Negligent Neighbour: New Zealand's Complicity in the Invasion and Occupation of Timor-Leste

Negligent Neighbour

New Zealand’s complicity in the invasion

and occupation of Timor-Leste

Maire Leadbeater

For my granddaughter Acacia

and the children growing up in Timor-Leste,

who are the hope of that country

Hard copy edition first published in 2006 by Craig Potton Publishing

98 Vickerman Street, PO Box 555, Nelson, New Zealand.

www.craigpotton.co.nz

eBook editions published in 2015 by Maire Leadbeater

71 Martin Avenue, Auckland 1025, New Zealand

© Maire Leadbeater

© Individual photographers

Hard copy ISBN 10: 1-877333-59-X

Hard copy ISBN 13: 978-1-877333-59-0

Hard copy printed by Astra Print, Wellington, New Zealand

EPUB ISBN 978-0-473-30065-4

Kindle ISBN 978-0-473-30066-1

PDF ISBN 978-0-473-30067-8

iBook ISBN 978-0-473-30068-5

All rights reserved. Apart from any fair dealing for the purposes of private study, research, criticism or review, as permitted under the Copyright Act, no part may be reproduced by any process without the permission of the publishers.

CONTENTS

Acknowledgements

Foreword

Preface

Introduction

Historical Outline

1.East Timor at the crossroads

2.The invasion is imminent

3.The invasion of East Timor

4.Occupation and collusion

5.Jose Ramos Horta and the tour that never was

6.The Labour Government betrays East Timor

7.New Zealand-Indonesia military ties

8.The Santa Cruz massacre

9.The Santa Cruz massacre reverberates

10.Xanana Gusmao and the East Timor movement come in from the cold

11.‘Oh, what a tangled web we weave’

12.New challenges for the Solidarity Movement

13.1998–1999 Cracks in the edifice and ultimate liberation

14.Has New Zealand learnt the lesson?

Epilogue: An independent East Timor?

APPENDIX 1: References

APPENDIX 2: Endnotes

APPENDIX 3: Chronology

APPENDIX 4: New Zealand and Australian Leaders (1972–2006)

APPENDIX 5: Abbreviations

APPENDIX 6: Further Reading

APPENDIX 7: A Note about Primary Sources

Index

ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS

I would like to acknowledge all my colleagues in the international East Timor solidarity network particularly those in Indonesia and East Timor who shared their insights with me at personal risk during the days of the Indonesian occupation. More recently, Avelino da Silva and Charlie Scheiner helped me to understand and put in perspective developments in Timor-Leste. Special thanks to my wonderful photographer friends, John Miller, Gil Hanly, Steve Snow and Karen Abplanalp for their remarkable and touching photos, and to Malcolm Evans for offering his sharply observed cartoons.

Australian East Timor colleagues kindly shared experiences and photos. I greatly appreciated my communications with Brian Manning, one of those who maintained a clandestine radio connection to Fretilin, and with Gordon McIntosh who helped to set the New Zealand solidarity movement going. Thanks to researchers in Australia, the United Kingdom and United States, including James Dunn, Hugh Dowson and Joseph Nevins.

I thank all those who worked to free East Timor in New Zealand and especially those who helped me directly with documents, photos and recollections for this book. Helen Yensen deserves a medal for reading this work several times, and helping me to find some order in the chaos. Colin Iles who has stayed the course for East Timor from 1976 to the present was an invaluable resource and source of encouragement. Joe Buchanan directed me to a treasure trove of Wellington documents and helped me source photos. Dr Steve Hoadley’s 1970s resources helped fill in a crucial gap.

My brother Keith Locke shares my view that the story of New Zealand’s East Timor collusion is one which needs to be told. He has helped in innumerable ways, including sharing key files and documents, as well as thoughtful analysis.

Nicky Hager provided key challenges to sharpen my analysis, and freely shared his own experiences as well as reading part of the text.

I thank Brian Lynch, former diplomat, who was gracious enough to spare me some hours of his time in full knowledge that this book would critique his past role and that of his colleagues.

Former MP Aussie Malcolm was also a useful source of information about events in the 1970s for which records have not been well kept.

My thanks to Helen Todd (mother to Kamal Bamadhaj), who kindly wrote the Foreword for this book, for her support, insights, and for the photo of Kamal. I am also grateful for the kindness of Greig Cunningham who set aside time to talk with me about his family’s personal tragedy.

I thank Ray Sutton, a down-to-earth policeman who served in East Timor in the worst of times. He may not have been prepared for the events he witnessed but he did not take long to grasp their significance.

My patient editor, Dr Susan Jacobs, has done a sterling job at two key stages of the process – helping me to find structure and coherence within a disorganised mass of material and at the final editing stage. I am in her debt for her willingness to take on such a difficult challenge.

I acknowledge with thanks the Peace and Disarmament Education Trust (PADET) for a grant to assist with research.

My thanks to my family for putting up with me when I was so distracted and to my work colleagues at Auckland Hospital who were unfailingly supportive. A special thank you to my partner Graeme Easte. He has served as a supplementary editor, reading every draft of the text as well as acting as my research assistant and confidante through all the ups and downs that this book has entailed. It cannot have been easy.

FOREWORD

I have some personal experience of the ‘diplomat-speak’ highlighted in this book. When my son, Kamal, was killed in Dili in 1991, I was told that he was ‘caught in the crossfire’. What that meant was that he was shot in the chest by an army patrol as he walked, unarmed and alone, on a Dili street. I was told that Kamal should not have joined a memorial march because he was ‘on a tourist visa’. What that meant was that any foreigner (as any Timorese or Indonesian for that matter) voicing dissent was asking to be shot.

This book tears aside the soothing curtain of deliberate lies that hid New Zealand foreign policy on East Timor for more than a generation. New material from foreign office archives shows a cosy connivance between a brutal army regime in Jakarta and a succession of democratically elected governments in New Zealand to hide the real story of East Timor from the people who elected them.

Maire Leadbeater was one of the earliest New Zealanders to refuse to be fooled. In the 1990s she led a growing number of activists, galvanized by the Santa Cruz massacre, to demand that foreign policy embody the kind of principles that New Zealanders applied naturally to themselves. In the end they were making such a racket that politicians – and even some of the mandarins closeting information in Wellington and Jakarta – were forced to take notice.

This is an important book for anybody who believes that foreign policy must be open to public scrutiny and debate. And even those who don’t should take note that the results of a policy hatched in secret by ‘experts’ was a disaster for the people of Timor, and a lasting blot on New Zealand’s reputation. And when New Zealand finally recognized and supported the Timorese right to choose their own political future, none of the outcomes predicted by the Jakarta lobby actually came to pass.

Helen Todd, 25 July 2006

PREFACE

The East Timor issue was a major part of my life throughout the 1990s. I was an active member of the Auckland East Timor Independence Committee organising demonstrations and meetings, networking, lobbying politicians and making media releases. As email became the preferred means of international communication in the mid-1990s reading emails and communicating with fellow activists around the world consumed several hours of most days. The new technology was enormously helpful for planning events such as conferences or coordinated demonstrations and campaigns. In the quiet of late evening as I sat in front of my computer I often felt that the streets of Dili and the besieged people of East Timor were very close.

Yet I did not visit East Timor until April 1999. It seems strange looking back that I did not visit sooner. Of course Indonesia did not want activists to visit and those who did generally found themselves constrained by the close oversight of the security and intelligence forces. But I was also convinced that the most important task was a home-based one, since East Timor’s narrative was not limited to events within its borders. I figured that if New Zealand was one of the western governments who had eased the way for Indonesia to invade and occupy East Timor then New Zealand must also have the power to help turn the situation around. What would it take to change the government’s mind? There was only one answer that I could see and that was public pressure. So I reasoned that my place as a solidarity activist was to work at home both helping to create awareness and striving to influence my elected representatives.

How did I get involved? Many of the long-term East Timor activists came from a background of having visited East Timor when it was still under the rule of Portugal, while others were ‘Indonesia buffs’ who had a longstanding interest in social and political movements in Indonesia. However my personal path flowed from my involvement in the peace and anti-nuclear movement.

I was born into a family where politics and activism were part of everyday life. My mother would often comment that of course one could not change the whole world, but it was quite possible and very important to seek to influence the policies of the government of your own country.

When I was a teenager in the 1960s the Cold War was at its height and the nuclear arms race threatened the survival of humanity. During the international crisis of 1962 that became known as the Cuban missile crisis the world came close to a nuclear holocaust, and fear of nuclear war was palpable.

So I became involved in the anti-nuclear cause. When we campaigned against nuclear testing in the Pacific in the 1970s and 1980s New Zealand activists soon got to know about the concerns of fellow activists in the French and American Pacific territories. For them fallout from atmospheric nuclear testing was not the only issue. They were also struggling to regain control over their political future, and for independence.

In 1975 a preparatory meeting for the first Nuclear Weapons Free and Independent Pacific Conference was held in my home. In time the East Timor movement became part of the Nuclear-Free and Independent Pacific Network (NFIP) as it came to be known. From the early 1980s East Timorese participants began to attend the regional Nuclear-Free and Independent Pacific Conferences as well as meetings in New Zealand, and the East Timor story seized my attention.

However, at the time the New Zealand peace movement was undergoing resurgence and pushing very hard for the goal of a Nuclear Free New Zealand. I was heavily involved in the preparations for mass anti-nuclear mobilisations against visiting American and British nuclear warships. In 1985 a Labour Government declined the visit of an American nuclear weapons capable warship and touched off a diplomatic disagreement between the two western allies which persists to this day.

The New Zealand government cemented its nuclear free policy in law in 1987. This milestone prompted me to consider a change of gear and take a little time out to reflect on my future direction. The next few years marked a kind of transition as I moved from peace movement activities to more active involvement in broader issues of social justice and human rights. With the Philippines Solidarity Group I took part in a ‘peace brigade’ to the Philippines, meeting with grassroots activists and marching with them to protest at the gates of the giant US Clark Air Force Base. When democracy was overthrown by a military coup in Fiji I helped to host the deposed Prime Minister Timoci Bavadra to tour New Zealand.

Around this time East Timor began to emerge from the shadows as Indonesia opened the door a crack to allow the visits of journalists and a trickle of tourists. The international solidarity movement was undergoing a revival, which meant that it was easier to find good information and to get good ideas for campaign strategies. I felt impelled to get more involved and then I found that there was no turning back!

This book is something of a mixture. There is the story of East Timor’s resistance, which underpins the narrative. There is historical research, which probes official documentation — much of it released to me under the provisions of the Official Information Act. This is supplemented by other formerly classified documentation from other western nations. The records of the New Zealand solidarity movement have been mined in order to record the pressure on the New Zealand Government to change its policy. Political analysis is leavened by interviews with some key players and where possible some personal reflections and experiences.

I have aimed to shine a light into a very dark place – the history of New Zealand’s support for the invasion and occupation of East Timor. The process of undertaking this research led me to many new and unexpected discoveries. There were some positive findings such as the discovery that solidarity campaigning had made more of an impact on Government officials and politicians than any of us had been aware of at the time. But that was small comfort considered alongside the mass of evidence that my Government had consistently chosen pragmatism over principle and continued relentlessly on the same path without ever really counting the cost to the East Timorese. This was no new discovery. However, I was shocked to find that almost every new batch of documents revealed new examples of the high-level subterfuge officials relied on as they plotted to help Indonesia deflect international criticism.

As I finished writing this book a further crisis had engulfed the new state of Timor-Leste. A bitter internal conflict climaxed with a breakdown of law and order of such magnitude that Timor-Leste’s government had invited international forces to help restore order. While apparently welcomed by all political forces in the country, the troops of Australia, New Zealand and other countries are, at the time of writing, taking on something of the character of a colonial occupation.

It is too soon to know how these developments will play out or to give a comprehensive answer to the question: What went wrong? I hear from Timorese NGOs who are calling for a rethink of the ways in which the international community has supported the development of the fledgling nation. They want the grassroots people to be involved in all the decisions that affect them; employment opportunities for the thousands of disaffected young people and an end to the unequal distribution of resources. They are talking about the need for urgent rural development programmes, for fair trading practices and the need for more diversified exports.

The international network in solidarity with the people of Timor-Leste still exists and it is gearing up to lobby at the United Nations and in western capitals for sustainable development programmes.

Alongside the economic and infrastructure problems are the unresolved issues of justice and accountability. It is an indictment on all of us that not one Indonesian General has been held responsible for the carnage in Timor-Leste, nor has one western nation apologised for its misguided actions or made any kind of reparation.

If simmering resentments and old, unresolved conflicts from the long years of repression have boiled over, this is hardly surprising. This book, therefore, is my way of addressing what I believe to be a clear personal responsibility to expose what went wrong in the past in the interests of putting things right in the present.

INTRODUCTION

For almost a quarter century from 1975–1999 the people of East Timor lived under Indonesia’s colonial yoke. This was a horrific chapter in human history. During this time a small nation of under 800,000 people lost close to 200,0001 of its population, and its people endured daily violence and fear.

It is well known now that Indonesia relied on western support for both the invasion and occupation of East Timor, but New Zealand’s role is often forgotten or mentioned only in parenthesis.

Declassified official documents have put so much material in the open now that we can study the workings of the New Zealand Government like inspecting the springs and cogs of an old fob watch.

New Zealand was not a bit-player. Indonesia considered New Zealand to be one of its inner circle of trusted helpers, and this was accepted and acknowledged by our Government officials. New Zealand’s material support for this Indonesian venture was less than that of Australia, Britain or the United States. But in the area of moral and diplomatic support we ranked significantly. Like the cox in a rowing eight our contribution was disproportionate to our size.

As this book was being prepared for publication the Commission for Reception, Truth and Reconciliation in Timor-Leste produced its definitive report. Leaving few stones unturned the report not only documents the human rights crimes but also deals exhaustively with the issue of accountability. New Zealand is identified as having played a significant role as one of the nations strongly allied with Indonesia and consequently as a nation which must take its share of responsibility for East Timor’s suffering.2

I believe it was in New Zealand’s power to help stop the violence and support the right of East Timor’s people to self-determination. The failure to do this had implications well beyond East Timor. The occupation was an important prize for Indonesia’s powerful military and helped to shore up its political and economic power, and set back the course of desperately needed democratic reform in Indonesia.

Who is to blame? It is difficult for ordinary New Zealanders to feel responsibility for a policy that they knew nothing about. This area of foreign policy was always largely hidden from public view, so that only a diligent few had any idea what was really going on. East Timor policy was designed by the bureaucrats who served it up for approval at the very highest political level by the Foreign Minister and Prime Minister.

New Zealand’s diplomatic service recruits highly able and academically gifted people who hone the diplomatic art of double-speak. They live within a kind of bubble where they are almost never subject to direct challenge. Their view of the world, their expectations and attitudes are closely shaped by contacts with their counterparts in the foreign offices of other western capitals.

Do we blame the officials who helped cover Indonesia’s tracks, or the politicians who allowed themselves to be led and misled? Successive New Zealand Prime Ministers and Ministers of Foreign Affairs were not entirely puppets in the hands of their advisors. Moreover, the records show that East Timor became a test of political integrity for senior politicians, who were often vocal in support of East Timor while in opposition but pursued quiet diplomacy while in government. For some politicians the change in stance began some time out from an election presumably as they anticipated that they might soon be sitting in the Government front benches.

While no one can or should escape responsibility for the foreseeable consequences of their actions, the East Timor case raises deeper questions about the country’s political allegiances and the ties that bind New Zealand to the foreign policy directions set by the United States and Australia.

East Timor illustrates in microcosm what the cold war was about. The interests of a small nation could easily be sacrificed to serve the strategic interests of a powerful and important western friend. The strategy was cloaked by a smear campaign against East Timor’s inexperienced liberation movement which was branded as dangerously unstable and communistic. That was easily sold to a compliant media.

We also need to examine what the East Timor case means for New Zealand. It is true that New Zealand has to some extent recanted. ‘Australia, the United States and New Zealand to varying degrees explicitly indicated to Indonesia acceptance of its intention to invade,’ said Phil Goff, Minister of Foreign Affairs, in 2002.3 But hypocrisy is often evident when our positive role in East Timor’s reconstruction is trumpeted as though we had no direct responsibility for the devastation.

Foreign policy continues to be forged without any public input and often with no parliamentary scrutiny. Decisions to send elite troops to join the war in Afghanistan were made and carried out in secret. Intelligence gathered in New Zealand is shared with other western powers and put to ends that neither the public nor Parliament has any say over, even retrospectively. New Zealand continues to cultivate its ties with Indonesia and praise ‘democratic reform’ while overlooking the ruthless and unaccountable power of the Indonesian military. Just as in the East Timor case, New Zealand sidesteps the challenge to support West Papua which was cruelly and fraudulently deprived of its right to self-determination in 1969.

The David-and-Goliath East Timor story has inspired many New Zealanders. Out of respect and admiration for the East Timorese and their courage and commitment many New Zealanders want to help the new independent Timor-Leste. But such assistance will not absolve us from the need to go back, examine the past and learn its hard lessons.

The declassified Government documents also provide a revealing insight into the effectiveness of the ‘East Timor lobby’. It is clear that Government officials were constantly gauging the strength of the solidarity movement and its impact on the public. We activists were largely unaware of this at the time, and would have been encouraged to know that our views and our activities were being taken into account, even if there were no immediate changes in Government policy direction.

As the novelist Milan Kundera (1978) reminds us,‘[T]he struggle of man against power is the struggle of memory against forgetting’. So long as we do not forget, an important legacy of the East Timor solidarity movement will be stronger and more effective work for all aspects of international peace and human rights.

HISTORICAL OUTLINE

‘The clock of development didn’t tick there…’ but at least the

Portuguese ‘left the indigenous peoples to their daily lives and

rituals, secure in their ancestral knuas1…’

Jose Ramos Horta reflecting on

East Timor’s colonial history (1987, p.14)

East Timor at 18,900 square kilometres is about as large as Northland in New Zealand’s upper North Island. It has a mountainous interior dividing the territory for much of its length, and a narrow coastal plain which widens at river mouths especially on the south coast. There are also highland plains in the east at Bacau and Lautem. The vegetation is diverse: jungle in the south, dry bushland on the slopes, and rain forests on the crests and ridges. There are only two seasons: dry and monsoon.

There have been successive waves of migration from Melanesia and Asia, so the Timorese are ethnically and linguistically heterogeneous. Traditional mythology recounts that the original Melanesian inhabitants of Timor were pushed inland around the fourteenth century by invaders of Malay origin. The geographical spread of both Hinduism and Islam never reached East Timor. In 1511 the Portuguese captured Malacca from where they moved eastwards to the Spice Islands (today know as Maluku) and to Timor. Portuguese influence was initially limited to the missionary work of Dominican friars and to trading in sandalwood and finished goods. The ‘Topasses’, mixed race entrepreneurs (the descendants of Portuguese traders and soldiers), assisted the Dominicans to maintain control in the seventeenth century. From the early eighteenth century a seat of colonial government was established, although several governors were forced out. A pattern of colonial government based on petty kingdoms, each ruled by a liurai, began to take shape. In 1769 the capital was moved from Lifau (today known as Oecusse) to Dili, where it remained, but it was only from the end of the nineteenth century, that the Portuguese tried to establish formal control over the colony.

The colonial division of the island of Timor between the Dutch and the Portuguese was established as far back as 1749 when the Topasses assisted by the Portuguese were defeated in a battle with the Dutch at Penfui. A formal agreement dividing the territory was concluded in 1915.

According to historian Peter Carey, (Carey and Cox, 1995) the seemingly arbitrary divide between West and East Timor does more or less correspond with the homelands of two distinct ethnic populations, the Antoni of West Timor and the more racially and linguistically mixed people of East Timor. The East Timorese came to share Tetum as their common language which by 1975 was understood or spoken in most parts of East Timor.

The survival of Timorese basic social and economic systems through four and a half centuries of colonialism has been remarkable. Social scientist John Taylor (1999) and other scholars (Carey and Carter Bentley, 1995) have attributed this achievement to the way in which traditional systems of ritual exchange were flexible enough to adapt to accommodate external trade in commodities such as sandalwood.

When the Portuguese began more systematic exploitation of the economic wealth by means of cash crops and forced labour, there was major resistance to the attempt to break down traditional patterns. Kingdoms united in resistance under the leadership of a liurai called Dom Boaventura. Rebellion was ongoing for 16 years climaxing in a major uprising from 1910–12, which the Portuguese only quelled with the assistance of troops from Mozambique and a cannon ship from Macau.

Weaving tais (traditional ceremonial cloth) (Steve Snow 1972)

After the rebellion was quelled the colony was then re-divided into administrative units intended to undermine the traditional system. The kingdoms were abolished, leaving the princedoms or sucos each controlled by a Portuguese administrator.

However, subsistence agricultural practices continued and colonial system leaders such as the village or suco heads were often also traditional political leaders.

Traditional East Timorese spiritual beliefs were also retained. According to these animistic beliefs, ancestors are present in everyday life. The Portuguese did not insist on conversion to Christianity, and by the time of the Indonesian invasion only about 30 per cent of the population were Catholic, although during the Indonesian occupation the population converted rapidly. The Indonesian pancasila state ideology stipulated that every citizen must belong to one of five recognised religions, Islam, Hinduism, Buddhism, Catholicism, or Protestantism. Catholicism was an obvious choice for most. The Church substituted for and to some extent incorporated traditional rituals, and served as a safe place to express national identity. Church luminaries, priests, bishops and nuns made use of their position of greater freedom of movement and access to the wider world to advocate for their flock.

Tiled communal facility for laundry, 1972 (Steve Snow)

After the Japanese assault on Pearl Harbour, East Timor became an allied forward base in the war against the Japanese in defiance of the wishes of the Portuguese governor and in spite of the colony’s neutral status. Crucial support was given by the East Timorese who protected, guided and fed the allied troops. But the East Timorese paid a terrible price for their time at the front-line of the Pacific War. In effect the allies abandoned a near-defenceless population to a vengeful invader. Whole families were executed, homes and villages were destroyed and what food was available was sequestered by the Japanese. In terms of relative loss of life – calculated at between 40,000 to 60,000 people – East Timor was one of the great tragedies of World War Two, but its suffering and sacrifice have scarcely been acknowledged.

In 1960 the United Nations approved