For decades Australian governments backed Indonesia’s occupation and repression in Timor-Leste to advance their own interests in the region, argues Maeve Larkins
This month marks 50 years since Indonesia invaded Timor-Leste. For 24 years, it maintained a brutal occupation.
At least 100,000 Timorese died—a full eighth of the population by the time of independence—either massacred by the Indonesian military or through illness and starvation.
Successive Australian governments, both Labor and Liberal, actively supported Indonesian rule.
Timor-Leste was colonised by Portugal in the 15th century and was largely neglected. By 1973, illiteracy was estimated at 93 per cent and there were just ten schools. Most of the population relied on subsistence farming.
Portugal’s 1974 “Carnation Revolution” placed military officers in power who sought to pull out of its colonies. This opened space for the Timorese to organise their own political parties.
Most important was the Revolutionary Front for an Independent East Timor or Fretilin. They were inspired by the Frelimo independence movement in Portugal’s other colony of Mozambique, which took power with support from the Soviet Union.
Indonesian military dictator Suharto was worried about the prospects of a “Little Cuba” in the middle of their archipelago. He had come to power a decade earlier by ruthlessly purging Indonesia’s communist movement, killing over a million.
Suharto began a covert operation to undermine the Timorese movement for independence in late 1974, a month after meeting Australian PM Gough Whitlam.
Whitlam told Suharto that he thought Timor-Leste was “too small for independence … and would inevitably become the focus of attention of others outside the region”, encouraging Indonesia to invade. Whitlam, like Suharto, was similarly concerned to avoid a Communist-sponsored “Little Cuba” in Australia’s backyard.
Australia’s ambassador to Indonesia at the time, Richard Woolcott, explained that Australia’s alliance with Indonesia was “unquestionably more important than the future of Portuguese Timor”.
Australia saw Suharto as a bulwark against the spread of communism in the region, as well as a strategically critical ally, running the fourth most populous country in the world with control of vital shipping lanes.
In the 1970s—when Indonesia invaded Timor-Leste and carried out the worst of its war crimes—Indonesia was, behind Papua New Guinea, the second largest recipient of Australian military aid, providing state-of-the-art Australian Sabre aircraft, as well as training Indonesian soldiers.
On top of this, Australia and Indonesia had negotiated in 1972 a maritime boundary in the Timor Sea which placed most its lucrative oil and gas reserves inside Australian waters. One of the largest of these reserves, the Greater Sunrise gas field, has an estimated value of $40 billion.
By the time Indonesia was making clear to Australia that it planned to annex Timor-Leste, government officials had already suggested that complete Indonesian control of Timor would make future negotiations over these reserves easier.
Whitlam’s government was told on 13 October by its Jakarta embassy about the planned invasion and resolved to turn a blind eye.
Just three days later, five journalists based in Australia were captured and executed by Indonesian troops in Balibo, a village near Timor-Leste’s border with Indonesia. They feared the journalists would expose that Indonesia had already begun covert raids into the country.
Australian intelligence had intercepted phone calls hours beforehand which indicated that the Indonesian military had intended to kill the journalists but nothing was done to stop them.
Australian officials then accepted the Indonesian military’s cover story that the journalists had been killed in crossfire. This sent a signal to Indonesia that they could act with impunity in Timor-Leste.
Indonesia launched its full-scale invasion on 7 December 1975. US President Gerald Ford and Secretary of State Henry Kissinger had left Jakarta the night before, giving Suharto the go-ahead, only urging that they wait until their delegation left, that they wouldn’t use US-made arms and that “whatever you do it succeeds quickly”.
A bishop in the Timor-Leste capital of Dili described the horrors of the invasion, “The soldiers who landed started killing everyone they could find. There were many dead bodies in the streets. All we could see were the soldiers killing, killing, killing.”
In the first days, almost one-tenth of the city’s population was slaughtered. Within weeks, Indonesia had control of Timor-Leste’s major cities.
In the years that followed, Fretilin waged a guerilla war from the interior, supported by villagers.
Indonesia’s counterinsurgency was brutal. They wiped out entire villages they suspected of supporting Fretilin and detained about 300,000 Timorese in camps. Arbitrary arrests, torture and public executions were common.
Australia actively assisted Indonesia in “pacifying” the country.
Malcolm Fraser’s Liberal government announced in 1978 de jure recognition of Timor-Leste as part of Indonesia. He stopped radio transmissions from Fretilin to supporters in Australia. Police confiscated equipment used by Communist Party of Australia activists for pirate radio broadcasts reporting Indonesian atrocities.
They reaped the rewards of this support when, in 1989, Bob Hawke’s foreign minister Gareth Evans and Indonesia’s equivalent Ali Alatas signed the Timor Gap Treaty, which gave Australia the lion’s share of profits from the Timor Sea. The deal was finalised while the pair sipped champagne on an aircraft above the Timor Sea.
When pressed about Timor-Leste, Evans simply said, “The world is a pretty unfair place.”
The resistance
Under the leadership of Xanana Gusmao, Fretilin began to shift tack, viewing international solidarity and civil resistance as more effective than guerilla struggle.
As early as 1974, Fretilin leader Jose Ramos Horta had visited Australia and established contacts with the Communist Party of Australia.
A solidarity movement was forming which connected trade unionists, churches and student activists.
Dockworkers refused to load aircraft being shipped to Indonesia, and manufacturing workers in Melbourne, who produced parts for Indonesian jets, downed tools. In 1976, unionists collected donations at factory meetings to sail a shipment of aid across the Timor Sea. The Fraser government arrested the sailors shortly after the ship left Darwin.
Timorese activists began to demonstrate in Dili, particularly when foreign officials came to visit, despite facing brutal repression.
In October 1991, 2500 people attended the funeral procession in Dili of a murdered independence activist. After a scuffle in which two Indonesians were stabbed, the Indonesian military marched towards the cemetery and opened fire on the crowd. They trapped people inside, and proceeded to beat, bayonet and arrest them. Over 200 Timorese were killed and injured. An English cameraman managed to record the massacre.
The broadcast of his footage caused international outrage. In 1996, Timorese independence activists Jose Ramos Horta and Bishop Carlos Belo were awarded the Nobel Peace Prize.
Reformasi
Suharto ran Indonesia for the benefit of his inner circle of accomplices and elites for 30 years. In 1997, the Asian Financial Crisis crashed Indonesia’s economy.
The IMF bailed Indonesia out but demanded Suharto remove government subsidies for key commodities like fuel and electricity, sending prices soaring just as unemployment surged.
As popular outrage reached boiling point, students held regular demonstrations on university campuses.
On 12 May 1998, the military killed four student activists. This propelled the movement into the streets, now joined by the broader working class. Suharto was toppled, with his vice-president BJ Habibie taking his place.
Habibie was forced to pass reforms releasing political prisoners, legalising trade unions and reducing the military’s role in government.
Facing a huge crisis domestically, and with Timor-Leste’s occupation becoming intractable and internationally controversial, he decided, at the start of 1999, that Timor-Leste would be given a chance to vote for either integration with Indonesia or independence.
But the military wanted to make an example of Timor-Leste to stop the independence movements in provinces like Aceh and West Papua, which were emboldened by Suharto’s fall.
When Timorese voted overwhelmingly in favour of independence, the military began a rampage using proxy militias trained by Indonesian Special Forces. In just over a week, thousands of Timorese were murdered.
It was only after this had happened that John Howard announced the deployment of Australian troops—after consulting Indonesia and receiving the go ahead. Howard’s government had wanted Timor-Leste to remain a part of Indonesia until the last minute.
Howard’s intervention into Timor-Leste, through a UN-sponsored “peacekeeping” force called INTERFET, was celebrated at the time, even on the left.
But it allowed Howard to bolster support for Australian military intervention as well as shore up Australian dominance in the South Pacific. Nor was Australia altruistically motivated.
Timor-Leste’s independence threatened to void the Timor Gap Treaty. Timor-Leste’s Exclusive Economic Zone, under the accepted UN standards, placed almost all the Timor Sea’s oil and gas fields within their sole control.
Australia forced Timor-Leste to sign a series of treaties which gave Australia a share of the revenue from oil and gas projects in those waters. Australia threatened to pull out of oil and gas projects from which Timor-Leste would receive sorely needed revenue, even if it was split. The Timorese reluctantly agreed.
During the negotiations, Australia’s spy agency had planted listening devices in Timor-Leste’s ministerial offices. Through blackmail and espionage, Australia forced one of the poorest countries in the world to surrender huge amounts of wealth.
From 1999 to 2014, Australia robbed about $7 billion in revenue from Timor-Leste. When the spying operation was revealed, Timor-Leste revoked the treaty, and a new agreement set the maritime boundaries at the international standard. But Timor-Leste received no compensation for the lost revenue.
Last month Abanese signed yet another defence treaty with Indonesian President Prabowo. It aims to bring the two countries even closer, as part of Albanese and Trump’s preparations for war against China.
Prabowo was an officer in the Indonesian Special Forces in Timor-Leste and likely orchestrated several of the worst massacres. During the Reformasi, Prabowo’s command “disappeared” dozens of student activists.
Now, as president, Prabowo is overseeing the occupation and genocide of West Papua, where an estimated 500,000 have been killed since Indonesia’s annexation in 1969.
We need to back the ongoing independence movements in places like West Papua, where the Australian government remains complicit in the Indonesian military’s atrocities.
This means demanding that our government ends its ongoing military aid and joint training with the Indonesia military.
