East Timor

Peter Job, a former East Timor activist, has written a careful, dispassionate account of the stance of Gough Whitlam’s and Malcolm Fraser’s successive governments in relation to Portuguese East Timor. He has consulted a commendably wide range of oral and written sources, interviewing, for example, several retired senior Australian officials formerly engaged in the design and implementation of Timor policy. His story ends in 1983, with Bob Hawke’s election to office. Job should be encouraged to complete his account in the future to acquaint readers with developments up to at least the UN intervention in 1999 that gave Australian diplomacy a new role.

Think of Syria today and you have East Timor in 1975–78, the main difference being that the story of Indonesia’s brutal invasion was totally hidden from the world. It was in this framework of pain, trauma, and confusion that an estimated three to four thousand Timorese children were carried off to Indonesia without informed parental consent.

Shirley Shackleton is well known to those acquainted with the story of the fight for justice by the families of the Balibo Five, the five reporters who were slaughtered in 1975 in a border town of what was then Portuguese Timor. Her husband, Greg Shackleton, and his colleagues, Gary Cunningham, Tony Stewart, Brian Peters and Malcolm Rennie – all in their twenties – were killed by Indonesian soldiers at dawn on 16 October, shortly after filming a major infantry, naval and air attack on the town of Balibo.

Thirty-four years after the former colony of Portuguese Timor experienced the horrors of invasion by the Indonesian army, the story of the killing of the five television journalists known as the Balibo Five – a persistent subtext of that history – has found new life in the forthcoming feature film Balibo, directed by Arenafilm’s Robert Connolly. In reviewing Tony Maniaty’s related book, I must declare a vested interest: his book Shooting Balibo: Blood and Memory in East Timor has appeared on bookshelves two months earlier than a book of my own, on which that film is based.

The publisher’s blurb that accompanied my review copy of Joseph Nevins’s book makes two prominent assertions. One is that the United Nations has given Indonesia a six-month deadline to prosecute war crimes committed in East Timor in 1999. The other is that Paul Wolfowitz, a former US ambassador to Indonesia and an architect of the 2003 US invasion of Iraq, was complicit in East Timor atrocities. I suppose such attention-grabbers are needed to sell books in today’s over-saturated literary markets, but these two do little justice to the broad sweep and value of Nevins’s latest work. (Under the pen name Matthew Jardine, he has written two others on East Timor, and is something of an activist on the subject.)

The careful media management accompanying the Australian National Archive’s release in January 2004 of cabinet papers covering the first year in office of the Whitlam government underlined the interest of the ageing ex-prime minister and his supporters in safeguarding his status as an Australian icon. It was a success: most analysts agreed that the papers showed that in 1973 the newly elected Labor government performed with exceptional dynamism and transparency.

The account of the events surrounding East Timor’s liberation from Indonesia by News Limited journalists Don Greenlees and Robert Garran is subtitled ‘The inside story of East Timor’s fight for freedom’. Dealing as it does primarily with the diplomatic machinations of the Indonesian and Australian governments in that period, it would be fair to say the subtitle should read ‘The inside story of those who worked against East Timor’s fight for freedom’. By detailing the story of East Timor’s transition to independence from the perspective of Jakarta and Canberra, the two reporters run dangerously close to echoing the perceptions of these two governments. The book reads in some parts like press releases from, alternately, the Australian Department of Foreign Affairs and Trade (DFAT) and the Indonesian state newsagency, Antara. A well-placed former Australian army officer remarked to me that, after reading the book, he came away ‘almost feeling sorry for the TNI [Indonesian Army]’.