The Assassination of Cultural Activist Arnold Ap

Arnold Ap was the curator of the Anthropological Museum in Jayapura and a member of a group of musicians called Mambesak, who promoted traditional Papuan music and broadcast a popular weekly program on the local radio. Ap was arrested by troops of the elite corps Kopassandha (now known as Kopassus) on 23 November 1983. After being interrogated and subjected to maltreatment, Ap, with four other detainees, was transferred to the headquarters of the regional military command. A month later, the five men were handed over to the intelligence officer of the local police.

When he heard that Ap was under arrest, the rector of Cenderawasih University in Jayapura temporarily dismissed him as curator on the grounds that he had been arrested on suspicion of subversion. When the Indonesian daily Sinar Harapan reported that Ap’s family were being denied contact, the newspaper was publicly reprimanded.

After being held in police and military custody for three months, Ap was transferred to the public prosecution authorities, creating the impression that formal charges would be laid. On 14 April 1984, he was seen on campus being escorted by an officer. A week later it was announced that he and four other detainees had escaped from prison, but this so-called escape had been arranged by the authorities. Military authorities regarded Ap as ‘extremely dangerous’ because of the activities of his Mambesak players and wanted him sentenced to death or given a life sentence, but they couldn’t not find the necessary evidence for him to be charged in court.

On 21 April, a Papuan police officer unlocked the cell doors of the five detainees and ordered them out. They were driven by a Kopassandha officer to a coastal base camp. One of the detainees managed to escape and later fled to Papua New Guinea where he described what had happened. The remaining detainees were told to swim out to a boat. One was struck on the head, stabbed in the neck and thrown into the sea. The others, including Arnold Ap, took shelter in a cave. Four days later, when Ap left the cave to urinate, the area was surrounded by elite troops. He was shot three times in the stomach and stabbed in the chest. He was taken to a hospital where, according to a nurse, he said that if he died his ring should be given to his wife. Other hospital staff said that he was dead on arrival.

Arnold Ap’s attempts to foster the traditional arts and crafts of the Papuan people as a way of safeguarding their identity and enhancing their dignity was not acceptable to the security forces, and was even seen as a threat to their integration within the fold of the Indonesian Republic; for this he paid with his life.

The Mysterious Death of Dr Tom Wainggai

Dr Thomas Wainggai was a lecturer at Cenderawasih University who made no secret of his rejection of West Papua’s annexation as a province of Indonesia. On 14 December 1988, he led a ceremony at the Mandala Stadium in Jayapura to unfurl the Kejora, the Morning Star flag, replacing the Indonesian red-and-white flag which had been pulled down. The event was attended by scores of people, including Protestant ministers. Dr Wainggai proclaimed the establishment of the West Melanesian Republic. While the ceremony was in progress, troops charged the crowd, beating many of those present.

Many people were rounded up and charged with rebellion (makar). Dr Wainggai was found guilty of rebellion and sentenced to twenty years. His wife Teruka was sentenced to eight years for sewing the flag, while others at the ceremony were sentenced, some up to six years, for handing out song sheets. When Dr Wainggai’s trial began, large crowds gathered outside the courthouse, eager to follow the proceedings. In order to prevent further demonstrations, the trial was moved out of Jayapura.

In January 1990, Dr Wainggai and his wife were moved from Jayapura to prisons in Jakarta; Wainggai was taken to Cipinang Prison while Teruka Wainggai ended up in Tanggerang Prison on the outskirts of the capital. She was released in 1993, after serving half her sentence.

In March 1996, it was reported that Dr Wainggai had died in prison. According to reports from the prison shortly before his death, he complained of severe pains in the stomach. Fearing that his food had been tampered with, he refused to eat the prison food but his condition failed to improve. On 14 March, his condition worsened; he was taken to a police prison but was found dead on arrival. His family called for an autopsy by the International Red Cross but this was refused. The prison doctor said that he had died from a heart attack but few people were prepared to believe this.

There were several days of confusion about where Dr Wainggai should be buried. The army wanted the funeral to take place in Jakarta, fearing that large crowds would gather in Jayapura to pay their last respects. However, perhaps fearing that this would create greater problems, the army returned the body to Jayapura. When the coffin arrived at Sentani airport, a large crowd of people were waiting, intending to carry the coffin the 35 km to Cenderawasih University so Dr Wainggai’s former colleagues could pay their last respects. However, the coffin was transferred from the aircraft to an ambulance and driven away at high speed. This so infuriated the crowds that they vented their anger by attacking government buildings, burning vehicles and pelting shops with stones. The unrest continued for several hours and, according to Republika, the Jakarta daily, Abepura was ‘in control of the protestors for an hour or more with protestors carrying banners bearing the words “OPM Freedom” and “West Melanesian Freedom”’.

On the day of the funeral, thousands gathered outside the Wainggai family home where the funeral service was conducted. A huge crowd followed the cortege to the Kayubatu cemetery. Commenting on the unrest, Bishop Munninghoff at the Jayapura diocese warned that the situation in the province was ‘highly combustible’ and could easily ignite. On 20 March, Republika wrote: ‘We could face yet more trouble in the coming days if, like East Timor, this most easterly province turns into an international issue’.

The Assassination of Theys Hijo Eluay

In his early days, Theys Hijo Eluay was a member of Golkar, the official party during the Suharto era; in August 1969, he was a signatory of the Act of Free Choice which unanimously—under extreme coercion from the military—voted to remain within the Indonesian republic.

Following the fall of Suharto, which ushered in a period of greater freedom, the Papuan people held a widely supported congress in early 2000. This was followed by a second Papuan Congress in May and June of that year, which was attended by many thousands of people from across the territory, who voiced strong support for the idea of Papuan independence. The congress created an executive body called the Papuan Presidium Council (PDP). Theys Eluay, a tribal chief and a highly-respected community leader, was elected head the PDP. Although the PDP had decided to pursue the path of dialogue rather than violence, army intelligence set up a special taskforce, which targeted members of the PDP, including Theys.

On 10 November 2001, Theys received an invitation to a celebration of Indonesia’s Heroes’ Day at the headquarters of Kopassus in Hamadi, on the outskirts of Jayapura. On the way home, his car was ambushed; Theys’ driver was forced to flee and the car was driven away. The driver, Aristoteles Masoka, rushed back to Kopassus headquarters to report what had happened. After entering the complex, he was never seen again.

On the following day, Theys’ body was discovered some fifty kilometres from the place of his abduction, in an upturned vehicle that had been found close to a ravine, creating the impression of an accident. The victim’s face was black and his tongue was hanging out, which suggested strangulation, and an autopsy concluded that he had died of suffocation. His funeral was attended by more than ten thousand people coming from all over West Papua.

News that Theys had died under suspicious circumstances led to outrage not only in West Papua but also from the international community, which forced the Indonesian authorities to bring those held responsible to trial. Seven Kopassus officers were tried, found guilty and sentenced to derisory sentences of three or three and a half years, while a senior Indonesian army officer hailed the convicted men as ‘heroes’. Nothing was ever established about who had ordered the crime.

The Murder of Kelly Kwalik

The most recent of Papua’s fallen leaders is Kelly Kwalik who was fatally shot on 16 December 2009, shortly before the end of Susilo Bambang Yudhoyono’s first term as president.

Kwalik died from loss of blood after being shot in the thigh by members of the infamous police anti-terror unit, Densus 88, a unit that has received training in the US. Initially it was reported that the wound only ‘pierced his skin’, meaning that they were not life-threatening. The results of the autopsy have not been made public and calls for an investigation have been ignored so the chances of anyone being called to account are remote, given the impunity enjoyed by Indonesian security forces for decades.

Kwalik’s sister-in-law Yosepha Alomang and other relatives were denied access to his body. ‘Why was he shot to death?’ Yosepha asked. ‘He was not a thief. You police did not search for him in the jungle but killed him at his home.’ Rev. Herman Saud, former chairman of the General Synod of the Papuan Protestant church (GKI), said that Kwalik should have been taken into custody and asked to explain what happened. ‘Central and local governments should have the courage to enter into dialogue with those on the other side of the fence because they too (are) citizens of this country’.

Keletus Kelly Kulalok Kwalik was from the Tsinga people, part of the Amungme tribe. The Amungme people lived in the mountain region which has since been taken over by the US mining company PT Freeport-Indonesia, whose operations have turned their mountain into a crater. The devastation caused across Timika by Freeport was always an integral part of Kwalik’s resistance to West Papua’s annexation by Indonesia. He studied at a Catholic teachers’ college before joining the Papuan freedom organisation OPM (Organisasi Papua Merdeka) in 1975. He held various command positions in the movement in Timika and in 2007 became head of TPN/OPM, the OPM’s military wing.

In 1977, major Indonesian military operations were conducted in the Central Highlands, an area dominated by Freeport’s mining operations. Resistance fighters under Kwalik’s leadership took action against the company; their most successful strike caused the destruction of a section of the pipe taking the copper from the Grasberg mine to Amamapare on the coast, and huge financial losses to the company. This led to retaliatory operations by security forces, forcing villagers to flee their homes and causing much loss of life.

Kwalik attracted international attention in 1996, when a team of anthropologists from Cambridge University on an expedition in West Papua were kidnapped by the OPM in Mapnduma and held hostage for five months. Although the International Red Cross (ICRC) was planning to handle the prisoners’ release, the organisation came under pressure from a Kopassus commander, Prabowo Subianto, son-in-law of President Suharto, to withdraw from the area and leave the military in charge. When a helicopter arrived to collect the hostages, some villagers approached, thinking that ICRC personnel were on board. Instead armed men opened fire, killing several people on the ground. Kwalik had fled, having been warned of a betrayal, and the hostages were met by Kopassus soldiers. Both before and after the hostages’ release, there were reports of the killing of villagers. One of the hostages later told a Dutch newspaper that they had ‘met entire village communities, men, women and children, on the run.’

During the crisis, TAPOL had called on Kwalik to release the hostages but Kwalik wanted to draw attention to Papua’s neglected struggle. Indeed for the first time newspapers around the world took a critical look at conditions in West Papua and its annexation by Indonesia in 1963. The fate of a small group of foreigners had aroused significant international interest while thousands of Papuans had died in numerous incidents since 1963 without the international community batting an eyelid.

Since 2002, there have been several attacks by gunmen on personnel working for Freeport, resulting in several deaths, including of foreign employees. On each occasion, the military have blamed the OPM under Kwalik’s leadership, without acknowledging the need for an investigation. Following an incident July 2009, when an Australian employee of Freeport was killed, the police chief of Papua, General F.X. Bagus Ekodanto, met Kwalik and was assured that he was not responsible for the shooting. However, a few days later the military commander of the Cenderawasih military command said that the shooting ‘looked like’ the work of Kelly Kwalik.

Finally, the police anti-terrorist unit Densus 88 attacked Kwalik in his home, shooting and fatally injuring him. Hundreds of people lined the route from the Mimika legislative building, where the body had lain in state, to the cemetery to mourn Kwalik’s passing.

Shortly before his death, Kwalik said:

In the thirty-four years I have been defending this forest and country, I have climbed many hills and mountains, I have walked many valleys and wetlands. For thirty-four years I have defended the forest, I have crossed many lakes, rivers and seas. I have endured many days that have baked my skin, I have endured the cold and freezing of my body from snow, to defend our glorious heritage and to restore justice so that truth, love and peace will reign in our glorious land.

Now I pray, and I shout with all my breath: ‘My God, take away all the copper, gold, oil and gas, fish, all the animals and other things that make this island rich. But all the things you have given us, take them away and give us only what we need today and give us tomorrow what we need then.

Carmel Budiardjo is the founder of TAPOL, a UK-based NGO that works to promote human rights, peace and democracy in Indonesia. She was a political prisoner in Indonesia under the Suharto regime and an Amnesty International prisoner of conscience.

But is it correct to say that colonialism, which for centuries brutalised native populations of North and South America, Africa, Asia and even parts of Europe, is completely dead and buried?

In 1969, violating terms established under its UN mandate for administering West Papua, Indonesia conducted an ‘act of free choice’, widely regarded to have been a fraudulent exercise in lieu of a plebiscite. From Indonesia’s 1963 assumption of administrative authority in West Papua, Papuans have suffered rampant brutality at the hands of security forces; they have seen their vast natural resources expropriated, often with devastating environmental consequences, and have suffered displacement and marginalisation as the Indonesian government shipped over a million ‘transmigrants’ to West Papua from the archipelago’s many over-crowded islands.

For three decades this brutal occupation proceeded under the direction of Suharto, one of the 20th century’s most brutal dictators. His 1965–67 ‘transition’ to power, following the ousting of the elected nationalist Sukarno, entailed the murder of hundreds of thousands of Indonesians. In 1975 Suharto’s military invaded East Timor. The twenty-four-year occupation of that tiny half island led to the deaths of an estimated 200,000 Timorese. In addition to this well recognised history, Suharto’s brutality also extended to West Papua, where scores of thousands of Papuans are believe to have fallen victim to his marauding military. Suharto’s tragic legacy in West Papua is not widely appreciated in the international community.

Throughout his long, bloody rule, Suharto was abetted and enabled by the United States and its allies, who saw in Suharto a bastion against the communist ties in Asia. But there was, for the United States, another reason to turn a blind eye to Suharto’s crimes. US firms, notably in the extraction industries, enjoyed easy access to the natural riches of the Indonesian archipelago. Among the largest of these, and one of the earliest to gain access to Suharto’s Indonesia, was PT Freeport McMoran, which in 1967 established what was to become the largest copper and gold mine in the world. It became Indonesia’s largest foreign taxpayer. In addition, it proved to be an easy touch for cash that flowed to the Indonesian military, nominally in payment for security services. Freeport and other US firms which prospered under Suharto’s rule acted in the early 1990s to blunt growing press, public and Congressional concern about the Suharto regime’s excesses. It created the United States Indonesia Society (USINDO), which became a de facto, very well-financed lobby for the regime and its brutal military in Washington.

But notwithstanding its close ties to the Suharto regime and subsequent Indonesian administrations, Freeport has had a rocky relationship with the military and, more recently, with the police. The key irritant in Freeport–security force relations has been money. In 1996 the military secretly organised a violent demonstration at Freeport’s headquarters in Tembagapura and in the support town of Timika. A senior Freeport executive at the time told a US Embassy officer (the author) that the dispute was over whether Freeport would fund the establishment of a battalion base for Kopassus, Indonesia’s infamous ‘special forces’. Following the incidents the funding flowed.

In 2002 a Freeport reduction in funds, paid to the Indonesian military for security services, preceded an attack on Freeport employees travelling on the Tembagapura–Timika road, which then as now was tightly guarded by the military. The one person indicted by a US court for the attack, which took the lives of two Americans and one Indonesian, had long ties to the military. Nevertheless, in what many international observers believe to have been a travesty of justice, the Indonesian court convicted only Papuans whom it alleged had ties to the small and very lightly armed Papuan resistance (OPM). Neither the Indonesian court nor the US Federal Bureau of Investigation were willing to pursue the many leads that pointed to an Indonesian military role. Even the Indonesian police investigation, which indicated both a role and the existence of a motive in the form of Freeport’s reduction of funding for the military, was ignored and the investigation was taken over by the military.

In mid July another spate of violence erupted in the Freeport domain as unidentified gunmen shot and killed an Australian on the tightly guarded Tembagapura–Timika road. Subsequent attacks at or near the same site took the lives of three more in the following days. While senior military personnel, as in 2002, immediately blamed the shootings on the Papuan resistance, the senior police official in West Papua said he saw no evidence of their involvement. As in 2002, information developed by the Indonesian police, including ballistics evidence, pointed to the role of Indonesian security forces. As in 2002, however, the military is now entering the investigation and its role in the investigation may preclude development of evidentiary leads suggesting a military role. Statements by senior Indonesian military officers assigning blame for the shootings to the small Papuan armed resistance, despite a lack of evidence, suggest that, as in the past, a military investigation will be prejudiced.

Again, as in 2002, disputes over money and rivalry among the various security actors at Freeport form the backdrop for understanding the violence. Under current arrangements, Freeport funding for security flows to the military through the police. Various sources indicate the military is not happy with this relationship. Also, over the years, local civilians have worked tailings from the Freeport mining operation to extract remnant gold and copper. Sources in Timika report that the militarised police, ‘BRIMOB’, control this lucrative, illegal trade. Freeport has enlisted the help of both police and military security forces to curb this trade. Finally, Kopassus continue to play a strong role in West Papua. Their brutal treatment of Papuan civilians and impunity were detailed in a June 21 Human Rights Watch report. Sources in West Papua note that there is tension within Kopassus between those who support the former Kopassus commander General Prabowo and those who do not.

A defining characteristic of colonialism is the exploitation and brutalisation of a people by non-native forces in collusion with similarly non-native monied interests. Invariably, this collusion persists with impunity and notwithstanding tortured appeals by the colonised people for redress. In recent years Papuans have directed such appeals to Jakarta and to the international community, pleading for an internationally facilitated dialogue between the Indonesian government and Papuans to address decades of abusive policies and marginalisation targeting Papuans. Only through such a dialogue can the fundamentally colonial relationship between Jakarta and West Papua be addressed.

The area behind the Taman Fatahgilla saw the worst riots and looting during the spree of May 14th after the deposition of Soeharto, back in mid 1998. The burnt out buildings sit right behind the square. I am looking directly out onto the Taman now. There is not a tourist in sight. These many months after the deposition, I have still been told to be very cautious here; anxiety already taxies towards me without a meter; it accompanies any foreigner who is cocky enough to set foot in a cab, or who thinks for a foolish or two moment that there should have been heroines in Conrad novels. The possibilities for a girl’s own annual in this town are remote. There has been a successful market for kidnapping sweaty foreigners…but the trade usually confines itself to business men reeking of old spice and aramis, brandishing suitcases that hold little else than a cellular phone.

Café Batavia is an elegant desolation, layered in white linen, polished timber and a staff with nothing to do. The whole place is scented with the traces of colonial evacuations. It had its time long ago and now nobody comes to scent the past. It could be the set for Red Dust or Casablanca; but the extras haven’t turned up. Oh wise extras! It is so hot I have to wipe a moustache of sweat from my face in order to navigate a Koffie Aroma. It has taken me about ten minutes to order it in faltering bahasa. In the gloom a lone caucasian man, absolutely enormous, sits a mile away consuming a vast yum cha, a blur of colour spinning past his gob on a lazy susan. The Chinese speaking giant is in emerald green, the same colour as the birdcage covers that float above me in a field of crinolines. The wooden ceiling is strangely silent; a sleeping aviary. Three tiny Indonesian women eat with him, and one older Indonesian man. Their hands move deftly over the wheel as it picks up speed. They are eating like they are running out of time. I drink and drip in the same way.

I look out to the heat and the light and when my eyes return to the inside, the white shirts of the staff fluoresce and die.

Out in the square, the dream is running amok.

Amuck, as a word, came down to English differently, like many things, too many to imagine, let alone count. The original spelling derived from the Indonesian dialect spoken about the port of Batavia, which still survives in the language and songs of the port. It was originally spelt A-m-o-k. But by the time the first and second traders had cruised back into British and Dutch ports, it had transmogrified into A-m-u-c-k.

Lifting a fine cup of something narcotic to your lips, pause for a moment and consider how this might have occurred.

These vowels and consonants were sensitive to cold. They were entirely stunned by the cooling of air over the larynx, as trading ships passed through the warmer seas of the Indian Ocean and on to the chill hem of the Atlantic. In this way the ‘o’ of amok came to sound less like the hollow knock of wood inside bamboo, than the low curtsey of a ‘u’ , ullulated in the back of Dutch and English palates.

This is one simple fable of origin that you might set against a hundred others. But as this one smells sweet and dangerous, I will tell it, whether it be true or not. What is true to say, is that in the beginning there was that problem of presuming things would always come down to English, as if this was as right and natural as filling ships’ hulls with spice and mineral money, and going to the trouble of moving them half a globe away on strung webs of longitude. The Dutch, as we have been taught, went to Asia to produce and buy at low prices, certain goods which yielded enormous profits in Europe. Chinese porcelain, for instance, could not be made in Europe, as the use of kaolin, or china clay was not yet known. European cloves and nutmeg, and also pepper, were so exclusive, that at the beginning of the seventeenth century, you could buy a large house for a small sack of cloves. That’s one hundred and fifty tubes of tooth paste, two hundred and twenty apple pies, one hundred gallons of mulled wine and the queasy smell of a million dental surgeries.

But the smell from the hulls was sure. Mapped and rounded. Giant cloves, nutty coffees, cinammon bark the size of tree trunks, large leaf teas and an endless abacus of peppercorns gave the ship its ballast, and all this kept dry by thin creaking belts of mahoganny. Sacks of kaolin had been mined to make small and delicate pottery; one half of the ship was packed with porcelain flour, fine as meringue dust. The officials on board were busy dreaming of hundreds of thin saucers rimmed with gold and celadon; the pouring of elixirs that would beget a long culture of rattling and stirring.

But coming back down to the English. It’s like a staircase, this ‘coming back down‘ thing. All the treads and risers of so-called linguistic inevitability. The lazy archeologies of the sound shift. But the idea of ‘coming back down‘ was a terrible assumption in itself. You might just as well have said: coffee and cloves came back down (or sailed back up) to the Northern Hemisphere differently, as if the action of temperature and shrieking wildlife, the exchange of promissory notes and the occasional descriptions of poets somehow ameliorated everything; made the huge shifting of resources appear as (un)natural and inevitable as an etymological shift.

Who can prove if flavour, words (or history for that matter) are really alterable by cold and the rhymes of a poet over time?………No-one really can……all we get to do is percolate the changes, without ever being able to guarantee the brew. Only occasionally will someone bother to think about the grains that got left behind in the boat.

We do know that coffee, for example, caused a great shock amongst pre-caffeinated society, catching fast in pale and trembly epiglottises, used to centuries of blandness. Such was the shock, that the imbiber seized upon stray granules as the most delicious irritation. One shot of coffee and words would tumble from mouths like pearls, as if they had been long and slow to form. Predictably, churches and newspapers initially condemned the stuff; preachers and landowners were the ones who usually did the talking…now, after two nips of the stuff, everyone was speaking up, breaking the silence, seizing the pulpit…and the force that drove them was not always a lucid one. Some feared that coffee, in particular would bring on the sort of revolution that only kings and princes could imagine.

The women in particular had been entirely sped up. By the drug, you see. And this speeding; this gentle agitation was important in itself, even if the new caffeinated trances pre-dated a great deal of writing on the subject of women speaking up and reflecting upon their dreams and lives. Formerly, in well to do houses at least, drugs had been the province of the men. But the men who had paid for the coffee now put down their newspapers in dismay. It was true to say that pineapples and coffee had done strange things to their women folk; the effect had been triple that of the tulip bulb mania that the Dutch had endured and survived with minimal loss of life.

For example, after two coffees, and seventeen acidic slivers of pineapple, the wealthier women of the olde worlde generally began to shake and shudder inside their whalebone. They felt their temperatures rise. They wanted to speak. To hold forth. To run amuck. To smell the pepperdur exude from working armpits in the fields. There were even some unsigned adventuresses who wanted to feel the day press and steam them down like a laundress, until their own fair skins jellied and blistered and needed to be cooled and soothed with banana leaf. In secret, they read the maps that were locked away in drawers, exhausting their husbands with their subtle geographical quizzing.

Amuck, in this sense, was a boon for proto-feminism. As were coffee, kaolin, cloves. The catalystic, cataclysmic fragrances of amok.

Clearly, amok was and is a variable phenomenon. The offficials of the European spice cartels ran amok and took what they wanted to. The memory of how they ran amok and what in the first place had chartered them on a course to amok, quickly faded, until memory itself had run amok and thence become a museum to amuck. Within the halls of industry, all violence, all greed had been forgotten or entered in the ledger as business. Bonded slaves were used on Javanese Nutmeg plantations up until the 1920′s but no-one remembers this now.

All we have been left with is a vague, inconsequential shaking of spice grinders over custard and whipped cream; a vague dusting at the back of the brain, something to do with the wordless knowledge that such a fragrance could never have originated out of the same soil that seeded juniper and holly. Custard was garnished with clove and nutmeg, and the nose and mind, for an instant, with the scent of worlds beyond. But over time, spiceworld became a sort of long term PR for a cloven amnesia.

In 1663 the word ‘amok’ was set into dictionaries as the idea of ‘a frenzied Malay.’ By 1672 this had given way to the notion of running amuck, i.e.’to run viciously in a frenzied quest for blood.’ In 1689, Pope recorded politely over coffee, that he was ‘too discreet to run amuck and tilt at all I meet.’ And Dryden chattily records the social type, who ‘runs an Indian muck at all he meets.’

In this way, the passage between amok and amuck came down to English; outwardly it appeared seamless and sociable. Inwardly, it ran amok with its own racist projections. And this is only one word, reinvented to conceal the linguistic layercake of centuries. The English seem to have been better than the Dutch at these swift concealments. But the Dutch, for example, still use the phrase, ‘It is as expensive as pepper’. Or, ‘het is Peperdur‘. Back in the seventeenth century, a small sack of clothes bought a narrow four story house in the port of Rotterdam. So traces can be found. Traces that contain the map and the mire, the hull the heyst; the word, heated or cooled according to the political recipe best served.

But as the dream suddenly re-enters the square, it seems the word has changed again. There is the scent of something else, something seldom bottled or set inside a hull for export. I drop my silver spoon and it clatters to the floor. The big man is up and the lazy susan arrested by the fine darting hands of the women. If food was roulette, this is it. But the round day, spinning away from easy consumption, has itself become a game; the women are its sudden dice. The women are Chinese Indonesian. The green man, who seems to be the part owner, ushers them out a back way. No-one is concerned with a caucasion woman, dipping her pen into a well of fear. The birds in the covered cages are awake and shrieking. A waiter is yanking off the cloths at speed, as if enlisting a small, feathered battallion to his aid.

And I have spilt the coffee. It stains the linen and seeps through to the floor boards. The Chinese waitress has been hidden in the cellar; but a boy still brings me some toast. A green feather floats softly down.

Outside in the square handmade weapons are being lifted up into a hot sail of sky. The policemen stand idly by, clove cigarettes between their fingers. The staff watch without moving. Then, there is a faint dusting at the back of my brain. I am in a frenzy, a frenzied caucasian, who needs to quickly find a halfway decent cab that will be able to get in and around the violence and secret me away to Kebayoran Baru, to the illusions of a guard’s hut and a ten foot concrete wall. I think, abstractedly: Queen Beatrix of Holland, the richest woman in the world, does she keep a cache of the first cinammon under her bed. Is it kept in a porcelain pot? Is the palace made of porcelain too? At what point do the guards become too well paid to dream of a perfect future? Is it true or false that they shoot peppercorns at the drug runners who arrive at the port of Amsterdam.

I tilt, I tilt at the staff, a frenzied caucasian; I beg them to get me the best cab they can. one with a meter and a driver who doesn’t dream. I tilt as hard and hysterically as I can. They look at me doubtfully. The fragments of shared language have suddenly fallen away; but all the meanings rise up; residual, different. Can we ever really know each other away from a context of food and drink? The theft and redemption of it. Its control and release. The language given over centuries to this very control and release?

In Indonesia the crisis price of rice is still more than sticky. And we still shift around the issues of sticky-by-implication, wondering what sort of speech to use.

There are long patches of sweat on my back and under my arms. Fear rattles in the throats of cups. Naivety suddenly seems to be a caffeinated, cloven thing.

‘ Please! A cab, a good cab if you can! Silakan Bu, Taksi bagus, sekarang!’

‘But, Ibu, you haven’t finished your coffee’, one of the girls says, in impeccable English, sweet as spice.

Silakan Ibu, kopi anda, belum minum minum!

Amanda Johnson teaches in the Department of English at the University of Melbourne

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 view of the situation in Fiji, with variations, is widely held. While further legitimated by the shock effect of George Speight and his militarised gang, the view largely stands in its own right. It is predominantly democratic common sense, shared not only by Alexander Downer but most sectors of the political spectrum. Who would want to be racist on these questions, let alone anti-democratic?

The solution is so obvious one wonders how any other view could stand up. But first pause a little and consider some counter examples. In Xinjiang Province, China, five Turkic Ulghurs – native to the region – were recently executed. They were campaigning for autonomy, or some form of independence, from the now majority Han population. Is it so obvious to claim that the Han ‘migrant peoples do not remain visitors forever. In the end, their new land owns them as once their old land did, and they have a right to own it in their turn’? To put it differently, what if certain cultural backgrounds allow whole peoples on average to adapt more quickly to modernising settings? Does this mean they should be able to simply dominate the pre-existing cultures of this or that region? The counter-examples can be multiplied many times over.

Do the white farmers in Zimbabwe simply have the right to buy and control the land because of their special history? Do the Melanesian inhabitants of West Papua simply have to stand back and see their land possessed by Indonesian powers and Javanese transmigrants? Can white Australians simply brush aside the special claims of Aboriginal people to land, not to mention their broader cultural claims, simply because they have a democratic majority? Of course these are different examples with different histories. Yet they are all related to one or another type of colonialism or imperialist domination. Each example can be shown to carry degrees of innocence by both parties. But the question that Rushdie shows no capacity whatsoever to take on board is whether indigenous cultures should have special rights, especially to the land, which would cut across popular notions of democracy that only recognise citizens as individuals.

In an important sense this question of migration and cultural rights is as old as human society. Migration of populations and domination by introduced cultures is one of the tragedies of human history. Yet to speak of tragedy is to imply reluctant acceptance. This is quite inappropriate, for the situation which now overwhelms the countries of the Pacific is of another order, one that carries a cultural challenge of a new kind and a strategic challenge for Australia as well as the region generally.

It is commonplace to note that the political upheavals in Fiji and the Solomons reflect particular histories and the interests of individuals and special groups. But at least one commentator has noted that they are also framed by general conditions which we all know in one form or another. These are the forces of globalisation which generate surplus populations and related economic crises for all the societies of the region, not to mention the world. The common view of globalisation which tends to see it simply in economic terms is part of the problem here. For it is the culture of globalisation which makes its mark simultaneously with its economy, the two being essentially inseparable.

The impacts of migrations over millennia and more recent migrations associated with globalisation do have some similarities. But the differences are nevertheless what count. The point is that globalisation culturally imposes practices which select those peoples who can relatively easily enter its abstract techniques and distanced forms of interchange. It promotes the mobility of populations in an order of magnitude hardly comparable with the past, while destroying the infrastructure of long-standing cultures and their modes of economy. And crucially it works against those cultures of indigenous peoples who represent the possibility of another future, one more based in relations structured around the physical presence of others. For these cultures, relation with the land is one of the ways in which they give expression to the significance of place. And place promotes the valuing of others as beings-in-place, as beings who are known in the flesh and blood rather than through connections made possible by media. They have a radically different structure.

The recent tragedy of young Chinese illegal immigrants dying in a truck in England after a trek across the whole Asian and European continent is a symbol of what globalisation means for large segments of populations in the era of global culture. A decade ago Los Angeles was the symbolic ‘centre’ of this process of sucking in populations to work as culturally and economically poverty-stricken half-citizens. Now vast cosmopolitan complexes emerge all around the world as ‘centres’ drawing in surplus populations from anywhere and treating them as flotsam, placed nowhere. It is a process which supports a simplistic and degenerate notion of multi-culturalism, and as well as a superficial notion of ‘democracy’. Its other side is the desperation of indigenous cultures. An offshoot from this is the opportunistic thuggery of George Speight and his militarised units.

It is true that immigrant populations do not remain immigrants forever, but the degree of respect between cultures is a central issue of how they may coexist over time. In today’s world, respect cannot be separated from an empathic understanding of the different capacities and values of peoples formed in different settings and an insight into how some may be disadvantaged by what for the moment passes for development. And these orientations need to be further tempered by a realisation that the present form of global culture is unsustainable in its insatiable appetite for the destruction of all social relations which value the face-to-face presence of others. We might then be in a situation of greater social realism.

Just how such respect is to be embedded in the relations between cultures and within state constitutions is of course a very difficult matter. But it will be far less difficult if the principle is accepted as a practical commitment. All cultures should have the right to a decent existence. And, to inject a small degree of self-interest into the argument, it is also worth remembering that global culture, given its present unsustainable trajectory, becomes progessively dependent on the very cultures it destroys. It cannot solve its own cultural problems without drawing upon the ‘wisdom’ inherent in the structures of indigenous cultures which give a proper significance to the face-to-face. Opportunism no doubt can always rear its head, but in today’s world reliance on a glib concept of ‘democracy’ to ‘solve’ the crisis in Fiji is one of the forms of opportunism. Rather than being an alternative to Speight, it is part of the conditions which call him into being. Salman Rushdie, like all of us, needs to face this contradiction.

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.

ASX [Australian Stock Exchange] (1998). The Investor Handbook: All Ordinaries Index Companies. Brisbane: Australian Stock Exchange

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

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.

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.

Beer, Michael (1999). ‘Movements Growing in East Timor’. The East Timor Estafeta. No.1/Vol. 5, Winter. New York: ETAN/US, p.7

Brooker, Paul (1995). Twentieth Century Dictatorships: The Ideological One-Party States. New York: New York University Press.

Dunn, James (1999a). ‘Local Leaders Key in Timor’, Sydney Morning Herald, 25 November.

Dunn, James (1999b). ‘Great Expectations as East Timor Begins to Rebuild’, Sydney Morning Herald, 24 December, 1999.

ETHRC [East Timor Human Rights Centre] (1998). East Timorese Political Prisoners. Melbourne: ETHRC, 23 June.

Freire, Paulo (1983). Pedagogy in Process: The Letters of Guinea-Bissau. New York: Continuum.

FRETILIN (1998). Manual and Political Programs, National Conference, 14-20 August 1998, Sydney, Australia. Sydney: Organisation and Community Affairs Department, FRETILIN Representative Office in Australia.

Hill, Helen Mary (1978). FRETILIN: The Origins, Ideologies and Strategies of a Nationalist Movement in East Timor. MA Thesis at Monash University, Melbourne, Australia.

Jolliffe, Fill (ed) (1976). Revolutionary Poems in the Struggle Against Colonialism: Timorese Nationalist Verse [of] Francisco Borja da Costa. Sydney: Wild and Woolley.

Lane, Max (1999). ‘The View from Dili’. Green Left Weekly.

Riggs, Bridget (1999). ‘Help Rebuild a Free East Timor’, Green Left Weekly, 24 November, p. 17.

da Silva, Avelino (1999). ‘The Transition in East Timor’, Green Left Weekly, 24 November, p.18.

da Silva Lopes, Carlos (1996). Perspectives Para O Futuro de Timor-Leste: O Papel da Juventude Timorense no Timor-Leste Independente. Paper presented at the International Conference on East Timor in Sydney, 21-27 June.

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

Winters, Rebecca (1999). Buibere: Voices of East Timorese Women. Vol.1. Darwin: East Timor International Support Centre.

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.

Like a funhouse mirror, the brutal mass-bombing and shelling of Chechnya by Russian forces resembles a distorted version of NATO’s bombing of Serbian forces in Kosovo. And while there are differences, as Clinton and Blair are keen to point out, the complicity of the West in the Chechnya situation is both real and multilevelled. Firstly, Russia has taken a leaf out of NATO’s manual on how to wage contemporary warfare. Secondly, the United States has long been a supporter of Russian attempts to dominate Chechnya. Finally, the muted response by the West to such overt barbarism has as much to do with investments in the global economy, natural resources, and ideological attempts to restrain perceived growth of fundamentalist Islam as it has to do with the issues of opposing a powerful and nuclear-capable nation.

Despite some coverage, the media response, in proportion to the amount of killing and terror that is evident in Chechnya, has been restrained. While Russia over the past six weeks has relentlessly bombed cities and villages, resulting in indiscriminate destruction, causing over two hundred thousand people to flee to neighbouring Ingushetia, there has been precious little coverage in the media of a crisis that equals, if not surpasses, the one in Kosovo. Whereas dozens of television cameras were able to convey the multifaceted scenes of terror in Kosovo, we are yet to see anything comparable in Chechnya. One can speculate on the reasons for this. One is that Russia has ensured that media contact is minimal – it is fighting its own version of an ‘information war’. Few reporters are willing to go to an area made so obviously dangerous by random bombing, combined with threats of kidnapping. Russian shelling has destroyed local media structures, along with everything else. The lack of television coverage means that Russia can deny much of what it is doing, the attack on Elistanzhi and the bombing of five Red Cross vehicles (killing two staff and twenty-five civilians) being two notorious early examples.

Another reason may be the effects of the new post-1989 division between so-called Central Europe and what remains of the East, a kind of replication of Zygmunt Bauman’s ‘new poor’ at a national/regional level. In other words, if it is not in ‘Europe’ then it does not get priority – at some level it does not even exist. Perhaps it is all too much to cope with so soon after Kosovo. Here we have another example of forced movement, bombing from above, except that the same side is doing both the bombing and the forced emigration. Yet if Kosovo remains in limbo, with little in the way of positive results, if the ‘humanitarian’ values espoused as the reason for the high-altitude bombing in the Balkans have withered with time, is it not possible to find a degree of convergence between NATO-style abstract destruction in the name of humanitarianism, and the more obviously odious form destruction takes in Chechnya?

Since the breakup of the USSR, the republic of Chechnya has been a source of consternation for Russia. Claiming an independent heritage and a different ethnic composition (largely Muslim), Chechnya also contains much of the rich oil and gas deposits of the Caucasus. In 1994 Russia attempted to submit Chechnya to its will, first through what is known as the Russian ‘Bay of Pigs’ disaster, when Russian soldiers disguised as Chechens attempted to infiltrate the region, and were comprehensively routed. Six months later this was followed by open invasion. In the end Russia withdrew, having sustained large casualties in fighting a vicious ground war. There have been subsequent incidents of Chechen terrorism, including several bomb attacks in Moscow in ‘retaliation’.

This time, it is different. Russia has followed the model of the United States in Iraq and NATO in Kosovo and has conducted war at a distance. When the weather is clear Russian airplanes have made over 150 sorties a day. On 3 November the Russian airforce commander complained that his pilots had dropped so many precision-guided bombs that they were running short. At the time of writing the bombing has increased. Not that precision seems to have been of much importance. The city of Grozny is decimated, its central marketplace and hospital destroyed. It may even be that the airforce and army do not even know what they are hitting, with many Russian pilots having received minimal training. Patrick Cockburn of the Independent reports that the most common sound in Chechnya is that of the notoriously inaccurate Grad missile launcher.

There is no doubt that in the short term many in Russia are reaping the benefits of this new style of mediated destruction. The approval ratings of Prime Minister Putin have soared as he vows to teach a lesson to the ‘bandits, terrorists and gangsters’ in Chechnya. That this can be done without apparent risk of the humiliation and defeat of Russian soldiers, as in the first war, means that Putin’s military posturing has made him currently the most popular Russian politician. By conducting this ‘safer’ NATO-style war, Russia gains a double revenge – against Chechnya after the humiliations of the 1994-6 war, and against the West – as Russia reasserts itself after being largely left out of the negotiations in Kosovo. The assertion of national power also provides a useful deflection away from the recent money-laundering scandal that rocked Moscow.

There is also a more material gain. It seems that Russia is determined not only to liquidate Islamic rebels (an attempt which has largely failed), but also to regain control of the Caucasus via first gaining control of Chechnya – the gateway to the rich energy resources of the Caspian and Central Asia. Notably, Russia’s ‘recovery’ has been led by profits generated from oil and gas. Indeed Russia’s current account surplus may top 20 billion US dollars, thanks to oil and gas revenue, something that was no doubt made clear to the IMF on a recent visit.

The West has been slow to criticise Russia for conducting the form of abstract terrorism it is now engaged in. Reasons are easy enough to find. Firstly, the Clinton administration has been a long-time supporter of Russia’s attempt to dominate Chechnya. Indeed in the first campaign of 1994-6 President Clinton was highly vocal in his support for Russia, comparing Russia’s ‘struggle’ with Chechnya to America’s civil war, even going so far as to call Boris Yeltsin a Russian Abraham Lincoln. The fact that Chechnya is largely Muslim, and the fact that bombs had been planted in Moscow by Chechens has allowed the rhetoric of the ‘war on terrorism’ to flow freely. In December last year the New York Times declared that ‘Mr. Yeltsin is justified in using military force to suppress the [Chechnya] rebellion’. Only very recently, Madeline Allbright expressed US support for Russia against fundamentalist terrorism. Al Gore has said that he will be even tougher than Clinton on Muslim fundamentalist campaigns of violence. This general tenor has created a paradoxical effect upon the world stage. At the same time as President Clinton was ordering Indonesia to get out of East Timor (albeit without real commitment), his administration was supporting a savage invasion of Chechnya, in the name of a war on terrorism. While support has recently waned in the light of Russia’s open and ‘disproportionate’ campaign of terror, this complicity explains the West’s muted criticism, and both the United States’ and Britain’s affirmation at this point that they will not attempt to impose sanctions.

The relation between Russia and the global economy points toward a further level of complicity. Some commentators have called for the United States to stop financial assistance to Russia, as this is clearly, at some significant level, underwriting the war on Chechnya. Yet, while this may happen, the United State is reluctant because of the effect this might have on the global economy. As Rupert Cornwall writes, ‘Economic sanctions could backfire by triggering loan defaults or a repeat of Russia’s 1998 financial crisis that might destabilise international markets’ (Independent, 6 November 1999). For a number of reasons then, it would seem that the hands of the United States are tied. If Prime Minister Putin thumbs his nose at the West, gaining in popularity as he does so, it is perhaps this knowledge that the West simply cannot afford to risk another financial collapse that underscores his immunity to criticism.

After the disaster in Kosovo, and after the destruction of the Chechen republic, it is increasingly clear that the only solution to such racial and territorial aggression is a strengthened United Nations able to intervene on the ground and outside of regional or national interest. While this is a tall order, it is the only realistic possibility. In the last six months we have seen that neither the United States nor NATO is able to act as the world’s policeman. The style of intervention – abstract killing at a distance, the generation of genuine, if often fleeting, upwelling of humanitarian support via media concentration – has proven highly selective, as well as ultimately ineffective. Now Russia has used the methods of the West in a brutal parody of Kosovo-style intervention. The West is unwilling to act due to varying degrees of complicity, its media almost turning a blind eye to the problem.

Note: For the full version of this article, see issue 44 of Arena Magazine.