Righting the record in East Timor

Several of the year’s elections have finally produced new governments: we looked at Bulgaria yesterday, and if I get time we’ll have a look at Finland later in the week. Thailand is still up in the air, with a vote in parliament not expected until early August, but East Timor, which went to the polls a week later, produced a more straightforward result and is further advanced in the process.

To no-one’s surprise, the first placegetter, Xanana Gusmão’s CNRT, reached an agreement with the smaller Democratic Party to form a coalition government. Between them they have a comfortable majority, with 37 of the 65 seats. Gusmão is to be sworn in as prime minister (for the second time) on 1 July.

Damien Kingsbury at the East Asia Forum praises East Timor’s electoral process as “next to flawless,” noting that it “has an enviable international reputation for conducting elections and is regularly credited with being the most democratic state in Southeast Asia.” But he also draws attention to its looming economic problems, suggesting that it has been living beyond its means and that Gusmão’s ambitions may exceed the country’s capacity.

The main reason for writing about East Timor, though, is to point to this wonderful review by Graeme Dobell, published earlier this month at Inside Story, of the authorised history of Australia’s 1999-2000 peacekeeping operation in East Timor, Born of Fire and Ash, written by Craig Stockings.

“Authorised” in this case is a possibly misleading term since, at least as Dobell tells the story, Stockings met considerable resistance from within government: he “had to wage a long and unusual struggle to protect this ‘official history’ from the knives of official Canberra.” Dobell attributes this to four interrelated motives: “fear of offending Indonesia; a wish to defend the department’s reputation and the Timor ‘triumph’ legend; a desire to protect intelligence capabilities; and official Canberra’s deeply embedded culture of secrecy.”

But the story is an important one, because it so directly contradicts the myth that has become embedded in Australian political culture: that East Timorese independence was an Australian project for which John Howard’s government could take credit. The truth is quite the opposite.

I tried to make this case more than a decade ago:

Howard entered office with as little intention as anyone of upsetting the status quo. When the dictatorship of General Suharto tottered and fell in early 1998 – the essential precon­dition for movement on East Timor – Australia remained loyal almost to the very end, having previously shown no interest in democratisation. But new Indonesian president B.J. Habibie, hoping to end the running sore of armed conflict, proposed offering the East Timorese a plan for autonomy.

It was at that point that Howard wrote to Habibie expressing support for the idea and suggesting that at some point in the future (he said 10 years, diplomatic code for indefin­itely far away) East Timor could also be offered the choice of independence – on the (no doubt unrealistic) assumption that they would be sufficiently conciliated by autonomy to vote against it.

Habibie reacted in quite an unexpected fashion, deciding that the choice between indepen­dence and autonomy would be offered immediately. From that point things moved quickly – to a UN referendum, followed by bloodshed, foreign intervention and ultimately indepen­dence.

No one really understands Habibie’s motives. It may have been a sudden dummy-spit; it may have been that Howard’s letter was seized on as a convenient excuse for what he planned to do anyway. But if the loss of even a small measure of Australia’s long-standing support really was the touchstone for the offer of independence, it makes us all the more culpable for not having tried to use that influence in the previous two decades.

Yet Howard seems genuinely proud of the part he played. It’s an interesting window onto a man whose career was not otherwise noted for sympathy with the poor and dispossessed. But it’s also a lesson that his successors have comprehensively failed to learn.

Armed with Stockings’s access to the archives, Dobell can be more precise – and if anything more trenchant – but the basic shape of the account remains. “Howard’s diplomatic initiative [was] in support of Australia’s core policy — that East Timor should remain in Indonesia … happenchance delivered a victory Canberra never wanted.” Howard emphasised that “Australia’s support for Indonesian sovereignty [in Timor] was unchanged”; he was “[s]eeking to defuse the problem,” but “had instead detonated it.”

And in Stockings’s own words: Habibie’s referendum was “the exact opposite of Howard’s suggestion.”

Whether or not this will disturb the established narrative is doubtful; at $99, the market for the Stockings volume is probably small, and the media’s worship of Howard has outlasted many a factual onslaught. But if we hope for a better future, for East Timor and for other victims of bad policy, we could start by trying to understand the past.