East Timor's independence

If the East Timorese independence leaders based their strategies to achieve independence on Jim Aubrey's approach to and understanding of Indonesia (see TNI: The people's Army or the people's tyrant in The Jakarta Post, Oct. 6) one can understand why the East Timorese have had to pay such a terribly high price for freedom.

Jim Aubrey, the editor of Free East Timor (Vintage 1998) and spokesman for Australians for a Free East Timor, makes so many generalized statements in his article one wonders whether accuracy as opposed to simplification is of concern to him. Perhaps he is more concerned about blowing his own trumpet, albeit in rather a perverse way. He, after all, had a role in bringing to an end what he boasts as being one of the "most infamous crimes against humanity in the 20th century" and supporting one of the "greatest struggles for freedom of all time".

Without condoning or playing down the atrocities committed by the Indonesian Military (TNI), to write that the TNI is "more of a tyrant than the Dutch ever were to the people of the Dutch East Indies" indicates a complete failure to understand the crimes perpetrated against Indonesians during the colonial era. Furthermore, one wonders what is the meaning and pertinence of these rather strange sentences: "Indonesia's problems are so profound that self-denial is the only way the contempt of the civilized world is comprehended. However, self-denial will not feed the people". I understand self-denial to mean forbearance of desire or going without. Thus, to translate, Jim Aubrey is telling us that Indonesia can only understand civilized, foreign contempt by going without, but going without will not feed its people. This is nothing short of drivel.

Jim Aubrey belittles "the degree of political sophistication in Jakarta"; but his own naive and populist approach is testimony to his own severe lack of depth and sophistication. If Jim Aubrey is genuinely concerned about the people of East Timor and Indonesia, he would do well to ask whether his outburst of indignation coupled with his rather superficial approach do any more than exacerbate the situation.

Now that East Timor has been devastated and crimes against humanity have been committed there, taking a purely practical retrospective view, we need to ask whether the East Timorese quest for independence could have been handled better by the United Nations, Australia and organizations like Jim Aubrey's.

Most of the parameters were known in advance. The goals and methods of the TNI have changed little over the years. Why then did this particular bid for freedom end in such a pyrrhic victory? It needs to be acknowledged that many of the pundits, activists, UN staff and the East Timorese leaders themselves badly miscalculated through lack of understanding. Unfortunately, Jim Aubrey, ignorance and the emotive simplification of issues in such situations can and has cost lives.

FRANK RICHARDSON

Jakarta