Time for fair E. Timor assessment

By Richard Woolcott

CANBERRA (JP): The foreign affairs editor of The Sydney Morning Herald, Hamish McDonald, noted in a recent article that politicians and diplomats were "dodging blame" and "lying low", following the release of the 1974-76 documents on East Timor.

I for one am neither dodging blame nor lying low. Moreover, governments not officials determine policy. Prime Ministers like Gough Whitlam and Malcolm Fraser were not leaders who would accept uncritically the advice of officials.

Neither I nor officers of the Embassy for which I was responsible from 1975-78 have anything to hide. While saddened by the tragedies which have befallen the East Timorese people, I also do not believe Australia can be "blamed" for the situation which evolved in 1975 and afterwards. Nor do I believe that the Australian government behaved in an unprincipled manner.

The documents show that Australia did take principled positions on self-determination and the use of force. But, given the irresponsible actions of Portugal and Fretilin, the impatience of Indonesia and the support for incorporation on the part of major and regional powers, the "pragmatic" acknowledgement that incorporation had become inevitable in the second half of 1975 was the right and practical policy for Australia to adopt.

An important omission of much of the media coverage so far is the failure to place the East Timor situation in its historical context. In 1974/75 the cold war was at its height.

In Vietnam, Saigon had just fallen to the Viet Cong and there were real concerns in Indonesia and throughout Southeast Asia then -- fanciful as they may seem now -- that a weak, left wing, unstable, non-viable independent East Timor would erode regional security.

The Indonesians were advised at all levels throughout 1975 that Australia could never condone the use of force, however legitimate Indonesian concerns about the chaotic way in which Portugal was handling the decolonization process.

Fretilin's own behavior did not help. I recall telling Jose Ramos Horta over lunch when we first met in Canberra in 1974, that Fretilin needed to take account of Indonesia's concerns about left wing activism.

Nevertheless, Fretilin leaders continued to address each other as "comrade", to execute political opponents and to oppose proposals for a referendum. Ramos Horta was quoted in this newspaper on Aug. 14 1996, as admitting in an address at Sydney University that "the immaturity, irresponsibility and bad judgment of the East Timorese provoked Indonesia into what it did. Jose Alexandre "Xanana" Gusmao also told me in Wellington last July that it had been a "bad mistake" for Fretilin to present itself as "Marxist" in 1975.

Indonesia correctly assessed in 1975 that the major powers, the United States, the Soviet Union, China and Japan (its major aid donor) would not act to prevent incorporation.

The United States was not interested in the fate of East Timor! In the concluding volume of the memoirs (of over 1,000 pages) of former foreign minister Dr. Henry Kissinger, which also deals with the 1974-76 period, there is not a single reference to East Timor.

The documents published also reveal that while China would be critical of Indonesia's action it would be "firing off empty canons", as one of the cables indicates. The documents also make it clear that Indonesia assessed, correctly, that Australia was likely to be its most severe critic.

The other countries of the Association of Southeast Asian Nations (ASEAN), then still in its formative stages as a regional organization, were urging Indonesia not to permit the emergence of an unstable mini state in Southeast Asia.

There is a danger now that the release of these documents will be exploited for domestic political purposes. There are hints of this already.

People overlook the fact that Prime Minister John Howard and Foreign Minister Alexander Downer maintained the same policies towards East Timor as the earlier governments under Fraser, Bob Hawke and Paul Keating, for their first two years in office -- until under interim president B.J. Habibie, Indonesia changed policy and decided that East Timor should be given the option of deciding whether it wanted autonomy within Indonesia.

Stripped of hubris, domestic political opportunism and moral rectitude -- so easy to embrace in retrospect -- I have little doubt that the present government and senior departmental officers would probably have taken the same position in the vastly different circumstances of 1974-1976 as the Whitlam and Fraser governments adopted.

The jury of history is still out on East Timor. Maybe in 20 five years time a future government will release the documents from, say, 1996 to 2000. We would then be able to compare the two most recent tragedies of East Timor, namely the tragedy of the 1975 invasion and subsequent Indonesian Army maladministration and abuses of human rights; and the predictable tragic results of the precipitate vote on autonomy or independence in August 1999, triggered by Howard's letter to transitional president Habibie.

There are a handful of activists who will continue to claim Australia is "guilty by association" in respect of East Timor. Australia alone could not have prevented the forceful incorporation.

But the issue now is the need to work as Ramos Horta put it in a comment on SBS on Sept. 13, "to let bygones be bygones." Indeed it is time now to focus our efforts on rebuilding a sound relationship with Indonesia, stabilizing the border with West Timor, assisting an independent East Timor along the difficult path to viability and consolidating as close and cooperative a triangular relationship as possible between Australia, Indonesia and a small weak but independent East Timor.

The writer was ambassador to Indonesia from 1975-1978, ambassador to the United Nations from 1982-88 and secretary of the department of foreign Affairs and trade from 1988 until his retirement in 1992.