Can jury of history pass a fair East Timor ruling?

The following is based on an article in The Australian on Sept. 26 by Harry Tjan Silalahi, who is from the Centre for Strategic and International Studies in Jakarta and a key interlocutor with the Australian government over East Timor in 1975.

JAKARTA: It was heartening to read the fair and robust response by former Australian ambassador to Indonesia Richard Woolcott to criticism of the roles of the Indonesian and Australian governments following the recent release of a government report.

The report from the Australian Department of Foreign Affairs and Trade (DFAT) was entitled "Australia and the Indonesian Incorporation of Portuguese Timor 1974-76".

Woolcott gave a tour de horizon of the geopolitics of 25 years ago: the Cold War, collapse of South Vietnam, election of a leftist government in Portugal, fear of a Cuba on Australia's northern doorstep, underlined by Indonesia's head-on political experience with a communist uprising in 1948 and having the largest card-carrying communist party membership outside the communist country leading up to the 1965 coup.

The vestigial regional development of the Association of Southeast Asian Nations set in place reasonably predictable foreign policy responses from all parties -- be it super-power or regional power or even middle power like Australia and a developing country like Indonesia.

I strongly agree with Woolcott's analogy of "The jury of history is still out on East Timor"; especially if it is true that over the past two years many of the key Australian official documents have been systematically pulled from the official record.

How can "the jury of history" fairly pass its verdict when the evidence presented is selective with some permanently destroyed.

Woolcott suggests that East Timor was then somewhat of a political football in Australia just as it is today.

Successive Labor Party and Coalition governments have cynically enjoyed scoring goals against one another since 1975 despite the fact that their East Timor policies -- as recited in Jakarta to me, to our ministries of foreign affairs and defense, intelligence agencies, and even to then president Soeharto -- were almost identical.

Undoubtedly, Woolcott, who was then ambassador, would appreciate that in this internal Australian political football match there were serious intra-party divisions. From the Jakarta end, the continual leaks of official communications in Canberra, were inspired by either prime minister Malcolm Fraser or foreign minister Andrew Peacock aimed at one another, but more probably Woolcott.

On this latter point, I distinctly recall sometime in 1977 an article on Australian foreign policy over East Timor in the Far East Economic Review displaying a photograph of Woolcott in impeccable batik, moving a minor chess piece, entitled "The cheapest pawn in the game".

This new DFAT publication smacks of a continuation of this inter- and intra-party sniping and ultimately clouds the truth.

Do not for one moment think that as a person continually mentioned and quoted by the Australian press over the past weeks and in this DFAT publication, I condone what happened in East Timor. Quite the contrary.

I am deeply saddened by the meaningless vicious violence against human beings and their property in this period prior to and after the referendum, and violence in the recent militia murders and atrocities in Atambua, East Nusa Tenggara.

Certainly, with the benefit of hindsight, Indonesia would have implemented the plan differently. But how could we have forecast all those vast geo-political changes in those intervening years?

What happened in the past leaves us with bitter regrets today. This selective travesty of a publication leaves me, for one, with even more bitter regrets.

This aside, I salute Woolcott for standing up to be counted over Australia's Timor policy despite the Australian press' snide remarks to the contrary. I am more than pleased to stand beside him in any judgment by the press or history.

Both our countries need to have a wider vision particularly in relation to East Timor. Woolcott and many in the Indonesian government would surely endorse a more pragmatic and forward looking approach.

As Woolcott repeatedly stated over the years of his ambassadorship and beyond, "Timor should not be the center-piece of our bilateral relationship" -- implying there were more important bilateral issues to be addressed. There were then and there are even more today.