assessments, concludes that ‘the White Paper only makes the case for the huge expenditure it projects by focusing on the stated principal task of deterring and defeating attacks on Australia without relying on the combat or combat support forces of other countries, while ignoring its own conclusions about the limits to self-reliance and about the likelihood of Australia having to defend against a major power adversary on its own’.

The White Paper makes the case for the extraordinary increases in military spending by exaggerating the threat to Australia—which has been the normal tactic of governments for the last sixty years. The effect of exaggerating military threats has been to justify current expenditure which is already far larger than is necessary, $73 million a day. Australia does not need military spending per person more than twice that of Japan or Russia or 50 per cent more than Canada.

The Benefits of Seeking Peace

The world is less threatening than the drafters of the White Paper claim. Most states now prefer to avoid inter-state conflict, and military activity is constrained by national economic and political interest and as well by rules, norms and conflict resolution processes. The traditional concept of state-based military power utilised to pursue national interest is being supplanted by the view that war is a threat to national interests. A recent example is the Report of the International Commission on Nuclear Non-proliferation and Disarmament (ICNND), which argues that ‘The downside risks of waging aggressive war in a globalized interdependent world are seen today as outweighing almost any conceivable benefit’.

Military power is no longer regarded by most nations and policy makers as the only basis of security. Alliances enable countries to strengthen their security. Multilateral rules, norms and conflict resolution processes constrain aggression. National economic goals are overwhelmingly achieved through commercial and political activity. And countries which act aggressively face penalties. The global order of the early 21st century is one in which great net benefits flow from co-operating with the international community.

The White Paper offers little explanation about what might cause conflict or war and nothing at all about peaceful means of attempting to resolve potential conflict. Australia’s interest is as much in peaceful conflict resolution as is that of all United Nations member states, yet this top priority is neither mentioned nor discussed. Nor is the value of regional political and economic bodies in strengthening integration and stability acknowledged.

The White Paper mentions the formative role of the UN Charter in establishing a rule-based international system and recognises that the maintenance of this multilateral system is a key consideration for Australia’s security. It does not, though, go on to discuss how to participate so as to act in ways consistent with the commitments of member states or to contribute to enabling the United Nations to do its work more effectively.

The UN Charter is the foundational document of postwar multilateral relations. Article 1 of the Charter describes the first purpose of the United Nations as being:

To maintain international peace and security, and to that end: to take effective collective measures for the prevention and the removal of threats, and for the suppression of acts of aggression or other breaches of the peace, and to bring about by peaceful means, and in conformity with the principles of justice and international law, adjustment of international disputes or situations which might lead to a breach of the peace.

Article 2 requires that Member States act in accordance with stated principles, the third of which is that:

All Members shall settle their international disputes by peaceful means in such a manner that international peace and security, and justice, are not endangered.

That is, membership of the United Nations requires countries to attempt by all reasonable means to avoid the threat or use of force and to seek non-violent means of minimising and resolving conflict. There have been many resolutions in the Security Council and General Assembly elaborating the theme of peaceful conflict resolution. For Australia to effectively fulfill this responsibility would involve taking the following steps.

First, defence planning should be more thoroughly integrated with other aspects of foreign policy. Recognition of the complementarities of foreign and defence policy would create the basis for a public and governmental discourse in which a range of perspectives and possibilities could be included. Australian security would be strengthened if defence is liberated from the silo within which it is imprisoned so that the framework for foreign and defence policy could be addressed holistically.

Second, for all these reasons and to conserve scarce funds for other higher priority international and domestic programs, proposed defence expenditure should be rigorously reviewed and some proposed weapons purchasers cut or cancelled – as the US has just announced it will do. This would limit competition for finance for services which voters regard as of far greater importance. Good public policy should not treat one kind of public outlay differently from all others by conferring on defence the unique privilege of announced real increases until 2030. The quarantining of defence spending discriminates against every other area of public service, introduces rigidity, and eliminates a financial incentive to strengthen the efficiency with which defence is provided.

Third, funding for the Department of Foreign Affairs and Trade (DFAT) must be substantially improved. Why should diplomacy, the instrument supposed to sustain a global and regional web of relationships and co-operative arrangements favouring Australia, receive one twenty-sixth of the funds allocated to defence? The Lowy Institute argues carefully for reversal of these trends, opening of new missions, increased appointment and training of qualified diplomats and expansion of other vital supporting activities. Swift implementation of those recommendations is vital. Steadily improved funding would allow DFAT to build up its capacity for engagement in peaceful conflict resolution through bilateral and multilateral analysis, consultation, mediation, negotiation and the other means listed in the UN Charter.

Fourth, continued expansion of the Australian aid program as promised by the Rudd Government is vital so that Australia can make a fairer and more effective contribution to economic, social and environmentally sustainable development, achievement of the Millennium Development Goals and reduction of despair, alienation and poverty. Seeking peace with justice is a more effective and constructive way of making Australia more secure than is militarism.

Bio:

John Langmore is a Professorial Fellow in the School of Social and Political Sciences at the University of Melbourne. He was the federal MP for Fraser for twelve years and a Director in the United Nations for seven. These arguments are elaborated in John Langmore, Calum Logan and Stewart Firth, The 2009 Australian Defence White Paper: Analysis and Alternatives, Austral Policy forum 10-01A, 15 September 2010

Cuba provides the overwhelming majority of medical assistance in Timor-Leste, with 305 health workers on two-year missions, comprising 230 doctors, 25 nurses, and 50 health technicians. Cuba is also building capacity for the future with 600 East Timorese medical and allied students being trained on full scholarships in several Cuban universities. First proposed at a Non-Aligned Movement meeting in Kuala Lumpur in 2003, a formal cooperating agreement between Timor-Leste and Cuba was finalised in January 2007. Under the program’s ‘doctor replacement policy’, East Timorese graduates will ultimately replace the Cuban contingent within seven to eight years. Alongside the Cuban doctors and scholarships for Timorese students, a third element of the program establishes a medical faculty at the National University of Timor Lorosa’e. This separate cohort of 105 students in Timor-Leste is being trained under a new program of general integrated health instruction, first pioneered by Cuban medical teams in Venezuela. Under this program, East Timorese medical students work under the tutorship of sixty Cuban doctors, accompanying them on their daily rounds in the communities where the students live. This day-to-day practical experience is integrated with formal university training, and conducted in cooperation with the World Health Organisation to ensure standards. More than half of these Timorese students are now in their second year.*

One specific objective of the cooperation agreement in Timor-Leste was the reduction of maternal and child mortality rates, especially in rural areas. A recent program evaluation found that in the areas where Cuban doctors work child mortality is now 27.5 per 1000, a figure more than 50 per cent lower than elsewhere in the country. Maternal mortality has also steeply declined in the areas where Cuban medical teams work. The overall aim of the scholarship program is to achieve a ratio of one doctor per 1500–2000 East Timorese by 2015, when the estimated population of Timor-Leste will be 1.5 million.

Other active programs in the Pacific region include Kiribati, which hosts a Cuban health team of twenty doctors, with more to come in 2009, and the Solomon Islands, which is recruiting Cuban doctors to reduce its present doctor/patient ratio of 1:10,000, and earlier this year received the first contingent of a future cohort of forty doctors. Other cooperation agreement programs exist with Tuvalu and Nauru.

Back in Cuba, alongside the 600 Timorese medical students are 64 Pacific Islander students comprising 25 Solomon Islanders, 20 i-Kiribati, 17 ni-Vanuatu and 2 Nauruans. Planning is also advanced for a contingent of Cuban doctors in Papua New Guinea, despite strong diplomatic pressure from former Australian Foreign Minister Alexander Downer in 2007, who warned through the Australian High Commission in Port Moresby that the presence of Cuban doctors could ‘destabilise security in the Pacific’. In a rare display of defiance against the regional power, this pressure was overtly resisted by PNG Prime Minister Somare, with his health minister replying publicly that ‘really, it’s our concern whether we bring Cuban doctors’. There are also reports of Fijian interest in a health cooperation
agreement with Cuba.

In total, more than 126,000 Cubans have completed health missions in 104 countries, including large scale missions after natural disasters in Asia, such as the post-Tsunami teams in Aceh and Sri Lanka, a contingent of 1000 doctors in Pakistani Kashmir after the earthquakes in 2005, and two field hospitals after the 2006 earthquakes in Java. There are currently some 37,000 Cuban health professionals working in 70 countries, and 25,000 medical and allied students from 123 countries studying in Cuba, including 100 from the United States. Cuba is also training 21,500 medical students ‘offshore’ in their home countries, with the vast majority of these in Venezuela, being taught by 9230 Cuban doctors, and smaller programs in Guinea-Bissau and Timor-Leste. It is therefore no exaggeration to describe the Cuban programs as a global health program. The Cuban health programs are well suited for the developing world and Pacific nations, with a strong focus on preventative and community medicine and specific programs on malaria, HIV/AIDS, cataracts, and other diseases prevalent in developing countries. It is also better suited to systems with poor medical facilities, as the preventative community heath focus is less critically reliant on advanced medical technology than systems in developed countries.

Perhaps the most remarkable program, from an Australian perspective, was the Cuban-run English literacy program in New Zealand, among Maori and Pacific Islander communities. The Cuban literacy program Yo Sí Puedo (Yes I Can) runs in twenty-eight countries, in several languages, including Portuguese and Tetum language literacy curricula operated by eleven Cuban teachers in Timor-Leste. In 2003, the rector of the University Te Wananga o Aotearoa in New Zealand, Rongo Wetere, requested the assistance of Cuban literacy educators to solve entrenched illiteracy among Maori communities. A pilot project using the Yo Sí Puedo method started in June 2003 in two Maori and one Pacific Islander communities — with more than 5000 participants. Despite considerable opposition from at least one National MP, the program had 3168 people in classes as of June 2008, of whom 2092 had become literate since the program’s commencement.

These Pacific region missions are an increasing part of Cuba’s global health and literacy programs, which are distinctive in their emphasis on ‘south–south’ cooperation between developing countries, and the durable numbers of doctors and future graduates involved. So significant have these programs become that in September this year the inaugural ‘Cuba–Pacific Islands Ministerial Meeting’ was held in Havana. The stated goals of this new forum are to ‘assist small island developing states in addressing the effects of climate change, and in strengthening co-operation in health, sports and education’.

The Cuban health and literacy programs in Timor-Leste are notable, as President Ramos-Horta has often reminded reporters since, as the only international aid missions not to leave the country during the 2006 political crisis. Malmierca Diaz, the Cuban ambassador to the United Nations, stated in his address to the 2006 Security Council meeting endorsing the new International Stabilisation Force (ISF) presence that there had been too much focus on security, and too little on ‘the urgent and serious structural, economic and social problems’ afflicting developing nations like Timor-Leste. For Antonio Pubillones, a Specialist in International Cooperation from the Cuban Ministry of Foreign Relations, the ‘doctor replacement policy’ — embodied in the scholarships program — demonstrates a genuine desire to build capacity in the long term, rather than create a situation of enforced dependence on Cuba. While the health agreements clearly stand to benefit Cuba in terms of goodwill, Cuban cooperation officials are notably averse to the language of ‘state-building’, and stress that the health cooperation programs are technical agreements imposing no conditions, with wider health policy issues the sole preserve of host governments.

Despite one prominent attempt by the deceased rebel leader Alfredo Reinado to ‘redbait’ the former FRETILIN government on the issue in 2006, the Cuban health program remains as strongly supported by President Ramos-Horta and the new AMP government as it was by the former FRETILIN administration. And while there is considerable scepticism, and occasional hostility, from the US and Australian governments, they have ultimately been unable to mount substantive criticisms of Cuban health programs in the face of endemic doctor shortages in the region. Certainly, the charge the Cuba is ‘buying votes’ in the United Nations is easy to refute, as there has never been significant international support for the US blockade of Cuba and, with the sole exception of the Federated States of Micronesia (a ‘sovereign state in free association with the US’), none at all in the Asia-Pacific region.

Rather, the motivation for Cuban health programs appears to follow a more complex political and humanitarian logic: first, of internal legitimacy within the Cuban state socialist system, with its historical focus on universal health provision and internationalism as measures of good ‘socialist’ citizenship; and second, as a means of developing ‘south–south’ modes of development cooperation, and reinforcing the Non-Aligned Movement with practical development initiatives — all of which have broad implications for a ‘north– south’ balance of power which Cuba no doubt views as constructive. While it is true that the massive health program in Venezuela has reciprocal benefits for Cuba in the form of subsided oil, this ‘special program’ is an exception. In most cases, the costs of Cuban health and literacy cooperation programs are substantially borne by the Cuban government. Host countries are generally required to find accommodation for doctors, while the Cuban government pays doctors’ salaries and the scholarships for students studying in Cuba. While regional governments continue to face chronic doctor shortages and failing health systems, the number of Cuban health cooperation agreements is likely to expand throughout Melanesia and the Pacific in the near future.

* This paragraph was changed on 16/3/09. It has been corrected in line with the author’s original text. Arena Magazine apologises for the error, made during editing.

Michael Leach works at Swinburne University of Technology, and is a regular visitor to Timor-Leste.

‘If we want things to stay as they are, things will have to change’, Prince Tancredi, in Il Gattopardo (1958),

Giuseppe T. di Lampedusa.

‘Empires everywhere, it seems, are on the move again’, writes Alison Caddick in Arena Magazine 96. That ‘big old world’ is still at it, and still guided by ‘hubristic notions of progress and supremacist nationalism’. Globalisation and global warming provide a new theatre for the old brutes, who continue to hog the centre stage as of right, shouting the old slogans louder than those quieter, smaller actors who have increasingly come out from the wings to occupy United Nations space: minorities, dwarf-nations and states like Singapore and East Timor, no-hope out-backs like Tibet, edge-lands like West Papua, reanimated fossils like Scotland and the Basque country.

For God’s sake — what can such pip-squeaks expect, in a globality so evidently configured by and for the big lads? As Caddick puts it, the reborn superpowers naturally seek to maintain ‘a way of life built on unsustainable economic and environmental assumptions … [and] cultural mores associated with the spread of a contagious form of high-tech capitalism’. When it suits them they are entitled to ‘put the clock back’, as Umberto Eco puts it in his new book of that title, with votes where possible (as in India), or by authoritarian means if not (as in China). What they really count on, she suggests, is popular feeling: ‘an exercise of power over actions and desire’, furnished of course by what Eco describes so accurately as ‘media populism’. The proverbial ‘small guy’ (and small nation-state) has no real option but to tag along and make the best of it. Tiddle-pots may sometimes choose sides, but are not allowed a side of their own.

Nor should they have that option, on one influential interpretation of events. The matter has been debated recently in Foreign Affairs, following Jerry Muller’s article in their March–April 2008 issue ‘Us and Them’. In the current issue the question is summed up by none other than Condoleeza Rice. Entitled (yep) ‘The New American Realism’, George Dubya’s Secretary of State is kind enough to add an explanatory subtitle: ‘Rethinking the National Interest’. In years to come (whoever wins in November) the latter must go on being guided by ‘this uniquely American realism’. Unique? It looks awfully like the Great-Chinese and Great-Russian realism that recent events have disclosed. After Iraq and Afghanistan have come Tibet and Georgia. ‘Responsibility’ accompanies ‘stability’ in all these national-interest justifications. Globalisation is fine, but cannot be allowed to upset things.

An academic team has been assembled to back Rice up. Their aim is reinforcement of centre-stage, loud-voice nationalism: ‘responsible’ big-lad politics, in fact. The vanguard is a Harvard–UCLA Sturmabteilung captained by Richard Rosecrance and Arthur Stein, co-authors of No More States? Globalization, National Self-determination and Terrorism (2006). Their message is that ‘apostles of national-self-determination would do well to consider a still more important trend: the return to bigness in the international system’ (Foreign Affairs, vol. 87 no. 4). Some idea of what this implies can be glimpsed in another astonishing essay from the same issue: C. Fred Bergsten’s ‘A Partnership of Equals’, which entreats Chinese leaders to stop being so modest, and turn into international Big Lads with whom Condoleeza can make deals, even alliances. Hey, Beijing, stoke up all that hubris and supremacism, time you joined the club: didn’t you know that economic power entitles you to being a bigness-bully?

Not so long ago, I doubt if Foreign Affairs could have published such rantings. But now there’s something in the air, as Caddick recognises. In the mill-race of globalisation, the previously unthinkable now gets tossed up like this almost every day, casually claiming normality: back-room fantasies, foregrounded as ‘speculation’. The deeper moving impulse behind the No More States? team is simply Great-American nationalism, more often glimpsed in weekend drag these days, as ‘neoconservatism’. However, McCain and Palin are working on a full dress musical revival for the coming Presidential elections.

Naturally, returning to bigness can be seen as favoring the old baton-wielder, the United States of America. But the point is, the latter is also favored by the new conjuncture. As Caddick puts it: ‘The strongest element in this depressing scenario is a common interest shared by these competing empires’. It’s what they jointly perceive as stability and continuity, and holding the clock hands firmly back. Condoleeza Rice’s ‘realism’ is simply an acknowledgement that, good as it was being the superpower, this couldn’t go on for ever. However, much may yet be saved via formal or tacit understandings among suitable ‘equals’. The resultant common interest leaves enough space (for example) to Barack Obama’s notion of the United States returning to ‘inspire’ the globe and renew the leadership beacon. ‘Hegemony’ is the new buzzword here: a fuzzy concoction counting on small fry to colonise themselves, by seeking guidance, collegiate support, orientation conferences and so on.

But surely Caddick’s analysis may be interpreted as pointing also to something more significant, way beyond such compromises. A growing number of people and states in the new global times have no wish to hegemonise themselves, do not long for an eventide beacon, or thirst for inspiration from the City on the Hill. ‘For God’s sake, leave us alone!’ may convey their attitude more accurately. I think quite a few of them resent having been made to feel, six months in advance, that an election where they have no say is, none the less, important enough to make them take sides. This isn’t internationalism. It’s more like unilateralism off its hinges, still pretending to be the only show in town. That there’s more than one unilateralist around — a unilateralist gang, as it were — is no consolation: the streets are even less safe than before.

So what’s the answer? In the decorous language of international relations it’s called ‘multilateralism’ — coined in French, not by chance, as le multilatéralisme. Small guys can defend themselves only by sticking together, and working out their own common interests as a kind of trade union. In the appropriate wider sense, democracy and equality are on their side, not with the City-on-the-Hill kids. The latter want protection money and obeisance (for which of course neoliberalism was the ideal missionary church). Multilateralism calls for something different: initially more modest but ultimately stronger, and more durable.

As for the big-lad populations, I quoted the most famous elegy for a dying culture above, from Colquhoun’s 1960 translation of The Leopard. But the original was slightly more eloquent: what Tancredi said was ‘bisogna che tutto cambi’ — everything, every single thing, has to change. I doubt if Count Lampedusa was looking ahead to globalisation, in 1958, but that’s how it has turned out: like it or not, ‘everything’ and everyone has got involved. And for that very reason, more breathing-space is urgently needed to make the global deal more tolerable. No doubt this is true for big-shot masses as well — but then, that’s the real point: it’s their problem, not ours. They are just nation-states like the rest us, if somewhat weighed down by their ridiculous scale. Would a short cure of ‘isolationism’ really be all that bad?

‘Globalisation’, by contrast, has to mean more differentiation, and substantial rather than formal respect for diversity. This is why Kevin Rudd’s theme of ‘middle-range’ policy and ambition could be so important. He has returned to the idea often enough, since his Lowy Institute address in 2007, and it must be hoped he really means it. David McKnight commented on the trend, pointing out how it represents a rejection not just of neoliberal mania but of the latter’s intellectual basis in the earlier work of Friedrich von Hayek. We may be entering an ideal, and rather prolonged, moment for movement in that direction. Having been disabused of state-led, short-cut socialism in 1989, electorates have now been even more thoroughly disenchanted by the collapse of its contrary, the weird right-wing ‘historical materialism’ of marketolatry and deregulated enterprise. Hayek always urged the Right to imitate the Left in seizing and publicising power, and was rewarded with disastrous success in the 1990s. However, part of that mimesis has continued on into its latter days: the ideological foundering of the Right has now followed (and may well exceed) that of the Cold War Left.

We don’t know how long this disarray will last. In his history of the 1929 Great Crash, J. K. Galbraith points out that about five years passed after the worst moment in 1931–32. Not until 1938 can one find ‘the leaders of the original shock troops (of the New Deal) polishing up speeches on the virtues of the free enterprise system’, satisfied that all that was possible on the public side had been done. George Soros thinks we are not yet at the worst point of system failure. But whoever is right on this, it seems reasonable to hope that, this time round, the disorientation is more fertile.

Rudd’s government had the good fortune to take office in its early phases — the contrary of Brown’s faltering Labour Party regime in Britain, originally set up all too close to the ’90s high tide of neo-liberal exaggeration and optimism. Carried forward on the latter, Blair and Brown felt compelled to focus on the futile business of remaining ‘Great’: the tradition of a once major state that finds it very hard to embrace middle-range identity and aspirations. Instead, it has clung to a Special Relationship that was in truth concealed prostration and camp-following. In other words, the United Kingdom. has consistently chosen the opposite of Rudd’s proposed modesty and co-operative initiatives.

And yet — ‘Never has there been a better opportunity to strike a new social contract between private capital and the people’, wrote Scottish commentator Iain Macwhirter in the Sunday Herald recently (21 September). British Labour seems incapable of making the case. Is there any hope that Australian Labor can do better? ‘Looking at the wreckage wrought by unrestrained greed during the boom years (Macwhirter continues) this should be a great time for a social democratic party like Labour — an opportunity to reaffirm its fundamental values. The people who should be on the defensive are the free-market Conservatives and their friends in the City who have brought us to this state thanks to their bonus culture and predatory lending. All those neo-liberal nostrums about the evils of government intervention have been swept aside as financiers fall over themselves to get state subsidies … ’ Socialism for the banks, as it were, in the service of saving face — Britain’s ‘world role’ — and keeping up with Caddick’s empires on the rebound.

Isn’t this also a new context for the argument on republicanism? Now that a convinced republican has become leader of the Liberals, the case is bound to be re-opened anyway. But the wider republican tradition has always been about more than doing away with monarchy: it embodies a positive drive as well — the reconstitution of collective will and ambition, a reformation of identity and belonging. As Caddick put it, in ordinary (‘middle-range’) states, ‘for ordinary people the struggle and strategy will have to take a different form …’ one that no longer denies ‘more subterranean channels of cultural identity and social meaning’. Wasn’t that a part of Rudd’s great apology to the Aboriginal peoples of Australia, and of the extraordinary emotion it generated? She’s right: the well-springs are there, and calling for more than exploded formulae and time-worn rules.

Tom Nairn is research professor at the Globalism Institute at RMIT University.

This iconic use of the image of the ‘ordinary person’ to bolster the standing of state and corporation is everywhere, and the Games have accentuated its force. The travels of the Olympic flame around Australia were central to this process. It is not an adequate critique of the ‘sacred flame’ that it was first revived in 1936 by Adolf Hitler as a way of linking the people of Nazi Germany to the deep past. It is not sufficient to note just that the munitions manufacturer, Krupps of Essen, produced a series of stainless steel torches weighing about a kilogram, to be carried in relay from Olympia in Greece to Berlin. And it is not enough to document that IOC president Juan Antonio Samaranch used to be a fascist. We have known that for a long time. Writing in the New Statesman in 1993, Andrew Jennings recorded Samaranch’s dubious past:

Samaranch, now in his seventies, deserted from the army of the Spanish Republic during the civil war and hid in Barcelona until Franco had won. He spent the next thirty-five years climbing the ladder of fascist politics, ending up as the head of Franco’s rubber stamp Catalan ‘parliament’. Ten years after the Allies discovered Auschwitz, he volunteered for the elite fascist Falange, wore its uniform and gave the fascist salute. This he did until Franco died in 1975.

What is needed is a thorough examination of the use of the myth of ‘ordinary’ heroes. Nevertheless, such stark connections to corporatism point up the way in which states and corporations bask in the uncritical milieu of myths connecting pseudo-sacred meanings, instrumentalised passions, and beliefs in the ascendancy of ‘the ordinary person’. Despite what the Foster’s ad tells us, the use of ‘the ordinary person’ as signifying the peace-loving nation (Australia, the United States, the United Kingdom), masks a new reality of mediated and globally projected violence. These are the nations that are continually being drawn into war despite their postnational ‘pacifism’. Just as Benjamin Martin (Mel Gibson in The Patriot) is tired of violence, having fought against the Indians and French, so are we. He is reluctant to fight the English in the American War of Independence, but when following the threat to his family he does enter the war, it is with a vengance. And so do we.

This point can be taken further. Ordinary people, non-combatants, now bear the brunt of wars whether it be in Iraq, Kosovo or Chechnya. State-down attempts to contain or even suppress national liberation movements now increasingly use ‘ordinary people’. In East Timor, the Indonesian government supported the outlaw local militia groups such as the Besi Merah Putih to disrupt and terrorise the independence process. Currently in West Papua, the ruling Indonesian party, Golkar, is said to financially support a local counter-independence militia called the Satgas Merah Putih or Red and White Taskforce. In the Philippines, the government is using local groups called the Civilian Armed Forces Geographic Units against the Muslim autonomy movement.

Next time let us not pretend that these things are not happening. Global events such as the Olympic Games could be splendid events if people such as John Howard, Juan Antonio Samaranch, John Elliot, Paul Hogan and Team Nike had to pay for tickets like the rest of us. If only we didn’t have to see repeated television footage of John Howard stepping into the reflected glory. Next time, let us get together without them, and leave behind the history of an instrumentalised, commercialised patriot games. As John Clarke might then say, ‘Let the People’s Games begin’.

This price tag does not include the US$550 million procurement budget estimated by the UN’s chief of procurement, Andrew Toh, long before the InterFET troops landed in Dili, based on a similar scenario in Cambodia (Australian, 27 April 1999). 

So, around A$1.2 billion will be up for grabs for businesses from all around the world in Timor Loro Sa’e during the next two to three years. This has come as very good news to the Northern Territory (NT) business people and administrators. 

As Drake International spokeperson Bill Feilberg concluded, developments in Timor Loro Sa’e and opportunities in expanding information technology services are likely to cushion the Northern Territory from a significant decline in employment for the quarter to 31 December (NT Business Review, November 1999). Darwin itself has enjoyed a boom of economic activity, thanks to the deployment of about 8,000 peacekeeping troops in Timor Loro Sa’e, whose supplies have to come from the Northern Territory. Most of the construction work in Dili also seems to be supplied from Darwin. On one lucky day, according to my source, Bunnings Building Supplies sold more than A$110,000 worth of timber to be shipped to Dili. 

There are many similar stories of the extraordinary prosperity which Indonesia’s destruction of Timor Loro Sa’e has brought to the Top End. 

This Timor bonanza reflects a complete reversal of the NT government’s stance towards Timor Loro Sa’e. The Country Liberal Party (CLP), which has held power in the Northern Territory since self-government in 1978, strongly supported Suharto’s regime to attract Indonesian businesses into the Territory as well as to promote NT-based businesses into Indonesia. In fact, the Northern Territory became the first Australian state or territory to sign a Memorandum of Understanding (MOU) with the Indonesian government in January, 1992. 

Chief minister after chief minister have made their courtesy calls to Suharto. The previous chief minister, Shane Stone, even represented John Howard soon after his election as Australia’s prime minister. When Mrs Suharto died in April 1996, Howard requested Stone to attend the funeral to represent Australia. In fact, Stone was the only ‘European’ invited to the service (Hawley, 1996; Asian Business Review, November 1996). 

In all those years, all NT chief ministers assured Suharto that the Northern Territory strongly supported Indonesia’s occupation and annexation of Timor Loro Sa’e. In fact, supporting Timor Loro Sa’e's annexation seems for the NT government to be a condition sine qua non for promoting business with Indonesia. This policy culminated during the tenure of Shane Stone. As Robert Wesley-Smith, a long time pro-Timor Loro Sa’e activist in Darwin puts it: 

Ever since Mr Stone became chief minister, and also police and fire services minister, Free East Timor protesters have had charges thrown at them in an obvious attempt to distract us from our cause. He had been appointed by Mr Perron as the first ‘Asian relations’ minister, and is widely thought to be a great admirer of President Suharto as he copies so many of his methods. (Wesley-Smith, 1997). 

This pro-Jakarta position was shared down the line by CLP members. One CLP official had even stated that the East Timorese independence supporters in the Northern Territory merely represented about a hundred FRETILIN leftist individuals continuously making pro-leftist propaganda, contributing in this manner to maintaining social, personal and family division in the community. The answer of the pro-East Timor nationalists to such charges is to retaliate by affirming they have become a scapegoat because their political action jeopardised the intent of the local and federal governments to safeguard its close relations with Indonesia. 

Interestingly, after the referendum and its violent aftermath, the president of the National Council for Timorese Resistance (CNRT) instantly became the NT government’s darling. NT authorities warmly welcomed Xanana Gusmao on his first official visited to Darwin in late September 1999. Immediately after this meeting, NT Chief Minister Denis Burke sent his special representative, Paul Tyrell, to assess the country’s damage and report on urgent immediate requirements for houses, port operation and essential infrastructure, accompanied by teams from the Territory’s Transport and Works and PAWA (Power and Water Authority). Lt. General John Grey, the Chief Minister’s special consultant estimated that the costs of reconstruction could reach as high as A$500 million – a figure that is way above the World Bank’s estimate. 

The results of the NT government’s assessment were immediately fed back to the NT business community in a ‘sell out’ breakfast briefing hosted by the Chief Minister himself, attended by more than 350 people. Following up on the briefing, the NT government also provided assistance to businesses to apply for registration with the UN agencies. So, eventually, 40 to 46 per cent of work in the disaster regions went to tenderers from the Territory (NT Business Review, November 1999). 

One of the attractions of opening shop in the newborn (or, reborn) nation, without a functioning state apparatus, is that wages are still very low. As it is advertised in a bulletin which mainly caters for the business community, in a patronising language that borders on nineteenth-century colonialism: 

The going rate is about A$5 a day, A$25 a 5-day week or, at an exchange rate of Rp 4000, Rp 20,000 and 100,000 respectively. There are no awards or trade unions in East Timor, but it is worth remembering that good management practice apply in every country. 

Ensure you keep plenty of water available. It is very hot throughout the day and if your people are doing manual work, make sure the water is at hand. They also need to eat so give them a break in the middle of the day. Some expats drive the workers home at noon and ask them to be back on the job (they find their own way) about 2 p.m. Of course you can structure the day however you want, but your workers must be given time to eat. It is also worth giving them a 10-minute break here and there. A nine-hour day is fair to everyone. 

The free ride home is simply a good management technique as there is no public transport and very few of these people have their own means of getting about. 

While you can pay your workers on a daily basis and ask them to work seven days (and they will almost be happy to do so) remember that on Sunday most will want to attend church. It is wise to allow them to do so. 

Settle wages weekly

Some expats get a local to act as the foreman for the Timorese. This is of course ideal, especially if the foreman speaks English. Having a foreman ensures that the locals are treated as they would expect to be treated.(Dili Times, 19 November 1999). 

This A$5 or Rp 20,000 daily wage is not only the going rate among the expatriate business community, but is also endorsed and practised by the UN authorities themselves. According to my sources in Dili, the UN Office for the Coordination of Humanitarian Affairs (UNOCHA), which co-ordinates the dozens of international and national NGOs involved in the relief work in the country has suggested the Rp 20,000 daily wage rate to the foreign NGOs. Then, the UNTAET cafeteria itself pays a daily wage of between A$2 to A$3 to its Timorese employees, while a meal at the cafetaria costs A$6. 

Obviously, this top-down exploitative labour policy turns Timor Loro Sa’e into a paradise for expatriate business people. In the Northern Territory, for instance, the minimum wage in the hotel industry is A$15 per hour, with only 38 hours of regularly paid work allowed each week. Or, a maximum of eight hours per day. That means Australian hotel workers are paid a minimum of A$105 per day. 

Usually, Australian hotel workers earn much more, depending on the collective bargaining between their union and the hotel management, and could therefore earn roughly A$25 per day. This means that Australian hotel workers are earning at least three times what their Timorese brothers and sisters are earning. To put it the other way around, Timorese workers are subsidising the Australian tourism business and the entire United Nations and foreign NGO community in their country. So, who is helping whom, one could ask. 

With a captive market of a couple of hundred foreigners, a handful of big businesses could practically have a monopoly over certain commodities and services. Or, form an oligopoly – a cartel, so to speak.

Which Australian businesses are currently profiting from the reconstruction of Timor Loro Sa’e? The following is a tentative list which is certainly not yet exhaustive. 

Telecommunication

Immediately after the last Indonesian soldier pulled out from the country, the Indonesian government switched off the telecommunication link of its former twenty-seventh province. Satellite phones became the only means of communication. 

After weeks of communication limbo, Telstra stepped in. Actually, Telstra had already moved in through the InterFET, since Telstra personnel entered the country together with the first Australian troops. Telstra’s intel people went along with the troops and recommended an almost complete replacement of the old system with the new CDMA technology. 

In only a matter of days after the troops landed, Telstra signed a deal with InterFET for a minimum of six years with no tendering process. Based on that deal, it would gain complete coverage of the island within eight months, and in the areas that the mobile towers would not reach, dual satellite/CDMA mobile handsets were being investigated. It is still planning to put payphones in Timor Loro Sa’e similar to Australia’s outback satellite payphones, or connect them via optic fibre from the local CDMA tower. 

Telstra made it very clear to the Australian Defence Forces (ADF) that the entire project required a massive initial capital outlay of between A$300 to A$350 million. It also made it clear to the ADF that it would only agree if it were given a six-year exclusivity guarantee from any other telephone carrier. Telstra’s argument was that it has to recoup its outlay – which should be recovered within the next few months with all the aid workers. The telecommunication giant apparently now even has the exclusive rights on the satellite footprint. 

Who authorised this deal? InterFET. Who was consulted in the process of making this deal? Certainly no other service providers and no East Timorese. Who will it affect? Nobody but the East Timorese. InterFET – who signed the deal with Telstra – will be gone in a matter of months; UNTAET, in three years. The East Timorese will then be forced into honouring this contract – and other contracts made by InterFET – which they had no say in formulating; hopefully not to the detriment of their economic and social development. 

Banking 

Westpac is the only Australian bank which has opened a branch in Timor Loro Sa’e. One of Australia’s biggest banks, Westpac is a sponsor of the Sydney 2000 Olympic Games. 

The bank, however, has a contradictory reputation in incorporating social and environmental criteria into its lending and investment activities. On the one hand, it is the only Australian bank to have signed onto the UNEP Banks and Sustainability statement. It began serious energy management and efficiency programs in 1992. This concept took off in 1994 with the introduction of the Energy Savers Awareness Programs; and it initiated a partnership with the Greenhouse Challenge to reduce energy consumption and decrease emission levels. Under that agreement, the bank’s original target to save 24,000 tonnes of carbon dioxide was surpassed in September 1998, according to National Environmental Manager for Westpac Corporate Facilities, Larry McNab. 

On the other hand, there are contradictions in Westpac’s environmental policy, including its record in financing environmentally disastrous mining projects in North Australia as well as in West Papua. One member of the Westpac group, Westpac Custodian Nominees, has come under strong pressure from environmentalists through its role in providing equity investment for Energy Resources of Australia (ERA) and North Ltd., companies behind the controversial plan to mine uranium in the Kakadu National Park in the Northern Territory. This plan is strongly opposed by the Mirrar people, the traditional owners of Jabiluka, the proposed mining site. 

Westpac Custodian Nominees is also the second largest institutional investor in Rio Tinto, a company condemned world-wide for its poor environmental and social record. It owns 11.8% shares in PT Freeport Indonesia, Inc., which controls the disastrous copper, gold and silver mine in the Amungme people’s homeland in West Papua (Kennedy, Chatterjee and Moody, 1998; MPI, 1998; Australian, 19 December 1999). 

Westpac has several overlapping shares and directorships with mineral and oil mining companies. The bank’s chairman, J.A. Uhrig, is also chairman of Santos Ltd, while also functioning as Deputy Chairman of Rio Tinto Ltd. In addition, Westpac is a shareholder of BHP Ltd. which, until mid-1999 was the co-leader of the consortia of oil companies exploiting the Timor Gap reserves. Santos is, meanwhile, still a major partner in the Elang, Kakatua, and Kakatua North oil fields, which have been producing 32,500 barrels of oil per day since July 1998, and also is still involved in the much more lucrative Bayu-Undan gas field soon to be exploited under Phillips Petroleum’s direction (Aditjondro, 1999; ASX, 1998). 

Finally, Westpac has very close links with the NT government. In 1994, the chief executive of the NT Department of Industries and Development was former Westpac chief manager, Lyal Mackintosh, who worked in the Pacific region for the bank. He believed that the Northern Territory’s role as a business broker in Asia was a natural one. The bank has also been the major corporate sponsor of the NT Expo for three consecutive years (1996, 1997, 1998). The NT Expo has been reported as a major regional business promotion event bringing many Dili-based Indonesian business people to Darwin (Business Review Weekly, 21 November 1994). Westpac was major corporate sponsor of the NT Expo for three consecutive years – 1996, 1997 and 1998. 

Hotels and tourism industry

This sector is the most ‘crowded’ with investors and their Timorese or Timor-based partners. Although it reflects one of the priority areas of the World Bank, it does increase the socio-economic gap between Dili’s expatriates and the locals, who mostly still have to squat in buildings which are not theirs. This sector is also reproducing a pattern similar to that which took place in Timor Loro Sa’e during the Indonesian occupation. This irony has not escaped the CNRT leader, Xanana Gusmao, who said that: 

It’s an insult to the misery, the suffering of our people. Our people need soap, they need food. They have primary needs. I have already heard about prostitution. Sometimes we felt that the Indonesian generals had no human feeling. Some businessmen also exploit the situation. It’s very sad, because I cannot do anything about it. If I have a little power I can tell them to go, but I have no power. (Socialist Worker, 19 December 1999). 

Dili Lodge is a hotel cum beer garden cum car and motorcycle rental business in Dili and is run by the Timor Lodge Hotel Pty. Ltd. Initially called Dili Lodge Hotel Pty. Ltd., the company was incorporated in Darwin on October 18, 1999, with Wayne Leighton Thomas and his wife, Margaret Ann Thomas, as directors. Both are from Brisbane. Mr Thomas claims to be the principal shareholder. As he explained to the author, he is also the chairman of the Thomas Group of Companies with diverse interests across Australia, especially hotels and resorts in the Northern Territory and Western Australia. 

An early beneficiary of the 1992 Memorandum of Understanding (MOU) between Indonesia and the Northern Territory, in March 1994 Thomas exported to the island of Lombok (Nusa Tenggara Barat province) a shipment of thirty pieces of new and used heavy earth-moving machinery (worth A$4 million). As he stated at that time, the exercise, the first in what he expected to become a lucrative and ongoing venture, could not have been achieved without the MOU framework. ‘The MOU made us reputable, gave us a semi-government status which definitively opened up doors for us’, he said, and added: ‘You have to travel in Eastern Indonesia to understand that. Every time you walk into a government office you see copies of the MOU – one in Indonesian, one in English – on the wall. There is no doubt the Indonesians think it is a very significant agreement’ (Australian, 20 January 1994). 

Other investors in the company are diverse and come from three Australian states, thirty of them from the NT (Sunday Territorian, 12 December 1999). The only one whose identity Wayne Thomas agreed to disclose in my written interview, is Shane Stone, who directs a company which has a 2.5 per cent share in Timor Lodge Hotel. The former NT Chief Minister has invested A$70,000 in the Dili Lodge. Stone is an NT Member of Parliament for Port Darwin and president of the Federal Liberal Party (NT News, 9 December 1999). 

According to Thomas, he (Thomas) went into this venture after extensive consultations with unnamed senior UN personnel, with a lease over the subject property for five years with another five-year option. With a total investment of A$2 million, Timor Lodge Hotel currently employs 98 local staff and eleven Australians. Local wages were negotiated and range from Rp 650,000 to Rp 1.5 million (around A$130 to A$300) per month, with meals provided for all the workers. 

Interestingly, the hotel is located at the former ground of the Battalion 744 of the Indonesian army near the Comoro airport. According to my interview with Thomas and Stone’s Timorese partner, Manuel Carrascalao, that 179-hectare property was formerly owned by Manuel Carrascalao Sr. 

The late Manuel Viegas Carrascalao Sr. was the Mayor of Dili in the early 1970s (Tomodok, 1994). In that capacity Carrascalao Sr. could certainly influence the land use planning of the city. He may also have foreseen that the land on the western bank of the Comoro River – which at that time was still relatively uninhabited – could become a future asset. On the other hand, he may also have known that this piece of land would become Dili’s main source of ground water in the future. 

Manuel and his brother, Mario, who had served for ten years as Jakarta’s appointed governor of Timor Loro Sa’e, both have a pro-Indonesian background. Manuel and another brother, Joao, the current Sydney-based UDT chairman had led the UDT fighters which assisted the Indonesian army invasion between October and December 1975 (van Klinken, 1997b). Other sources told me that after the invasion, Manuel and his UDT troops had still assisted the Indonesian army in hunting down the FRETILIN/FALINTIL guerillas in the mountains of Timor Loro Sa’e. 

When Indonesian military power was consolidated in Timor Loro Sa’e, Manuel moved to business, managing the family’s civil engineering firm, CV Algarve Timor. In 1982, he became a member of the Indonesian provincial puppet parliament, on the platform of the government party, Golkar. He become one of the most vocal voices in the parliament, but still supported the Indonesian occupation. 

After the 1996 Nobel Peace Prize for two of his compatriots – Bishop Carlos Filipe Ximenes Belo and Jose Ramos-Horta – both Manuel and his younger brother, Mario, began to shift their political directions in line with their younger brother, Joao, the UDT leader. Early in December 1997, Manuel launched his Movement for Reconciliation and Unity of the People of Timor (GRPTT: Gerakan Rekonsiliasi dan Persatuan Rakyat Timor Timur) at a UDT congress in Perth, Western Australia. This movement, which also embraced other former Indonesian collaborators, began to campaign for a referendum to respect the Timorese right to self-determination, and instantly became the target of military and militia intimidations (van Klinken, 1997b; Taudevin, 1999). The major event, though, which could be seen as the public announcement that both Mario and Manuel have become supporters of the nationalist cause was, the first pro-independence public meeting in Dili on 9 June 1998. Mario chaired the public meeting, called by the East Timor Students Solidarity Council (ETSSC). 

Eventually, to accommodate all former collaborators into the CNRT, Xanana appointed Manuel Carrascalao to coordinate the CNRT committee in Dili, together with another UDT member, Leandro Isaac, and a former political prisoner from FRETILIN, David Dias Ximenese. Manuel’s pro-independence campaign eventually cost him the life of his eighteen year-old adopted son, Manuelito, when one hundred military and militias stormed his mansion on 17 April, 1999 (Taudevin, 1999). 

Soon after my interview with Wayne Thomas, the United Nations wind in Dili turned around. The UN ordered Wayne Thomas to dismantle and abandon the A$3 million ‘instant hotel’ created only moments after InterFET took control of Dili. The new UNTAET chief, Sergio de Mello, found out that Thomas did not have written UN permission to occupy that land. This change occurred after CNRT members told the UN that Manuel Carrascalao had sold the land to the Indonesian army and thus no longer had a claim on it. It also came after CNRT president, Xanana Gusmao, delivered a stern warning on 6 December 1999 that, in times of national crisis, CNRT members were supposed to serve the people, not themselves. The comment was widely seen as an attack on Manuel Carrascalao’s involvement with Wayne Thomas. But apart from the intra-CNRT politics, it reflected the UN position to deem all former Indonesian army land as ‘state property’ until land claims can be heard by the embryonic Timor Loro Sa’e court system. 

Construction

Potentially the most lucrative business deal in Timor Loro Sa’e is still to be made by Australian construction giant, Multiplex Constructions Pty. Ltd. The chairman and CEO of this company, John Charles Roberts, has family ties with the 2/2 commandos that served in Timor Loro Sa’e in World War II. Multiplex’s Darwin-based manager, John Brears, recently visited Aileu, which at that time was still the headquarters of CNRT and FALINTIL, and has tendered to rebuild some public buildings there, while donating some computers and vehicles to the CNRT. 

‘We are primarily interested in the short term in helping the Timorese people get themselves established’, John Brears told Catherine Munro from the Sydney Morning Herald on 16 November, 1999. But Multiplex also wanted a long-term relationship, he added. ‘We are not being carpet-baggers, we are not here to make a quick buck.’ 

What do the UNTAET officials think about this proposal? According to the same news article, Sergio de Mello’s legal adviser, Hansjoerg Strohmeyer, was already in Dili designing the planned property and land commission in consultation with East Timorese independence leader, Xanana Gusmao. 

As he has spent most of his adult life fighting in the mountains, in underground bunkers, and in jail cells in Dili, Semarang, and Jakarta, it is still debatable whether Xanana knows what kind of corporate giant he is dealing with. Or, whether Multiplex is the right partner to reconstruct Timor Loro Sa’e's public buildings for the lowest cost. 

As far as the company’s history shows, Multiplex is certainly not interested in small-scale developments. It also has a history of financially underwriting local political elites. Founded in Perth in 1962, it still is a family business under the leadership of its founder and present chief executive, John Charles Roberts. Since 1983 it has been involved in overseas construction activities, with significant operations in Singapore, Malaysia, and Indonesia. In 1997, it employed more than 3,000 direct and indirect workers on its sites and undertook work with a value of over A$2 billion. In Sydney, it completed Australia’s most prestigious office building, the Chifley Square, and is currently constructing Stadium Australia, the main stadium for the Sydney 2000 Olympic Games, with a contract value in excess of A$450 million. 

According to sources in Darwin and Dili, Multiplex had received a sympathetic ear among the CNRT leaders thanks to Joao (‘Joy’) Goncalves and Darwin-based lawyer, Martin Hardie. Joy is a Timorese who fled to Melbourne in the mid-1970s, and later moved to Cairns, Queensland, where his family owns a supermarket. Goncalves, who had a very low profile role during his twenty-four years in Australia, as far as Timorese politics is concerned, seems to be currently well-entrenched in the CNRT inner circle. He is often seen managing the CNRT office in Dili, or travelling with Xanana Gusmao. Many Indonesian-educated Timorese jokingly call him ‘Mensekneg CNRT’, referring to the Indonesian acronym of ‘State Secretariate Minister.’ By cooperating with Multiplex Corporations, Joy allegedly plans to open a new supermarket and a hotel in Dili. Martin Hardie was fortunate to have the right contacts to approach the CNRT leadership. Those contacts were Jose Gusmao, a relative of Xanana Gusmao and formerly the CNRM Representative in Darwin, and Angie Pires, a Timorese woman whose sister was Gusmao’s former wife. During my visit to Dili in mid-November 1999, I was told that Martin Hardie was the one I had to see in Dili, to make an appointment with Xanana Gusmao. 

Due to Goncalves’s mediation, Multiplex has recently obtained a contract of A$0.5 million to rebuild the Dili headquarters of the old Portuguese-era chamber of commerce, called ACAIT (Associacao Commercial Agricola e Industrial de Timor). During the Indonesian occupation ACAIT had been changed into KADINDA (Kamar Dagang dan Industri Daerah) Timor Timur, which was headed by Manuel Carrascalao. ACAIT has recently been revived by an ad hoc committee, again headed by Manuel Carrascalao with Joy Goncalves as the secretary. Without consulting other former members and without holding a public tender, this ad hoc committee has appointed Multiplex to reconstruct the old ACAIT building. In the meantime, Joy is already planning to open a restaurant in the reconstructed building. Apart from the absence of a public tender, the A$0.5 million proposal to rebuild the ACAIT building also contain some labour irregularities. The proposal is based on an A$25 minimum wage for construction workers, while in reality Timorese workers are mostly only paid A$5. 

Slowly but surely, Multiplex is beginning to receive other contracts as well. Recently, it obtained a A$2 million contract to rebuild the former Indonesian provincial parliament building, which during the Portuguese time housed most of the government offices. 

Legal services

Since the transition towards full independence, and the destruction of so many public and private properties have created immense legal problems, obviously Timor Loro Sa’e has become a lucrative market for law firms. One Australian law firm which has moved into the country is Dunhill, Madden and Butler. This law firm is politically well connected in Australia, since Stephen Loosley, a former NSW State Secretary of the Australian Labor Party (ALP), joined it after leaving the NSW state parliament. 

With a recommendation from Xanana Gusmao, they found their Timorese partner, Manuel Tilman, to form their joint venture in Dili, called Tilman and Dunhill. This Portuguese-educated lawyer, who was previously based in Macao, had been involved in the so-called ‘reconciliation process’ among pro-independence and pro-Jakarta Timorese initiated by Suharto’s eldest daughter, Tutut. In December 1993, Tilman attended the infamous London Meeting as part of the so-called grupo de seis, which included the highly respected Timorese community leader, Padre Francisco Fernandez (Gunn, 1997). 

Three years later, Tilman joined a consortium with three other Timorese collaborators, Abilio de Araujo, the Lisbon-based former top executive of FRETILIN, Francisco Lopes da Cruz, a former UDT leader who had become Suharto’s ‘roving ambassador for East Timor’, and Jose Abilio Osorio-Soares, then Jakarta-appointed governor of Timor Loro Sa’e and co-founder of the pro-Indonesian party, APODETI. 

During Suharto’s last years in power, Tilman gradually moved from Tutut to Jose Ramos-Horta and Xanana Gusmao. On 23-27April 1998, Tilman and his Macao Group were even trusted by Xanana to organise the National Congress of the Timorese in the Diaspora in Peniche, Portugal. This was attended by 218 delegates from various political parties, and civic, cultural and sporting associations. Two groups were absent from the convention, namely the Timor Socialist Association, who ran their own resistance network in Indonesia and inside Timor Loro Sa’e and Manuel Carrascalao’s Reconciliation Group for East Timor’s Development (GRPTT). Joao Carrascalao, the UDT leader, who was in Lisbon attending another conference, initially refused to attend the convention but later changed his mind. 

For the sake of unity, the convention replaced the name Maubere in CNRM with Timor, to accommodate UDT’s rejection of the name Maubere which they considered to be derogatory. So, CNRM became CNRT. The convention also elected Xanana in absentia as the umbrella organisation’s president and Ramos-Horta and an unnamed person inside Timor Loro Sa’e as vice presidents. Finally, the convention approved a Pact of Rights, Duties, Liberties and Safeguards for the People of East Timor. This ‘Magna Carta’ was based on a draft from FRETILIN leader Mar’i Alkatiri, incorporated parts of a draft from Luis Cardoso, former CNRM Representative for Portugal and Spain, but rejected a draft made earlier on by RENETIL (ETRA, 1998; Taudevin, 1999; Carlos da Silva Lopes, personal communication, 1998). 

At the moment, Tilman is being trusted by Xanana to co-ordinate CNRT’s taskforce on legal affairs, and co-operates with the United Nations to investigate the post-referendum human rights violations perpetrated by the Indonesian military and their Timorese collaborators (Sydney Morning Herald, 16 December 1999). 

The question is now, without any legal regulations in place against conflicts of interests for Timor Loro Sa’e's public figures, is it appropriate for a figure with such important legal power to run a law firm, which may be recruited by business people who may have supported the previous regime during the occupation? 

To avoid potential conflicts of interests, as in the case of Manuel Tilman’s ‘double function’ as Coordinator of CNRT’s Legal Affairs Taskforce and partner of a large international law firm, it is highly recommendable that the UN should pay reasonable salaries to CNRT staffpersons, who should be prohibited from directing any business and should put all their family’s company shares into a blind trust during their term of office. Learning from the Australian model rather than reproducing the Indonesian-style of ‘KKN’ (korupsi, kolusi, nepotisme), which brought the Indonesian economy to a standstill and facilitated the downfall of Suharto, should be the way for the newborn (or, reborn) country to go. 

The World Bank: from supporting genocide to building a country from scratch 

Compared to all those Australian and other capitalists, the role of the World Bank is much more crucial in the reconstruction and future development of Timor Loro Sa’e. Understandably, the first city which Xanana Gusmao visited, after his first CNRT meeting in Darwin, was Washington, DC. In Washington, the former guerilla leader, now in his three piece-suit and tie, persuaded the World Bank to allocate its resources to reconstruct and develop his country during the interim UN administration over the next years. 

Xanana’s plea did not fall on deaf ears. Klaus Rohland, the World Bank’s country director for Papua New Guinea and the Pacific Islands, has been charged with co-ordinating the Bank’s involvement with East Timor. Without waiting for the grass to grow, Rohland himself led an international mission to conduct a three-week assessment of the country, assisted from the Bank’s side by Sarah Cliffe and from the Timorese side by Mario Carrascalao, the longest serving governor of Timor Loro Sa’e during the Indonesian occupation. 

In their press conferences in Canberra and Dili, Rohland and Cliffe did not unveil much of their mission’s findings, except that it may cost up to A$375 million over the next three years, and that it will be discussed at a meeting of lending institutions and countries in Tokyo. They did mention, however, that in contrast to the poorly paid, graft-prone public service of more than 28,000 under the Indonesian occupation, the mission wants no more than 12,200 in the three-year transitional period, with nearly 90 per cent of these to be teachers and health workers. The mission also identified agriculture – particularly coffee – as central to the country’s economy (Sydney Morning Herald, 10 and 19 November 1999). 

An article in the Asian Wall Street Journal on 7 October 1999 sheds some light on what Timor Loro Sa’e means to the World Bank: ‘This tiny, devastated former Portuguese colony is to become an important testing ground for the World Bank, the International Monetary Fund and a group of wealthy donor countries’ (Casey, 1999). A testing ground for what? A testing ground to show the world how to build a macro-economic infrastructure from scratch. 

They – meaning the World Bank, the IMF and a group of wealthy lending countries – have the task, according to Casey, ‘of building the foundation of the fledgling country’s economy. A finance ministry, a revenue-collection agency, a monetary authority, a currency regime, customs and payments systems, regulatory bodies – all probably will be designed and built by a clique of Washington-based economists and development planners’ (1999). 

The Bank has already aggressively sought to take charge, says Casey. In addition to organising an informal meeting of prospective Timor Loro Sa’e lending institutions and countries in Washington, DC, during the last week of September 1999, in the following month the Bank had provided a three-week crash course in international economics to a small group of East Timorese economists. According to Casey: 

The few ethnic East Timorese holding PhDs are mostly former exiles living in places like Sydney or Lisbon, for whom starting a new life in Dili might be hard. Even so, World Bank staffers say they are impressed with the support they have found among the far-flung East Timorese diaspora. (1999) 

What the World Bank – and also Xanana and the young and overseas Timorese paired to the Bank’s East Timor mission – seem to forget, is that during the Indonesian occupation, the World Bank was also part of the problem, and not the solution. As several authors have highlighted, the World Bank was an active and very willing participant in two genocidal policies in Timor Loro Sa’e, during the Indonesian occupation, namely (a) the so-called ‘transmigration’ policy of resettling Balinese and Javanese farmers on the rice-fields of the Timorese farmers in the border areas and southern plains; and (b) the so-called ‘family planning’ program, where Timor Loro Sa’e in particular became targetted for the promotion of the more permanent fertility control techniques, such as Depo Provera injectables and Norplant implants. In fact, Timor Loro Sa’e had the highest level – 72.22 per cent – of all new users of injectables among all Indonesian provinces in 1993-1994 (Otten, 1986; Aditjondro, 1994; Scharfe, 1996; Sissons, 1997). 

In addition, in 1992 the World Bank also happily took over the chair of the club of Indonesia’s lending institutions and countries, which changed its name from IGGI to CGI, after the Netherlands and Canada protest against the Santa Cruz massacre of 12 November 1991 (Scharfe, 1996). 

In other words, the World Bank has helped to legitimise Indonesia’s occupation by assisting the New Order regime to utilise all those ‘idle and under-utilised’ rice-fields in the Maliana and Zumalai plains, and re-filling the population gap as a result of the deaths of a third of Timor Loro Sa’e's pre-invasion population. 

Looking at it from that perspective, all the loans from the World Bank to reconstruct Timor Loro Sa’e should be turned into grants, as a form of compensation for helping Jakarta to legitimise its illegal occupation of this still-born nation. 

Agrarian Reform

In all these plans and efforts to reconstruct and develop the war torn country, what seem to be missing, so far, are talks or plans on how to redistribute the excessive land holdings inherited from the two former colonisers: Portugal and Indonesia. 

Since agriculture, and coffee in particular, seems to be a major focus of the World Bank’s reconstruction plan, agrarian reform is certainly very relevant in this sector. About 60 per cent of the coffee plantations are still in the hands of smallholders, 10 per cent are in the hands of large family plantation owners, or facenderos, and 30 per cent were in the hands of the Portuguese government company, SAPT (Sociedade Agricola Patria e Trabalho) until taken over by a military-backed company, P.T. Salazar Plantations, during the Indonesian occupation. 

During the occupation, one of the Portuguese facenderos, Antonio Brito, was fortunate enough to keep managing his seven coffee plantations, but in a profit-sharing arrangement with the military. Hence, a Portuguese television journalist, Rui Araujo, described Brito, (who formerly was the manager of the Dili branch of Banco Nacional Ultramarino) as a privileged person. 

He works, and works hard for the Indonesians. There are few others like him. To encourage the Timorese, Jakarta pays the collaborators generously. They want them to set an example by [creating a] contrast between plenty and generalised penury. Inequality serves, on top of it all, to create or emphasise the abyss that is beginning to separate the Timorese from each other. [By] creating first-class and second-class citizens, Indonesia is applying the old axiom of dividing to dominate. (Budiardjo and Liem, 1984) 

Now that the Indonesians have left, legal problems might occur in relation to the future of Antonio Brito’s coffee plantations, as well as the ex-Salazar Plantations coffee plantations in Ermera. 

SAPT is the oldest large-scale coffee plantation in Timor Loro Sa’e, established in 1897 by the then Portuguese Governor Celestino da Silva. In 1904, the Companhia de Timor, also based on metropolitan capital, emerged as a rival to SAPT in the coffee plantation business in Ermera. By the 1910s they were joined by four other plantation companies, the most important of which was Associacao Commercial Agricola e Industrial de Timor (ACAIT) administered by da Silva’s son. By 1910, an additional 6,000 hectares of land had been granted by the colonial rulers to other individual Portuguese planters (Gunn and Lee, 1994; Abrantes, 1994). 

However, will a future Timor Loro Sa’e government still recognise absentee ownership of land in the country by a foreign government and foreign nationals? If that is the case, it will open the door to other foreign control of land in Timor Loro Sa’e by foreign governments, foreign companies and foreign individuals. 

If, on the contrary, a democratically elected Timor Loro Sa’e government will not allow foreign control of land in the country, then decisions need to be made in the immediate future as to how to redistribute the 16,000 hectares of land. This question also applies to large plantations with commodities other than coffee, such as coconut, which was also heavily dominated by SAPT and SOTA, and was obviously also taken over by Indonesian army-backed interests. 

In addition, a decision needs to be made: whether the facenda system will still be allowed to be continued, even if the facendero family members have already moved out of their facenda into non-farming business. Mario Carrascalao’s own opinion is that the facendas should be taken over by the new government, by paying a certain compensation to the former owners. The next step is to redistribute those mostly idle coffee plantations to the actual farmers, which may have a huge employment effect. 

Large land holdings are not limited to those families who might try to regain the land appropriated from them by the Indonesian occupation forces. If we exclude the former Suharto land-holdings, which will definitely be taken over by the future Timor Loro Sa’e government and returned to their rightful owners, then it may be said, safely, that the Catholic Church is the largest landlord in the country. It covers many tracts of land all over the country, from Fuiloro in Lautem in the east, to Fohorem in Covalima in the west. Or, just outside Dili, it covers the Fatunaba stretch of land from the War Memorial south of Dili to the former seminary in Dare. 

This church-related agrarian reform should not only be focussed on redistributing excessive church-held land, but also on a review of the relations between local church authorities and peasants, where the renting of church-owned tractors and other mechanical equipment involves a portion of the peasants’ harvest. This means that in their daily lives these same parishioners are basically the church’s sharecroppers. 

Unlike what some people on the Right may argue, agrarian reform is certainly not a policy limited to marxist regimes, such as North Korea. Under pressure from US General MacArthur, three East Asian capitalist countries – Japan, South Korea, and Taiwan – carried out redistribution of excessive and absentee agriculture land-holdings to facilitate the transfer of former agriculture land into urban-based industries, while also increasing rural land productivity. 

The question is, has the UNTAET and CNRT any interest in those issues? What limits should be put on landholdings in rural areas? Should those limits only be put on rural properties, or also on urban properties? Who is entitled to own land in Timor Loro Sa’e: only those born in this country, before the Indonesian invasion, or also those born after the invasion? 

The basic question is, however: should the future Timor Loro Sa’e government base its agrarian policy on Timorese customary law and customary land right systems, which often prohibit outsiders who are not members of the local knua (clan) from owning land in their respective hamlets? Or, should the government develop a new agrarian law, which would simply whitewash the disparities and social stratification created by the Portuguese colonial system of ‘bribing’ deportados with large facendas, as well as appropriating the Maubere people’s land to rich and powerful people from the Metropole or to the Catholic Church? 

If the basic solution to solve all land disputes in Timor Loro Sa’e is to uphold the customary land rights of the indigenous people, who have been marginalised by two colonial powers in a row, then at least the customary land laws of three ethno-linguistic groups need to be investigated. In the case of the coffee plantations, the future government should investigate the customary law of the Mambai people, whose homelands covers Ermera, Aileu, Ainaro and Manufahi (Traube, 1986). In the case of transmigration, the customary land law of the Bunak and Kemak peoples in Maliana and, again, the Mambai land law in Manufahi, should be investigated. And in the case of land appropriation in the Eastern tip (Ponta Leste), where a hydro-power plant was planned, the customary land law of the Fataluku people should be investigated. This all demands a full-time investigation, which preferably should be initiated by the CNRT Legal Affairs Taskforce. 

An overall policy of agrarian reform should also cover the large land holdings of the Catholic Church, to abolish an archaic form of exploitation which dates back from the Portuguese colonial era. Obviously, various church institutions may still need to keep some of that land to generate the funds to cover their costs, but a substantial part of what is currently church land was also obtained from parishioners as a form of gratitude, or as a form of future investment, after the occupation forces had left their country. 

Sweeping those matters under the carpet would only be a temporary solution. Since with the limited resources available to the majority of the Timorese people, sooner or later any disparity in standards of living and ownerships of assets will become the target of public criticism, if not vandalism. And questions on ‘how free are we?’ will emerge, if political freedom does not go hand in hand with economic justice. 

Conclusion

Based on these observations, allow me to draw the following conclusions. First of all, the empirical evidence indicates that Frantz Fanon’s observation of post-colonial states in Africa, where the new national middle class became a ‘transmission line between the nation and [global] capitalism’ is very relevant in analysing the current situation in Timor Loro Sa’e. 

The destruction of Timor Loro Sa’e by the Indonesian military and Timorese collaborators, and the forced deportation of a quarter of its population, has created an excellent market and bonanza for Australian businesses. These were the major contributors to previous regimes in Canberra and Darwin, which for more than two decades had supported the occupation of East Timor. 

Despite all the rhetoric of helping Timor Loro Sa’e to get on its feet and with more than a billion dollars to be pumped into the country, what is missing from the equation is a serious study on what proportion of the aid funds is actually leaving the country again in goods and services. These are purchased from overseas companies and are consumed by foreigners who are soon going to leave the country, without a significant ‘trickle down’ or ‘multiplier’ effect for the local, grassroots economy. With the very low standard of wages for local workers, set by the business community and endorsed by the United Nations, Timorese workers are subsidising their Australian employers and the UN and foreign NGO community at least twice the amount of their wages (using the Darwin hotel workers’ wage rate as a yardstick). 

The absence of a code of conduct among CNRT officials and employees raises the questions of conflict of interests of those in political power who are simultaneously involved, or related to those involved as joint-venture partners of the overseas investors. 

Likewise, the absence of a socially and environmentally friendly foreign investment policy and the agressive promotion of Australian businesses into the country is turning Timor Loro Sa’e into a paradise for market-driven foreign investors, without considering the real need for foreign investment. 

Finally, by failing to investigate the urgency of agrarian reform in Timor Loro Sa’e, the World Bank-CNRT mission may intensify future problems of social justice and agricultural productivity. 

Timor Loro Sa’e is rapidly moving away from its previous status as Jakarta’s colony towards becoming a new outpost of global capitalism in the Asia-Pacific region, due to the absence of a democratically elected government. Such a government would rely more on its own people’s resources and traditions, and would therefore put the brakes on this massive influx of foreign capital. 

This is the second part of an edited version of an article which was written in December 1999. The first part appeared in arena magazine number 46.

Bibliography

Abrantes, Manuel Soares. (1994). Usaha Penataan Kembali Direito de Ocupacao Berdasarkan Konversi: Satu Studi Kasus do Desa Bemori. Honours Thesis (Skripsi) at Satya Wacana Christian University in Salatiga, Central Java, Indonesia.

Aditjondro, George J. (1994). In the Shadow of Mount Ramelau: The Impact of the Occupation of East Timor. Leiden: INDOC.

Aditjondro, George J. (1999a). ‘Dari Cabral ke Zanana – Modifikasi Sosiologi Perang Kemerdekaan dari Afrika ke Nusantara’. Foreword in Ronald H. Chilcote. Pembebasan Nasional Menetang Imperialisme: Teori dan Praktek Revolusioner Amilcar Cabral. Jakarta and Dili: Sa’he Study Club and Yayasan HAK, PP. xvii-xxxvi.

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Budiardjo, Carmel and Liem Soei Liong. (1984). The War Against East Timor. London: Zed Books.

Casey, Michael. (1999). ‘New Economy has Meaning in East Timor.’ Asia Wall Street Journal, October 7.

da Costa, Helder. (1999). ‘East Timor Has the Potential to Rise From the Ashes.’ Australian Financial Review, December 17.

ETRA [East Timor Relief Association] (1998). National Council of East Timorese Resistance (CNRT) Magna Carta. Sydney: ETRA.

Gunn, Geoffrey C. and Jefferson Lee. (1994). A Critical View of Western Journalism and Scholarship on East Timor. Manila: Journal of Contemporary Asia Publishers.

Gunn, Geoffrey C. (1997). East Timor and the United Nations: A Case for Intervention. Lawrenceville, NJ: The Red Sea Press, Inc.

Hawley, Janet. (1996). ‘Little Big Chief.’ Good Weekend, October 26.

Kennedy, Danny, Pratap Chatterjee and Roger Moody. (1998). Risky Business – The Grasberg Goldmine: An Independent Annual Report on P.T. Freeport Indonesia, 1998. Berkley: Project Underground.

van Klinken, Gerry (1997b). ‘A Surprise East Timor Initiative?’ Digest, December 18.

Mineral Policy Institute [MPI] (1998). The Buck’s Gotta Stop Somewhere: Social and Environmental Accountability in the Financing of Mining. Sydney: Mineral Policy Institute.

Otten, Mariel. (1986). Transmigrasi: Indonesian Resettlement Policy 1965-1985. Copenhagen: IWGIA.

Scharfe, Sharon. (1995). Complicity: Human Rights and Canadian Foreign Policy. Montreal: Black Rose Books.

Sissons, Miranda E. (1997). From One Day to Another: Violations of Women’s Reproductive and Sexual Rights in East Timor. Melbourne: East Timor Human Rights Centre.

Taudevin, Lansell (1999). East Timor: Too Little, Too Late. Sydney: Duffy and Snellgrove.

Tomodok, E.M. (1994). Hari-Hari Akhir Timor Portugis. Jakarta: Pustaka Jaya.

Traube, Elizabeth. (1986). Cosmology and Social Life: Ritual Exchange Among the Mabai of East Timor. Chicago: The University of Chicago Press.

Wesley-Smith, Rob. (1997). ‘NT Elections – Here We Go Again!’, The AustralAsian, August 29.

George Aditjondro is in the Department of Sociology and Anthropology at the University of Newcastle

Closer to home, we have seen a similar tendency in East Timor’s former coloniser where, after failed attempts to set up a liberal democracy in the early 1950s, Indonesia was basically ruled by two autocrats, Sukarno and Suharto. Therefore, it is interesting to observe what course Timor Loro Sa’e (East Timor) is taking, after its people decided, through a UN supervised referendum, to declare their independence from Indonesia. What has made it even more interesting is that Jose Alexandre Gusmao, also known as Kay Rala Xanana, the leader of the East Timorese independence movement, has repeatedly stated in interviews prior to his return to his home country that he did not want to repeat the historical mistake of having to preside over his newborn (or, reborn, as some may say) nation, after having led the independence struggle for seventeen years. Therefore, he will refuse to become Timor Loro Sa’e’s president and prefers to become an artist (Oposisi, 4–10 February, 1999; Tempo, 31 October 1999).

This topic is not only academically interesting but is also socially crucial, since it involves a people who have fought for a quarter of a century to obtain their own independent state, and still seem to be quite far from that goal, even after taking the very courageous step of casting their ballots when their country was still occupied by tens of thousands of Indonesian troops and their Timorese collaborators.

Political transformations

Timor Loro Sa’e is still a quasi-independent country, where foreign nationals are making all strategic decisions. For the next two to three years, the Timor Loro Sa’e people — many of them prefer to be called the Maubere people — are still to be administered by UN officials through the UN Temporary Authority of East Timor (UNTAET), which is headed by a Brazilian diplomat, Sergio Vieira de Mello, as Special Representative of the Secretary General. His administrative power is supported by the economic muscle of the World Bank, which has appointed a senior official, Klaus Rohland, to be the Bank’s director responsible for reconstruction of the country.

Security of the country had also been in the hands of the InterFET (International Forces for East Timor) troops under the command of Major-General Peter Cosgrove from the Australian Defence Forces. InterFET’s role has now been taken over by new troops which function under the UNTAET structure, commanded by a Filipino general, with an Australian general as his deputy.

Officially, in all these functions — administration, economic planning, and security — the UN officials have Timorese counterparts. Sergio de Mello’s counterpart is the overall leader of the Timor Loro Sa’e liberation movement, Xanana Gusmao. Klaus Rohland’s counterpart is Mario Viegas Carrascalao. And the de facto counterpart of Peter Cosgrove was again Xanana, who, apart from being the president of the National Council of Timorese Resistance, or CNRT, is also the Commander of CNRT’s military wing, FALINTIL. On several occasions, though, the FALINTIL commander has been represented by his deputy commander, Taur Matan Ruak, for instance when Major-General Cosgrove met his Indonesian counterpart to solve the dispute of the Timor Loro Sa’e and Indonesian border near Motain, brokered by the US Ambassador for the United Nations, Richard Holbrooke.

Questions on representativeness

There are still some problems with this parallel Timorese structure. The three foreign officials mentioned earlier clearly have someone to whom they are responsible, namely the UN Secretary-General in New York and the World Bank President in Washington DC. Meanwhile, to whom are Xanana, Mario Carrascalao and Taur Matan Ruak accountable in co-administering their country’s civilian and military affairs?

If they are part of an embryonic government of an independent Timor Loro Sa’e, where is the embryonic parliament to which they are accountable?

This is an important political problem, which the foreign media — which until this moment, seems to be the only source of information on Timor Loro Sa’e — have overlooked, in their frequent references to Xanana Gusmao as the most likely first president, or even ‘president designate’ of the newborn nation.

Timor Loro Sa’e is still a nation without a state. CNRT, which was the umbrella organisation of the liberation movement, still has to set up a framework for a state: a democratic, not an authoritarian state, that is.

James Dunn, a former Australian diplomat in Dili and long-time supporter of the independence struggle, suggested that the UNTAET should learn from the experience of Namibia. In that former South African colony, the question of what status to give the SWAPO was resolved by the UN administration by recognising SWAPO as ‘the authentic representative of the Namibian people’, until elections could be arranged. Dunn believes that ‘CNRT has earned the right to be regarded as the authentic representative of the Timorese people until elections can be held’.

The basis of his argument is twofold. First, CNRT has brought together the leaders of all the main Timorese parties, including FRETILIN and the UDT, which in August 1975 were briefly in conflict, and even members of APODETI, which once championed integration with Indonesia. Second, CNRT is endowed with leaders of distinction, especially Xanana Gusmao, Jose Ramos-Horta, and Mario Carrascalao (Dunn, 1999a).

These arguments could be questioned on three counts. First of all, as mentioned earlier, the Timorese people would not necessarily want to repeat the history of Namibia, where ten years after shrugging off colonial rule the liberation hero has turned into an autocratic ruler of a one-party dominated state amid popular disenchantment.

Secondly, a quarter of a century after UDT and FRETILIN were established, the old party rivalries are not so relevant any more. FRETILIN’s national conference in August 1998 in Sydney, Australia, scrapped the ‘agrarian reform’ point from the party’s new manual and political programs, and replaced it with the following more market-oriented and capitalistic sounding formulation:

Defining a national Agriculture and Rural Assistance Policy which achieves equilibrium between the need to develop family agriculture and the green belt of the cities with the promotion and encouragement of the entrepreneurial capacity of private individuals in export production, creatively exploring the potential of micro-climates for the diversification of production. (FRETILIN, 1998)

This is indeed a major shift from the original ‘Economic Reconstruction’ program, which stated that:

All large farms will be expropriated and returned to the people and will be used within the co-operative system. Fertile lands not under cultivation will be distributed to the people and will be utilized in co-operatives or by State enterprises. (Hill, 1978)

On the other hand, in my interview in Darwin on 11 November 1999 with Mario Carrascalao, a co-founder of UDT, he suggested that all the large private coffee plantations should be taken over by the newborn state with proper compensations to the former owners, and then redistributed to the coffee growers. ‘In this way we could create more jobs for the farmers’, he argued, refusing to be drawn into a discussion on whether his idea mirrors FRETILIN’s original political platform, which had been so strongly opposed by UDT in the mid-1970s.

The socialist leaning of FRETILIN, meanwhile, has also been watered down among the older leaders, including among those who had spent most of their fighting years in Mozambique which was for decades ruled by a Marxist-Leninist liberation movement. Last August, in an interview in New York with one of the leaders who had lived for two decades in Mozambique, he said that the experience of living in a socialist country had taught him to prevent Timor Loro Sa’e from following such a path.

On the other hand, this son of a liurai in Viqueque suggested that an independent Timor Loro Sa’e — and FRETILIN in particular — should respect the customary laws of the different ethno-linguistic groups in the country, and take those laws into consideration in designing the new state’s political and economic systems. In other words, for him, state socialism is out but a more clan-based socialism is welcome.

Third, a new leftist group has emerged from among many former FRETILIN members, and has formalised itself into a new political party, PST (Partido Socialista de Timor). This party originally emerged as an association of socialist activists within FRETILIN, and called itself AST (Associacacao Socialista de Timor). They had left FRETILIN in protest against the formation of the National Council of Maubere Resistance (CNRM, or Concelho Nacional de Resistencia Maubere) in the occupied country on 31 December, 1988. They also left FRETILIN in protest against the decision of FRETILIN’s diplomatic front to de-recognise the Democratic Republic of East Timor, or RDTL (Republica Democratica de Timor Leste) which was unilaterally declared by FRETILIN on 28 November, 1975.

Unfortunately, AST lost some of its credibility among East Timor supporters in Indonesia and also among fellow Timorese nationalists when the organisation sided with Abilio de Araujo. In August 1993, this Lisbon-based former FRETILIN leader was suspended from the Central Committee of FRETILIN as well as its Representative in Europe, when he responded positively to approaches by Suharto’s eldest daughter, Siti Hardiyanti Rukmana, aka Tutut, who had set up a Portuguese-Indonesian friendship association to undermine the pro-independence diplomatic campaign of FRETILIN and Ramos-Horta’s overseas CNRM network.

Meanwhile, the Timorese student resistance movement, RENETIL, has taken a non-partisan line following the example of Xanana Gusmao and the CNRM, of which it was a member organisation. Besides, RENETIL accommodates students whose parents did not come from a FRETILIN background. In fact, according to a survey of its members, 48 per cent of its members have parents with an APODETI background, 26 per cent have parents with an UDT background, and only 24 per cent have parents with a FRETILIN background (da Silva Lopes, 1996).

In the meantime, AST remained a small and lesser known organisation until 1977, when it received national attention over two major events. The first was the arrest in September of four AST members for assembling a bomb in a village in Demak, Central Java, which they had planned to smuggle into Timor Loro Sa’e. The bomb had exploded prematurely and the four AST members went into hiding in the Central Javan capital, Semarang, where they were immediately arrested by the Indonesian military.

The consequent trial of the four AST members — Ivo Salvador Soares Miranda, Domingos Natalino Coelho da Silva, Joaquim Santana, and Fernao Pedro Malta Correia Lebre — became a focus of solidarity demonstrations by other Timorese student activists, and popularised the name of AST in the Indonesian media. After a lengthy trial, the ‘Semarang four’ were eventually acquitted (ETHRC, 1998).

The ‘Demak bomb-making case’ also brought AST closer to Xanana. The imprisoned resistance leader took full responsibility for the bomb-making plan, which was meant ‘to strengthen our resistance towards the Indonesian armed forces’ (Sydney Morning Herald, 20 November 1997).

AST’s secretary-general, Avelino, who often uses the pseudonym Dr Shalar Kosi, knew that the interrogations of his comrades could lead to his arrest as well. Hence, on 19 September 1997, Avelino and his wife Sobicha, their two children, Cea and Dina, and two other AST comrades, Nunu Vicente Pereira and Custodio da Costa, sought refuge in the Austrian embassy and asked to be deported to Portugal.

In early 1999, before Avelino and his family and friends left the Austrian Embassy, his comrades further popularised PST in Indonesia through several campaigns in Jakarta. On 9 March, around one hundred PST members demonstrated in front of the UN office as well as Dutch and Austrian embassies, demanding the release of Xanana Gusmao as well as their own comrades in the Austrian embassy. That demonstration was led by Flarinando Coimbra. Then, on 26 March, some members of PST’s Central Committee came to the electoral commission in Jakarta to protest against the planned Indonesian general election in Timor Loro Sa’e. This action was led by Nelson Tomas Correira, a PST political commissar and spokesperson (Detikcom, 25 March, 1999).

The emergence of this new Timorese political party received strong support from two ideological sisters, the Indonesian People’s Democratic Party, or PRD (Partai Rakyat Demokratik), and the Australian Democratic Socialist Party (DSP) through its sister organisation, ASIET (Action in Solidarity for Indonesia and East Timor).

Then, after a stay of nearly twenty months, Avelino and his group left the Austrian embassy, to regain the leadership of PST. He spent several months going back and forth between Dili and Jakarta before returning to Dili around 2 September. He was also in Dili in the lead up to the 30 August referendum, and stayed with the refugees in the hills of Dare, helping to reorganise the refugees return to Dili after the InterFET troops landed on 20 September.

Before the referendum, Avelino’s party had called for the formation of a ‘transitional Democratic Collective Government to represent all the existing political forces in Timor Loro Sa’e’ (da Silva, 1999). To a certain degree, this idea was incorporated by Xanana through the formation of a Transitional Council. These seven persons, Avelino included, are part of a National Consultative Council which has been set up by Sergio Vieira de Melo, the head of UN Transitional Administration of East Timor (UNTAET), to act as the country’s interim government (Dunn, 1999b).

PST itself has not — and most likely will not — join CNRT. As is the case with many FRETILIN militants, PST is still unhappy with the de-recognition of the Democratic Republic of East Timor (DRET), Republica Democratica de Timor Leste (RDTL), by FRETILIN and UDT’s diplomatic front in the early 1980s. Hence, it has initiated the formation of the Council for the Popular Defence of the RDTL, or CPD-RDTL.

This organisation attempts to consolidate support for the reaffirmation of the 1975 RDTL, which is part of PST’s political platform. To attract popular support, CPD-RDTL organised a massive demonstration of students that protested the 5 May 1999 agreement in New York which entrusted the Indonesian forces with security in Timor Loro Sa’e until the referendum.

Apart from those political activities, PST has also begun to initiate economic and cultural activities in their homeland. In cooperation with their Australian counterpart, ASIET, they have formed the Maubere Cooperative Foundation (KOPERMAR), which organises small coffee farmers, plantation workers and other villagers in Ermera, Liquica, Manufahi and Aileu, where KOPERMAR branch offices have been severely bruised during the post-referendum terror campaign.

This joint Timorese-Australian endeavour is also developing a fifteen hectare sustainable farm near Manatuto, east of Dili. Some 90 per cent of the town’s infrastructure was destroyed by the Indonesian military and their Timorese collaborators. The land was donated to the cooperative by a local family. KOPERMAR activists hope that this sustainable farm project will generate income for other local self-sustaining activities.

While reviving those economically oriented activities, KOPERMAR is also active on the educational front. It seeks to publish a newspaper, Tuba, and has began to conduct English language classes. Around 1500 eager Timorese, ranging in age from nine to forty, were crammed last November from 7 a.m. to 7 p.m. in a makeshift classroom with no in-house sanitation, illuminated by a solitary light bulb. Five teachers also helped these students to take their primary and secondary school examinations (Lane, 1999; Riggs, 1999).

Currently, while FRETILIN has still not yet reactivated itself publicly in Timor Loro Sa’e, outside the FALINTIL structure, PST has filled the need of many young people, peasants and workers for a radical avenue to organise. According to a source close to the party, PST has been able to attract a total of 23,000 members, 2,000 of them students in the city, and the others urban workers and peasants. Many of them were formerly members or sympathisers of FRETILIN.

In the first exercise to show their force in 2000, on 5 January the Socialist Party of Timor mobilised a demonstration of 400 people at the gates of the UNTAET headquarters to protest for the rights of the East Timorese people (the ‘Maubere’ people). The protestors presented five demands to the UNTAET, namely to stop the importation of foreign labour, give the East Timorese the chance to work, lower the cost of food and construction materials, lift the minimum wage, and broaden rice and other food distribution (ASIET News Update, 10 January, 2000).

Meanwhile, a third leftist group has emerged in Timor Loro Sa’e. It is not a political party with massive membership, such as FRETILIN and PST, but more of a discussion and research institute. Initially called Sa’he Study Club, the Sa’he Institute for Liberation was founded in Indonesia in early 1999 by young Timorese activists who saw the need for a deeper reflection on what economic and political directions their future country should take after gaining its political independence.

Sa’he founders were especially worried about the drive by certain CNRT leaders to promote the country to foreign investors. As one Sa’he activist wrote to me in February 1999:

Where do they [those CNRT leaders] want to take our country? Has it too become like Indonesia, or at least like Timika [in West Papua] with its Freeport mine? Will they turn Atauro and Jacko into another Christmas Island? Is it enough that decisions concerning the exploration of the Timor Gap will be taken only by the leaders, without consulting the people?

Combining action with reflection, Sa’he published their analysis on the pitfalls of the Indonesian autonomy offer, and distributed it among villagers in Timor Loro Sa’e, where they educated the people about the forthcoming 30 August referendum. Sa’he’s membership encompasses members of RENETIL and other groups as well as other Timorese not affiliated with all those organisations. Its director is a young lawyer, Aderito de Jesus Soares.

All this shows that ‘the Left’ in Timor Loro Sa’e is certainly not only embodied by FRETILIN, even as it currently seeks to reaffirm its social democratic line by joining Socialist International.

Generation gap

Meanwhile, a quarter of a century after FRETILIN and UDT were founded, other real and potential contradictions among the Timorese people have come to the forefront. First of all, there is a widening ‘military versus civilian’ gap between the 1,000 to 2,000 people who joined the armed struggle in the mountains of Timor Loro Sa’e, and the young people, ten times that number, who fought the occupation forces right on their own turf, namely in the cities of Timor Loro Sa’e and Indonesia.

Since Xanana Gusmao’s return to his home country, and his decision to reside in Aileu among his former guerilla army, these young Timorese who had not joined the FALINTIL but had faced the Indonesian troops in unarmed, non-violent civil disobedience actions in the cities of Timor Loro Sa’e and Indonesia, have felt themselves alienated. This is not only in relation to the UN and other foreigners, but also to their own leader.

This feeling of alienation may have been further aggravated by Xanana’s comments and behaviour, which show the leader’s identification more with the former guerilla army than with the young people. On 19 November 1999, Xanana took the radical step of leading a group of twenty guerillas to protest the behaviour of the InterFET troops who continued to disarm them outside their cantonment areas.

This action was taken in full daylight, in front of the foreign media and in front of the UN headquarters. Under the command of Xanana, the FALINTIL guerillas blocked Major General Cosgrove from entering the UN compound (West Australian, 20 November 1999). Then, ten days later, in an interview with a major Australian newspaper at his house in Aileu, Xanana stated: ‘I’m more the leader of FALINTIL than the president of CNRT’ (Australian, 1 December 1999).

Being the leader of FALINTIL and CNRT is for Xanana indeed not an either/or issue. Firstly, he is both the president of CNRT as well as the commander of FALINTIL. Secondly, the deputy commander of FALINTIL, Taur Matan Ruak, is also a member of CNRT’s Transitional Council. This body of seven persons represents the Timorese in the UN Steering Council. In other words, FALINTIL is overly represented in the Transitional Council, where UDT, FRETILIN, PST, and OMT all have one representative.

This preference to be identified with FALINTIL, and the lack of appreciation for the non-violent and unarmed struggle of thousands of young Timorese in the cities and towns of Timor Loro Sa’e and Indonesia, is not taken lightly by these young people, for various reasons. First of all, the struggle in the cities which was pioneered by young people — such as Constancio Pinto, who currently studies at Columbia University in New York — was what revived the international attention and solidarity with the Timor cause. The decisive moment was the massacre on 12 November 1991 that took between 270 and 400 young lives.

Secondly, members of the Timorese student resistance movement, RENETIL, had continued to serve as estafetas between the two wings of the resistance in the occupied country, namely FALINTIL and the clandestine front, with the movement in Indonesia and with Xanana himself during his imprisonment in Cipinang, Jakarta. Wave after wave of RENETIL activists jumped over the embassy fences in Jakarta. They had maintained their links with Xanana and kept consulting with Xanana in carrying out their actions; actions which continued to bring the Timor cause into the international daylight.

Finally, after Xanana returned to Timor Loro Sa’e — via Darwin, New York, Washington, and Lisbon — the thousands of Timorese students and young graduates who had to be repatriated by the UN from Indonesia to save them from military and militia terror discovered how the CNRT had already deeply buttressed itself with Portuguese and English-speaking elites from the diaspora. Most of the young Timorese who have been recruited by the various CNRT bodies in Darwin, Dili and Aileu had fled with their parents in the 1970s and grew up in Australia or Portugal.

In other words, a growing gap is emerging between the 1975 resistance leaders plus the diaspora elite and the young Timorese who grew up living under the Indonesian occupation, which they had forcefully opposed from within. Ironically, the man who had been their main source of inspiration, whose name they had shouted in all their demonstrations, and whose image had loomed large on their banners and T-shirts, seems to feel much more comfortable among his former guerilla comrades and the Portuguese speaking diaspora élite than with this upcoming Timorese intelligentsia.

Indeed, by insisting that Portuguese should become the official language of the newly independent nation-state, using Portuguese as the language of education, and by insisting that the escudo should become the national currency, the CNRT elite have further alienated themselves from the Indonesian-educated intelligentsia of Timor Loro Sa’e (Sydney Morning Herald, 5 November and 3 December, 1999).

It is a great idea for Timor Loro Sa’e to join the association of Portuguese-speaking countries and to obtain export privileges into the European market through Portugal. With around 200 million speakers in Brazil, Portugal, and the five Portuguese-speaking countries in Africa (Angola, Mozambique, Guinea-Bissau, Cabo Verde and Sao Tome e Principe), the Timorese people will have the advantage of exchanging experiences with those fellow developing countries and learning from their successes as well as mistakes.

The tendency of Brazil and many Luso-African countries to reproduce a Portuguese style of bureaucracy and formalism, as well as the tendency of Brazil to favour economic growth at all cost, are certainly negative aspects which the Timorese should avoid reproducing. On the other hand, however, mastering Portuguese would enable many young Timorese to study the progressive thought from Brazil and Africa which aided FRETILIN in the 1970s and which PST and the Sa’he Institute of Liberation are currently reviving.

The problem arises if the Portuguese-speaking UNTAET chief, Sergio de Melo, will lend his support to the top-down tendency of the CNRT elite to force Portuguese to become the language of education and commerce. This will certainly further marginalise the young Indonesian-educated people, the rural people, and the women, who are currently more at home with Tetum and Indonesian. Simply rejecting Indonesian as their former coloniser’s language is too naive, since Portuguese itself was also once a colonial language.

So a creative solution should be found, in a dialogical way, as the late Brazilian educator Paulo Freire suggested in Guinea-Bissau. And while Freire’s suggestion of adopting Guinean Creole was flatly turned down by the elites of Cabo Verde and Guinea who had become the new rulers of the country and were more in favour of Portuguese as the national language (see Freire, 1983), a similar mistake should not be repeated in Timor Loro Sa’e.

Gender gap

Women — buibere in revolutionary parlance — are under-represented in CNRT. The only woman on the seven-member Transitional Council is Felicidade Guterres, a graduate of the Indonesian-backed University of East Timor.

Outside this Transitional Council, there are four channels open for Timorese women. The first one is the Popular Organisation of Timorese Women, or OPMT (Organicao Popular da Mulher de Timor), FRETILIN’s women’s wing, which has had its members among the guerilla fighters as well as in the clandestine front in the cities and towns of Timor Loro Sa’e (Aditjondro, 1999b).

This organisation has a link with CNRT, since the highest ranking woman in FRETILIN’s hierarchy, Ana Pessoa Pinto, who is also an OPMT cadre, has been invited to sit on CNRT’s Political National Council (CPN), headed by Xanana. She has spent most of her OPMT militant years in Maputo, Mozambique, where she obtained her law degree from the University of Eduardo Mondlane and has worked in the Mozambican justice system.

When CNRT was officially established in Dili and opened its office, OPMT leaders decided to drop the ‘P’ in their abbreviation to become OMT.

The second organisation is the ‘East Timor Movement Against Violence towards Women and Children’, which kept its Indonesian abbreviation, GERTAK (Gerakan Wanita anti-Kekerasan), an Indonesian word meaning ‘verbal threat’. This organisation is led by Maria Olandina F.C. Alves-Cairo, a poet and former broadcaster for FRETILIN’s Radio Maubere, who has been repeatedly arrested, detained and harassed by the notorious Indonesian army intelligence unit, SGI, in Timor Loro Sa’e.

After being sacked from the Indonesian provincial government, she opened two small restaurants, the first one in Bidau and the other one on Dili’s beach. Both were burned down by the military and paramilitary forces during the post-referendum horror. At the time of my visit to Dili last November, GERTAK had just taken over the former office of the Indonesian civil servant’s wives association, Dharma Wanita, in the centre of Dili, and received their guests from the Indonesian human rights commission, Komnas HAM, squatting on UN-donated tarpaulin on the floor.

Olandina and Xanana are contemporaries. In 1975 they both used to write poetry in FRETILIN’s newspaper, Timor Leste (Jolliffe, 1976). She has, however, maintained her independence from CNRT, and has publicly criticised Xanana for emerging authoritarianism. In my interview in her half-burned-down house in Bidau, Dili, on 17 November 1999, she emphasised that she will maintain GERTAK’s status as a non-government organisation, independent from the current embryonic or future elected Timor Loro Sa’e government. This is while her own sister, Ligia de Jesus, works for Ramos-Horta’s office, first in Lisbon and now in Dili.

The third feminist organisation is FOKUPERS, or the Timor Loro Sa’e Women’s Communication Forum (Forum Komunikasi Perempuan Timor Loro Sa’e), which was founded in 1997 by wives of former political prisoners, former female political prisoners and other female activists, as well as some male HAK lawyers. It is led by Domingas Fernandes Alves-Bareto (‘Michato’), the wife of Jacinto des N.R. Alves, a former political prisoner in Dili and Semarang (Indonesia). Michato herself had been an OPMT militant during her years in the mountains, and had also spent time in political detention (Beer, 1999; HEKS Handeln, No. 265, March 1999).

Currently, this organisation is sharing its office and battered women’s shelter in Marconi, Dili, with the HAK Foundation, after its former office in Farol was ransacked and burned down by Indonesian soldiers and their Timorese collaborators.

The fourth feminist voice is the Young Women Student’s Group of Timor Loro Sa’e, or GFFTL (Grupo Feto Foin Sae Timor Loro Sa’e), the women’s wing of ETSSC. In November 1998, the group organised a well-attended conference on the situation of Timorese women (Conferencia Loron Rua Kona Sa Laloek Feto Timor Loro Sa’e) — the first conference of its kind during the twenty-three years of occupation. Among the speakers were two of their elder and vocal sisters — Michato and Olandina (Winters, 1999; Suara Timor Timur, 10 November, 1998).

Along with ETSSC leader, Antero Benedito da Silva, GFFTL’s leader, Atanasia Pires, was invited to Norway to receive the International Student Peace Prize in Trondheim. In the aftermath of the referendum, both of them were, with more than a thousand other refugees, evacuated from the UNAMET compound in Dili and flown to Darwin. While currently working in the UNTAET office, she is still actively raising buibere concerns in the reconstruction of her home country.

In addition to those specific women’s organisations, several Timorese NGOs have also developed their own women’s — and feminist — divisions and projects. CDHTL for instance, has developed a special division which deals with violence against women, led by Yvette de Oliviera. Likewise, Timor Aid, a Timorese humanitarian organisation which has Jose Ramos-Horta as its patron but is independent from the CNRT, has developed a Timor Women Development Centre, led by Ofelia Napoliao.

Church versus state

Finally, the Catholic Church, which had played such an important role during the occupation, has suddenly seen its role radically diminished. The foreign aid agencies, which during the occupation saw the church as the main partner in relief distribution, are currently attempting to work more and more with the local CNRT structures. The church’s past role in monitoring human rights violations seems to be increasingly taken over by non-church-linked human rights organisations set up by young Timorese lay activists, such as the Hak Foundation and the Commissio dos Direitos Humanos de Timor Leste (CDHTL), or the Timor Loro Sa’e Human Rights Commission, both of which have been very active in investigating the post-referendum killings by the Indonesian military and their Timorese compradors.

In addition to the assaults on nuns, priests and Bishop Belo himself, the Church itself has suffered tremendously from the physical destruction of its properties. Bishop Belo has lately taken the role more of a watchdog of the UN as well as the CNRT leadership.

One priest, Francisco Fernandes, the former Timorese community leader in Macao, also sits on the Political National Council of CNRT. However, according to canonical law, he does not represent the church as such.

The Catholic Church, however, is not the only church in the country. A small group of Timorese have joined the Protestant church, called in its Indonesian abbreviation GKTT (Gereja Kristen Timor Timur), led by the progressive minister and former FRETILIN and FALINTIL militant, Rev. Arlindo Marcal, who studied at a seminary in Indonesia and married an Indonesian policewoman. During the last five years, this Protestant church has also become a strong advocate of human rights in the country.

Recently, Marcal joined three Timorese women — Ofelia Napoliao, Maria Bernardino and Olandina Cairo Alves — to form a group to monitor the directions of the reconstruction of their country. They rightly called the group Rebuilding Watch, with its motto ‘Ba Direito O Povo Timor Loro Sa’e’ (For the Rights/Justice of the People of Timor Loro Sa’e). On 11 December 1999, Rebuilding Watch circulated their first letter to the UNTAET and CNRT chiefs and were invited to discussions with Sergio de Melo and Xanana Gusmao respectively. It is interesting to see that this group was initiated by a Timorese woman, Maria Bernardino (‘Laka’), who works at one of the international aid organisations, World Vision, and is also assisting PST’s media and fund-raising committees.

Seeing the need to raise the Maubere people’s concerns, Laka invited Ofelia Napoliao to join, followed by Rev. Marcal and the senior Timorese woman activist, Olandina Cairo-Alves. At the end of the year, around one hundred Timorese in Dili had joined the organisation, the first ‘development watchdog’ of its kind in the country. They were all driven by a common concern to prevent a new form of colonialism from developing in their country, after gaining their political independence from Indonesia.

So in the coming months one can anticipate that more Timorese organisations and individuals may take a more critical stance towards the UN authorities and the shadow government of CNRT. With the increasing legitimacy problems faced by Xanana and his top CNRT leadership, questions have been raised whether the original plan to hold general elections at the end of the UNTAET period should not be reconsidered. This would mean that serious discussions and debates should be started to explore what kind of presidential and parliamentary elections are most appropriate for Timor Loro Sa’e.

FALINTIL’s future

While still faced by this potential legitimacy crisis, Xanana and his CNRT Transition Council are pressed to determine the future of the between 1,000 and 2,000 FALINTIL guerillas. Contrary to Xanana’s pledge in his defence before the Indonesian court in Dili on 27 March 1993 to build a country ‘without an army’ (Gusmao, 1996), which he repeated in a speech written for a conference in Auckland, Aotearoa (New Zealand) on 9 September 1998 (Taudevin, 1999), the current tendency among the InterFET and the CNRT leadership is to transform a proportion of those guerillas into a police force and a French-style gendarmerie (Sydney Morning Herald, 2 December 1999). By the end of November 1999, already fifty-five guerillas had been demobbed and joined a local security force put together by the United Nations to guard public utilities (Australian, 1 December 1999). Xanana explains his change of opinion:

I just met the UN human rights delegation, and the chief, a woman from Costa Rica, she told me about her country which is without an army. We always maintained Costa Rica was the country to follow, but what happened here changed our opinion. We know that we have to guarantee security to our people to be more confident. With fears, with threats, essentially our people on the border, and in Oecussi, will not be able to work. We have to think about the future of FALINTIL, yes, but we have to reassure our people we are ready if necessary to defend our country. (Australian, 1 December 1999).

As in the case of Indonesia’s former guerilla army that transformed itself into Indonesia’s regular army, the TNI, there seems to be a reluctance among its top commanders — such as Xanana himself, Taur Matan Ruak, and those who are also FRETILIN militants, such as Luo’lo, the current FRETILIN president — to deny FALINTIL a political function in the newborn nation. This has partly been influenced by the fact that, at least during the last decade of the occupation, all the components of the movement have treated FALINTIL as the vanguard of the liberation struggle, and always coordinated their actions with the heroes in the mountains. This is certainly true of the clandestine front in the occupied country itself, which during the last five years was led by a former FALINTIL commander, Sabalae.

Then, after the arrest of Xanana in November 1992, and more so after his removal from Dili to the Cipinang prison in August 1993, all the four fronts of the movement — the armed front in the mountains, the clandestine and youth front in the cities of Timor Loro Sa’e, the student resistance movement in Indonesia, and the diplomatic front led by Jose Ramos-Horta — acknowledged the leadership of Xanana as chairperson of the CNRM (which in April 1998 changed its name into CNRT) and commander of Falintil.

Eventually, for the sake of unity, the FALINTIL flag was accepted by both the left (FRETILIN) and right (UDT) wings of the movement to become the CNRT flag. This was a huge sacrifice for FRETILIN, whose leaders had unilaterally declared the independence of ‘Republica Democratica de Timor Leste’ on 28 November 1975, and had invented the RDTL flag which used the same symbolism as the FRETILIN flag. For the sake of unity, during the last five years of the occupation the RDTL flag had been replaced by the new CNRT flag (which is actually the FALINTIL flag) in all the mass actions of the young Timorese activists in Timor Loro Sa’e as well as in Indonesia. Even UNAMET which oversaw the 30 August referendum accepted this decision and used the CNRT flag on the ballot to represent the choice of rejecting the Indonesian autonomy offer.

Nevertheless, the overlapping symbolism of FALINTIL and CNRT still dominates the popular psyche, since all the houses and buildings which are currently used by CNRT officials are decorated by the disguised FALINTIL flag. This overlap does not sit well with many of the young Indonesian-educated Timorese activists, who are very suspicious of anything that smells of parallels with Indonesia’s ruling party, GOLKAR or with the notorious ‘dual function’ doctrine of the Indonesian military, or ABRI.

In my interview with FALINTIL’s deputy commander, Taur Matan Ruak, in his new headquarters in Aileu on 14 November 1999, I asked the guerilla commander what guarantees there are that FALINTIL would not repeat the sad history of ABRI’s dwifungsi doctrine. He replied that:

Based on our own experience of having suffered for twenty-four years, because of ABRI’s dwifungsi, it is impossible for us to repeat the same mistake. And even if we do that, the Timorese people themselves will immediately correct us.

As for FALINTIL’s future role in Timor Loro Sa’e, the guerilla commander stated that he personally wants his country to be without a regular army. ‘But in this transition period, while there are still threats from militias and from abroad, we do need to have an army to defend us both from these threats.’ He explained that he still frequently received threats from the pro-Indonesia militias over his handy-talky. And at the end of the day, ‘only CNRT can decide the future of FALINTIL’. This sounds like circular logic, since in fact the two top FALINTIL commanders play a decisive role in CNRT’s Transition Council.

Talking about FALINTIL’s future role, the Rev. Arlindo Marcal, the leader of the Timor Loro Sa’e Protestant church, GKTT, and his fellow activists of Rebuilding Watch, in their petition of 11 December 1999 also recommended the need for FALINTIL to participate in upholding the rule of law in the country. He admitted, though, that it was a dilemma. ‘On one hand, we don’t want to be forever dependent on Australian or American troops, but on the other hand, there are rumours that Indonesia is building up its Army and Navy forces in Nusa Tenggara Timur [the province to which West Timor belongs]’, said Marcal in a phone interview with the author on 27 December 1999. He added: ‘So, the long-term solution is to reconcile with Indonesia, not just with the few militia leaders who are basically following orders from the Indonesian military.’ Then, he believes, Timor Loro Sa’e can reduce its troops — and thereby, its military budget — drastically.

Conclusion

By entrenching himself among the FALINTIL troops in Aileu and his favouritism towards the Portuguese- speaking diaspora elite, Xanana Gusmao has alienated himself from the masses of the educated young people of his nation, who had stayed behind and fiercely fought the occupation forces on their own turf. This alienation from the majority of the young people, the male-biased leadership, the favouritism towards one political party (UDT) and FALINTIL among the CNRT leadership, may create legitimacy problems for a future democratically elected Timor Loro Sa’e government. To avoid that possible future, the courageous effort towards liberation now, in an independent Timor Loro Sa’e, needs to be channelled into the formation of a representative and inclusive state. May we all have the courage and humility to make the necessary corrections, on time, so that the blood of hundreds of thousands of martyrs, fallen in the struggle to liberate the Maubere people, will not have been spilled in vain.

This is the first part of an edited version of an article which was written in December 1999, and published by the Centre for Asia-Pacific Transformative Studies, a joint project of the Universities of Newcastle and Wollongong. The second and final part appeared in arena magazine number 47.

Bibliography

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Aditjondro, George J. (1999b). Women as Victims Versus Women as Fighters: Redressing the Asymmetrical Focus of the East Timorese Activist Discourse. Paper for Conference on East Timorese Women and International Law, organised by Associacao Portugesa da Mulheres Juristas and the International Platform of Jurists for East Timor (IPJET) in Lissabon, January 20-24.

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George Aditjondro is in the Department of Sociology and Anthropology at the University of Newcastle

This is Trepang — an indigenous opera performed on four consecutive nights at this year’s Festival of Darwin. The Yolngu people from Elcho Island in North-East Arnhem Land have joined with Macassan performers from the Indonesian island of Sulawesi, to retell their shared history and celebrate their family connections. Trepang director Andrish Saint-Clare has been nurturing the project since 1994 when he first posed the idea of a Trepang performance to senior Yolngu people at Elcho Island, and began the process of negotiation involved in staging such a cultural performance. This includes seeking and receiving permission from the owners and managers of the cultural material in the performance. Since then, with the support of the Elcho Island community, Trepang was successfully staged as a community celebration at Elcho Island in 1996, and subsequently developed into a stage production for a festival to commemorate the Kingdom of Gowa in Ujung Pandung in 1997. This year’s performance was the first opportunity for non-Yolngu audiences in Australia to see the show.

The 1999 Darwin Festival was held in the shadow of the horrific events taking place in nearby East Timor. With the constant sound of army Hercules aircraft flying overhead en route to and from Dili, thoughts of East Timor pervaded the festival. Trepang performers dedicated their opening performance to the people of East Timor, in the spirit of hope of negotiated relations between neighbouring cultures.

The performance begins in the Sulawesi capital, Ujung Pandung, the old city of Macassar. Once the home port of the Macassan traders, who for several centuries or more travelled in their praus to the coast of north Australia to collect trepang (a sea cucumber) which they traded with China. At the start of the monsoon each year the Macassans would travel with the winds to what they called Marege, and negotiate and trade with the coastal Aboriginal people for rights to collect trepang. When the monsoon was over they would return home. Over time a pidgin ‘Macassan’ became the lingua franca for much of the north Australian coast, for as well as in dealings with Macassan trepangers, it was also used among the Aboriginal peoples who, through their employment with the Maccassans, came together over large distances.

In return for the right to harvest the trepang in Yolngu territories, and in exchange for Yolngu labour employed to aid in the harvest and processing of trepang, Macassan goods such as cloth, tobacco, knives, rice and alcohol were traded with the Yolngu peoples. These goods, and contact with Macassan traders, have had a lasting impact on Yolngu culture and cosmology.

Macassan traders had stopped visiting Arnhem land shores by 1907 as a result of the introduction of taxes levied by the South Australian government against Macassan praus, and other actions by missionary groups. Nevertheless, details of this period of material and cultural exchange remain a part of Yolngu living tradition. The time of the Macassans is described by some Yolngu as a kind of cultural ‘renaissance’, the products of which are recorded in complex oral histories, song cycles, ceremonial dance and artistic works. The Trepang performance is based on a richly coded ceremonial song cycle of mortuary rites which are regularly performed in North-East Arnhem Land today.

While Trepang is a reproduction of the first contact experience between the two cultures, it is also a ‘play within a play’. Trepang is a celebration of a relationship that is enmeshed in historical tensions and ambivalence. The narrative focus of the performance is a romantic ‘love trade’ in which a Yolngu girl meets a Macassan sailor, who trades with her parents for her hand. Yet the Yolngu songs performed in Trepang do not echo such romance; they are full of sorrow, stories of abduction and the forced trade in Yolngu women that developed in the Macassan period. Likewise, the Macassan goods brought both benefit and turmoil for the Yolngu. Knives and alcohol proved lethal, especially when combined with angry retribution over the abductions of Yolngu women. Conflict and bloodshed figure prominently in the Yolngu oral histories of the period (although not particularly among Yolngu on Elcho Island, where relations were mostly peaceful).

Yet out of this period were forged the family ties that Trepang now celebrates. Mansjur, the male lead in the Macassan cast, is a grandson of a Macassan sea captain, Otching Daeng Rangka, who abducted and married the great-grandmother of Matjuwi, the senior Yolngu ceremony leader in Trepang. According to Saint-Clare, the composition of the cast in Trepang was dictated, in part, by the Yolngu insistence that the performers’ kinship relationships to one another reflect this ‘true story’, and thus honour the legacy of that relationship.

There are other reasons too for the Trepang celebration. The story retells a sentimental history fresh with enthusiasm for renewed contact. For the Macassans, it is a reminder of the past greatness of their Kingdom of Gowa and of the seafaring might that their port city, Macassar, once enjoyed, positioned at the centre of East Indies trade routes.

For the Yolngu, it shows others that long before Europeans arrived in Australia the Yolngu people were ‘business people’, engaged in the commerce of international trade. Despite the sorrow, Trepang also recounts stories of positive relationships formed through this period: the blood ties, the exchanges of language and names, the co-operative working and trading relationships. Beyond the, the Maccassan period is remembered as a time of both the new and of renewal, a time when the Yolngu created a new identity and controlled it on their own terms firmly within the traditions of knowledge that have existed for them ‘from the beginning’. It is a sentiment as forward-looking as it is nostalgic.

Twenty-five years ago, Julie Barbosa, who now lives in Broadmeadows (a suburb of Melboume) saw the lights of a Norwegian cargo ship blinking silent passage through the deep waters of the Wetar Straits that lap the north coast of East Timor. She morsed distress, and ten days later, with a hundred other government workers, landed in Darwin, a bewildered refugee of a decolonisation program that had been pushed too fast, and manipulated by a cruel and clever neighbour. They thought they’d be back home in a month or two, but instead they became the first Timorese in a polyglot of cultures that Australia had only just begun to acknowledge. Tonight, in St Patrick’s, Julie’s family’s richly woven tais adorn the altar, its deep cherry-brown border caught in a glow of light that frames an opulent stillness; gold-flecked mitre, viridian majesty of the robes, the priests arced around the altar, heads bowed, hands shaped for prayer, ready to begin chanting the ancient ritual text.

Patsy Thatcher is in the seventeenth pew, kneeling – or should I say half-kneeling – in that manner of the well-bred agnostic where most of the body’s weight remains on the bench seat. She was born in Woolamai, near Wonthaggi, about sixty years ago, the daughter of a member of the Communist Party of Australia. At some stage in her life Professor Herb Feith, a Jewish scholar from Monash University, suggested she document the lives of East Timorese in Australia. This she did, although the Timorese mostly ignored her drama of questions and invited her, instead, to all their social and political functions. Their preference for this sort of social collaboration meant Patsy has attended many Catholic Masses. She still looks uncomfortable in the religious setting and almost celebrates her ignorance of the rite’s endearing irrationalities.

Paddy Murphy, my godfather’s wife, is in the front seat that Max Potter, the caretaker of the Cathedral, always reserves for her. Paddy’s faith in God is complete and regardless of priests and the occasional bishop who get in the way. She’s the mother of five who’ve all turned out very well indeed – despite the hardships – and grandmother to thirteen more. Her father was Secretary of the Labor Party in Ballarat for five years, and absolutely loyal to the Party all his life, although he resigned for moral reasons after Whitlam ‘disbanded conscription and wrecked Australia’. He was also a very good Catholic, but hated priests playing politics and telling parishioners to vote for the Democratic Labor Party who were ‘all scabs, the lot of them, splitting the Party and betraying the country’. She and Joe worked hard to send their boys to the Jesuits’ Xavier College in Kew, where they sat side by side with the sons of Bob Santamaria, another good Catholic (Italian) who led the unfortunate split in 1955. Many of her friends had voted for these doom-bound rebels, so she learned to hold her tongue and keep her nose right out of politics. However this didn’t stop her from taking the right steps to speak to the right people about matters pertaining to East Timor. This is attested to by the photo of Paddy and the Pope which overwhelms the entrance to her small flat in Mont Albert. The gilt-framed photo was taken in 1998 by the Vatican photographer in the Pope’s private chapel.

Abel Guterres sits, head bowed, in a pew at the back of the Church. Years ago, in 1975, in the middle of the same inferno that prompted Julie Barbosa to signal the Norwegian cargo ship, Abel hijacked a Red Cross aeroplane in Baucau and flew to Australia. Later, perhaps in 1983, he knocked on Patsy Thatcher’s door in Middle Park and asked her to document the role of women in East Timorese society before and after the Indonesian invasion. Abel has worked for Melbourne’s public transport service for twenty years, and filled every hour in between lobbying politicians, organising meetings, arranging aid, and telling the story of East Timor. In July 1999 he returned to help with the ballot, euphoric that a democratic process, at last, would render worthwhile the long loneliness of life in exile. Back in his homeland his well-honed diplomacy bore sweet fruit, for he was able to arrange a meeting between Taur Matan Ruak, leader of the resistance in East Timor, and Bishop Hilton Deakin, Vice-President of Caritas International (arguably the biggest non-government organisation in the world). The bishop, who is the main celebrant in St Patrick’s tonight, had to trek for three hours in a clapped-out jeep and another five on foot to the fighters’ cantonment in the mountains. They asked him to bless their small bamboo church, the Chapel of the Holy Family, which he christened Freedom Chapel, and to baptise a baby, Izildo Freitas, who will be known forever as the one who had water poured over his head by a ‘red’ bishop. He listened as the men, chewing betelnut, recalled years of routing the bush for berries to eat, of their comrades’ deaths left unattended on the rocky peaks; and then, together, they prayed for a peaceful referendum. Abel stayed on while the United Nations implemented the ‘key to peace’ and was forced to watch as his friends and relatives were hacked to death and his country was burned to the ground.

Sitting beside Abel in the back row is Alan Matheson, the International Representative of the Australian Council of Trade Unions, and Leigh Hubbard, former Industrial Officer of the Plumbers Union (now the CEPU) and current Secretary of the Victorian Trades Hall Council. Neither usually goes to church, but they are here tonight to support Abel and his community, to ameliorate the troubles, share the sorrows, nourish this latest Gethsemane. And, I suspect, to reflect upon the safety of their workers during the Union strike against Indonesia’s Garuda. The fight started at 4.30 this morning when twelve workers raced forty Victorian Police to the rollaround gate at Tullamarine. The tangle of burly arms and legs locked in battle along the baggage carrier, and ended up at the bottom of the shute, bruised and battered like a new-shorn sheep. Police made a couple of perfunctory arrests, but essentially the workers and the Timorese (who had maintained a rhythmic chant throughout) won the day and Garuda had to cancel the first of many flights. The media failed to capture the pain or the glory, and interviewed a motley of Australian brats who tried to debase the coinage by proclaiming their democratic right to visit the Indonesian island of Bali.

Lots of other Union members are at the Mass because they’d heard the Victorian Trade Union Choir was singing. No one can recall the Union being invited to St Pat’s, let alone bannered members being requested to lead a procession of firecoal-red-robed priests. Typically, no one seems able to recall exactly why, either. In truth, the Labor Party, political arm of the workers’ movement, was once considered to be concerned (some say exclusively) with bettering the lot of impoverished Irish Catholics. Then some members began to make overtures to oppressed Russian (not necessarily Catholic) workers, causing other members – more loyal to hearth and home politics, and, incidentally, led by a charismatic Irish Bishop – to see red and split the party. Such was this group’s bitterness that it was prepared to couple with Australian Communists just to keep the parent body out of Federal Parliament for years (and years).

Everyone knows the Catholic Mass is a tightly structured series of liturgical events with a miracle in the middle. It’s been like this all over the world for a couple of thousand years. However this Mass in St Pat’s was already suspiciously different. For a start, the ritual hadn’t begun with an organ-generated hymn, but an evocative two-phrase melody resonated by a buffalo’s horn and a thundering rap on a magnificently carved drum. This was a novel soundscape for some, but for many others a deeply emotional moment. Few realised it was also animist Timor displaying its proud tradition, perhaps for the first time, inside the sacrosanct boundaries of the Catholic ritual. Then there was the business of the trade unionists, some with bannered lettering, some with sheets of music, some unsure which knee to genuflect with. The Diocesan chiefs hadn’t known the banners were coming, and were uneasily surprised to note their passage in the procession. They’d been worrying for days about what the unblessed choir might be singing, and had bent their proud heads to ask; but most had replied ‘I dunno, probably thingummyjig’. This left the chiefs in the unenviable position of having to heap their faith on a couple of hopes that thingummyjig would prove to be appropriate liturgical text. When it was time for the sermon to be delivered, the Bishop, who had recently returned from his thirteenth visit to Timor, moved deliberately to the microphone at the edge of the altar. He welcomed the Victorian Trade Union Choir, then said, ‘When this night is over the word will go from here to wherever people will talk about East Timor that we are in solidarity with you’. Rising his arms aloft, he invited the congregation to stand and with joined hands to sing ‘Solidarity Forever’, the Union’s anthem. There was silence. An electric silence. The choir itself looked shocked. For, in the name of the East Timorese, the Bishop had invited fifty years of history to fall over and reconcile. And here we were, only two-thirds of the way through the ritual.

But in St Patrick’s on Thursday 9 September 1999 a very old ritual provided structure for the release of energy that had been tied up for a long long time. The four thousand who sang together an old tune of six words – and then spontaneously clapped for such a long time that the bishop eventually had to ask them to stop – became 26,000 in Bourke Street the next day; and Abel Guterres, the village school teacher from Baucau, looked beyond the gathered throng and saw his diplomacy become new Australian foreign policy. A week after that there were 40,000 in Spring Street, and old soldiers whose lives were saved by Timorese during the Pacific War rejoiced, because their nation had decided to pay its debt to the East Timorese. Peacemakers, blessed peacemakers, reached out to kin in Indonesia who had courageously supported the rights of the Timorese to self determination. Peacemakers recalled kin in Burma and the West Papuans of Irian Jaya who had voted for their freedom but then were robbed. And peacemakers everywhere were reminded of the power of solidarity to render their cause anew.

At its most basic level, the republican model of government holds that a community should govern itself. The community is the highest court of appeal, not a distant monarch or deity. As such, its success depends upon citizens taking an active role in public debate. To do so, they must feel that their participation matters.

This was precisely where the ‘Yes’ case failed. Debate, such as it was, was reduced to simplistic sloganeering, a seemingly endless parade of celebrities repeating a sentiment that, if opinion polls are any indicator, the majority of Australians agree with anyway – i.e. that an Australian should be the head of state.

No doubt presenting the ‘Yes’ case in such simple terms was a tactical move, designed to allow for easy media consumption. But in confining debate thus, the republican cause ceased to be republican in anything but the shallowest sense. Absent was any sense of what it might mean to be a citizen in an Australian republic or indeed what sort of nation Australia should be as we enter the twenty-first century. This failure to engage was reflected in the voting patterns, which indicate, quite unequivocally, that the referendum divided Australians between those who feel their involvement in the life of the nation slipping away and those who are seen, rightly or wrongly, as being the ones wrenching it from them: a division that is expressed geographically in a gap between regional and rural Australia on one end of the spectrum and the city centres on the other. In the current issue of Arena Magazine Doug White explores the meaning of the referendum result further, interpreting it as a victory for those excluded from mainstream political processes, and, implictly, a vote in favour of more radical political change.

What was missing from the ‘Yes’ case was any sense of what Benedict Anderson recently referred to as the nation as a ‘common project’. Anderson’s understanding of the nation as a ‘common project’ suggests an idea of the active involvement of different groups in an ongoing process of dialogue and negotiation, through which the nation is continuously enacted and re-enacted, made and re-made. It is this shared involvement in the project of the nation that is held in common by its members.

Anderson contrasts this conception of the nation with another quite different idea: the nation as an ‘inheritance’, an unchanging ‘thing’ from the past to be preserved and protected. Where the nation is conceived as an inheritance, Anderson argues, the will to preserve it takes over as the prime expression of nationalism, often creating divisions and, all too often, violence among rival claimants. By contrast, the idea of the nation as a common project allows for diverse, even unexpected expressions of nationalism. Anderson suggests, for example, that shame at the actions of one’s nation can be an indication of a deep nationalist sentiment – the reason being that members of a common project are morally culpable for anything done in its name, even if they personally had no hand in it. In Anderson’s words:

No one can be a true nationalist who is incapable of feeling ‘ashamed’ if her state or government commits crimes, including those against her fellow citizens. Although she has done nothing individually that is bad, as a member of the common project, she will feel morally implicated in everything done in that project’s name.

 

In ‘official’ pronouncements of Australian nationalism and definitions of the national interest, shame is a scarce resource. Look no further than Paul Keating’s recent apologetics for the Indonesian Government. Keating argued that John Howard had single-handedly created the conditions for militia violence in Timor, by sending a letter to then President Habibie pressuring him to deliver greater autonomy to East Timor. So upset by the letter was Habibie, according to Keating, that he announced the referendum on independence prematurely, without consideration for the likely violent consequences. Keating claimed that Howard’s letter was motivated by populist opportunism, and in pressuring Indonesia thus, he had put the Timorese people and Australia’s ‘national interest’ at risk.

But whose interests are we talking about here? Certainly not the Timorese who, after years of oppression at the hands of Indonesian military forces, voted overwhelmingly for independence. Neither was Keating expressing the interests of the hundreds of thousands of Australians who over the years and months have worked and rallied in support of the Timorese cause, whose membership in the ‘common project’ of Australia has left them ashamed and angry at the role successive Australian governments have played in arming and training the Indonesian military forces whose links with militia forces are now beyond dispute.

The four thousand people who packed Melbourne’s St Patrick’s Cathedral in celebration of East Timor’s newly won independence, as described by Louise Byrne in the current issue of Arena Magazine, are a living embodiment of this common project, their differences in belief and politics overshadowed by their disgust at Australia’s record in Timor.

By contrast, Keating’s remarks demonstrate an unwillingness to be involved. His comments reflect nothing more than a desire to protect his own place in history, even if that means preserving the shameful legacy he and others have bequeathed to the nation. Moreover, the feebleness of Keating’s analysis suggests that it was borne out of desperation – an attempt to play down the contribution of two decades of Australian aid, training and support to Indonesian military forces in fuelling the current situation in East Timor, thereby absolving himself and his Government of any moral culpability.

The flip-side of Keating’s recalcitrance over Timor is his successor’s continuing inability to offer a genuine apology to the stolen generation. John Howard famously dismisses calls for an apology as the product of ‘a black arm-band view of history’. Considering Anderson’s view, however, the ‘black arm-band view of history’ that Howard holds with such contempt, suggests a deep commitment to Australia.

Howard’s unwillingness to enter into a more complex engagement with Australia’s past (and thus its present and future) stems from a shallow involvement with the nation. Howard’s view does not allow for questioning, or indeed shame at the dispossession and oppression of indigenous people, since this would tarnish and thus devalue the inheritance. All that can be permitted are a few carefully selected ornaments from Australia’s past to give the appearance of involvement: Menzies’ desk, ‘The Don’, or an Akubra at the weekend. Anything more substantive than this eternal parade of the national furniture is ruled out as un-Australian.

There are, however, other more productive ways of engaging with Australia’s past. Graeme Byrne’s careful deconstruction of the national mythology surrounding the Snowy River Hydro-Electric Scheme in the current issue of Arena Magazine suggests one example. Byrne’s analysis de-stabilises several of the cultural meanings associated with the Snowy, highlighting the exclusions of history, politics and culture upon which they are built. In complicating the Snowy Scheme’s place in Australia’s national mythology, Byrne’s analysis shows the darker side of the Scheme, particularly the shameful history of industrial and environmental exploitation. Far from destroying the place of the Scheme in national mythology, however, Byrne’s more complex interpretation suggests how it might be reinvented as an example of an alternative model of national development and nation-building in which both pride and shame have equal place.

What does all this have to do with the republic? Simply this: if an Australian republic is to be worthwhile, and seen as such, it must address the hard questions that come with deep engagement with Australia as a common project. Republicans cannot afford a surface encounter with the nation, limited to media-friendly slogans. The republic debate needs to encompass and address more difficult issues, from the dispossession of indigenous people to the reconstitution of local community by processes of globalisation. If it does not, the debate over the head of state will appear to most Australians, quite rightly, as a minor and largely irrelevant quibble between rival claimants to the national estate – the only difference between them being that one wants to instal a president where at present there is a queen.