By George J. Aditjondro
June 17/18, 1999
This is the first of two articles on the role of the United Nations in the upcoming direct ballot in East Timor.
(Jakarta Post - June 17, 1999)
Second Article --- About the Author
Newcastle, Australia -- Will the United Nations seriously defend the right of the East Timorese to self-determination in the forthcoming direct ballot in the occupied territory?
Without any armed peacekeepers, unlike in Kosovo where NATO sent armed peacekeepers to oversee the withdrawal of Serbian troops and protect Kosovar refugees, I have serious doubts about the sincerity of the UN, particularly Secretary-General Kofi Annan.
Not only by contrasting Kosovo and East Timor, but also by studying the history of Southeast Asia, especially the history of postcolonial liberation movements in the region, it can be concluded the UN has never been objective as far as Malaya expansionism is concerned.
In 1963, the UN approved the expansion of Malay into the North Borneoan British territories. This took place under Secretary-General U Thant, a Burmese, whose country has the longest history of ethnonationalist movements in the region.
Before the new Malaysia federation was declared by then prime minister Tengku Abdul Rachman in Kuala Lumpur, the secretary-general sent a so- called fact-finding mission to assess whether the Dayak, Chinese and Malay communities in North Borneo (now Sabah) and Sarawak were willing to join the proposed Malaysia federation, as had been proposed by Tengku Abdul Rachman with the support of the British.
After traveling for some weeks in the jungles of Borneo and meeting some Dayak leaders in their longhouses and Chinese leaders in the towns, they concluded that "the majority of the people in Sabah and Sarawak wanted to join Malaysia". This in an area which is certainly much larger than East Timor.
U Thant completely disregarded the supporters of the Brunei People's Party (PRB), which had transformed itself into the North Kalimantan People's Party (PARAKU), and other political parties in Sabah and Sarawak who were against Malaysia's proposal and for a unification with Sabah.
As most The Jakarta Post readers may have forgotten, PRB declared Brunei's independence from the British on Dec. 8, 1962. In a week's time, the rebellion was crushed by British-led Gurkha troops sent from Singapore, flushing the rebels and their rebel army, the National Army of North Kalimantan (TNKU) into the jungles of Sarawak and West Kalimantan.
PRB, whose leader Tun Azahari had studied veterinary medicine in Bogor and had taken part in Indonesia's independence struggle, had earlier won parliamentary elections in Brunei. Inspired by Indonesia's independence struggle, PRB's platform was to fight for independence from the British and to transform Brunei into a republic with a socialist economy, where the sultan would only have a symbolic role as is in most European monarchies. The sultan (the father of the current sultan), realizing the threat posed by the PRB, refused to swear in the new PRB-dominated parliament.
Hence, PRB (Paraku) and TNKU were forced to take the extra-parliamentary way, which was instantly repressed by the sultan with the support of the British.
This was what led Indonesia (not just Sukarno and the Indonesian Communist Party, PKI, as some pro-Indonesian Armed Forces historians would like us to believe) to confront Malaysia, by providing support -- military training and ammunition -- to Paraku/TNKU and its sister organization, the Sarawak People's Guerrilla Forces (PGRS), who were young Sarawak-Chinese activists who supported the ideals of PARAKU/TNKU.
On the international diplomatic front, Indonesian diplomats at the time attacked the results of the UN fact-finding team because they contradicted several UN resolutions and guidelines concerning non-self-governing territories.
After Sukarno was toppled and general Soeharto came to power, PARAKU and PGRS guerrillas became fair game for RPKAD (now Kopassus) troops, the same troops that had trained them. Indonesia and the newborn Malaysian Federation jointly crushed any nationalist feelings in Sarawak, which had became East Malaysia (while the federation of nine sultanates in the Malaya Peninsula had became West Malaysia).
PGRS and Paraku guerrillas who fled into the jungles of West Kalimantan became the first Security Disturbance Movement (GPK) or Wild Disturbance Movement (GPL) in the history of the New Order, just as the military authorities later branded the West Papuan, East Timorese and Acehnese freedom fighters.
Speaking about West Papua, after successfully crushing the "PGRS/Paraku remnants" and turning West Kalimantan into a paradise for military-backed logging companies, Soeharto then turned his attention to this easternmost outpost of the former Dutch colony. Incidentally, under Sukarno he had served as the commander of the Trikora Operation to "liberate" the West Papuans from the yoke of Dutch colonialism. His headquarters were in Makassar (now Ujungpandang), where he met and became like an older brother to B.J. Habibie.
With the same RPKAD troops who were responsible for the massacre of up to two million Indonesians, mainly in Java and Bali, where 5 percent of the population was massacred by military-backed landlord vigilante troops, and the same RPKAD troops that had hunted down their former pupils in Kalimantan, Soeharto began his attempt to crush all West Papuan freedom fighters. These unsuccessful operations have continued to the present, regardless of whether the cries for freedom were expressed violently or nonviolently.
Even while West Papua was under the temporary administration of the UN from 1962 to 1963, Indonesian soldiers had already moved in to exterminate the forces of the small West Papua Independent Movement (OPM), which was born out of the Papua battalion set up by the Dutch. This took place in front of the mostly Pakistani UN peacekeeping troops.
In 1969, after seven year of establishing control over West Papua, Indonesia -- not the UN -- carried out the notorious "act of free choice". Or rather, "act of no choice". This was done before the eyes of UN observers. And although the UN chief in West Papua submitted a critical report on how the "consultation" of 1,025 tribal leaders had taken place in marathon sittings in eight West Papuan towns, the UN General Assembly approved the results of these "consultations".
The result is that now West Papuan nationalists, through the Nuclear Free and Independent Pacific Forum in Suva, Fiji, have to campaign to relist West Papua as a non-self-governing territory under the UN Commission on Decolonization, popularly known as the Commission of 24.
In the meantime, Sarawak natives have to fight for their cultural and ecological self-determination as an "environmental" or "indigenous rights" movement; no longer as an independence movement.
This, unfortunately, could be the lot of East Timorese independence fighters if the UN is allowed to carry out its third farce in Southeast Asia, or its second in the South Pacific. For the UN, the bottom line is still the interests of the United States and its allies.
The bottom line for the U.S. and its Western allies is the interests of Western multinational companies. Azahari's independence movement in Brunei, which had its resonance in Sarawak, was a threat to Royal Dutch Shell. So it had to be crushed. And extending Malay power to Sarawak and Sabah had to be supported because the aristocratic Malays, like Tengku Abdul Rachman, and not the leftist republican Malays, such as Tun Azahari, supported British and other foreign multinational corporations on their soil.
In the case of West Papua, the U.S. forced the Dutch to surrender control over West Papua because they themselves wanted to control the mineral resources of West Papua. See how close Henry Kissinger is to Freeport McMoRan, a company which was saved from collapse after Fidel Castro nationalized their nickel mines in Cuba by the Ertsberg copper-gold-and- silver mine in West Papua.
The U.S., Britain and other Western powers also assisted the Indonesian military in crushing the OPM.
This is the second of two articles on the role of the United Nations in the upcoming direct ballot in East Timor.
(Jakarta Post, June 18, 1999)
First Article --- About the Author
Newcastle, Australia - Unlike in the case of Kuwait or Kosovo, U.S. Secretary of State Madeleine Albright has not put U.S. weight behind the UN secretary-general to demand the disarming of militias and the withdrawal of Indonesian troops from East Timor.
Incidentally, a U.S. company, Philips Petroleum, has now emerged as the major player in the Timor Gap. With Mobil Oil also entering the Timor Sea, U.S. oil companies may become the major players in the entire Timor Sea, stretching from the Ashmore Reef in the west to the Arafura Sea in the eastern entrance to the Timor Sea.
Australia, as always, is a junior partner in the U.S.-led global capitalist system. The "Big Australian" BHP has sold its Timor Sea assets to Philips Petroleum after moving its oil operations to the Mexican Gulf. Its office in Houston also houses the U.S. representative office of Indonesia's state oil company Pertamina.
In the meantime, BHP's Australian partners, Woodside Petroleum, Santos and Petroz, are now operating under -- or in conjunction with -- U.S. oil giants.
Santos and Petroz operates in the Timor Sea under Philips Petroleum, and Woodside in the North Western Shelf with other U.S. and Japanese partners. Woodside is now planning to rub elbows with the Exxon-BHP partnership in the Bass Straits between the Australian continent and Tasmania.
In other words, the maritime waters around the Australian continent are now controlled by combined U.S., Australian and other Western and Japanese oil interests. Mind you, Woodside itself is half owned by Shell, which in turn is an Anglo-Dutch joint venture.
Emphasis here is not on "all Australian waters", but "all the maritime waters around the Australian continent". Why? Because the seas around Australia also have been robbed from their rightful owners, namely the indigenous peoples of Australia and Timor, East as well as West. This is what lay behind the late Prof. Johannes' objections against the Timor Gap Treaty, because this illegal 1989 treaty was signed by then Australian foreign minister Gareth Evans, Australia's candidate for the UNESCO directorship, and his Indonesian counterpart, Ali Alatas.
The treaty between Australia and East Timor's occupying force materialized after a long series of maritime border negotiations between Indonesia and Australia, which practically robbed fishing communities in Sulawesi and West Timor from the right to fish in their traditional waters, a tradition extending back before Capt. James Cook laid claims for the British crown to the Australian continent and its surrounding waters.
At this point in time, I believe that we need to analyze the current events in East Timor also from a global political economy perspective.
It might give us a deeper understanding of the UN's half-hearted way in protecting the rights of the Maubere people to determine their own future. It also may give human rights activists a better understanding in targeting their campaigns, apart from the Indonesian corruptors and their Timorese collaborators.
Strange as it may sound, I believe that the biggest perpetrators of human rights violations are not the stupid soldiers and paramilitary men who only know how to pull a gun's trigger or to hack their machetes.
The biggest perpetrators of human rights violations in East Timor live right in Darwin in the Northern Territory, Australia, the major supply base of the Timor Gap oil and gas operators. Others live in their regional and global headquarters far away from the bloodstained soil of Timor Lorosae, the traditional Timorese name for their land.
From their air-conditioned skyscrapers in the Northern hemisphere, they will benefit from the potential cancellation of the UN-supervised referendum -- not even called a "referendum" in the first place but a "direct ballot" -- due to Indonesian opposition.
The longer the stalemate, the more these oil companies can rob the oil and gas resources of the Timor Sea. The border between East and West Timor is a nuisance for them since they want to integrate the wells on both sides of the border into a grid, which is more economical to operate.
A long stalemate is not a problem for the oil and gas operators because the Timor Sea hydrocarbon reserves mainly consist of natural gas, which will be liquefied and condensed in Darwin or at another town on the northern coast of Australia. And from the economical point of view, it is better to stockpile this natural gas and oil under the sea until the East Asian economies -- Japan, Korea, Taiwan, Hong Kong and China -- recover from their economic eclipse and can resume importing the Timor Sea's liquefied natural gas.
And a prolonged stalemate will enable the oil interests to benefit from the billions of dollars worth of oil and gas which has the potential to turn the entire island -- and not only East Timor -- into another Brunei.
While fighting against the immediate human rights violations in East Timor, the public in Australia, the U.S., Britain, the Netherlands, Norway, Japan and Indonesia need to be educated about the complicity of their oil companies in the East Timor tragedy. Basically, the Timor War is a proxy war carried out by the pro-status quo forces in Indonesia on behalf of the multinational oil giants.
I sincerely hope that Megawati Soekarnoputri and her advisors also will see East Timor from this more global political economic perspective and will not embarrass her late father, Bung Karno, a champion fighter against "nekolim" (new colonial and imperialist forces) by playing into the hands of the global oil interests.
About the Author: Dr. George J. Aditjondro teaches Sociology of Postcolonial Liberation Movements at the University of Newcastle in Australia. His newest book, Is Oil Thicker than Blood? A Study of Oil Companies Interests and Western Complicity in Indonesia's Annexation of East Timor , has recently been published by Nova Science in the United States. It is currently being translated into Indonesian and will be published by Solidamor in Indonesia.
