The Balibo Declaration revisited

The Balibo Declaration revisited

By Aboeprijadi Santoso

AMSTERDAM (JP): With the recent visit of East Timorese leader
Jose Alexandre "Xanana" Gusmao to Jakarta to meet his old friend
President Abdurrahman Wahid, or Gus Dur, the two leaders have
begun a new relationship between Indonesia and Timor Lorosae.
Only a few weeks ago the two men -- Gus Dur and Gusmao -- were
partners and opposition leaders in Jakarta. With democracy
hopefully starting to flourish in the country, the time has come
for the two nations to reflect on past mistakes.

But some mistakes may be harder to forget and forgive than
others. One such mistake, no doubt, is the killings, rampage and
mass deportations by Army-backed militias last September which
marked the end of the Indonesian era in East Timor.

Another would be Indonesia's invasion of East Timor on Dec. 7,
1975, which started the conflict. Twenty-four years on, it is
still overshadowed by the much celebrated event a week earlier
which served to justify the invasion, i.e. the so-called Balibo
Declaration in which four East Timorese political parties,
allegedly representing the people and expressing their wishes,
called for integration with Indonesia.

The declaration shaped the basis to legitimize the 1976
annexation of the former Portuguese colony. Soeharto's New Order
propaganda machine was so pervasive that few doubt the invasion's
validity. It has been taken for granted for decades that the
"integration" of East Timor into Indonesia was politically and
morally sound. Even though the formal integration was revoked by
the People's Consultative Assembly (MPR) last October, the Balibo
Declaration remains officially intact and unquestioned.

In reality, though, the document was artificial from the very
beginning. It is symbolic of the whole tragedy of East Timor
itself; for if the Balibo Declaration represented the wishes of
the majority of East Timorese as was claimed, why did the
Indonesian Army have to launch a major assault to annex East
Timor why did it take so many years to pacify the territory. In
other words, the declaration marked a new phase in the conflict,
suggesting the determination on the part of Indonesian generals
to act against the East Timorese with force.

Indonesia never had ambitions to expand territorially. But, as
early as 1963, the late Gen. Ali Moertopo, then a member of the
Mandala command resolving the conflict in West Irian, suggested,
so he later claimed, that Indonesia simultaneously take over East
Timor with the conquest of West Irian. However, his superiors,
Gen. Soeharto and president Sukarno, rejected the idea. Moertopo
disclosed this to journalists in 1974.

Moertopo's claim indicates the belief among some military
leaders in the legitimacy of the annexation of the former
Portuguese colony. East Timor was simply regarded on the same par
as West Irian, which was part of the former Dutch East India. As
Indonesia used to compare her independence struggle with
Vietnam's and Algeria's as pioneers of Afro-Asian
anticolonialism, it follows, in this view, that East Timor, being
the colony of a Western nation, would be considered by Indonesia
a "natural" part of the country, which earlier was born out of
this struggle.

It is this kind of ahistoric patriotism which served as the
context for the Balibo Declaration. In addition, there was an odd
sentiment -- a pseudo-nostalgic cry of sorts. "We are true
brothers, so we need to restore the historic links and solidarity
of our ancestors that have been broken by the Western
imperialists," the late Jose Martins Jr. told Moertopo when they
first met in 1974.

Significantly, Moertopo played a key role in the run up to the
invasion. In the 1940s, he joined the nationalist struggle
against the Dutch, nonetheless, 30 years later, he turned out to
be a leading strategist in the political campaign and war against
East Timor. He saw East Timor as a "security risk ... itching our
(Indonesia's) armpit". Like many actors in the Timor saga, the
anticolonial "hero" himself became a colonialist.

A key factor here, of course, was the heightening tension of
the Cold War in mid-1975. Still, it came as a great surprise to
Jakarta that Fretilin, the popular East Timorese left-wing
nationalist movement, declared independence before Jakarta had
fully prepared itself for a military offensive. The invasion
itself was, as many generals now admit, "a great blunder".

Although the possibility of an invasion was being discussed in
the East Timor capital of Dili as early as mid-August, it was not
until three months later that the invasion was felt to be
imminent. By then, the Rome Memorandum between Indonesia and
Portugal had failed to materialize and Moertopo's political
maneuverings had gained momentum.

In July, he organized a tour for Timorese leaders -- mostly
from the political party UDT -- in order to impress (read
intimidate) them with Indonesia's arsenal in Cilandak, South
Jakarta. A few weeks later, a UDT-led coup broke out in Dili,
provoking a short-lived civil war. But Opsus, a military
intelligence operation directed by Gen. Moertopo, continued to
launch attacks from neighboring Atambua, East Nusa Tenggara,
while supporting the mounting number of refugees.

The growing tension eventually resulted in Fretilin
unilaterally declaring independence for East Timor on Nov. 28. At
this time, United States president Gerald Ford and secretary of
state Henry Kissinger were about to visit Indonesia, so it became
urgent for Jakarta to response to Fretilin's challenge sooner
than planned. Hence, justification for the invasion had to be
prepared hastily, even before it was certain that president
Soeharto would give the green light for the military action --
which he did on Dec. 3.

As a consequence, the issuing of the Balibo Declaration was
clumsy, and yet it had to appear credible because it was intended
to sway international public opinion. It was for this purpose
that a dozen East Timorese from all parties except Fretilin were
gathered in a Denpasar hotel owned by Col. A. Soegiyanto.

"We were in Bali to take courses (on integration), and on Nov.
29 Pak Soegiyanto suddenly called us," the then leader of the
Apodeti political party, Guilherme M. Gonzalves, told this writer
in 1995.

"That morning we were woken up. Mario (Carrascalao), me and
others went out in pajamas and were told the news (of Fretilin's
unilateral action)," Jose Martins Jr. recalled in 1992.

But nothing was spontaneous. It was not without pressure,
Martins indicated, when he was asked to sign the declaration. The
Balibo text was drawn up quickly and brought to the border
between East Timor and East Nusa Tenggara to be presented to the
authorities in a ceremony attended by East Timorese refugees. "We
came up with (the concept), and the next day we went to Atambua
to meet foreign minister Pak Adam Malik, and after an hour or so
we returned to Bali," said Gonzalves.

The two Balibo cosigners denied the document was drafted in
the East Timor town of Balibo as was claimed. In fact, Moertopo's
Opsus team and the pro-Jakarta East Timorese elite never met
inside East Timor.

Jose Martins recalled instructions given to him by the
military officer: "We made the proclamation in Bali. You write
Bali." But the officer hastily corrected himself: "You write
Balibo."

Former Australian consul James Dunn suspected it was Col.
Soegiyanto and intelligence (Bakin) agent Luis Taolin who came up
with the original concept for the Balibo Declaration.

One Japanese linguistic scholar, Akihisa Matsuno, who compared
the many versions and additions to the declaration, made it clear
that he believed the text was a heavily manipulated document. In
the original version, the four political parties simply declared
their desire to be integrated into Indonesia, but in the version
meant for the United Nations "integration" was defined as a form
of independence.

Interestingly, in one of the most crucial points for
justifying the military invasion, the text clearly shows it was
composed by an Indonesian speaker rather than a Portuguese
speaker. Indonesia's hand, not that of East Timor, was obvious.

In the end, the Balibo Declaration will die. Most of the
signers of the declaration have denounced it while a few others
have kept silent, but they all feel humiliated by their
connection to the document. East Timor is now free and the
conspiracy of the Balibo Declaration -- a "great masquerade",
according to Jose Martins -- has failed. For most East Timorese,
the Balibo Declaration was the Bali-bohong (Bali Lie). It is an
example of a great lie which caused people to suffer greatly.

The writer is a journalist based in Amsterdam, the
Netherlands. He wrote a book on Indonesia and East Timor in 1995.