Australia threatens to suspend East Timor gas and oil talks
Australia threatens to suspend East Timor gas and oil talks
Agence France-Presse, Sydney
Australia's foreign minister threatened on Sunday to suspend
talks with East Timor on disputed multi-billion-dollar Timor Sea
gas and oil fields, saying the opposition Labor Party had
politicized the issue.
Foreign Minister Alexander Downer accused Labor leader Mark
Latham of acting irresponsibly by saying last week that he would
start fresh negotiations with East Timor if elected in national
elections expected in October or November.
The long-running negotiations have strained Australia's
relations with East Timor, which wants a greater share of oil
revenues, and Downer said Latham had "lurched into" the issue at
a delicate stage in a bid to score political points.
He said Latham had undermined Australia's position and the
government was considering suspending the next round of talks
with Dili, scheduled for September.
"That's obviously something we'll have to consider," Downer
told Channel Nine. "There won't be any point in going ahead with
the negotiations if Labor is going to restart the negotiations
after the election.
"This comes at a very bad time, because these negotiations are
very delicate and difficult negotiations."
Australia's conservative government has been accused of
bullying one of the world's poorest countries by claiming
ownership of oil-rich continental shelf two-thirds of the way
across the Timor Sea.
East Timor wants the border drawn midway between the two, a
change East Timor Prime Minister Mari Alkatiri said last month
would be worth an additional US$12 billion in revenue for his
country over the "next generation", compared to $4.0 billion
under the existing arrangement.
Latham said last week that Labor would start negotiations from
scratch because "bad blood" had dominated the existing talks.
He said it was important for East Timor to remain a viable
nation and it would not be in Australia's interests to have a
failed state on its doorstep.
Labor foreign affairs spokesman Kevin Rudd said Downer was
playing politics ahead of the election.
Rudd said Labor's policy had two key points that had been on
the record for six months -- it wants an agreement to be
finalized within three to five years, rather than the
government's open-ended approach, and it wants international law,
including the United Nations' law of the sea, to be considered.
In March 2002, Australia withdrew from the International
Tribunal for the Law of the Sea before the dispute reached the
arbiter.
"These were two clearly articulated differences and six months
later Alexander Downer decides to make a political case out of
it," Rudd said.