East Timor: Will the United Nations make another blunder?

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.