Ex-Fretilin leader speaks for RI at UN committee
JAKARTA (JP): A former leader of an East Timor armed separatist movement spoke in favor of the integration of the former Portuguese colony and said he is proud to be an Indonesian citizen.
Fransisco Xavier Amaral, a former leader of Fretilin which has been fighting for a separate state for the last 19 years, told the United Nations' Decolonization Committee in New York that East Timor is firmly part of Indonesia.
"Ethnically, East Timor is no different from West Timor. They were only separated because of past colonial policies," Amaral was quoted by the Antara news agency as saying.
The UN forum, better known as the Committee of 24, resumed the debate about East Timor on Wednesday. The world body still regards it as a Portuguese colony although Portugal abandoned the territory in haste in 1975.
Amaral, a founding member of Fretilin, was one of three persons who spoke about the need for everyone to be realistic in treating the East Timor case. The other two were Jose Martins III, formerly head of the Timorese Liberation Organization, and Paulino Gama of the Timorese International Secretariat for Human Rights, according to Antara.
The committee also received a petition from 29 international non-government organizations that included the Timorese Democratic Union and the East Timor Action Network of the United States and the Asia-Pacific Conference on East Timor in Manila.
The petitioners criticized Indonesia's human rights record in East Timor and demanded that the territory be given its independence.
Amaral, however, recounted the cruelty of the Portuguese in colonizing East Timor for over 450 years which included persecuting any literate East Timorese because they were considered dangerous.
Portugal also set one East Timorese against another, even a son and his father, he said.
When they abandoned East Timor, they washed their hands of it while the country was in a state of civil war, he said. "I know this because I was one of the protagonists in that civil war fighting for East Timor's independence."
Amaral told the committee that the East Timor problem has now been turned into a "political commodity" by some people to serve their own interests, including those in Portugal.
He underlined that Portugal also has a poor record when it comes to its hands-off policy in its other former colonies such as Mozambique and Angola.
"Integration does not simply mean that East Timor is part of Indonesia, it also means that all of Indonesia belongs to East Timor," he said.
The Indonesian and Portuguese delegations are expected to address the forum on Thursday.
Indonesia has insisted that the decolonization process of East Timor was completed on July 17, 1976, when tribal leaders representing the majority of the East Timor people signed a petition declaring their intention to integrate with Indonesia. (emb)