Shameful Australia
By Ghali Hassan
02 June, 2005
Countercurrents.orgMost Australians know East Timor from the perspective of their Australian government and a tightly controlled corporate media. The cliché is that, Australia is unreservedly supporter of East Timor “independence” and the East Timorese people. Yet, nothing could be further from the truth. Australia’s policy toward East Timor has always been shameful self-interest.
The Republic of East Timor, also known officially as Timor Leste is a former Portuguese colony with a population of 700,000 people. The Southeast Asian nation, consisting of the eastern half of the island of Timor, the nearby islands of Atauro and Jaco, and Oecussi-Ambeno, a political exclave of East Timor situated on the western side of the island, surrounded by West Timor. Darwin is approximately 700 kilometres away from East Timor capital, Dili.
In 1975, only one day after U.S. president Gerald Ford and secretary of state Henry Kissinger had met with the Indonesian president Suharto in Jakarta, East Timor was invaded and annexed by Indonesia as its 27th province until 1999. According to a study by the foreign affairs committee of the Australian Parliament, ‘at least’ 200,000 East Timorese have been killed (more than a quarter of the territory’s people) as a result of the invasion and occupation of territory. Australia, Britain and the U.S. have supported Jakarta with weapons and at the U.N. There were two U.N. Security Council resolutions and eight General Assembly resolutions condemning the invasion and urging Indonesian withdrawal, and rejected Indonesia’s annexation of East Timor. Australia was the unwavering Indonesia’s ‘backer’ during these years of occupation.
In fact Australia was the only country in 1985 to recognise Indonesia’s sovereignty over East Timor in exchange for a promise by Jakarta that Australia would share the oil and gas spoils of the Timor Gap, a deal formalised in 1989. This was followed by a joint declaration made by the Indonesian and Australian governments, stating that they were about to undertake a joint venture aimed at exploiting and looting of East Timor oil resources in south East Timor.
The looting of East Timor started with the Timor Sea Treaty signed (in 1989) on the board of an aircraft flying over the Timor Sea by former Indonesian Ali Alatas and the then Australia’s foreign Minister Gareth Evans, the current president and CEO of the Brussels-based right-wing think tank, the Crisis International Group. “This is an historically unique moment”, said Evans, “that is truly, uniquely historical” he added. “The ultimate prize, as Evans put it, could be ‘zillions’ of dollars”, said John Pilger in Death of a Nation. Despite the unpopularity of the occupation in Australia, “[t]here was not a word of concern for the fate of the Timorese [people]”.
Australia’s East Timor policy is consistent with Australia’s hypocrisy on human rights and international law. After the U.N-sponsored elections in 1999, East Timorese voted for full independence from Indonesia, violence, instigated primarily by anti-independence elements broke out soon afterwards. Agreed on by the Indonesian government and forced by the Australian people, the current Australian Government of Prime Minister John Howard led the U.N-sponsored peace mission to restore law and order, and most importantly to gain political mileage out of “sadness and sorrow”, as he always does. East Timor achieved full “independence” on May 20, 2002.
East Timor’s “independence” which was achieved largely as a result of worldwide public protest against Indonesia’ occupation, is becoming just ink on paper. After 25 years of brutal occupation, oppression, poverty and the unnecessary deaths of thousands of human beings, the rhetoric of East Timor leaders was empty self-interest hypocrisy. Having joined the club of U.S. militaristic imperial agenda, East Timor ruling elites have betrayed their own people struggle for freedom and independence by supporting the U.S. in its invasion and Occupation of another defenceless nation, Iraq.
The end of Indonesia’s rule in East Timor proved to be a bonanza for Australia’s negotiators and Australia’s oil corporations eager to exploit East Timor oil and gas. Using its Western “allies” and “influence”, Australia rejects the international boundaries between two neighbouring nations, which is either the median line, or halfway point. While Most Australians support the view that international law should determine the maritime boundary between East Timor and Australia, Australia is using old boundaries, negotiated illegally with Indonesia. Further, to avoid any scrutiny, Australia has refused to recognise the jurisdiction of both the International Court of Justice and the Tribunal for the Convention on the Law of the Sea. This allows Australia to illegally occupy a large junk of the Timor Sea and siphons East Timor oil and gas resources.
According to Helen Hill of University of Victoria in Melbourne, East Timorese negotiators are also unhappy with the so-called Greater Sunrise Utilisation Agreement which gives Australia 82% of the revenues from one of the biggest oilfields while east Timor, far closer to Sunrise, gets only 18%. So far, Australia has siphoned between $2 to $4 billion in tax revenues and continue to delay the negotiation long enough to enable it to bleed East Timor to death.
Meanwhile, there are still many details to be negotiated and worked out between Australia and its new small neighbour before a deal is finalised. Unwilling to negotiate, and instead insisting on delaying the negotiation for some years until all the oil and gas is extracted and permanent boundaries become insignificant, Australia is buying time on the expense of the Timorese people.
After long years of occupation and destruction, East Timorese need the oil revenues to rebuild the economy of their new fledging nation and avoid the trap of forever indebted to the World Bank and the International Monetary Fund. The current situation in East Timor is that, food shortages and malnutrition are very high. The East Timorese Syara Timor Loro Sa’e newspaper reported that, “since October 2004 at least 53 people had died of starvation in the village of Hato Builico”, and the situation is not better in other districts with “huge crop failure” and high level of malnutrition among children under five years old, according to CARE Australia.
At the same time, the Australian Government continues to announce different estimates for gas and oil royalties to East Timor in an effort to induce East Timor to accept a once-off payment of say 10-20 billion dollars and give up its claims on the resources for at least for 50-100 years. However, the Timor Sea Justice Campaign accused the Australian of unfairness and providing a “shoddy deal” to East Timor.
Recent reports by humanitarian organisation and individual expert rightly objected to Australia “generous” offer to East Timor for its unfairness. According to oil and gas experts; “If the [Greater Sunrise] project goes ahead Australia and Timor Leste could expect more than $90 billion (US $68 billion) in export revenues and about $A52 billion (US $39 billion) government receipts (taxes and royalties) ... The value of the field to Timor Leste must be seen as the sum total of the upstream plus downstream benefits. The US $39 billion in government receipts is only half the story. Of comparable value are the downstream benefits arising from onshore infrastructure investment,” Geoff McKee, of the School of Petroleum Engineering at University of New South Wales told the Australian Parliamentary Joint Standing Committee on Treaties in October 2002. The reality is that Australia is exploiting East Timor resources and denying the new “free” nation a faire share to care for and feed its own people. Will the Australian people allow the looting of East Timor resources to continue in their name?
Instead of taking a humanitarian attitude to assist the people of East Timor build their nation - education system, healthcare services, and civilian infrastructure -, the Australian government is taking a colonial attitude of bullying and exploiting East Timor resources. Australia’s policy is very shameful and very ‘UnAustralian’.
Ghali Hassan lives in Perth, Western Australia.
