East Timor: Will the United Nations make another blunder?

By George J. Aditjondro

This is the second of two articles on the role of the United Nations in the upcoming direct ballot in East Timor.

NEWCASTLE, Australia (JP): Unlike in the case of Kuwait or Kosovo, U.S. Secretary of State Madeleine Albright has not put U.S. weight behind the UN secretary-general to demand the disarming of militias and the withdrawal of Indonesian troops from East Timor.

Incidentally, a U.S. company, Philips Petroleum, has now emerged as the major player in the Timor Gap. With Mobil Oil also entering the Timor Sea, U.S. oil companies may become the major players in the entire Timor Sea, stretching from the Ashmore Reef in the west to the Arafura Sea in the eastern entrance to the Timor Sea.

Australia, as always, is a junior partner in the U.S.-led global capitalist system. The "Big Australian" BHP has sold its Timor Sea assets to Philips Petroleum after moving its oil operations to the Mexican Gulf. Its office in Houston also houses the U.S. representative office of Indonesia's state oil company Pertamina.

In the meantime, BHP's Australian partners, Woodside Petroleum, Santos and Petroz, are now operating under -- or in conjunction with -- U.S. oil giants.

Santos and Petroz operates in the Timor Sea under Philips Petroleum, and Woodside in the North Western Shelf with other U.S. and Japanese partners. Woodside is now planning to rub elbows with the Exxon-BHP partnership in the Bass Straits between the Australian continent and Tasmania.

In other words, the maritime waters around the Australian continent are now controlled by combined U.S., Australian and other Western and Japanese oil interests. Mind you, Woodside itself is half owned by Shell, which in turn is an Anglo-Dutch joint venture.

Emphasis here is not on "all Australian waters", but "all the maritime waters around the Australian continent". Why? Because the seas around Australia also have been robbed from their rightful owners, namely the indigenous peoples of Australia and Timor, East as well as West. This is what lay behind the late Prof. Johannes' objections against the Timor Gap Treaty, because this illegal 1989 treaty was signed by then Australian foreign minister Gareth Evans, Australia's candidate for the UNESCO directorship, and his Indonesian counterpart, Ali Alatas.

The treaty between Australia and East Timor's occupying force materialized after a long series of maritime border negotiations between Indonesia and Australia, which practically robbed fishing communities in Sulawesi and West Timor from the right to fish in their traditional waters, a tradition extending back before Capt. James Cook laid claims for the British crown to the Australian continent and its surrounding waters.

At this point in time, I believe that we need to analyze the current events in East Timor also from a global political economy perspective.

It might give us a deeper understanding of the UN's half- hearted way in protecting the rights of the Maubere people to determine their own future. It also may give human rights activists a better understanding in targeting their campaigns, apart from the Indonesian corruptors and their Timorese collaborators.

Strange as it may sound, I believe that the biggest perpetrators of human rights violations are not the stupid soldiers and paramilitary men who only know how to pull a gun's trigger or to hack their machetes.

The biggest perpetrators of human rights violations in East Timor live right in Darwin in the Northern Territory, Australia, the major supply base of the Timor Gap oil and gas operators. Others live in their regional and global headquarters far away from the bloodstained soil of Timor Lorosae, the traditional Timorese name for their land.

From their air-conditioned skyscrapers in the Northern hemisphere, they will benefit from the potential cancellation of the UN-supervised referendum -- not even called a "referendum" in the first place but a "direct ballot" -- due to Indonesian opposition.

The longer the stalemate, the more these oil companies can rob the oil and gas resources of the Timor Sea. The border between East and West Timor is a nuisance for them since they want to integrate the wells on both sides of the border into a grid, which is more economical to operate.

A long stalemate is not a problem for the oil and gas operators because the Timor Sea hydrocarbon reserves mainly consist of natural gas, which will be liquefied and condensed in Darwin or at another town on the northern coast of Australia. And from the economical point of view, it is better to stockpile this natural gas and oil under the sea until the East Asian economies -- Japan, Korea, Taiwan, Hong Kong and China -- recover from their economic eclipse and can resume importing the Timor Sea's liquefied natural gas.

And a prolonged stalemate will enable the oil interests to benefit from the billions of dollars worth of oil and gas which has the potential to turn the entire island -- and not only East Timor -- into another Brunei.

While fighting against the immediate human rights violations in East Timor, the public in Australia, the U.S., Britain, the Netherlands, Norway, Japan and Indonesia need to be educated about the complicity of their oil companies in the East Timor tragedy. Basically, the Timor War is a proxy war carried out by the pro-status quo forces in Indonesia on behalf of the multinational oil giants.

I sincerely hope that Megawati Soekarnoputri and her advisors also will see East Timor from this more global political economic perspective and will not embarrass her late father, Bung Karno, a champion fighter against "nekolim (new colonial and imperialist forces) by playing into the hands of the global oil interests.

The writer teaches Sociology of Postcolonial Liberation Movements at the University of Newcastle in Australia. His newest book, Is Oil Thicker than Blood? A Study of Oil Companies Interests and Western Complicity in Indonesia's Annexation of East Timor, was recently published by Nova Science in the United States. It is being translated into Indonesian and will be published by Solidamor in Indonesia.