A Pretty Unfair Place

a pretty
unfair place
East Timor Ten Years
After Self-Determination
KEN WESTMORELAND
A PRETTY UNFAIR PLACE
Ken Westmoreland’s interest in East Timor over the past twenty years
has taken him around the world, from Portugal to Australia, the UK to
Indonesia, and Ireland to East Timor itself. During that time, he has
worked as a researcher, a proof-reader, and a Tetum translator for clients
from government departments to film companies.
What I can say is simply that the world is a pretty unfair place, that it’s
littered over the course of the decades and the centuries with examples of
acquisitions by force which have proved to be, for whatever reason,
irreversible.
– Gareth Evans, Australian Foreign Minister, 1990

a pretty
unfair place
East Timor Ten Years
After Self-Determination
KEN WESTMORELAND
Published by Lafaek Press, 2009
Copyright © Ken Westmoreland 2009
Ken Westmoreland has asserted his right under the Copyright, Design
and Patents Act 1988 to be identified as the author of this work.
All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced or

transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical
including photocopying, recording or information storage or retrieval
system, without the prior permission in writing of the publisher.
This book is sold subject to the condition that it shall not by way of trade
or otherwise be lent, resold, hired out, or otherwise circulated without
the publisher’s prior consent in writing in any form of binding or cover
other than that in which it is published and without a similar condition
being imposed on the subsequent purchaser.
ISBN: 978-0-557-15827-0
Printed in Great Britain

CONTENTS
Acknowledgements vii
Prologue: How Different It Might Have Been ix
Introduction: Deeply Unfashionable xvii
1. The Last Ugly ‘Ism’ 1
2. Mythology, Dogma and Denial 15
3. Indonesia: A Squandered Opportunity 35
4. Australia: As Ye Sow, So Shall Ye Reap 53
5. Portugal: Emotion is Not Enough 71
6. The UN: What International Community? 89
7. Speaking in Tongues 105
8. E-Locked and Air-Locked 125
9. Economics: Politics for Grown-Ups 143
10. The Buck Stops in Dili 159
Epilogue: Signs of Change? 175
Notes 179
Bibliography 201
Index 204
BURMA
(M Y A N M A R) LAOS
VIETNAM
THAILAND
PHILIPPINES
CAMBODIA
BRUNEI
Aceh
M A L A Y SI A
SINGAPORE
Kalimantan
Sumatra Sulawesi Maluku
Papua
I N D O N E S I A
Java Nusa Tenggara
Bali EAST TIMOR
SCALE
(T I M O R - L E S T E)
0 500m 1km
A U S T R A L I A
Ataúro
SCALE Baucau
0km 75km
Liquiçá . .
DILI Manatuto . Lospalos
. Jaco
.
Ermera . Aileu
.
Batugade. Ainaro . .
Viqueque
Maliana
. . Same
.
Pante-Macassar
Oecussi .
Suai
EAST TIMOR
(T I M O R - L E S T E)
ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS
ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS
I WOULD LIKE to thank the following people from East Timor,
who I have had the pleasure to have known over the years:
Abel Guterres; Abel Pires da Silva; Acácio Marques; Alfredo
Borges Ferreira; Anastácio Moniz; Arsenio Bano, Benjamim
Côrte Real; Boaventura Moreira; Carlos Alves; Cesar Dias
Quintas; Christopher Henry Samson; Clementino dos Reis
Amaral; Dino Gandara Rai; Domingos Savio; Estela Alves Amaral;
Estêvão Cabral; Fernando Encarnação; Flavio Simões Martins;
Francisco Guterres; Hermenegildo Lopes; Humberto Seixas; Ivete
de Oliveira; Jeremias Desousa; José António Belo; José Amorim;
José Dias Quintas; José Teixeira; Julia Alves; Kirsty Sword
Gusmão; Lilia Paixão Araújo; Luciano da Conceição; Luís Costa;
Mito Alves; Nicolau Santos; Nilton Alves Amaral; Pascoela
Barreto; Rique Alves Amaral; Valerio Trindade; Ventura da
Conceição; Vicky Tchong and Zequito de Oliveira. Obrigadu barak
ba imi hotu hosi Maun Ken – many thanks to you all from ‘Brother’
Ken.
I would also like to thank the following people around the
world, who I have had the pleasure to have met, to have known,
or with whom I have had the pleasure to corresponded:
Achmad Gozali; Alan Taylor; António Pinto da França; Ann
Turner; Aone van Engelenhoven; Arnie Kohen; Ashley Green-
Thompson; Bill Nicol; Bob Vidoni; Brian Farrell; Carmel
Budiardjo; Catharina van Klinken; Catherine Scott; Charlie
Scheiner; Chrys Chrystello; Chuck Rice; Clinton Fernandes;
David Norris; David Scott; Diane Almeida; Dom Rotheroe; Don
Brown; Edson Marinho Duarte Monteiro; Eric Avebury; Erik
Mackinlay; Fiona Anderson; Fiona Crockford; Fernando Paulo de
Mello Barreto Filho; Francisco Nazareth; Gil Scrine; Geoffrey
Hull; Helen Hill; Helen Clark; Helen Yensen; Hugh Dowson;
ix
ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS
Hugh O’Shaughnessy; Humberto Ribeiro; Irena Cristalis; James

Dunn; Janelle Saffin; Janet Steele; Jennie Herrera; Jim Hewitt;
João Paulo Esperança, Joe Davies; John Hajek, John Macdougall;
John Taylor; Jonathan Humphreys; José António Rocha, Julian
Gill; Kerry Taylor-Leech; Lance Eccles; Liston Siregar, Lev
Lafayette; Lucy Williamson; Maire Leadbeater; Margaret Wilson;
Margarida Azevedo; Margarida Gonçalves; Maria Bandeira Neves;
Maria Emília Irmler, Marie Quinn; Mary Skinner; Martin
Maguire; Maureen Tolfree; Max Stahl; Michael Kirby; Michael
Leach; Mike Pothier; Noel Stott; Paul Barber; Paula McBride;
Peter Carey; Peter de Haas; Pedro Braga; Robert Connolly; Roger
Gill; Rosely Forganes; Roy Wiles; Ruy Jobim Neto; Sean Steele;
Russ Feingold; Saimoni Nacolawa; Shirley Shackleton; Simon
Long; Soei Liong Liem; Steve Alston; Steve Kibble; Thomas
Nehrmann; Tom Hyland; Toni Pollard; Tony Leon; Virgínia
Sampaio and Wayne Brittenden.
However long or brief our acquaintance, however recent or
long ago, I have not forgotten you, and however great or small
your contribution may have been, every little has helped.
However much we may have disagreed with each other in the
past, or indeed, you disagree with each other now, again, many
thanks to you all.
I would also like to dedicate this work to the memory of
Michele Turner and Lieutenant Colonel Mervyn Jenkins.
Lastly, I would like to thank my family for their indulgence of
my interest in this and other ‘lesser-known’ parts of the world
over the years. Eccentricity is the mother of creativity – maybe
one day it will pay off!
x
PROLOGUE
HOW DIFFERENT
IT COULD HAVE BEEN
JAKARTA, 8 JUNE, 2008. It was President Suharto’s birthday.

After four decades in office, during which Indonesia had seen
unprecedented economic growth, he saw no reason to step down,
or even groom a successor, and had been re-elected for a ninth
term by the People’s Consultative Assembly. Unopposed.
And why not? Joaquin Balaguer, President of the Dominican
Republic, had remained in office until he was ninety-one, and had
even attempted a comeback at the age of ninety-four. If Balaguer
could do that, then why not Suharto, a sprightly eighty-seven year
old, unfettered by such things as multi-party democracy and the
risk of losing elections?
The guest list at the celebrations included all the usual
suspects. There was the President of Australia, Richard Woolcott,
who had been Ambassador to Indonesia in the 1970s, and the
Foreign Minister, Greg Sheridan, who, before embarking on his
political career, had been foreign editor of The Australian, and a
staunch defender of Suharto’s Indonesia.
On the other side of the world, in El-Aiún, the capital of
Western Sahara, José Ramos Horta, the ‘foreign minister in exile’
of East Timor, watched coverage of the celebrations on CNN. On
seeing the presidents of the two countries, both dressed in
Indonesian batik, he turned to his Sahrawi colleague and remarked
‘See? Two pieces of shit in matching shirts!’
xi
HOW DIFFERENT IT COULD HAVE BEEN
Western Sahara, or to use its official title, the Sahrawi Arab

Democratic Republic, was regarded as an ally by Horta and others
seeking independence for East Timor, since it had finally gained
independence in 2002. There were many parallels between the
two. Both had been colonised by Iberian countries; Western
Sahara by Spain; East Timor by Portugal; and both had been
abandoned by them in 1975. Both were subsequently invaded and
annexed by their more powerful neighbours: Western Sahara by
Morocco; East Timor by Indonesia.
In 1999, Morocco finally agreed to a referendum on the future
of Western Sahara, in which its people were to choose between
autonomy within the Kingdom of Morocco, or full independence.
However, it was not an amicable divorce; as the departing
Moroccan military and local militias laid waste to the
infrastructure. After international condemnation, King
Mohammed VI agreed, albeit grudgingly, to a French-led
international peacekeeping force.
This gave way to a UN transitional administration, known by
the acronym ATNUSO – Administration Transitional des Nations
Unies au Sahara Occidental in French, preferred by the Moroccans,
Administración Transicional de las Naciones Unidas en Sahara Occidental
in Spanish, preferred by the Sahrawis.
José Ramos Horta was visiting Western Sahara at the invitation
of its President, Mohamed Abdelaziz. His colleague, Mari Alkatiri,
was already living in El-Aiún, where he was East Timor’s
Ambassador.
It had been thirty-three years since Horta had last seen East
Timor, and there was no prospect of him going home, short of
throwing in the towel, and siding with the Indonesians, as his
brother, Arsenio, had done. Yes, Maun Arsenio, his big brother,
was now a member of Suharto’s Advisory Council for East Timor
Affairs.
xii
While there had been a glimmer of hope that the Suharto

regime would collapse after the student demonstrations in Jakarta
in 1998, this quickly disappeared after they were bloodily
suppressed. Horta had been so optimistic about change, that he
told his friend David Scott that he would celebrate his fiftieth
birthday in a free East Timor. (He ended up spending it in
Ireland, still in exile.)
The scenes of demonstrators being gunned down in Merdeka
Square were reminiscent of those in Dili seven years earlier,
which were captured on videotape and shown around the world,
tragic when they happened, but soon forgotten. Even the deaths of
two American journalists in Dili, Amy Goodman and Allan Nairn,
killed with guns that the US had supplied to the Indonesian
military, did not stir Washington into changing its policy. ‘Who
cares? They were liberals!’ a White House aide smirked.
Suharto’s Indonesia was too important to the West to
antagonise, and that was certainly the case after 9/11. Despite
having the world’s largest Muslim population, Indonesia prided
itself on its religious tolerance. Of course, it paid a price for this:
Defence Minister Benny Murdani, was killed in 2002 when
Jemaah Islamiyah suicide bombers targeted Jakarta Cathedral,
along with the former Australian Prime Minister, Paul Keating.
After the attack, Osama Bin Laden made a video address, in which
he denounced Suharto as an apostate, and Indonesians as kufar, or
infidels.
Portugal, East Timor’s former ruler, and according to the UN,
still the administrating power, was a sad case in 2008: ‘the Albania
of the Iberian Pensinsula’ as one British newspaper columnist
called it. Unlike other countries in the European Union, like
Ireland or Greece, no amount of subventions from Brussels had
helped Portugal to escape poverty, its economy was stagnant,
dwarfed by that of Estonia and Romania. Finally, in 2000, after
xiii
years of throwing good money after bad, Brussels lost patience,

and Portugal was the first country to be expelled from the
European Union.
Since then, it had struggled to survive, dependent on a mixture
of loans from Brazil and Angola, remittances from migrant
workers in Sweden and Norway, laundered money from Russian
billionaires, and duty-free goods smuggled into Spain. It was one
part Andorra and one part Morocco.
Such was Portugal’s insignificance, that when the Lisbon daily
24 Horas published unflattering cartoons of the Prophet
Mohammed in 2005, there was barely a reaction in the Islamic
world. It was probably because Portugal had so little presence
there that would-be protesters could not find anything to attack.
Or even boycott. Had it been Denmark, they could have
vented their hatred by boycotting Lurpak butter, Bang & Olufsen
television sets, or Danish biscuits. But the imams found it so
difficult to find anything visibly Portuguese that indignant
Muslims could boycott, attack, or burn, it simply wasn’t worth the
trouble. Even the South African restaurant chain, Nando’s, had
decided to drop the Portuguese theme from its restaurants
because Portugal was so unfashionable.
While Brazil had economic and geopolitical clout, its leaders
had little interest in the plight of East Timor, not least since
President Celso Amorim had sought to forge strong links with
Indonesia, as part of his ‘Look Outwards’ policy. The Indonesian
Minister of Technology and Research, BJ Habibie, was a great
admirer of Brazil’s aircraft industry, and was looking to produce
Embraer aircraft under licence.
The fact that Brazilians spoke Portuguese, a language that
Indonesia had been trying to stamp out in East Timor, did not
really trouble the Indonesian authorities. Such was the lack of
interest in learning Portuguese among young East Timorese, that
xiv
Jakarta felt that it was no more a threat to national unity than the
learning of Chinese. Like Sanskrit or Arabic, Portuguese could be
taught as a religious language, or, like Latin or Greek, as a classical
one.
When Horta had tried to find the contact details for the newly
opened Sahrawi Embassy in Moscow, he had to go to the trouble
of calling the Ministry of Foreign Affairs in El-Aiún, because the
Sahrawi Foreign Ministry website had been in a state of disrepair,
and the information had not been updated in years. It was par for
the course: foreign advisers would design attractive, but over
elaborate websites, which they would update for the length of
their contract, and then abandon on their departure.
And then there was the expense of calling Western Sahara from
the rest of the world. For some perverse reason, telephone calls
cost around US$3 a minute, even using a discount phonecard.
(Assuming that you could get through at all: many telecom
carriers did not recognise Western Sahara’s +297 country code, or
still listed it as being the code for Aruba in the Caribbean, which
now used the code +1 297.)
Despite the astronomical cost of telephone calls, the
unreliability of the internet, and the barely functioning postal
service, Horta was astonished that the Sahrawi government did
not see the benefits of having fax machines, never mind separate
fax lines, in government offices.
When he mentioned this in passing to government’s media
advisor, she was distraught. ‘Please be more understanding, José,’
she sobbed, ‘this country is so new!’ Well, not that new;
Montenegro and Kosovo were newer, and if East Timor, by some
act of divine intervention, became independent tomorrow,
Western Sahara would be even less new. ‘Being correct does not
necessarily bring about change!’ she added.
xv
Maybe not, Horta thought, but it doesn’t mean it never will.

Even he, an exiled resistance leader, had a separate phone line and
fax line, while the Conselho Nacional de Resistência Timorense
(CNRT) had a regularly updated multimedia website, maintained
by a committed volunteer in Washington, Will Sommer.
Will had, in fact, offered to do the same for the Sahrawi
government, whose advisors either changed the subject by
waffling on about servers and bandwidth, or gave him the brush-
off. In this case, it was the presidential brush-off: Abdelaziz had
told him that the government had the matter in hand locally, even
though it did not.
‘It’s crazy,’ Will told Horta, ‘I offer to do things for them, free
of charge, that they’re too busy or unable to do themselves, and
what do they say? “How dare you”!’ He added ‘the problem with
the Sahrawis, is that they’ve forgotten their all-weather friends,
and how useful they can still be. You know what I call that
country? Alice in Wonderland meets Dog in the Manger.’
While some commentators had denounced the Internet as
promoting a ‘cult of the amateur’, with crudely edited videos on
YouTube and inane outpourings on blogs, for the East Timorese
resistance, it had proved a powerful tool. It no longer mattered
that the resistance could not afford a satellite television
transponder, as the Tamil Tigers were able to do, although it was
just as well, as Sri Lankan pressure had led to it being dropped.
Instead, the CNRT had its own video channel on YouTube, TV
Maubere.
Surprisingly, the Indonesian authorities had not tried to block
access to TV Maubere when it posted a video address by Xanana
Gusmão, recorded on a mobile phone smuggled into Cipinang
prison in Jakarta. However, it was so inundated with abuse from
posters like ‘Proud To Be Indonesian’, ‘Proklamasi1945’, ‘Prajurit
Pancasila’, ‘Pramuka65’, and ‘Pattimura4Ever’ that it had to
xvi
restrict comments. (It was later revealed to be the same person,

Purba Negoro, in Jakarta, using multiple accounts.)
Riding in the President’s Land Cruiser from the airport into
the El-Aiún, Horta could see reminders of the scorched earth
policy of the departing occupiers. Would the Indonesians behave
the same way if the East Timorese had the effrontery to vote
against them? Quite possibly.
However, the Sahrawi President was more scathing about the
UN. Speaking in French (the only language common to both him
and Horta) he remarked: ‘l’ONU nous a donné une squelette d’un état’
– ‘The UN gave us a skeleton of a state’.
Despite being used by the UN as a poster boy for nation
building, Western Sahara was a fragile state. It was not, as some
people unkindly called it, ‘Western Somalia’, but it was still fragile,
economically as well as politically, despite the revenues from
phosphates, and, potentially, from offshore oil and gas. The
withdrawal of Moroccan subsidies and the adoption of the euro as
Western Sahara’s currency meant that living costs in the country
had sky-rocketed, and El-Aiún rivalled Tokyo and Oslo as the
world’s most expensive capital.
The UN was looked upon by Sahrawis with contempt, and
indeed, by expatriate aid workers, one of whom described UN
staff as WILCs – Wankers In Land Cruisers. Even Western NGOs
were less than altruistic in their motives, and some had no qualms
admitting it. The director of one NGO remarked to her friend:
‘You know what we’re here for, don’t you? To pay for our early
retirement!’
Inevitably, ‘capacity building’, that piece of jargon beloved of
the UN, had even entered the local vocabulary, as a euphemism
for pointless exercises in wasting time and money. While many of
the foreign consultants and advisors were hardworking, Horta
learned, they worked very, very hard trying to take the mountain
xvii
to Mohammed, instead of taking Mohammed to the mountain.

The German general, Kurt von Hammerstein-Equord, said that
the worst kind of officers to have were not the clever and lazy, but
the stupid and industrious. He would have hated El-Aiún!
Horta thought of what East Timor would be like in the hands
of such people: the only difference would be that rather than
escaping to Marrakech or the Canary Islands, they would be going
to Bali or Darwin, and rather than ‘wadi-bashing’ (driving over
sand dunes in the desert) they would be scuba-diving.
xviii
INTRODUCTION
DEEPLY
UNFASHIONABLE
Where I go, fashion follows me
- Earl of Kildare
WHENEVER I hear the words ‘East Timor’ and ‘fashionable’ in the

same sentence, I laugh. East Timor has never been fashionable,
unless one counts the fifteen minutes of international fame that it
had in 1999.
Somebody once described East Timor as being my ‘hobby
horse’, but I would rather be accused of riding my own hobby
horse than of jumping on somebody else’s bandwagon. Had East
Timor been a cause celèbre like nuclear disarmament, saving the
rainforest, or animal rights, then I would probably not have taken
the interest in it that I have over the past twenty years.
That has been the case for East Timor, both in the ten years
before the act of self-determination in 1999, and in the ten years
thereafter. What many people have forgotten is how thankless and
hopeless a cause East Timor was, virtually unknown even among
those who espoused similar causes. Writing in 1987, José Ramos
Horta, now the country’s President, contrasted the plight of his
country with that of Cambodia, which had aroused righteous
indignation in the West.
We Timorese only wished that Indonesia was a Vietnam, run by

the communists; then, our tortured land would be flooded with
crocodile tears, our tragedy would be sung by international stars,
Western governments would condemn the violation of our
xix
DEEPLY UNFASHIONABLE
human rights, Christian agencies of mercy would race with each

other to help us. But because Indonesia is not Vietnam, the West
doesn’t give a damn about the Timorese.1
As a six-year old in North Yorkshire in 1978, I can remember

how I and my classmates had to draw a green blob, label it
‘CAMBODIA’ and then add a black dot with ‘Pnomh Penh’.
None of us knew where it was, but the plight of its starving
people was all the rage, just as that of Biafra had been a decade
earlier.
There were, inevitably, tasteless jokes about starving
Cambodians being uttered then, which were recycled a few years
later as jokes about starving Ethiopians. Tasteless they were, but it
did at least show that the Cambodians and the Ethiopians were
being noticed, whereas the East Timorese were not.
In fact, for many years, the biggest problem was not that
nothing was being done about East Timor’s plight under
Indonesian occupation; it was that it was not known at all.
Growing up in Singapore, what I knew about Indonesia was far
from negative: it was the next door neighbour, with which both
Singapore and Malaysia had many affinities, despite the different
colonial histories, and Indonesian was largely intelligible to
speakers of Malay. Indonesia wasn’t alien, much less malign.
I had heard of a former Portuguese colony called East Timor,
which had been absorbed into Indonesia in much the same way,
as far as I knew at the time, as Goa had been into India. The
Portuguese connection aroused my curiosity, because at this time
I had developed an interest in Portuguese colonial history, and
more specifically, the Portuguese language.
However, while Portugal had had a trading empire in the
region until the 17th century, it had since been completely
forgotten, and Asians could be forgiven for regarding the
xx
Portuguese in much the same way as Europeans regarded the

Vikings, as a people who no longer existed.
It was only when I returned to Europe in 1989, that the way
that I saw East Timor, and Indonesia, began to change. On the
flight to London, I remember sitting next to an Australian man,
who asked me if Lee Kuan Yew, then Prime Minister of
Singapore, was ‘like Suharto’, the then President of Indonesia. I
answered, reasonably enough, ‘no’, but that was as much out of
ignorance of Indonesia as it was regard for Singapore.
In October of that year, I saw a documentary featured in the
TV listings, called Buried Alive: The Story of East Timor, produced in
Australia by Gil Scrine, who I have since described as the man
who I have to thank for my interest in East Timor, and the man
who my family and friends have to blame.
It was not actually filmed in East Timor, instead relying on
archive footage, but what was compelling was how it followed a
man called José Ramos Horta, who had the thankless job of trying
to get the UN to take an interest in the plight of his country. And,
if that were not enough, he had to do so on a budget of next to
nothing: I remember a scene in which he was on the phone to
American Express, trying to sort out a credit card payment.
What had the most effect on me was in the film was the way
that East Timor’s plight was ignored by the countries of the
‘Third World’, which were all too prompt to denounce Western
colonialism, and indeed, apartheid in South Africa. However, as
José Ramos Horta pointed out, when it came to the repression of
one ‘Third World’ people by another, they were silent.
The film featured coverage of the 1986 Non-Aligned
Movement summit in Harare, Zimbabwe. I remembered this
when I lived in Singapore: a talking shop of countries with
nothing in common apart from a desire to indulge in anti-Western
posturing.
xxi
The film had certainly had an effect on me, but what could I
do? Most people I knew had either never heard of East Timor, or
regarded it as a lost cause if they had. There were no shortage of
causes to espouse; at the time, Nelson Mandela was still
imprisoned by the apartheid regime, the Berlin Wall had yet to
come down, the Baltic States were still under Moscow’s yoke, and
Eritrea had yet to win independence, so East Timor had to get to
the back of a very long queue.
I often encountered supposedly ‘progressive’ Western people,
who were familiar with the plight of Tibet, or what was then
called ‘Irian Jaya’, the Indonesian-administered part of New
Guinea, now known as Papua, but knew nothing of East Timor.
One backpacker, on hearing about someone who had visited East
Timor, asked ‘is it like Irian Jaya?’ Well, yes, and no.
Over the years, people have had misconceptions, if
understandable ones, about my interest in East Timor, for
example: that I am left wing; that I am a human rights activist; or
that I have an interest in development issues generally.
I am not left wing, although for various reasons, I have become
less right wing as I have got older, unlike many other people, for
whom the reverse is true. I once described myself as a
conservative, but what I was really trying to be was contrarian.
Indeed, it was precisely the fact that East Timor was not a cause
celèbre of the left in Western countries, except in Australia, which
appealed to me.
Nor am I a human rights activist: the only human right that I
was advocating in East Timor was that of self-determination.
Amnesty International does not support any specific political
cause; it campaigns simply for the release of political prisoners and
for the abolition of the death penalty. I might have some
sympathy with the former of Amnesty’s objectives, but have less
with the latter.
xxii
A family friend had the idea that once I had done what I had
set out to do in East Timor, I would be able to do similar things
in, say, Eritrea. Well, no, because Eritrea already has people doing
what I would be seeking to do in East Timor, and even if there
were not, what little I know about Eritrea tells me that I wouldn’t
want to go there.
Of course, when it comes to taking up these issues, Westerners
are caught between a rock and a hard place. On the one hand, if
they turn a blind eye to the plight of the oppressed in a ‘Third
World’ country, they are attacked as callous and accused of siding
with the oppressor. On the other hand, if they do not, and take up
such causes, they are vilified and branded as hypocrites, especially
if their country is a former colonial power.
Yet did the fact that Edward Morel, who helped to expose the
horrors of the Belgian slave trade in the Congo, was of French
and British parentage, make his arguments any less compelling
than if he had been, for example, Swiss? The Belgians would have
been in a far stronger position to accuse their French and British
critics of hypocrisy in 1899, than Asian governments (and their
Western defenders) were in accusing their Western critics of
double standards over East Timor a century later.2
It has been even worse for people in ‘Third World’ countries
themselves. People speaking out against abuses, be they
Indonesians under Suharto, or Zimbabweans under Robert
Mugabe, were smeared as Western stooges by those regimes, and
indeed, by Westerners themselves, on the left and right alike.
Add to this the fact that the East Timorese are predominantly
Catholic (although this owes more to Jakarta than Lisbon), and
Islamists, along with their Hindu and Buddhist imitators, start
spouting the line that this is all a Christian plot to dismember
their countries. Yet one of the architects of the Indonesian
xxiii
invasion, General Benny Murdani, was Catholic, and the first

Prime Minister of East Timor, Mari Alkatiri, was a Muslim.
During the 1990s, following the opening up of East Timor to
foreign visitors, and foreign journalists, Indonesian rule was
placed under greater scrutiny. In 1991, video footage of the
shooting of demonstrators in the Santa Cruz cemetery, made East
Timor headline news since the invasion sixteen years earlier.
Granted East Timor’s plight was still not as well known as that
of Cambodia, much less that of South Africa, but it was starting to
be noticed. With the end of the Cold War, there was less need for
authoritarian pro-Western regimes like that of Suharto, and 1991
saw the Gulf War, to liberate Kuwait, a small country invaded and
annexed by Iraq, its larger neighbour.
But Suharto remained in charge, and despite East Timor
becoming, as Foreign Minister Ali Alatas put it, ‘a pebble in the
shoe’, there was to be no change of policy, and even autonomy
within the Indonesian state was ruled out.
In a draft of my MA dissertation ‘International Responses to
the Indonesian Annexation of East Timor’ in 1996, I even wrote
that Jakarta’s annexation of the territory was ‘unlikely ever to be
rescinded’! Rather than being filled with hope by my interest in
East Timor, it made me more of a pessimist. When I often
thought ‘there’s more chance of East Timor getting independence
than of me…’ it was a reflection of how bad I thought things
were, and sometimes how I think they still are.
However, despite my pessimism, political change in Indonesia
came about in 1998, following the Asian financial crisis, the
collapse of the Indonesian economy, and the resignation of
Suharto, succeeded by B J Habibie. At long last, Indonesia seemed
to be experiencing its version of glasnost. The position on East
Timor softened, with autonomy being a possibility, although self-
determination and independence were ruled out: Habibie made it
xxiv
plain that Portugal, and the UN, would have to recognise

Indonesian sovereignty.
Then on 27 January 1999, there was a sudden change. That
afternoon, I had tuned in to the BBC’s domestic radio news
bulletin, The World at One, rather than the World Service’s
Newshour. I cannot recall what the lead story was, but it was a
subsequent one which was a shock: Indonesia had raised the
possibility of independence for East Timor!
I felt vindicated, because for years I had been told that this
could never happen. But I also felt a degree of discomfort, because
I knew East Timor’s history, and feared that it would repeat itself.
The Indonesians, like the Portuguese before them, went from
being totally inflexible, to being more interested in cutting their
losses than in overseeing an orderly and dignified process of self-
determination. (Or, rather, some of them: Habibie’s decision was
anathema to the military, and even to pro-democracy civilian
politicians like Megawati Sukarnoputri, daughter of the country’s
first President.)
Not only would it be a loss of face for Indonesia, resulting in a
backlash by the military, but it would see East Timor thrown in at
the deep end, totally unprepared. In a referendum on 30 August
1999, voters were made to choose between two options, both of
which flawed: limited autonomy within the Indonesian state for
ever; or immediate separation from it.
An Indonesian officer in East Timor warned that the military
would not leave peacefully: ‘we came in blood, and we will leave
in blood’ and so it did. During the violence, one Indonesian
soldier scrawled the graffiti Timor merdeka akan makan batu – ‘a free
Timor will eat stones’.3
After peace was restored by the International Force for East
Timor (InterFET) and Indonesia formally rescinded its
annexation of the territory, the United Nations Transitional
xxv
Administration in East Timor (UNTAET) was established. Yet

again, within a much shorter timeframe, East Timor’s rulers in
New York, like their predecessors in Lisbon and Jakarta, wanted
to cut their losses. They may have been more benign, but in the
eyes of some politicians in East Timor, they were still foreign
occupiers, and UN member states saw no point in outstaying
their welcome and spending more of their taxpayers’ money.
On 20 May 2002, East Timor celebrated its independence, or
as some saw it, the restoration of independence, declared on 28
November 1975 (by coincidence, my third birthday). It was
moving to watch, but I still felt discomfort. I also bristled when I
heard the then UN Secretary General, Kofi Annan, say ‘I still
recall the day, forty-five years ago, when my own country Ghana
attained its independence. Tonight, I am as excited as I was then.’4
Really? Ghana at independence had one of the best starts of
any post-colonial state, in terms of economic development,
infrastructure and education. With most of the infrastructure
destroyed by the Indonesian military and local militias, East
Timor was off to the worst start possible.
Four years later, divisions in the army and police led to
widespread unrest, and those in Australia and elsewhere who had
opposed East Timor’s self-determination, began to hit back.
Having long accused their critics of a ‘vendetta’ against Indonesia,
they began to wage one of their own, promoting a version of
history that could only be described as counterfactual, and better
suited to a parallel universe.
It was all the fault of the wicked Western activists, the so-called
‘East Timor lobby’, spreading ‘propaganda’, raising false hopes
among the East Timorese, and developing a cult of personality
around independence leaders like José Ramos Horta and Xanana
Gusmão, along the lines of Che Guevara.
xxvi
By contrast, poor old Suharto’s Indonesia supposedly had no

resources to argue its case in the international media, much less
Australia, where it had to make do with a praetorian guard of
academics, politicians, journalists, bureaucrats, diplomats and
businessmen – all supposedly powerless against supporters of a
cause so ‘fashionable’, that its best known supporter was not
Bono, Sting, or Bob Geldof, but Noam Chomsky!
This is in no way meant to downplay the role of people in East
Timor who took part in the resistance, nor that of people around
the world who supported them, at risk to their livelihood, if not
their lives. On the contrary, it is a tribute to them that they kept
on going when theirs seemed a lost cause, in the face of
vilification and abuse.
Granted, the young people who took part in the
demonstrations outside the Santa Cruz cemetery may not have
been saints, and there were foreign journalists present. Yet in what
way were they different from their counterparts in Sharpeville or
Soweto in South Africa? Or worse than those who took part in the
Easter Rising in Ireland?
One of these praetorian guards, the late economics professor
Heinz Arndt, warned that an independent East Timor would be a
‘mendicant state, indefinitely dependent on foreign aid’.5 The
reality is, in some respects, worse than that: East Timor is a state
of mendicants, who have to go around with a begging bowl in
search of funding, either from the UN, which infantilises the
country, or from the Ministry of Finance, in which all control
over spending was centralised. (This was, supposedly, in order to
reduce corruption, but in reality, it centralised sloth and
incompetence, if not corruption as well.)
On two occasions, I had the opportunity to work in a
government ministry in Dili. The first job opportunity, which
involved having to secure funding from the UN Development
xxvii
Programme, also involved me having to write my own terms of

reference, because the official who told me about the job thought
it ‘over her head’. I thought better of it.
The second opportunity involved people in the same ministry
having to go back and forth to the Ministry of Finance. Once
funding had been secured, all that was left was the approval of the
incoming minister, who, for reasons best known to him, decided
to put all recruitment on hold.
‘Okay, so the new minister is being briefed and getting to
know his team…’ said one official. Well, no, it wasn’t okay, and it
would be even less so for people less sympathetic to East Timor
than I was. But who else would have been dumb enough to have
gone through all that inconvenience for nothing?
However, I still wanted to hit back at the powers-that-be in
Dili. I considered writing an article for Quadrant magazine in
Australia, many of whose contributors, including Heinz Arndt,
and its previous editor, the late Paddy McGuinness, had been
staunch defenders of Suharto’s Indonesia and its rule in East
Timor.
I mulled over what to call it – ‘Make Timor Pay’ was one
possibility, in which I would call for Australia to cut off aid to East
Timor, start billing Dili for the upkeep of the Australian military
deployed there, and even more mischievously, break off relations
with Portugal and Brazil on the grounds that they, and their
language, were an irrelevance. Another title was more self-
explanatory, and inflammatory – ‘East Timor and Indonesia: The
Case for Reintegration’.
I started writing something, but later abandoned it. It wasn’t
because I was afraid of provoking people, as I enjoy using sarcasm
and hyperbole, and am unafraid of being branded self-important,
tendentious and arrogant. Nor was it being a ‘trophy activist’,
xxviii
although that would have just led to me being branded as a bitter

and twisted nobody.
It was because contrarian writing, far from being bold,
thought-provoking, or original, is actually lazy. No, I thought,
much better to attack everyone, than to attack only a select few,
and express unfashionable views about an issue that has always
been deeply unfashionable.
Even those who were once sympathetic to East Timor’s
struggle have had an axe to grind. ‘If I sound angry, I am,’ wrote
New Zealand Herald columnist John Roughan, complaining that
‘the steady drip of propaganda for East Timor’s independence had
us believing the place was a cohesive, capable political
community.’6
Well, I too am angry, but precisely because I knew what was
going to happen as a result of things going the way they did. In a
remarkable display of naïveté, Roughan remarked that ‘nobody
imagined… that within seven years the state would fail.’
Nobody? In 2007, José Ramos Horta told Australian radio: ‘we
received a country in 2002 that was a half-baked, half-cooked
state. The UN Security Council decided that we had to have only
two years transition to independence.’7 The only thing that I find
astonishing about this is how astonished other people are.
The people of East Timor have had to make very difficult
choices under very difficult circumstances and for outsiders to
patronise and insult them because of that, is, quite frankly, a cheap
shot. While it is time for the powers-that-be in Dili to snap out of
their ‘only over time’ mindset (indulged by Westerners as a
charming and amusing local custom) there are scores that need to
be settled with people in New York, Canberra, Jakarta and Lisbon
first.
This is not an exhaustive account of what has happened before
or since East Timor’s act of self-determination in 1999, nor is it
xxix
intended to be. I have not, for example, focused on the role of the
United States or Britain, because neither of those countries has
been directly involved in administering East Timor, nor have they
had substantial military presence.
I have instead chosen to focus on areas such as language policy
and communications links. These represent two different sides of
the same coin: in order to communicate and interact with each
other, and with the rest of the world, people in East Timor need
both. Sadly, while essential for East Timor’s development, these
are areas in which other countries have been working against each
other, rather than with each other, or have failed to deliver at all.
xxx
CHAPTER ONE
THE LAST
UGLY ‘ISM’
ISM’
If the East Timorians decide to revolt,
I’m sure I’ll have a statement.
- George W Bush, 16 June 1999
IN BRITAIN, I still frequently have to deal with people who have

never heard of East Timor, never mind ‘Timor-Leste’ – ‘Where is
it? What was it called before?’ At least people who have never
heard of East Timor are honest – customer service staff in India
are adamant that the country is ‘under Indonesia’.
While Indonesia recognises East Timor as an independent
state, many organisations do not. One East Timorese friend of
mine, studying in London, was told by a bank that in order to
open an account, he would have to be classified as stateless. (He
took his custom elsewhere.) When José Ramos Horta was in exile
in the United States, he had to explain to people that he was not
an Eskimo, nor was he from Istanbul!1
One British woman living in Dili still has her bank statements
addressed to ‘East Timor, Indonesia’, although given how East
Timor’s (non-Indonesian) postal service barely functions, it
would be better to have them online instead, and save time, paper
and postage.
Anyone attempting to book a flight to Dili online, will have
discovered that the city’s airport, renamed after the slain
independence leader, Nicolau Lobato, is still listed as being in
Indonesia.
1
THE LAST UGLY ‘ISM’
After I had been corresponding with it for nearly a year, a US

travel site has updated its entry, which now says ‘Dili,
Timor-Leste, Nicolau Lobato’. If the Irish had named Dublin
Airport after Pádraig Pearse, would they stand for it being listed
under ‘United Kingdom’?
What is even worse than a small country being lumped
together with its larger neighbour, is it being described as a ‘new’
this, or ‘another’ that. Cape Verde, another former Portuguese
colony, has been described as ‘the new Caribbean’. Some have
suggested that East Timor could be ‘the new Thailand’,2 or more
depressingly, ‘another Bali’.3
For some people, the fact that East Timor has a land border
with another country would be something of a revelation, given
that it is all too often described as ‘an island’. Other
misconceptions about the country are that it is ‘tiny’ and ‘remote’.
It is not tiny: it is several times larger than Singapore or
Luxembourg: hundreds of times larger than Macau or Gibraltar.
Nor is it remote: it is located between the Indian and Pacific
Oceans; and between two regional giants; Indonesia and Australia.
Some people think that calling it ‘East Timor’ is a tautology,
as Timor, from the Malay timur simply means ‘east’, but it does
not mean that in Tetum or other indigenous languages spoken on
the island.
The usual pronunciation of Timor in English is ‘tea-more’,
rather than ‘ti-mour’ or ‘timm-or’, although even those are
preferable to ‘tai-more’ or ‘tai-moore’. The most bizarre name for
the place which I have ever heard, however, was from a family
friend who called it ‘PNG’ – and this from an Australian! Calling
East Timor ‘Papua New Guinea’ is like calling Tasmania ‘New
Zealand’.
Even people who call the country ‘Timor-Leste’ in English,
still use ‘East Timorese’ as an adjective, which is clumsy.
2
‘Timorese’ is the obvious alternative, but are the people in the

western part of the island not Timorese as well, even as part of
Indonesia? When Western Samoa decided to call itself ‘Samoa’ in
1997, the people of American Samoa took exception.
In December 1991, the now defunct news magazine Asiaweek
had an editorial piece called ‘The Last Ugly “Ism”‘, referring to
nationalism. For a publication which went in for chest-beating
about so-called ‘Asian values’, it seemed rather odd that it should
have been calling for less nationalism, rather than more.
Perhaps the last ugly ‘ism’ is parochialism, but even that is
term is unsatisfactory, as is ‘isolationism’. While many people are
dismissive of places in the world of which they know nothing,
they can be very well travelled and can speak authoritatively about
countries which they know well.
Instead, one could call it ‘anti-differentism’: hostility towards
anything different from what people know, or what they are
accustomed to. But whatever the ‘ism’ is, not being well known is
a handicap for any country trying to forge links with the outside
world.
In most Western countries, such as Britain, it is easy to dismiss
East Timor as ‘obscure’, but what were the Falklands for most
British people before the war with Argentina in 1982? Virtually
nobody in Britain knew or cared about the islands before the
conflict, and few have cared about it since.
East Timor has oil; Sierra Leone has diamonds, but what do
the Falklands have, apart from sheep and squid? A tiny population
of British descent, who before the war, many saw so little future
for then in the islands, that they were emigrating either to Britain
(until they lost the right of abode there) or to New Zealand.
While the British contribution to the International Force East
Timor (InterFET) was relatively small, consisting of a regiment
Gurkhas (Nepalese mercenaries) stationed in Brunei, which only
3
served in East Timor for six months, there were some

commentators who thought that this would be another Kosovo. It
wasn’t.
Many were prompt to point out that there was no historical
link between Britain and East Timor, but it was in no small part to
Britain that East Timor and its people played a role in defending
Allied and Commonwealth interests in 1942, despite being a
territory of neutral Portugal.
While it was Australian, not British, troops, who were
deployed to East Timor, the British government was well aware of
the territory’s strategic importance. In correspondence with
Australian Prime Minister John Curtin, Secretary of State for
Dominion Affairs, Lord Cranborne, wrote:
His Majesty’s Government in the United Kingdom agree that

Japanese occupation of Portuguese Timor would constitute serious
threat and that consultation with the Netherlands authorities
would be desirable. It is felt, however, that this subject should be
discussed with the Portuguese also.4
It is still a matter of some debate as to whether or not Japan

would have invaded Portuguese Timor had it not been for the
deployment of Australian troops, but the contribution of its
people to Commonwealth defence should be better known in
Britain, and more widely acknowledged.
Commenting on a piece in the Daily Mail erroneously titled
‘President of East Timor shot during failed coup in country where
Gurkhas keep peace’ (they no longer do) reader Ian Millard wrote:
‘Would this “country” not be a better place if it were, say, an
Australian quasi-colony? Yes, but we are not usually allowed to
suggest that.’5 Who did he mean by ‘we’? Many Australian
commentators have no qualms in suggesting it.
4
And why did he put the word ‘country’ in quotation marks?

Millard is a barrister who was admitted to the Bar in Anguilla, a
small island in the Caribbean. There is nothing wrong with that,
but why is East Timor’s status any more absurd than that of
Anguilla, which rebelled against rule by St Kitts and Nevis,
despite having a population of less than 15,000 people? Indeed,
why should St Kitts and Nevis have been separated from the other
Leeward Islands in the first place? The only reason why Anguilla
has been able to survive economically is as a tax haven.
So who are British people to be lecturing others about the
absurdity of creating unviable microstates? Few of them realise
that the Solomon Islands, now racked by poverty and instability,
was a British colony until 1977, although it is Australia and New
Zealand which are clearing up the mess.
Another misconception is that East Timor was an example of
so-called ‘liberal interventionism’, like Kosovo and Sierra Leone.
It was nothing of the sort: had the Indonesian government not
changed its policy, and accepted the need for an act of self-
determination in East Timor, the idea of UN intervention there
would have remained as far-fetched as it was before 1999.
Kosovo was one in a series of many conflicts to arise from the
break-up of Yugoslavia, whereas Indonesia had remained intact,
along with its grip over the ‘27th province’. Despite the fact that
the UN had never recognised Indonesian sovereignty over East
Timor, the deployment of international peacekeepers was with the
consent, however grudging, of Jakarta.
Indeed, in June 2000, the Australian commander of InterFET,
General Peter Cosgrove even went as far as to say that ‘the
mission in East Timor was accomplished with the co-operation of
the Indonesian armed forces, not in spite of them, or in
opposition to them’.6
5
By all means, let people in Britain denounce New Labour’s

interventionist foreign policy, but they should not blame East
Timor for it, however ridiculous the late Robin Cook appeared by
jumping on the ‘Something Must Be Done’ bandwagon.
Internationalism is a term which has been given a bad name,
partly because of its socialist connotations. It is the reason why
Cuba sends doctors to East Timor and other countries. More
recently it has become synonymous with the term ‘liberal
imperialists’ used by isolationists on the right, like Correlli
Barnett.7
The problem with isolationism is not that it is unethical or
uncaring, but that it is counterproductive. ‘What does it matter to
you if a million Eritreans die?’ somebody asked me. If it means
that their relatives start turning up in large numbers in our
country, a great deal!
To paraphrase John Quincy Adams, why go abroad in search
of monsters to destroy, when all those monsters are turning up on
your shores intent on destroying you? In his book The Bottom
Billion, the Oxford economist Paul Collier wrote:
I have a young son, and when he is older I don’t want him to be

exposed to the risks of being a peacekeeping soldier. But I don’t
want him exposed to the risk of being blown apart in London or
shot in Bradford by some exile from a failing state, either.8
The late Australian academic Herb Feith, one of the country’s

first specialists on Indonesia, wrote how, after living and working
among Indonesians, he and his colleagues saw themselves as being
in the van of enlightenment on things like racism and

parochialism. And when I speak of parochialism I don’t mean
merely Australian parochialism, I also mean Western
parochialism, which is sometimes called first-world
6
parochialism and which is, as you well know, well and truly
alive.9
However, parochialism, is not objectionable because it is

unenlightened, but because it is bad for business. Of course,
countries are entirely within their rights to hide themselves from
the rest of the world, gaze at their navels or live in the past, but
they should have no right then to complain that they are not taken
seriously, or completely ignored.
The reaction of the government of Kazakhstan to Borat, a
creation of British comedian Sacha Baron Cohen, is a case in
point. How many people had even heard of Kazakhstan before
then? Had it been better known, it is less likely that the urine-
drinking, Jew-hating, gypsy-hating and sister-raping TV reporter
would have been portrayed as one of its citizens. It was only with
the release of the Borat film, that Kazakhstan’s tourist board began
advertising on CNN and other international channels.
In 1997, Frances Cairncross of the Economist wrote a prescient
book called The Death of Distance. Although much of what she
wrote is now commonplace; e-commerce, streaming of video and
audio, telephone calls over the internet, all over high-speed
broadband connections, psychological barriers about places being
‘far away’ are alive and well.
When the miniseries Answered by Fire, set in East Timor during
the 1999 referendum was shown in Australia and Canada in 2006,
I contacted Power, the international distributor in London to
enquire as to whether it would be shown in the UK. I was told
that there had not been any interest from the ‘English [sic]
channels’, possibly because East Timor was ‘far away’.
Yet in what way is it ‘far away’? It is closer to Britain than
Australia and New Zealand, and was of enough interest in the
1990s to warrant two ITV documentaries, Max Stahl’s In Cold
Blood and John Pilger’s Death of a Nation.
7
One can only hope the Australian feature film Balibo, set
during the 1975 invasion of East Timor is not orphaned by a
distributor as surly or unresponsive as that of Answered by Fire.
The deaths of five TV newsmen in Balibo in 1975 has long
been a cause celèbre in Australia. However, the issue has also been
used as a way of stifling debate about East Timor, with any
negative media coverage of Indonesia’s role in East Timor being
portrayed as an attempt to ‘get square’ over the deaths.
Of course, focusing on the ‘Balibo Five’ has played to
Australian parochialism, with talk of ‘our boys’ or ‘our journos’,
even though only two of the men, Greg Shackleton and Tony
Stewart were Australians. Two others, Malcolm Rennie and Brian
Peters, were British, while another, Gary Cunningham, was a
New Zealander.
Very few East Timorese I know have never heard of the ‘Balibo
Five’, and probably could not have cared less if they had. Given
what they and their families had to go through for twenty-four
years, who can blame them? Certainly the families of these men
were badly treated by all three countries’ governments, but not to
the extent that people in East Timor were by the Indonesian
military.
As with the Bali bombings and the Tsunami, Western media
focus on the Western victims, not the local ones. As the
apocryphal newspaper headline reads: ‘Thousands Die In
Earthquake, No Local People Involved’.
I remember talking with one progressive type in Britain, who
bemoaned how many feature films about Asia and Africa like
Beyond Rangoon and Hotel Rwanda focused on Westerners. ‘Don’t
people in these countries have their own stories to tell?’ he asked.
Yes, they do, and they make their own films about them, but
unless you go to an art house cinema or film festival, you won’t
see them. In fact, while Westerners wring their hands in angst,
8
most East Timorese I know who have heard of Balibo are just glad
that foreign film makers have taken notice of their country at all.
While Portugal is dismissed as being ‘far away’, the Portuguese,
sadly, are less intrepid in the age of the jet aeroplane than they
were in the age of the sailing ship. When I told a Portuguese
colleague that I was going to New Zealand, he looked at me
aghast: ‘it’s so remote!’ Vasco da Gama would be turning in his
grave.
If East Timor has suffered from ignorance and prejudice
towards it, then it has also suffered from the ignorance and
prejudice that the main foreign players in the country, Australia
and Portugal, display towards each other. There have been few
other instances in the world in which those countries in
particular, or indeed, Asia-Pacific and Portuguese-speaking
countries generally, find themselves living and working side by
side.
Portugal is looked upon with suspicion in the region, not, as
some Portuguese acquaintances have complained, because of
‘Lusophobia’ or anti-Portuguese sentiment, but ignorance. Some
people, like former Australian Prime Minister, Paul Keating, have
accused others of viewing Indonesia through the ‘prism of East
Timor’,10 but in reality, many Australians still view Portugal in
much the same way.
Many Australian commentators have conjured up absurd
images of Portugal, bordering on Black Legend and blood libel,
attributing all kinds of sinister and ulterior motives for its
involvement in East Timor. Yet, far from having a hidden agenda
in East Timor, the problem is that Portugal has no agenda at all,
and simply uses the promotion of its language and culture as a fig
leaf for its lack of investment. It is not a country to be despised, it
is to be pitied.
9
Sadly, disagreements in East Timor over the use of Portuguese

have damaged the image of the language in the region, and it is
seen as the source of the fledgling state’s problems. Worst of all, a
belief has emerged that because Portuguese is regarded as a useless
language by many people in East Timor, it is, therefore, a useless
language.
Yet if the use of Portuguese in East Timor is anachronistic and
impractical, then what about the use of French in Cambodia,
which France has spent millions trying to promote as a medium
of instruction in schools and universities, with little success? Why
have no Australian commentators denounced this as a ‘whacky
insistence’,11 ‘bizarre project’12 or ‘pseudo-colonial’?13 Why has
Paris not been accused of ‘preening chauvinism’ over language in
Cambodia, as Lisbon has been in East Timor?14
Partly because Australia does not regard Cambodia as its turf,
as it does East Timor, but also because French is widely taught in
schools and universities in Australia, whereas Portuguese is not. If
Australia were to dismiss French as a useless language, many
teachers and lecturers would be out of a job.
Yet why do so many universities in Australia teach Spanish,
given that it has died out in the Philippines, the only country in
Asia where it was ever spoken? Does Australia have strong trade
links with Spain and other Spanish-speaking countries? No, and
nor has there been much immigration from those countries. In
fact, Australia’s largest trading partner in South America is Brazil,
the largest Portuguese-speaking country in the world.
Perhaps it is because Australia’s few Latin America specialists
look adoringly on Fidel Castro, Che Guevara, or Hugo Chávez,
just as many of its more ubiquitous Indonesia specialists looked
adoringly on Suharto. As a Portuguese-speaking capitalist, I do not
know what is more depressing: Australians having the idea that
10
everybody in Latin America is a socialist revolutionary; or that

everybody in Latin America speaks Spanish.
It all comes down to image: Portuguese is the Cinderella and
Ugly Duckling of the Latin languages, certainly compared to
Spanish. As A A Gill put it ‘Spain got bullfights, flamenco,
Penélope Cruz and Real Madrid; Portugal got golf courses, porto,
gout and domestic servants.’15
While the Australian media have been accused of looking at
Portuguese as ‘Latin with a triple by-pass’,16 even this is over-
generous, given that several Australian universities teach Latin,
but not Portuguese.
Some people from Western countries, even those who consider
themselves well-informed and culturally sensitive, think that the
poorer a country is and the darker-skinned its people are, the
more right they have to patronise the people of that country, and
insult their intelligence.
It is, as always, a case of ‘do as I say, not as I do’, for example,
East Timorese who may wish to have dealings with Portugal are
given lectures on geographical realities by Australians, who think
nothing of visiting Europe, without the slightest interest in
visiting Southeast Asia. To paraphrase Gore Vidal, it is a case of
globalisation for the rich and parochialisation for the poor.
A family friend in Singapore told me that ‘when you’re giving
advice to people in developing countries, you need to be
diplomatic’. That is not the point. If what you are telling them is
ill-informed, no amount of ‘diplomacy’ is going to make it any
more palatable.
Why would you want to be lectured about the importance of
learning a language which you already speak, by those who a)
cannot pronounce the name of your country correctly, and b)
cannot get the name of that language right, let alone speak it
themselves?
11
Among some supposedly culturally sensitive people there is a

belief that non-Western languages should have authentic names in
English: ‘Panjabi’ instead of ‘Punjabi’; ‘Kiswahili’ instead of
‘Swahili’; ‘te reo Maori’ instead of ‘Maori’, and ‘Bahasa Indonesia’
instead of ‘Indonesian’.
Names of languages in Indonesian and Malay always include
the word ‘Bahasa’, but why should English speakers follow suit?
Nobody calls Latin ‘Lingua Latina’ in English, they call it ‘Latin’.
Even sillier has been the tendency to refer to the Indonesian
language as ‘Bahasa’, which simply means ‘language’, and is the
equivalent of referring to Latin in English as ‘Lingua’.
I do not mind what speakers of other languages call Britain, as
long as it is not the same as their word for England. Strangely,
while even the BBC’s Indonesian service refers to Britain as
‘Inggris’, its Radio Netherlands counterpart calls it ‘Britania’.
There are even disagreements over whether Tetum should be
called ‘Tetun’, which is what it is called in the language itself,
rather than ‘Tetum’, which is influenced by Portuguese, in which
‘m’ at the end of the word is pronounced as a nasal ‘n’. The late
Cliff Morris, who compiled a Tetum dictionary, wrote:
The wise old men (KATUAS) tell us that the people who lived on
the plains (TETU, adjective), therefore the people who spoke the
language were of the plains (TETUN, noun). There can be no
argument as to the name of the language or its spelling as adjectives
are changed to nouns by adding N. In any case no other Tetun
word ends in M.17
Well, the katuas are entitled to call Tetum anything they want
in their language, but it does not follow that people should call it
that in English. However, we should all be able to agree that it is
not called ‘Teton’,18 which is the language of the Sioux Nation,
and nor is it a ‘kitchen dialect of Indonesian and Portuguese’!19
12
While internet services from Google like YouTube and Blogger

have helped promote East Timor internationally, Google does not
recognise Tetum, and the local homepage, google.tl, is in
Portuguese only. Having suspended its Google in Your Language
project, it seems unlikely that Tetum will have the same
recognition as such languages as Klingon, Hacker, Pirate, Elmer
Fudd, and Bork! Bork! Bork! (spoken by Swedish Chef on The
Muppet Show).
There have also long been people on the left who live in the
modern societies and enjoy its benefits, who look upon those who
do not as being noble savages. ‘I don’t want the Eastern Europeans
to be like us,’ one of them said to me after the fall of the Berlin
Wall. Why not? They were before, and given the choice in 1945,
would have been again.
Similarly, some on the right think that it is clever to deny such
things to others on the grounds that they loathe modernity and
despise progress. Yet would they want to swap place with people
living on a remote island with no airport, no electricity, no
telecommunications links, and no economy?
In his book The New Asian Hemisphere: The Irresistible Shift of
Power to the East Singaporean diplomat and academic, Kishore
Mahbubani wrote: ‘If I were asked to name the date when my life
entered the modern world, I would date it to the arrival of the
flush toilet.’20 Few people would take issue with Mahbubani on
that, not least people in Indonesian West Timor, who still have to
use a plastic scoop filled with water from a tank.
I do not expect people to champion the rights of every ethnic
group or territory seeking independent statehood, because I
certainly do not. However, I do not wish ill of anyone in South
Ossetia, Transdnestria, Western Sahara, Dagestan or elsewhere
who seeks it, nor anyone in other countries who support them.
13
Nor do I expect everyone to be a world citizen. Most people in

the US will never travel outside their country in their entire lives.
Nor will many people in large countries like Indonesia or Brazil.
However, the reason why the US is a world power, and China is
becoming one, is because it has a critical mass of people who are
exceptionally well-informed about the rest of the world.
While there is much talk of Brazil, along with Russia, India and
China, being one of the BRIC nations, it is still the most inward-
looking of them all. How many Southeast Asia specialists are there
in Brazil? How many Latin America specialists are there in
Indonesia? Answer: not enough. This is because, unlike the US or
China, these countries still see each other’s part of the world as
either ‘far away’ or a ‘no go area’. For years, there has been talk
about ‘south-south cooperation’, but very little else. To paraphrase
what Mahatma Gandhi said when he was asked what he thought
about Western civilisation, ‘south-south cooperation’ would be ‘an
excellent idea’.
While China has forged close trade links with Brazil, there has
been little incentive for Indonesia to do so, given that unlike
China, both are resource rich, rather than resource hungry, and
see little advantage in forging such links, despite both countries
being members of the G20.
What I do, however, expect, is that when a people have chosen
independent statehood, in accordance with international law,
however small or ‘obscure’ that state may be, the rest of the world
should recognise that. It is not really too much to ask.
14
CHAPTER TWO
MYTHOLOGY,
DOGMA AND DENIAL
History is a pact between the dead,
the living, and the yet unborn
- Edmund Burke
HISTORY is not necessarily written by victors, but it is invariably

written by the powerful. In the case of East Timor, while those
foreigners who opposed its self-determination may have lost the
argument, they are still in a position to manipulate and distort
history. Indeed, while these people are prompt to accuse people of
peddling myths about East Timor, they have been peddling a
whole mythology about the issue. Here are some of its most
‘fashionable’ orthodoxies:
East Timor cannot be a nation state, because it is based on artificial

colonial boundaries
Most national boundaries in the region are those inherited

from Western colonial powers, including those of Indonesia.
While Indonesian nationalists alluded to the Majapahit empire,
which covered much of the archipelago in the fourteenth and
fifteenth centuries, this did not correspond to the boundaries of
the Republic of Indonesia of today. If this were to be used as an
argument for Indonesia’s claim to East Timor, then it could also
be used for claims to Malaysia, Singapore, Brunei, and the
southern provinces of Thailand.
15
MYTHOLOGY, DOGMA AND DENIAL
When it was pressing its claim to West New Guinea at the UN

in 1957, Indonesia stated:
[T]he attempt to link West Irian to east New Guinea would

create a very dangerous precedent, for example, in the case of the
islands of Borneo and Timor. Indonesia had no claims on any
territories which had not been part of the Netherlands East
Indies. No one should suggest otherwise or advance dangerous
theories in that respect.1
Certainly, colonial boundaries are not sacrosanct, and there are

precedents for a former colony of one European country merging
with one a former colony of another. For example, Cameroon was
created through the merger of a British colony, with a former
French one, although not without friction between English and
French-speaking regions, while attempts to unite formerly British
Gambia with formerly French Senegal, even in a loose
confederation, foundered. Such mergers are the exception rather
than the rule.
Yet even homogeneity is no guarantee of national unity. The
people of Somalia are from the same ethnic group, language and
religion, but the country has broken up, with the formerly British
part declaring independence from the former Italian part, now the
quintessential ‘failed state’.
The former Australian Prime Minister, Gough Whitlam,
claimed that ‘the great tragedy’ of East Timor under Portuguese
rule had been that it had been ‘kept in a cocoon’. ‘There is no
question’, he said, ‘that but for the arrangement made by
Alexander VI and approved by Julius II, each side of 1500, the
island would have been united. It was a pure accident of history
that it was separated.’2
Separated, yes, but by whom? If any European country were
responsible for the separation of the island, it was the
16
Netherlands, which occupied the west of the island in 1640,

leading to its eventual partition. As late as 1769, the capital of
Portuguese Timor was not Dili, but Lifau, in the west of the
island, in what is now the enclave of Oecussi. Yet Whitlam
claimed that:
There were no contacts with West Timor, and there has been no
trouble in West Timor. The point is that they both had an
indigenous language, Tetum … they did have the same language
… There was a possibility that if they could meet each other, as
they would over a three - or five - or eight-year period, that they
would learn to communicate … there was a chance, with proper
preparation, that the two Timors could have got to live
together.3
In what way would they have ‘got to live together? ‘João’,

interviewed by the Australian author Michele Turner in 1986, was
well aware of conditions in the Indonesian part of the island:
The people from West Timor used to cross the border to come
to our market in Maliana … They traded kerosene, food, dresses
for medicines… they were so desperate for them. So we could
see that the level of life there was lower than ours. Indonesian
doctors used to come to watch operations and learn from
Portuguese surgery and West Timor authorities and their wives
came to Dili Hospital to be operated on.4
It is, therefore, far from clear that increased contact between

the two halves of the island would necessarily have convinced the
people of East Timor of the merits of integration with Indonesia.
In fact, José Manuel Duarte, one of the participants in a rebellion
against Portuguese rule in 1959, stated that: ‘We are not interested
in the government of Indonesia, but in the integration of East and
West Timor.’5
17
Support for independence came from Fretilin, a communist party.
When East Timor’s decolonisation began in 1974, the Cold

War was at its height, and those in Jakarta advocating the
incorporation of East Timor were able to take full advantage of
Western fears of a ‘communist threat’ in the region.
Consequently, one of the objectives of Indonesian military
intelligence (BAKIN) was to portray the Frente Revolucionária de
Timor-Leste Independente (Fretilin or Revolutionary Front of
Independent East Timor) as a communist party, which would
turn East Timor into a Soviet or Chinese satellite.
Yet Fretilin in 1974-75 was not so much the most radical party
in East Timor, so much as, in the words of Australian journalist
Bill Nicol, ‘the least conservative’, with members from the right
to the extreme left.6
In fact, Fretilin was originally founded in May 1974 as the
Associação Timorense Social Democrática (ASDT or Timorese Social
Democratic Association) and it was only in September of that year
that it adopted the more radical-sounding name. Clearly the
similarity of its name to Frelimo in Mozambique did not help,
nor did the demand in its manifesto to be recognised as the ‘only
legitimate representative of the people of East Timor’.7
In an article in the Sydney Morning Herald, Gerard Henderson
wrote that ‘[José] Ramos Horta acknowledged Fretilin had made a
“tremendous mistake” in willingly [!] allowing itself to be
portrayed “as communist”‘,8 yet what Horta had actually said was:
Sure, there were some elements who had come from Portugal --
Marxist orientation, but there were no more than five elements,
very vocal, made sounding speeches with Marxist slogans and so
on. That is what was exploited by Indonesian to portray Fretilin
as Communist, but that was an enormous exaggeration. But I
acknowledge that was a tremendous mistake on our part.9
18
In fact, Mari Alkatiri, later to become Fretilin’s leader after

independence, and branded a ‘Marxist’ by Henderson and other
Australian commentators, was critical of how detached from
geopolitical reality these students were, seeing Portuguese
colonialism as a greater threat than Indonesian neocolonialism.10
Although Fretilin always advocated independence, it was not
the only party in East Timor to support independence. While the
more conservative União Democrática Timorense (UDT or Timorese
Democratic Union) joined with Fretilin in a pro-independence
coalition, having previously favoured continued links with
Portugal.
The only party to advocate integration with Indonesia was the
Associação Popular Democrática Timorense (Apodeti or Timorese
Popular Democratic Association), which had only limited
support. It had originally called itself Associação para a Integraçao de
Timor com a Indonésia (Association for the Integration of Timor
with Indonesia) but had felt the need to downplay its intentions.
Although it advocated East Timor becoming an autonomous
province within the Republic of Indonesia, this became untenable
when Jakarta made it clear that it would have no special status and
would be no different from any other province.
Two other parties were established: Klibur Oan Timor Asuain
(KOTA or ‘Union of Timorese Warriors’ and Partido Trabalhista
(Labour Party) but never gained official recognition from the
Portuguese authorities. Indonesia would later take advantage of
this, by claiming that there were four parties in opposition.
Even a pro-Australian party emerged in East Timor, known as
Associação Demócratica para a Integração de Timor-Leste com a Austrália
(Aditla or Democratic Association for the Integration of East
Timor with Australia) but soon folded after Canberra rejected the
idea,11 just as it did António Salazar’s suggestion that the territory
become an Australian dominion or condominium in 1964.12
19
Indonesian radio broadcasts to East Timor not only denounced

Fretilin as ‘communist’ but also denounced UDT as ‘fascist’,
playing to the prejudices of Fretilin’s more extreme members,
who at this time, were daubing such graffiti as ‘Burn the Traitors!’
and ‘Death to the Fascists!’13 These broadcasts also took to
accusing both pro-independence parties as ‘communist’, claiming
that UDT’s leader João Carrascalão, supported the Soviet Union,
while Fretilin supported China.14
As early as October 1974, BAKIN was planning to brand
Fretilin as communist. Harry Tjan, of the Centre for Strategic and
International Studies, who acted as a conduit between Indonesian
military and the Australian Embassy in Jakarta, told First Secretary
Jan Arriens that Australia ‘need not worry that there would be
adequate evidence of communist subversion in Portuguese
Timor. We will look after that.’15
Testifying to East Timor’s Commission for Reception, Truth
and Reconciliation (known by its Portuguese acronym CAVR)
Xanana Gusmão recalled how the ‘communist’ label was used as
an excuse by UDT supporters to attack Fretilin members
physically. Although Vicente Reis, also known as Sahe, was
accused of ‘bringing communism from Portugal’, others,
including Gusmão, were also accused of being ‘all communists’:
They yelled ‘Communist!’ as they beat and kicked Sahe’s body

until he staggered. But he never complained. A UDT guard told
us that we were in detention because we were all communists.
Sahe asked him whether he knew what communism was. He
said: ‘Communism, yeah, ah, I am not sure’ and he left.16
Fretilin did not, in fact, declare itself to be a Marxist-Leninist

party until 1977, after the Indonesian invasion, and did not
formally reject this until 1984.17
20
In an interview for ABC Radio National, Richard Woolcott,

who was Australian Ambassador to Jakarta in 1975, emphasised
how Indonesia’s position on East Timor had to be seen in the
context of the Cold War:
Indonesia was seriously afraid that if an independent East Timor

were to emerge at that time it might be recognised by the Soviet
Union or China, and actually the phrase was quite commonly
used, it would become a South East Asian Cuba, by which they
meant that the Russians might put missiles in there and point it
[sic] at Jakarta. Now this all seems very fanciful now but at the
time it was a real thought.18
Yet in his memoirs, Woolcott portrayed the Soviet Union as

indifferent to the prospect of an Indonesian takeover of East
Timor in 1975.
I recall asking the Soviet ambassador how the Soviet Union

would react if Indonesia moved to incorporate East Timor. We
went through a revealing charade. Taking me over to the map of
Indonesia on his office wall, he said: ‘Where is East Timor?’
Playing my part, I pointed to it on the map. ‘It is very small and
surrounded by Indonesia, isn’t it?’ he said, and then changed the
subject.19
Although China recognised Fretilin’s unilateral declaration of

independence, and condemned the Indonesian invasion at the
UN, it was anticipated by Indonesia, and seen merely as ‘an
obligatory protest’. In a cable to London on 2 January 1976, the
British Ambassador to Jakarta, John Archibald Ford, wrote:
Apropos the Fretilin delegation’s visit to Peking and the Chinese

ostensible support of Fretilin, the Chinese had apparently
commented to the effect that too much notice should not be
21
paid to their support of Fretilin: there were occasions when

cannons need to be fired even if only paper balls were shot.20
By 1990, diplomatic relations between China and Indonesia

had been restored, and Beijing, mindful of its own problems with
those seeking independence for Tibet or Xinjiang, assured Jakarta
that it would not provide aid for subversive activities or interfere
in Indonesia’s internal affairs.21
Indonesia only took military action in East Timor reluctantly, after the
territory erupted into civil war
When Indonesian military intelligence launched Operasi

Komodo, with the objective of ensuring that East Timor opted for
integration with Indonesia, it planned to use Apodeti as a vehicle
for integration. Yet when Apodeti failed to gain widespread
support, it turned instead to UDT, warning its leaders that Jakarta
would not tolerate an independent East Timor under Fretilin
control.22
This led to the break-up of the pro-independence coalition
between Fretilin and UDT, and the staging of a coup on 11
August 1975. During this time, the Portuguese Governor Mário
Lemos Pires moved to the island of Ataúro, north of Dili, where
he remained until the Indonesian invasion.
While bloody, with an estimated 3000 dead,23 by September
1975, fighting had largely ended, with UDT and Apodeti leaders
and their supporters fleeing across the Indonesian border. As a
condition for being granted asylum, they were required to sign a
petition calling for integration with Indonesia. UDT and Apodeti
later became known as the Movimento Anticomunista (MAC or
Anti-Communist Movement).24
José Martins, leader of the small KOTA party, who had
addressed the UN Security Council in support of Indonesia, later
22
escaped and wrote a letter to the UN Secretary-General, in which

he said:
The very moment we entered Indonesian territory in the first

week of September 1975, fleeing from advancing Fretilin forces,
we became instruments of the Indonesian government.
I wish to stress the fact that while the Indonesian authorities

claimed that over 40,000 East Timorese sought refuge in West
Timor, the real figure was no more than 20,000. It is also
necessary to stress that these people did not flee to Indonesian
territory because they wanted to join Indonesia.
The refugees were either forced to take military training and

fight against Fretilin or to work without pay for the Indonesians.
Their belongings were confiscated, such as money, jewellery and
so on. As early as October, the refugees wanted to return to East
Timor, but the Indonesian authorities did not allow them to do
so.25
At the same time, the CIA was reporting that: ‘Jakarta is now
sending guerilla units into the Portuguese half of the island in
order to engage Fretilin forces, encourage pro-Indonesian
elements, and provoke incidents that would provide the
Indonesians with an excuse to invade if they decide to do so.’26
Gough Whitlam accused the political parties in East Timor of
intransigence. He said: ‘We said we would make Darwin available
for all the parties to get together, and I think Macau was
suggested, and Lisbon, and there were other ones. But whoever
was winning, or hoping to win, would not come.’27 Yet a paper
prepared by the US Secretary of State, Henry Kissinger, pointed
out that Fretilin, which it described as ‘vaguely leftist’, would now
be outnumbered in any conference by ‘the two rival parties now
under de facto Indonesian control’.28
23
In East Timor itself, Fretilin was calling on the Portuguese

Governor to return to Dili and resume the decolonisation process.
The Portuguese flag continued to fly over government buildings,
and the Banco Nacional Ultramarino remained locked. The
Governor, however, argued that he was awaiting instructions from
Lisbon. In a memorandum to the Portuguese government, he
stressed:
…the existence of a Fretilin that proposes negotiations while I

am running out of excuses. Though I agree that any solution in
the region must pass through negotiations with Indonesia, it is a
fact that Fretilin declares to control most of the territory, and has
been seeking negotiations for a while now, and these have been
postponed because of the prevailing situation.29
Pires had sent several messages to Lisbon asking for

instructions and help, but none was forthcoming. His last
telegram, according to José Ramos Horta, pleaded with Lisbon to
answer ‘the 17 telegrams I sent earlier’.30
Far from provoking an Indonesian invasion, Fretilin’s
unilateral declaration of independence on 28 November 1975 was
taken at a time when border regions had already fallen to the
Indonesian forces. James Dunn, former Australian Consul in Dili,
had advised José Ramos Horta that Fretilin should wait a few
more months before declaring independence unilaterally. Horta
had advised his colleagues to wait until at least January 1976, but
Fretilin made the decision to declare independence on 1
December.31
With the fall of the town of Atabae, forty kilometres west of
Dili, this was brought forward. On the day that he was sworn in as
President of East Timor, Fretilin’s president, Xavier do Amaral,
said:
24
The Indonesian army have already entered Atabae… They have

occupied Atabae! If we wait until 1 December we might not
have time to declare independence in Dili. So we’d better
proclaim independence today.32
Under Indonesian rule, human rights abuses in East Timor were no

worse than Portugal’s
In an article in The Australian in 2007, former diplomat Cavan

Hogue wrote:
We hear much about how Australia should have done something

about the Indonesian invasion because of our debt to the
Timorese who supported Australian soldiers during World War
II. Nobody, however, showed much concern for the Timorese
when they were being oppressed by the brutal dictatorship of
Antonio Salazar. Why not? Is European oppression more
acceptable than Asian oppression?33
Certainly, Portugal’s human rights record in East Timor was

far from unblemished, before or after the Second World War. In
1959, the rebellion in Viqueque was suppressed by the
Portuguese, who brought in soldiers from Goa, with estimates of
the death toll varying between 160 and 1000.34 Many people
involved in the rebellion were subsequently exiled to Angola and
Mozambique.
The Portuguese secret police (PIDE) was active in East Timor,
described by José Ramos Horta as ‘omnipresent and powerful,
feared and hated by everyone’.35 In 1970, Horta had been
interrogated by PIDE and exiled to Mozambique, after he had
suggested to visiting Americans that ‘if Portugal is too poor to
develop Timor, better give it to the Americans.’36 Shortly before
the Carnation Revolution in 1974, Horta was preparing to go into
25
exile again, following an Australian newspaper article in which he

had said that the East Timorese were ‘lagging behind in education,
professional opportunities and prospects’.37
However, to paraphrase what Hogue himself said in his article,
any suggested action must be put within the framework of the
world as it was then, not as it is today. Australia was under the
conservative government of Robert Menzies, the ‘White Australia’
policy was alive and well, and there was little interest among
Australians in their Asian neighbours, much less in East Timor.
Nevertheless, Australian soldiers had not forgotten their debt
to those in East Timor who had helped them, and in 1946, even
lobbied Canberra to purchase the territory from Portugal in order
to improve living conditions.38 Yet even their efforts to show
concern for East Timor were frustrated by the lack of transport
and communications links; direct flights from Darwin did not
begin until 1966.
Despite this, Arthur ‘Steve’ Stevenson, a commando who had
served in Portuguese Timor, did maintain in contact with
Celestino dos Anjos who had helped him evade capture by the
Japanese in 1945, and was awarded an Australian loyalty medal. In
1986, Stevenson received a letter from dos Anjos’ son, Virgilio. It
was an account of how his father and his wife had been killed by
the Indonesian military.
…on 27/9/83 they called my father and my wife and not far from
the camp, they told my father to dig his own grave and when
they saw it was deep enough to receive him, they machine-
gunned him into the grave. They next told my pregnant wife to
dig her own grave, but she insisted that she preferred to share
my father’s grave. They then pushed her into the grave and
killed her in the same manner as my father.39
26
The letter was dated 2 March 1984, but the flow of

information in and out of the territory became far more restricted
under the Indonesian military than it had been under the
Portuguese. Interviewed by Michele Turner, ‘Justino’ described
the risks involved in sending and receiving letters:
Mail could take up to five months in Dili to be censored. There

was a unit of Indonesian Military Intelligence that did this work.
People who understood Portuguese, Tetun [sic] and Hakka
[Chinese] read all the letters. If there was nothing about the
military situation, your letter might get through. I wouldn’t
write to my family. A simple letter from outside could turn into
a trap for them. After it was censored they’d be watched.40
East Timor saw rapid development under Indonesian rule after

centuries of Portuguese neglect
Under Indonesian rule, Indonesians made up a fifth of East

Timor’s population by 1998.41 It was not just the indigenous
population of the ‘27th province’ who were entitled to all those
schools, hospitals, churches and roads, but the growing number of
transmigrants from Java and Sulawesi, who also dominated
commerce and administration. By contrast, the Portuguese spent
little on infrastructure in East Timor because there were so few of
them, or indeed, people from elsewhere in their empire, in
comparison to colonies like Angola and Mozambique.
However, writing in The Australian in 2007, the late Paddy
McGuinness claimed that:
[B]y the time of independence [East Timor] was far better off
than it had ever been under Portuguese rule, and so far arguably
than under the regime which has followed independence. And
its social services and education system were far superior to
27
anything the Catholic Church had allowed when it controlled

these areas.42
McGuinness described the claim that East Timor experienced

deprivation and famine under Indonesian rule as ‘a myth…
beloved of the activists’. Yet as late as 2009, malnutrition rates in
West Timor were on a par with sub-Saharan Africa.43
Bill Nicol gave this account of conditions in Indonesian West
Timor, at a time when East Timor was still under Portuguese
rule.
The Timor archipelago had poor harvests in 1974 and 1975

because the annual wet seasons came too late. The 1975 corn
crop was cut in half. The result was famine in Savu, Sumba, and
all of Indonesian Timor except the Amarisi region in the south.44
If East Timor’s social services and education system under

Indonesian rule were ‘far superior’ to those provided by the
Catholic Church, then why that was the case? The answer is
because Indonesian authorities prevented schools operated by the
Church from receiving aid from foreign donors. Teachers had to
choose between remaining in Catholic schools, denied funding, or
working in Indonesian schools, on wages treble their existing
income.45
The total number of jobs in East Timor created by the whole
Indonesian Fourth Five-Year Development Plan (1983-89) was
just 1,675, less than 4 per cent of what would have been necessary
for all school leavers. In 1990, one disaffected youth said:
What’s the use of school if there’s no way of getting a decent

job? These days, all office jobs are closed to us. If the Regional
Office Head is a newcomer, he will only be interested in having
his relatives or at least people from his own region working in
his office.46
28
Visiting East Timor in February 1993, the US Ambassador to

Jakarta, Robert Barry, described the situation as ‘calm but grim’.
He gave this assessment of economic development in the
territory:
Economic backwardness is remarkable despite the efforts the

Indonesians have put into building up the infrastructure,
improving education and investing in agriculture over the past
few years… Efforts to get domestic and foreign investors to
build factories in [East] Timor have failed, and there is little
question that the province is a drain on the Indonesian
treasury.47
Bill Nicol also gives an insight into the ‘superiority’ of

Indonesia’s social services and education system in the Indonesian
half of Timor.
There had been a flourish of economic activity in Kupang since

the Portuguese revolution. Roads and bridges were rebuilt and
buildings were given a drab, cement-rendered facelift. But the
work was only superficial. Beneath the surface the schools still
had a chronic shortage of teachers and textbooks, the hospital a
chronic shortage of doctors and so on.48
Jose Dinoy, a resident of Kupang, gave this account of

conditions in West Timor today:
Roads are a state of ruin, electricity supply is intermitted [sic],

there is no potable water supply provided by PDAM (there are
no water treatment plants in the entire province of NTT), town
planning does not exist and where it does it is at the mercy of
corrupt practices, the health and education systems are in chaos,
etc.49
29
Independence leaders were unrepresentative of the people of East Timor
Since 1975, many commentators have tried to depict East

Timor’s independence leaders as unrepresentative and
illegitimate. When political parties first emerged in East Timor,
Gough Whitlam claimed that:
There may well be, beneath the surface, thoroughly indigenous

political forces which would carry the support of the inhabitants
of Portuguese Timor in directions different from those on
which their present leaders are set.50
Gough Whitlam regarded political leaders in East Timor as

unrepresentative was on the grounds that they were mestiço or
mixed race. In 1979, he said:
Political parties emerged there for the first time in May 1974…
They were led by mestizos [sic]… who seemed to be desperate
to succeed the Portuguese as leaders of the rest of the
population.51
When challenged about this by José Ramos Horta in 1982,

Whitlam replied that ‘the most articulate spokespersons of the
Timorese happened to be mestiços’.52
In fact, there were relatively few mixed-race people in the
Fretilin leadership, with José Ramos Horta being an exception.
When fighting broke out in August 1975, many mixed-race East
Timorese fled to Australia. Far from considering it a bastion of
mixed-race (or white) privilege, they were accusing Fretilin of
forcing them out. Interviewed by The Age, José Gonçalves said:
30
The Fretelin [sic] is taking little babies and cutting their heads
off. The Fretelin are racists. They don’t want white people to
have cars and things like that.53
There were mixed-race people in the UDT leadership,

although having Portuguese ancestry did not preclude them from
taking up an allegiance to Indonesia. Mário Carrascalão served as
Governor of East Timor between 1981 and 1992, while his
brother, Manuel, was a member of the territory’s Assembly.
Following the end of Indonesian rule in 1999, independence
leaders returned from exile. Whereas ethnicity had previously
been used to discredit many of East Timor’s leaders, the fact that
many leaders, had been in exile, was now being used against them.
When José Ramos Horta, Mari Alkatiri and others left East
Timor on 4 December 1975, it was in the full knowledge that
Indonesia was about to invade. Short of collaborating with Jakarta,
returning to East Timor under Indonesian rule was not an option,
nor was basing themselves in neighbouring countries like
Thailand or the Philippines. Even Australia and New Zealand
refused entry to Fretilin leaders until the 1980s.
Worse still, in the eyes of Australian commentators, was the
fact that several leaders, like Fretilin leader Mari Alkatiri, had lived
in Mozambique, with references to a ‘Mozambique clique’.54 Yet
José Ramos Horta also received support from Mozambique when
he represented Fretilin at the UN, working at the country’s New
York mission, and travelling on a Mozambique diplomatic
passport.
East Timor was hardly the first post-colonial state in which
nationalist leaders had spent long periods in exile. Thabo Mbeki,
the former President of South Africa, spent nearly thirty years in
exile, during which time he received military training in the
Soviet Union.
31
Another stereotype of East Timor’s leaders in the Australian

media was that they were ‘aging’,55 although in 1975, the problem
was the precise opposite: they were mostly young and
inexperienced. When he left East Timor just days before the
invasion, José Ramos Horta was only 25. By contrast, Gough
Whitlam was 56 when he became Prime Minister of Australia in
1972, while Nelson Mandela was 76 when he became President of
South Africa in 1994.
Divisions in East Timor itself are the cause of political unrest in the
country since 1975.
When East Timor saw widespread unrest during 2006, this was
used by Australian commentators as proof that East Timor was as
irreconcilably divided as ever. It became fashionable to talk of a
regional division between lorosa’e and loromonu or ‘east’ and ‘west’.
It was easy to characterise this as being due to ethnic and linguistic
differences, with easterners being Papuans, and westerners being
Austronesians, speaking completely unrelated languages.
Yet this was simplistic: in the district of Bobonaro, on the
Indonesian border, many people speak Bunak, a Papuan language,
while in Viqueque, in the southeast, speakers of Naueti, an
Austronesian language, have intermarried with speakers of
Makassae, a Papuan one.56 The division was based more upon the
fact that under the Indonesian occupation, the western districts
were the first to be brought under Indonesian control, while the
eastern ones were the last. (Even when Indonesia declared East
Timor an ‘open province’, and allowed foreigners to visit, the
eastern districts initially remained off-limits.) As a result, what
remained of the Forças Armadas de Libertação Nacional de Timor-Leste
(Falintil or Armed Forces for the National Liberation of East
Timor) was dominated by people from the east.
32
Following independence and the formation of the Falintil -

Força Defesa de Timor-Leste (F-FDTL or Falintil-East Timor
Defence Force) the first battalion to be recruited was dominated
by former combatants from the three eastern districts, also
creating a sociolinguistic imbalance.57 However, by 2006, 65 per
cent of the F-FDTL members were westerners.58
Despite the differences between the three main parties in East
Timor in 1975, many of their leaders were closely related. While
José Ramos Horta supported Fretilin, his brother, Arsenio,
supported UDT, while João Carrascalão, a UDT leader, was his
brother-in-law. Mari Alkatiri and his brother Djafar were
members of Fretilin, but their brother Maharus, was a founding
member of Apodeti.59 Osorio Soares, an Apodeti leader, was the
brother-in-law of Fretilin’s president, Xavier do Amaral.
Even after the emergence of local militias supported by the
Indonesian security forces in 1999, many commentators claimed
that the post-referendum violence was the result of divisions
between the East Timorese themselves. Referring to the
destruction of the infrastructure, Paddy McGuinness wrote:
The events of independence unfortunately, with fault on both

sides, destroyed a good deal of this beneficial Indonesian
legacy.60
The Final Report of the Commission for Truth and

Friendship, established by the governments of both Indonesia and
East Timor places greater blame on the Indonesian military and
on local militias than on independence supporters. During the
time when militia activity was increasing in the run-up to the
referendum on 30 August 1999, the Falintil guerrillas were in
cantonment.61
However, while largely unarmed, Falintil and other pro-
independence groups were responsible for illegal detentions, not
33
only of militia members, but also non-combatant civilians. For

example in Liquiçá in June 1999, Falintil captured a policeman
and a militia member and held them hostage for several days until
the UN negotiated and oversaw their release. During this time,
the men were beaten.62
Yet the evidence compiled by the Serious Crimes Unit also
showed that there was widespread co-operation and collaboration
between the Indonesian security forces and the militias, whose
membership often overlapped.63 The Final Report stated that:
Analysis of this evidence leaves no doubt that gross human

rights violations in the form of murder, sexual violence, forcible
transfer and deportation, and persecution, as well as others,
occurred in East Timor in 1999. The evidence also leaves no
doubt that pro-autonomy militias were typically the primary
perpetrators of these crimes and that the consistent, patterned,
and systematic manner in which they were carried out
demonstrates institutional responsibility for these crimes.64
‘The fact is that virtually no influential politicians or

commentators in Australia barracked for Indonesia’s repression of
East Timor,’ wrote Gerard Henderson in 2006.65 Indeed they did
not, but that is not the point. They downplayed it and ignored it.
This is not, however, to suggest that Australian commentators
alone are ‘in denial’. So too are the Portuguese, albeit for different
reasons. East Timor and its foreign supporters are also ‘in denial’,
although more about the present and the future than the past.
34
CHAPTER THREE
INDONESIA:
A SQUANDERED
OPPORTUNITY
Whereas freedom is the inalienable right of all nations, colonialism

must be abolished in this world as it is not in conformity with
humanity and justice.
- Preamble, Constitution of the Republic of Indonesia
WHETHER IT WAS the colonial power governing the Dutch East

Indies, or independence leaders governing the modern Republic
of Indonesia, no one can deny that governing a sprawling
archipelago of more than 17,500 islands, with dozens of ethnic
groups has been a monumental task.
If the forging of a national identity among Indonesians was a
challenge, then so too was the choice of a common language: a
balancing act between different linguistic groups, as well as ethnic
and religious ones. What is now almost forgotten is that the basis
of Indonesian, a form of Malay, was once only spoken by a small
minority, even as a lingua franca, not only by the different peoples
of the archipelago, but also as a contact language by the Dutch
themselves.
This meant that it gained far more acceptance than Hindi in
India, Sinhala in Sri Lanka, or indeed, Malay in Malaysia. Despite
the Malaysian government’s attempts to rebrand Malay as Bahasa
Malaysia, as Indonesians rebranded it Bahasa Indonesia, it was still
identified with the largest ethnic group, just as Javanese was in
35
INDONESIA: A SQUANDERED OPPORTUNITY
Indonesia. It is a reflection of the mixed fortunes of the two

countries’ language policies that while people talk in English
about an ‘Indonesian’ language, no one talks about a ‘Malaysian’
one.
Indeed, the lack of interest on the part of the Dutch in
spreading their language, religion and culture in the East Indies
was in marked contrast to that of the Portuguese, who, along with
the Spanish and the French, were assimilationists. One French
academic, George Henri Bousquet, remarked that it was the fault
of the Dutch themselves that Indonesian nationalists had adopted
Malay, which he described as ‘a terrible psychological weapon’,
and what little social role the Dutch had would soon disintegrate.1
If there were ever to be a pan-Asian language, Indonesian
would be a strong candidate, deriving much of its vocabulary from
Asian languages like Sanskrit, Arabic and Chinese, as well as from
Western ones like Portuguese, Dutch, and, increasingly, English.
Sadly, despite having the advantage of being written in Roman
script, and not having tonal pronunciation, it is all too often
overlooked in favour of other Asian languages, just as Portuguese
is in favour of other Western ones.
Some people in East Timor have tried to make Indonesian
more acceptable by referring to it as ‘Malay’, but this is confusing
and counter-productive. While Malay and Indonesian are still
mutually intelligible, and have shared a common orthography
since 1972, there are differences in vocabulary, partly the result of
different colonial legacies. Whereas Malay is more influenced by
English, using universiti, fakulti, Ogos, kempen, kualiti and kuantiti,
Indonesian is more influenced by Dutch and Latin, using
universitas, fakultas, Augustus, kampanye, kualitas and kuantitas, which
in turn have similarities with Portuguese.
During Indonesia’s occupation of East Timor, it became
fashionable to draw an analogy between East Timor’s relationship
36
with Indonesia and those of Goa and Macau with India and
China, and describe East Timor as an ‘enclave’ in a larger
country’s national territory.
Yet no comparable relationship ever existed between East
Timor and Indonesia; despite the fiery anti-colonial rhetoric of
Sukarno, East Timor never became a cause celèbre, as West New
Guinea did, while under Suharto, relations with the Portuguese
authorities in East Timor were cordial. Indonesian Foreign
Minister Ali Alatas later asked:
If we ever had expansionist designs, or coveted that territory, as

Portugal now alleges, then would it not have been easier to
realize such an ambition at a time when Portugal under the
Salazar/Caetano regime was so universally unpopular as to
foreclose any international censure, as in the case of Goa in 1964
[sic]?2
Far from rejecting the principle of self-determination, or

independence, Jakarta had always argued that the people of East
Timor had chosen ‘independence through integration with
Indonesia’.3
In fact, the only occasion in which Indonesians were involved
in an anti-Portuguese uprising in East Timor was in Viqueque in
1959. Far from being supported by the Indonesian government,
they had sought asylum in Portuguese Timor, and were feted by
the colonial authorities, who settled them in Baucau and gave
them a daily subsidy.4
The fact that the men had arrived in Portuguese Timor on a
boat laden with guns and ammunition did not alarm the
Portuguese; this was at the time of the failed Permesta rebellion in
Sulawesi, which had been crushed by Jakarta in 1958. However,
once granted asylum, they soon made common cause with
disgruntled civil servants and members of minor royal families.5
37
Following the brutal suppression of the rebellion, the alleged

conspirators were sent to prisons in Angola and Mozambique.
Several returned to Portuguese Timor, later joined the pro-
Indonesian party Apodeti. This was later used by Jakarta to claim
that the ‘Viqueque Movement’ was the ‘embryo’ of a process
towards integration with Indonesia.6
In April 1972, when Adam Malik, Indonesia’s Foreign
Minister, was asked how Indonesia would respond if people in
Portuguese Timor were to set up a liberation movement, he
replied: ‘We shall finance and wish it [sic]’.7 He had dismissed a
report in the newspaper Indonesia Raya accusing the Soviet Union
of trying to set up a ‘Dili Timor State’.8
Indeed, when Indonesian nationalists did consider the
incorporation of Portuguese Timor, it was in addition to other
neighbouring colonies. In 1945, a group of Indonesian nationalists
were gathered together by the occupying Japanese to determine
the boundaries of the new state.
Known as the Badan Penjeledik Kemerdekaan Indonesia (BPKI) –
Body for the Investigation of Indonesian Independence, it voted
on three options:
• former territories of the Dutch East Indies, plus the

territories of British North Borneo (now Sabah), Brunei,
Sarawak, Portuguese Timor, Malaya, New Guinea and
surrounding islands;
• former territory of the Dutch East Indies; or
• former territory of the Dutch East Indies excluding
New Guinea but including Malaya
Despite 39 of the 66 members voting for the first option, and

only 19 for the second, the leaders of what became the Republic
of Indonesia declared that its territory consisted solely of the
38
former Dutch East Indies, including West New Guinea, which

remained under Dutch rule after 1949.9
India’s military takeover of Goa, along with Daman and Diu,
in 1961 was relatively bloodless. As J K Galbraith, US Ambassador
to India remarked: ‘The casualties were minimum. I am in favour
of all wars being like the war between India and Portugal –
peaceful and quickly over’.10
This was entirely attributable to the fact that Goans had such
close links with the Indian hinterland that they already saw
themselves as Indians, and so openly greeted Indian soldiers as
liberators. As Tristão de Bragança Cunha put it ‘Goa can have
freedom only in unity with India’.11 He and other ‘freedom
fighters’ in Goa had formed a local branch of the Indian National
Congress, and had strong links with the ‘Quit India’ movement
against the British.
Such was the attachment of many people in Goa to the Indian
hinterland, that rather than advocating statehood within the
Union, they advocated merger with the neighbouring state of
Maharashtra. However, in a referendum in 1967, this was rejected
by 172,191 votes to 138,170.12 It was not until 1987 that Goa
finally became a state.
Although Portuguese ceased to be the official language in Goa,
as it did in East Timor, its place was taken by languages which
were already widely spoken, Marathi and Konkani, as well as
English, rather than a language which was largely unknown, as
was the case with Indonesian in East Timor.
Unlike Indonesia, where regional languages are largely
vernaculars, with no official status, in India, regional languages are
used extensively in administration, education and the media,
particularly in the southern states, where attempts to introduce
Hindi, completely related to local Dravidian languages like Tamil,
have been met with hostility.
39
In fact, the decline in the use of Portuguese in Goa had started

long before the Indian takeover, as the ever-growing number of
Goans working in British India, in both the civil service and the
church, meant that there was a considerable demand for education
in English.13
In 1947, Dr Froiliano de Melo told the National Assembly in
Lisbon that there were now 63 English schools in Goa, employing
389 local teachers, 71 foreign ones, and 8890 pupils – twenty-two
times the number in the Portuguese lyceum.14
Yet in East Timor, even the pro-Indonesian Apodeti, which
advocated the continued ‘right to enjoy the Portuguese language’,
had few leaders with any grasp of the Indonesian one. Only days
before the invasion, an Indonesian radio broadcast told listeners in
East Timor that Jakarta would ‘respect and allow use of the
Portuguese language for communication between people and
organisations’.15 When a ‘People’s Assembly’ met to vote
unanimously for East Timor’s integration with Indonesia, all of its
proceedings were conducted in Portuguese.16
However, once East Timor became the ‘27th province’, the
Indonesians banned the use of Portuguese, which they saw as
being used as a ‘secret’ language.17 Students and teachers at the
Externato de São José, the last Portuguese-medium school to
remain during the Indonesian era, were regularly harassed by
Indonesian military intelligence, which regarded the school as a
hotbed of ‘anti-integration activities’.18 In 1992, shortly after the
killings of student demonstrators at the Santa Cruz cemetery, the
school was finally closed.
Yet the survival of the Portuguese language in East Timor was
already in question, as US Ambassador to Jakarta Robert Barry
presciently observed following his visit to East Timor in 1993:
Cultural autonomy, including the preservation of elements of

Portuguese culture, would not seem to be a problem; Governor
40
Abilio [Soares] even said he would be glad to see a Portuguese

cultural center in Dili (although the military might feel
differently). The offer of education in Portuguese in addition to
Indonesian may appeal to some, but missionaries estimate potential
interest as low.19
In Goa, the use of the language was in such sharp decline that
it was not seen as a threat, although the Portuguese-language daily
newspaper O Heraldo survived until 1987, when it became an
English-language title, The Herald, and the civil code, which Goa
still uses as the basis of its legal system, remained in Portuguese
for decades.
However, India, as a federal democracy, has been far better
equipped to deal with regional aspirations, be they related to
language or other issues, than has Indonesia. This is in part a
legacy of the Dutch East Indies, which were governed as a
centralised unitary state, unlike British India or Malaya, which
were patchworks of separately-administered provinces and
princely states. Malaysia, unlike India, still has states with
monarchies, with the position of head of state being rotated
between the nine Malay rulers.
Such was the opposition of the Dutch authorities to any form
of self-determination, that they even rejected the moderate
proposals of the Soetardjo petition in 1936. Supported by a
majority of the Volksraad, the colony’s legislative council, it called
for a conference to arrange autonomy within a Dutch-Indonesian
union over a period of ten years.20 (This was a similar timeframe
to that advocated by East Timor’s independence leaders until
1999.)
Yet the Dutch did not even dignify the petition with a response
until 1938, which was ‘no’. If the Dutch could not countenance
autonomy for the Indies as a whole, then what chance was there
that they would do so for different islands and regions?
41
While a large proportion of seats were reserved for natives in

the Dutch East Indies Volksraad, these members were either
indirectly elected by local councils (resulting in a franchise of only
2228 out of a population of 70 million in 1931) or appointed.21 By
contrast, the Portuguese, unlike the Dutch, extended political
rights to colonial peoples deemed to be assimilated, both
culturally and linguistically, but so few native people in Timor
were classified as assimilados, that the franchise for both the local
Legislative Council and the National Assembly in Lisbon was
confined to only a few thousand.22
Following the end of the Second World War, the Dutch
returned to their colony, and attempted to reimpose their
authority, despite the declaration of an independent republic on
17 August 1945. With only parts of Java and most of Sumatra
under the control of the Republican government, the Dutch
established a federal system in the rest of Indonesia, with self-
governing states. One of the largest, the State of Eastern
Indonesia, comprised all the islands east of Java and Borneo, and
west of New Guinea.
Consequently, Indonesian nationalists looked upon federalism
as partition in disguise. The United States of Indonesia was a lop-
sided federation, in which the Republic of Indonesia was only one
state, albeit the largest. Shortly the Dutch finally departed in 1949,
the federal system disappeared, and with it the idea of regional
autonomy.
Due to this suspicion of regional autonomy, the incorporation
of East Timor raised constitutional and legal problems for
Indonesia. Although Apodeti had advocated that East Timor
became an autonomous province of Indonesia, its leaders were
told that this was not possible: Indonesia was not a federation.
Suharto also stated this to Australian Prime Minister Gough
42
Whitlam in September 1974. In a meeting with US President

Gerald Ford in July 1975, he stated that:
If they want to integrate with Indonesia as an independent

nation [sic] that is not possible because Indonesia is one unitary
state.23
While Macau was not returned to China by Portugal until

1999, its links with mainland China were even stronger, not least
as by 1976, the majority of people in the territory had come from
the mainland. The first President of China, Sun Yat-sen, even
built a house in Macau, having lived there as a child, which served
a base for his ‘revolutionary activities’ after he left office.24
Nor was Macau immune from effects the Communist-led
‘Cultural Revolution’, which inspired riots during 1966,
culminating in the ‘12-3 Incident’, in which eleven people were
killed. In response, local Chinese began a campaign of ‘three noes’
– no taxes, no service, and no selling to Portuguese, which led to a
statement of apology by the Portuguese authorities, and a
recognition of de facto Chinese sovereignty. As a result, activities in
support of the Kuomintang, based in Taiwan, were banned in
Macau.25
In 1972, China successfully argued for the removal of both
Macau and Hong Kong from the UN’s list of non-self-governing
territories. Its ambassador to the UN, Huang Hua wrote that:
Hong Kong and Macau are part of Chinese territory occupied by

the British and Portuguese authorities… Consequently they
should not be included in the list of colonial territories covered
by the declaration on the granting of independence to colonial
territories and people... With regard to the questions of Hong
Kong and Macau, the Chinese government has consistently held
43
the view that they should be settled in an appropriate way when

conditions are ripe.26
‘When conditions are ripe’ meant that in the interim, the status
quo would remain: despite China’s distaste towards the European
colonial presence on its soil, Hong Kong, and to a lesser extent,
Macau, played a useful role in entrepôt trade with the rest of the
world. Consequently, when Portugal offered to return Macau
following the ‘Carnation Revolution’ in 1974, this was refused by
China, fearing that this would have a destabilising effect on Hong
Kong. Instead, Macau was redefined as a ‘Chinese territory under
Portuguese administration’.
Three years after it signed agreement with the British over
Hong Kong in 1984, China encountered little difficulty in signing
a similar one with Portugal over Macau, under which it became a
Special Administrative Region of the People’s Republic of China
in 1999.
China’s grounds for devising the ‘one country, two systems’
policy were economic, rather than cultural, given that Macau and
Hong Kong had completely different economies from mainland
China, as does Taiwan, for which was originally intended. It has
ruled out any similar status to Tibet, which the Dalai Lama has
proposed, arguing that:
Tibet is a case totally different from Hong Kong and Macao, and
Taiwan. It won peaceful liberation in 1951; in 1959, it
underwent the Democratic Reform; in 1965, the Tibet
Autonomous Region was founded to enjoy autonomous rights
according to the Chinese Constitution and PRC laws. Tibet is
already part of China and it is therefore seeking the
independence of Tibet if the ‘one country, two systems’ policy is
followed there.27
44
Indonesia under Suharto was even more inflexible about

autonomy for East Timor, refusing even to countenance the status
of daerah istimewa or special territory, accorded to Yogyakarta and
Aceh. This would have resulted in very limited autonomy,
confined largely to education and culture. When Foreign Minister
Ali Alatas raised the possibility of a similar status for East Timor,
he was rebuffed by Suharto, and told that the status was being
phased out.28
Following Suharto’s death in 2008, former Australian Prime
Minister Paul Keating suggested that had it not been for him,
Indonesia would now be like Nigeria, an ‘economic and social
wreck’.29 Yet Zaire under Mobutu was even more of a ‘wreck’
than Nigeria, but it was supported by the West for the same
geopolitical and economic reasons as Indonesia under Suharto.
To paraphrase what Niall Ferguson wrote about Augusto
Pinochet in 1973, Suharto ‘did not have to be good… he just had
to be less bad than the alternative’.30 Indeed, the British had
thought the same about Idi Amin in Uganda when he seized
power. Suharto, according to Richard Woolcott, did at least know
‘what he did not know’,31 and brought in US-trained academics
known as the ‘Berkeley Mafia’ as his economic advisers, just as
Pinochet brought in the ‘Chicago Boys’, inspired by the work of
Milton Friedman.
Unlike Suharto, Pinochet envisaged a return to a genuine
multi-party democracy, albeit on his terms. When he stepped
down as President of Chile in 1990, he remained commander-in-
chief of the armed forces, declaring himself a life member of the
country’s Senate, and immune from prosecution.
Yet Suharto was determined to continue in office, having been
re-elected unopposed in March 1998. Paul Keating had suggested
to that, he should announce that he would not serve the full five-
year term.32 Instead, Suharto appointed B J Habibie as Vice-
45
President, as if to discourage any thoughts of a succession, and

make it as unpalatable as possible. By May 1998, Suharto had
bowed to pressure, and the unpalatable had happened.
Only with the departure of Suharto from office did the idea of
autonomy for East Timor become a possibility. When Australian
Prime Minister John Howard wrote to President B J Habibie in
1998, suggesting ‘wide-ranging autonomy with a built-in review
mechanism’, he mentioned the Matignon Accords, in which a
vote on New Caledonia’s final status could be deferred
indefinitely. Habibie did not understand the reference, but when
Foreign Minister Ali Alatas explained, he retorted: ‘That’s a
colonial arrangement, that’s France. I object to that.’33
It may have been this analogy, however unintended, by
Howard, which prompted Habibie to have ‘a brain snap’,34 and
propose a referendum immediately, rather than ten to fifteen years
hence. Howard could not have been more insensitive if he had
drawn an analogy with Aruba, which had postponed
independence from the Netherlands.
However, by the time the proposals for the Special
Autonomous Region of East Timor (SARET) were finalised in
1999, and were considered derisory. After President B J Habibie
agreed to independence being an option, they had been watered
down – the Region was not even allowed its own flag.35
Under the proposals, Indonesian laws in force could not be
altered or repealed. The Indonesian military presence would
remain unaltered, and Indonesian police could still intervene in
the Region’s affairs. Jakarta retained control over immigration,
meaning that it could deny entry to East Timor, and deport people
from it. Revenues from East Timor’s natural resources would
continue to be channeled through Jakarta.36
Following Suharto’s death, Paul Keating claimed that ‘even
Soeharto’s [sic] annexation of East Timor was not expansionist. It
46
had everything to do with national security and nothing to do

with territory.’37 Keating did his Indonesian friends a disservice by
using the term ‘annexation’, as they much preferred the term
‘incorporation’ or ‘integration’.
If this were the case, then why did Indonesia need to
incorporate East Timor into its territory at all? Israel never
annexed the West Bank and Gaza Strip, despite the growing
numbers of Jewish settlers. Nor did Turkey annex northern
Cyprus, despite its large military presence there, and a large settler
population.
In meetings with Harry Tjan, Australian diplomats in Jakarta
raised the possibility of East Timor being a client state or satellite
of Indonesia, as an alternative to incorporation. While Tjan was
responsive to the suggestion, he told the Australians that the
‘satellite option’ had ‘absolutely no support elsewhere’.38
As late as April 1975, José Ramos Horta had tried to convince
Tjan’s colleague, Liem Bian-Kie, of the merits of a ‘hearts and
minds’ campaign, but, he later wrote:
[A]ll our assurances of friendship, cooperation, membership of

ASEAN, a foreign policy that was tantamount to Finlandization
of East Timor – all fell on deaf ears.39
Becoming a satellite or client state instead of a province may

not have spared East Timor from Indonesian invasion or military
occupation, but it could have allowed for greater autonomy than
would have been possible within the Indonesian state at that time.
There would have been no need for Indonesia to force
refugees to sign petitions calling for integration when they fled
across the border in 1975. Nor would there have been any need
for the ‘Act of Integration’ in 1976, described by the US Embassy
in Jakarta as stage-managed.40 One of the members of the People’s
Assembly, Clementino Amaral, described the selection process:
47
What was this process? They [the Indonesian authorities]

wanted two people from each district to represent the district, to
make the petition to ask Indonesia to allow us to enter
Indonesia. In Baucau, how did this go? Hold an election? [No.]
The functionaries that were close to them chose the two
people…41
While the decision of Xanana Gusmão to attend Suharto’s

funeral in 2008 may have been distasteful to many, it was a
recognition that even if East Timor had become independent in
the 1970s, it would have had to have lived with Suharto’s
Indonesia. It would have had to distance itself from separatist
movements in West Papua, Aceh or Maluku, and prevent them
from using the country as a base for their activities. Members of
the Association of South East Asian Nations (ASEAN) like the
Philippines either barred foreign delegates from attending
conferences on East Timor,42 or in the case of Malaysia, prevented
them from being held altogether.43
Fretilin would have had to tone down its left-wing rhetoric,
and recognise, as the Portuguese officer Luís Freitas put it in 1975,
that ‘what is right for Africa is not always right for Timor’.44 Even
Frelimo in Mozambique, despite its Marxist and anti-apartheid
stance, would eventually sign the Nkomati agreement with white-
ruled South Africa in 1984, in which Pretoria halted military
support for Renamo, in return for Maputo ending support for the
ANC.
By contrast, India was not only predisposed to regional
autonomy, but also relatively tolerant of mini-states on its
doorstep. Although it supported the rebellion against Portuguese
rule in Dadra and Nagar Haveli in 1954, which resulted in
Portuguese surrender, India did not incorporate the enclaves into
its territory until 1961, effectively allowing them to function as an
independent state in the interim. While the Himalayan kingdom
48
of Sikkim voted against joining India in 1949, it became an Indian

protectorate and later voted in favour of Indian statehood in 1975.
In 2001, Heinz Arndt branded Fretilin not only as Marxists,
but also Catholics ‘filled with hatred for Suharto’s anticommunist
Muslim Indonesia’.45 Yet one of Fretilin’s leaders, Mari Alkatiri,
later Prime Minister after independence, was a cousin of Mari’e
Muhammad, Suharto’s last Finance Minister.46
Nor were Fretilin’s leaders originally anti-Indonesian. Before
the change of government in Portugal, José Ramos Horta was in
close contact with Indonesia’s consul in Dili, Elias Tomodok,
often meeting in the middle of the night to avoid surveillance by
Portuguese secret police.47
In fact, in 1974, Fretilin advocated the teaching of Indonesian,
not as a medium of instruction in place of Portuguese, but as a
foreign language in addition to French, the only foreign language
other than English taught under the Portuguese system. Yet at the
time, this modest proposal was met with a hostile reaction.48
Despite moves away from Indonesian-medium education in
East Timor, Indonesia remains the destination of choice not only
for university, but even for secondary school. Education in
Indonesia, like many other things from East Timor’s giant
neighbour, has the advantage of being accessible, affordable, and
available.
As Prime Minister of East Timor, Mari Alkatiri notoriously
described people who had Indonesian university degrees as sarjana
supermie or ‘instant noodle graduates’,49 i.e. easily bought and of no
nutritional value. Yet while Alkatiri supported the training of East
Timor’s doctors in Cuba, his brother, Djafar, had no qualms
about his son studying medicine at an Indonesian university in
Jakarta.50
Writing about the first generation of Indonesian university
students to emerge under Dutch rule at the beginning of the
49
twentieth century, Anthony Reid could have been describing East

Timorese university students towards the end of it: fluent in the
language of their rulers; open to other cultures; ‘moving
confidently in the modern technocratic world of Indonesian cities,
though less sure how to put their knowledge to the service of the
traditional societies they had left.’51
The goodwill of many East Timorese towards Indonesia and
its people is not due to realpolitik but to the fact that the East
Timorese did not see themselves as the only victims of the
Suharto regime, and were able to make common cause with those
seeking democracy in Indonesia itself. This is in marked contrast
to the relationship that South Koreans have with Japan, and that of
the Estonians, Latvians and Lithuanians have with Russia, which
remain acrimonious – Moscow still rejects the claim that the
Soviet Union illegally annexed the Baltic states in 1940.52
While it is tempting to dismiss ‘Asian values’ as anti-Western
posturing by authoritarian governments, it is often all too easy for
Westerners to forget their rationale. It is no coincidence that the
most vocal proponents of ‘Asian values’ have been those in
countries that are the most heterogeneous: Indonesia, Malaysia
and Singapore.
Malaysia describes itself as ‘Truly Asia’; Singapore has been
described as ‘Instant Asia’ or ‘Asia for Beginners’, but Indonesia is
‘Southeast Asia for Grown-Ups’. If the East Timorese under
Portuguese rule were ‘kept in a cocoon’ and insulated from
Indonesia, the same is still often true of Malaysians and
Singaporeans, never mind Western expatriates.
It is not that they are ignorant about what has been bad about
Indonesia, human rights, the environment, labour issues, but that
they are ignorant about what is good about Indonesia. Many are
surprised to learn that Indonesia is not an Islamic state, despite
having the world’s largest Muslim population, and an
50
overwhelmingly Muslim population. Pancasila, the Indonesian

state philosophy, enshrines religious diversity, according official
recognition to Islam, Hinduism, Buddhism, Catholicism and
Protestantism. It can be preferable to be a non-Muslim in
Indonesia to being a non-Muslim in Malaysia, despite, or because,
of the fact that they make up a smaller percentage of the
population.
Indeed, Indonesia should be in a better position than either
Singapore or Malaysia to talk about ‘Asian values’ or ‘shared
values’, given that it has had far greater experience of having to
find common ground between ethnic and religious groups than
their neighbours, and on a much larger scale. Why should it be
left to Singaporeans like Kishore Mahbubani, from a country
unkindly described by B J Habibie as ‘a little red dot’?53
East Timor’s relationship with Indonesia today gives it the
worst of both worlds. Whereas under Indonesian rule it had all of
the disadvantages of being part of Indonesia, but all of the
advantages, it now has none of the advantages, but all of the
disadvantages.
Travelling to and from East Timor across the Indonesian
border, I had to change time zones, as the country is now an hour
ahead of the rest of the island, even in the enclave of Oecussi. In
order to re-enter Indonesia, I needed to apply for a visa at the cost
of US$45, which, while manageable for me, would be expensive
and inconvenient for most East Timorese.
Had Indonesia’s leaders been more intelligent and imaginative
in 1974, an independent East Timor would have been no more of
an anomaly, and posed no more of a threat, than San Marino has
done to Italy, or Lesotho to South Africa. Unlike East Timor,
which is half of an island, San Marino and Lesotho are entirely
surrounded by their larger and more powerful neighbours.
51
Like San Marino and Lesotho, however, East Timor would

have been heavily dependent on its giant neighbour, economically
and politically. Yet this could have given it many benefits: a
customs union, a common currency, a postal union, freedom of
movement, access to consular assistance overseas, all of which
could have been offered to an independent East Timor in 1974.
Indeed in March 2008, Paul Wolfowitz, former US
Ambassador to Jakarta, suggested that, rather than invade, it may
have been better for Indonesia to have let East Timor ‘stew in its
own juice’.54 This may have been more effective in convincing
East Timor’s leaders, not least Fretilin ones, of the merits, and the
inevitability, of being closely linked with Indonesia.
52
CHAPTER FOUR
AUSTRALIA:
AS YE SOW,
SOW, SO SHALL YE REAP
In many Australian households, Asia is seen as the place where

Bad Things Happen.
- Eric Ellis, ‘The Whingers of Oz’,
The Spectator, 11 June 2005
AUSTRALIA’S response to the East Timor issue since 1974 says as

much about Australia, and how it sees itself in the wider region, as
it does about East Timor and Indonesia.
The way that Australians changed their perception of Indonesia
in 1965 was as dramatic as the way that Americans changed theirs
of Iran in 1979. Of course, it was in exactly the opposite direction;
whereas Iran suddenly became a scary place for Americans after
the Shah gave way to the Ayatollah, Indonesia ceased to be a scary
place for Australians after Sukarno gave way to Suharto.
Despite Richard Nixon describing Indonesia as ‘the greatest
prize in Southeast Asia’, during the Cold War, Suharto was just
one of many US allies, along with Pinochet in Chile, Mobutu in
Zaire (now the Democratic Republic of Congo), and Park in
South Korea.
When Jeane Kirkpatrick, later appointed US Ambassador to the
UN by Ronald Reagan, wrote her essay ‘Dictatorships and
Double Standards’, she made no mention of either Suharto or
Indonesia, although it could easily have applied to them. Written
in November 1979, after the fall of the Shah in Iran, and Somoza
in Nicaragua, it argued that ‘traditional autocracies’ were
preferable to anti-Western populist regimes.1
53
AUSTRALIA: AS YE SOW, SO SHALL YE REAP
While many in Australia, like B A Santamaria, supported the

Suharto regime because of its anti-communist and pro-Western
nature, others supported it because it was Asian.
In an article in The Monthly, Don Watson, speechwriter to Paul
Keating wrote that:
Suharto gave us nothing less than the chance to shed our ancient
fears of Asia. It is more than a coincidence that the generation of
Australians that took such pride in open immigration policies
and declared pluralism, tolerance and diversity among the
country’s defining characteristics corresponded to the rule of
Suharto.2
This gave them a great sense of moral superiority – if Suharto’s

critics could not be branded as being left-wing, then they could
always be branded as racist, with attitudes harking back to the
White Australia policy.3
Indeed, it is notable that as late as the 1960s, Australian
universities, even the Australian National University (ANU) in
Canberra, showed little interest in the study of Indonesia, unlike
Cornell, Yale, Michigan, Wisconsin and Berkeley in the US.4
In an article in The Age, former Australian diplomat and
journalist Peter Rodgers wrote that Australians should be able to
debate their links with Indonesia ‘without resorting to name-
calling’.5 So indeed they should, but not resorting to name-calling
should work in the other direction.
If Australians should abstain from accusations of ‘stooge’,
‘quisling’ or ‘Jakarta lobby’, then what about ones of ‘lunatics’,
‘prigs’, ‘aggrieved journalists’, ‘emotional priests’, ‘misguided
idealists’, ‘kumbaya crowd’, and ‘war party against Indonesia’, to
name but a few of the names applied to those who supported East
Timor’s right to self-determination?
54
The term ‘Jakarta lobby’ arouses defensiveness among many

influential people in Australia, particularly academics at the ANU.
Indeed, a shibboleth of those who are accused of being part of the
‘Jakarta lobby’ is that they do not use the term. They call it ‘the
Indonesia lobby’, perhaps because it suggests an interest in the
country as a whole, rather than in its central government alone.
In response, they talk about an ‘anti-Indonesia lobby’, or more
specifically an ‘East Timor lobby’, as did the late Heinz Arndt.
While others, like Richard Woolcott, accepted that East Timor’s
independence was ‘a reality to which the region must now adjust’,
and got on well with Xanana Gusmão, who he described as
‘flexible, forgiving and magnanimous’,6 Arndt did not adjust.
He described José Ramos Horta as ‘a Marxist guerrilla leader –
an Asian Che Guevara’, with ‘personal responsibility for the
deaths of countless [!] victims of the civil war in which he had a
major role.’7 He described as ‘utterly grotesque’ the decision to
award Horta the Nobel Peace Prize in 1996,8 but it was no more
so than awarding it to Menachem Begin, Yasser Arafat, and
Nelson Mandela, all of whom were once branded as terrorists.
Even Arndt’s colleague, Jamie Mackie, wrote that ‘in a way’, he
behaved ‘like a caricature of the Indonesia [sic] Lobby’:
He used to get very angry when people attacked Soeharto [sic],

which one would hope was happening a great deal more than it
did. But Heinz couldn’t bear criticism of these guys he thought
were doing a great and good job, which they were, but you had
to balance the picture.9
What was most undignified was not Arndt’s defence of Suharto

and Indonesian rule in East Timor, when there was a government
and a policy to defend, but his diatribes against East Timor’s
independence leaders after the change of government and the
change of policy, up until his death. Nevertheless, what can be
55
said in defence of the ‘Jakarta lobby’, or whatever people may

choose to call them, is that it at least they have been Australians
living in Australia, not Western expatriates living in Asia.
There are others in Australia who have not moved on, accepted
that an independent East Timor is now a reality, and stopped
being defensive over their role in the past. While some former
Prime Ministers, like Malcolm Fraser and Bob Hawke, have
moved on, others, like Gough Whitlam and Paul Keating, have
not.
In 2002, Bill Nicol invited Whitlam to launch his book, Timor:
A Nation Reborn, an update of his 1978 work Timor: The Stillborn
Nation. In a conversation with a friend, Geoff Forrester, who had
become Deputy Secretary of the Department of Foreign Affairs
and Trade, Nicol had expressed regret that Whitlam had ‘given
Timor away’, to which Forrester retorted ‘no, he didn’t!’ adding
that he had been present at the talks with Suharto in 1974.10
Yet while Whitlam may not have given Indonesia the ‘green
light’ to invade East Timor, he was convinced that integration
with Indonesia was the only option, and the wishes of the people
of East Timor were of secondary importance. Richard Woolcott,
Australia’s Ambassador to Jakarta quoted Whitlam as saying:
I am in favour of incorporation but obeisance has to be made to

self-determination. I want it incorporated but I do not want this
done in a way which will create argument in Australia which
would make people more critical of Indonesia.11
Whitlam saw self-determination purely in terms of convincing

the people of East Timor that they were Indonesians. He claimed
that:
Four hundred years of Portuguese domination may have

distorted the picture which the people of East Timor have of
56
themselves and perhaps obscured for them their ethnic kinship

with Indonesia. Time will be required for them to sort
themselves out.12
There were other flaws in Canberra’s approach. One was the

decision to snub East Timor’s politicians. In November 1974,
Graham Feakes of the Department of Foreign Affairs advised
Foreign Minister Don Willessee against receiving José Ramos
Horta. After weighing up the pros and cons of a meeting, Feakes
told Willessee: ‘The reasons against were stronger than those in
favour, and I recommend accordingly that you do not receive
him.’13 Willessee also argued against an all-party parliamentary
delegation to East Timor, which would, he said ‘be unwelcome in
focussing public attention on the issue of Portuguese Timor and
involving us more intimately in it’.14
Another was the decision not to reopen the Australian
consulate in Dili, which had been closed in 1971. Shortly after his
appointment as Ambassador to Jakarta in 1975, Richard Woolcott
remarked that ‘with the value of hindsight, it may have been a
mistake.’15
The arguments against reopening the consulate were that it
might arouse Indonesian suspicions as to Australian intentions,
and raise false hopes among Timorese politicians. Yet reopening
the Dili consulate in 1975 would not have precluded Australia
from supporting integration with Indonesia: in 1998, it opened a
consulate general in what it then recognised as the ‘27th province’.
In an article in the Sydney Morning Herald, Peter Hastings
admitted that these were ‘undeniable risks’, but, he added:
[I]n view of East Timor’s rapidly changing political scene, the

divisions and splits in the parties, the growing tension between
independence forces and the numerically small pro-Indonesian
groups, and the fact that the only reliable source of information
57
on day-to-day developments is not distant, distracted Lisbon,

but Dili, the advantages of re-establishing our mission outweigh
the disadvantages.16
In fact, in the same year that the Dili consulate was closed,
Australia opened an embassy in Lisbon. In 1974, Whitlam told
Suharto that ‘our own objective in Lisbon would be to put to the
Portuguese Government the view that Portuguese Timor was part
of the Indonesian world.’17
While Whitlam argued that he was no longer in government
when the Indonesian invasion occurred, this did not stop him
from becoming a vocal defender of Indonesia over East Timor,
and attacking its critics. In 1982, after the head of the Catholic
Church, Monsignor Martinho Costa Lopes wrote a letter detailing
Indonesian military operations and impending famine, Whitlam
went on a three-day trip to East Timor, supposedly under the
auspices of the International Committee of the Red Cross
(ICRC).18
At a press conference in Jakarta, Whitlam branded Lopes
‘mendacious’. Claiming that Lopes and his clergy ‘simply
lamented and resented the departure of the Portuguese’, Whitlam
said ‘I cannot understand why he perpetrated this wicked act and
sent this cruel letter.’19
Later that year, Whitlam petitioned the UN Decolonisation
Committee, saying that it was ‘high time that the question of East
Timor was voted off the United Nations agenda...’20
Another former Prime Minister who has not moved on from
Suharto and Indonesian rule in East Timor is Paul Keating. When
he became Prime Minister, people must have wondered if he
could have been any worse over Indonesia than Bob Hawke, who
once told Suharto that he was one of the ‘most respected heads of
state… in the world’, adding that ‘your people love you, Mr
President’.21 Yet he was.
58
What is often forgotten is that as Treasurer, Keating

infamously described Asia as the place where ‘you fly over on your
way to Europe’.21 As Prime Minister, he described his Malaysian
counterpart, Mahathir Mohamed, as ‘recalcitrant’, thereby
threatening diplomatic and trade relations.22
In 1995, Keating refused to let 1500 East Timorese apply for
refugee status, on the grounds that they were entitled to
Portuguese nationality.23 However, previous governments in
Canberra had allowed people from East Timor to do so, despite
having recognised de jure Indonesian sovereignty since 1979. After
a decade in legal limbo, they were finally allowed to remain in
Australia.24
Also that year, Keating concluded a security treaty with
Indonesia without the knowledge or consent of the country’s
Parliament.25 Yet four years later, Keating argued ‘the only way
you could have ever given autonomy to East Timor let alone
independence was if the whole Indonesian nation wanted it to
happen’.26
In common with other democracies based on the Westminster
model, the Australian Parliament has little control over foreign
policy, which remains the preserve of the government, and the
Department of Foreign Affairs and Trade. It cannot, for example,
vote to block arms sales to foreign countries, as the US Congress
has done in the case of Indonesia.
Whitlam exercised an even tighter grip over foreign policy as
Prime Minister, also serving Foreign Minister during his first year
in government. Even after he had relinquished the portfolio to
Don Willesee, he continued to maintain a hold on foreign policy.
In 2005, declassified documents revealed that there had been no
discussions in Cabinet regarding policy on East Timor.27
Following East Timor’s referendum in 1999, and the
subsequent violence and Australian-led military intervention,
59
Keating attacked his successor, John Howard, accusing him of

opportunism over East Timor, and of not caring about the
relationship with Indonesia.28
Yet far from pandering to the ‘East Timor lobby’, Howard’s
track record was the precise opposite. In opposition, he had
criticised Labor governments for placing too much importance on
human rights and East Timor, rather than too little. After
becoming Prime Minister, he told Suharto that these issues
‘should not be allowed to damage or affect or to upset the
relationship between our two countries.’29
As for opportunism, it was Labor’s foreign affairs spokesman,
Laurie Brereton, who successfully campaigned for a change in
policy over East Timor in 1997, supporting the right of self-
determination.30 Not only did this cause annoyance to Indonesia,
where Suharto was still in power, but it also meant breaking the
consensus over East Timor which had existed in Canberra since
1975. It was not without critics in the party itself; one of them was
Kevin Rudd, now Prime Minister.31
In the lead-up to the federal election in 1998, Brereton said
that a Labor government would appoint a ‘Special Envoy on East
Timor who will work closely with the United Nations and all the
parties involved’.32 Even after Labor lost the election, Brereton was
calling for a ‘permanent international presence to monitor military
activity in East Timor’ in response to ‘allegations of clandestine
military action and arming of paramilitary squads’. Downer, by
contrast, had praised reports of Indonesian troop withdrawals
from East Timor as ‘a step in the right direction’,33 despite army
personnel records, which had been smuggled out, showing that
the number of troops had remained unchanged.34
Yet at this time, Foreign Minister Alexander Downer had been
arguing against any such moves. As late as January 1999, Downer
said ‘I do not think that immediately moving into some sort of
60
active self-determination in East Timor is a solution at all’, only a

fortnight before Indonesian President Habibie announced a move
in that direction.35
In the fourth paragraph of his letter of December 19, 1998, to
Indonesian president, B J Habibie, Howard wrote:
I want to emphasise that Australia’s support for Indonesia’s

sovereignty is unchanged. It has been a longstanding Australian
position that the interests of Australia, Indonesia and East Timor
are best served by East Timor remaining part of Indonesia.36
As regards autonomy, Howard said:
The successful implementation of an autonomy package with a

built-in review mechanism would allow time to convince the
East Timorese of the benefits of autonomy within the
Indonesian republic.37
Responding to accusations by Mark Aarons of being an

‘apologist for Indonesia’,38 Gerard Henderson claimed that there
was ‘a debate about how the interests of the East Timorese could
be best advanced’, pointing out that:
In July 1994, for example, I advocated that Indonesia’s

president, Soeharto [sic], should step down and that East Timor
should be granted wide-ranging autonomy. Yet this was
sufficient for me to be branded a member of the Jakarta lobby.
The supporters of Fretilin in Australia were, and remain,
uncompromising.39
It was certainly bold enough for Henderson to advocate wide-

ranging autonomy as far back as 1994, never mind that Suharto
step down. However, if anyone were ‘uncompromising’ back
then, it was not supporters of East Timor in Australia (who were
61
not necessarily supporters of Fretilin) but Suharto himself. In fact,

Aarons, who was once supportive of Fretilin, has since become a
vocal critic of the party’s track record in government, and has been
attacked by those in Australia who still support it.
The involvement of the extreme left in East Timor support
groups in Australia put considerable strain on them. David Scott
told hard left members of the Australia East Timor Association
(AETA) that they would not be involved if it had been Sukarno or
a government that they viewed as ‘progressive’ which had invaded
East Timor.40 After all, the left in Australia was happy to side with
Jakarta over its claim to Dutch New Guinea, or ‘West Irian’.
Scott added that if that had been the case, conservative Senator
Brian Harradine ‘would be the AETA Chairman’. In a debate
following the Indonesian invasion of East Timor, Harradine
remarked:
‘If it is correct to criticise Indonesia today for its action over East
Timor it was also correct to criticise Indonesia for its actions in
West New Guinea, but the forces which are beating the drum
now about East Timor were silent in 1962. Why were they
silent?... Mr. Laurie Aarons in the Communist Party Tribune of
20th May 1962 wrote... ‘Communist policy is for complete
support for Indonesia’s claim for West Irian, and complete
independence for the peoples exploited and oppressed by
Australian Capitalism’.41
Laurie Aarons was the father of Mark, the family being

described as ‘the Royal Family of Australian communism’.42
In fact, while Australia supported self-determination for West
New Guinea, it was the US and Britain which brought pressure
to bear on the Dutch to cede the territory to Indonesia. In
December 1961, Harold Macmillan wrote a letter to Robert
Menzies to that effect, or as Paul Monk put it:
62
‘Dear Bob, I’ve had a chat with Jack [Kennedy] in Bermuda

about this New Guinea situation. We think that, on balance, it
would be best for all concerned if you were to roll over on this
one… If we throw Sukarno this bone, we’ll rob the
Communists of a stick to beat us with. We can then find other
means for dealing with the problem of the Indonesian
Communist Party.’43
This may have influenced Gough Whitlam’s thinking on East

Timor: even if Australia were to support self-determination for
the Portuguese territory, the US and Britain would side with
Indonesia instead. As Graham Freudenberg put it: ‘Whitlam, as
Prime Minister, was determined never again to have a bar of the
humbug, humiliation and hypocrisy which had occurred over
West Irian.’44
It was against the backdrop of West New Guinea that the
government of Robert Menzies had considered the future of East
Timor, which, it reasoned, could be the next target for Indonesian
expansion. In 1963, James Dunn, Australian Consul in East
Timor, sent a report to Canberra, with this analysis of the
situation:
1. The Portuguese in Timor have little real support from the

indigenous population who, if given the opportunity, will
probably favour a change in the status of their territory. In these
circumstances there would be some pressure towards the setting
up of an independent state but the majority would probably
favour Indonesian rule as the alternative to the continuation of
Portuguese rule.
2. (a) Portuguese Timor is a poor and extremely underdeveloped

territory. It has no secondary industries, poor mineral resources
and low-level subsistence production in agriculture. Very little
63
has been done by the Portuguese to remedy these weaknesses

and there is no evidence of any genuine effort to overcome them
in the foreseeable future.
(b) As an independent state it is difficult to see how Portuguese

Timor could exist as a viable economic state without substantial
financial and technical assistance from outside.
(c) Continued Portuguese rule will mean further stagnation of

the economy with increasing dissatisfaction on the part of the
indigenous population and probably some attempts at
insurrection. There is already some evidence of the existence of
a movement with the aim of ousting the Portuguese, with aid of
Indonesia.
3. In the event of an Indonesian attack few of the Timorese

would remain loyal to the Portuguese. The Portuguese forces,
with no air or sea support would be overwhelmed or driven into
the interior of the island within a matter of hours. Without the
support of the native population it is unlikely that they could
resist long in guerrilla warfare.
4. If Indonesia were to send in agitators they would undoubtedly
win support and, with appropriate supplies of arms etc., could
start a campaign of insurgency throughout the province.
5. The Timorese themselves are unlikely to succeed in any

attempt to overthrow the colonial regime if only through lack of
leadership. However, with Indonesian aid and inspiration the
Portuguese position might soon become untenable.45
This was used by Whitlam to discredit Dunn, who was a vocal

critic of the Indonesia occupation of East Timor.46 What Dunn
wrote, however, should be seen in the context of the time. Not
only had the Dutch capitulated to Indonesia over West New
Guinea, but barely a year earlier, Portugal had just been ejected
64
from Goa by India, with local support. Four years earlier in East
Timor itself, there had been the uprising in Viqueque, which had
been bloodily suppressed.
Five years later, the situation had changed; Indonesia was
under a pro-Western government, which was anxious to promote
a moderate foreign policy, distance itself from Sukarno’s
expansionist and irredentist tendencies, and which shared
Salazar’s dislike of communism or left-wing ‘liberation
movements’.
If Suharto’s Indonesia had, as Don Watson claimed, enabled
Australian governments to pursue a progressive immigration
policy, then it might also have enabled them to pursue a
progressive foreign policy, as long as it involved countries on the
other side of the world.
Writing in The Australian, former diplomat Cavan Hogue said
that in 1975, Australia ‘could have been more active in the UN,
but the world took the same interest in East Timor that we take in
Africa.’47 In fact, such was Gough Whitlam’s interest in Africa that
in 1973, he recognised the unilateral declaration of independence
by the Portuguese colony of Guinea-Bissau.48
Hogue claimed Fretilin ‘was and remains a communist party’,49
but Canberra supported the ANC in South Africa, which ‘was and
remains’ in coalition with the Communist Party. It was also an
Australian Prime Minister, Malcolm Fraser, who aided the rise to
power of Robert Mugabe in Zimbabwe, despite ZANU
advocating a Marxist-Leninist one-party state. As Mugabe said of
Fraser ‘I got enchanted by him, we became friends, personal
friends... He’s really motivated by a liberal philosophy’.50
Paul Keating claimed that it was thanks to Suharto that
Indonesia had not become an ‘economic and social wreck’ like
Zimbabwe.51 Yet perhaps it was also thanks to Suharto that the
man responsible for turning Zimbabwe into such a wreck came to
65
power, with Australian support. Would this have happened if

Canberra had not embraced a progressive foreign policy?
Many commentators in Australia who supported Indonesian
rule in East Timor, now complain about now having a ‘poor,
backward and unstable entity on our doorstep’, but why did an
independent East Timor need to be poor, when it could have
profited from oil reserves in the Timor Sea?
This was one factor in Australia’s support for East Timor’s
incorporation into Indonesia, and its decision to recognise
Indonesian sovereignty in 1978. In a cable to Canberra in 1975,
Richard Woolcott suggested that closing the gap in the maritime
boundary ‘could be much more readily negotiated with Indonesia
than with Portugal or independent Portuguese [sic] Timor.’52
In 1989, the Foreign Ministers of Australia and Indonesia
signed the Timor Gap Treaty, or to use its full title, ‘Treaty
between Australia and the Republic of Indonesia in an Area
between the Indonesian Province of East Timor and Northern
Australia’.
Under an interim agreement following the end of Indonesian
rule, Australia was granted access to two-thirds of Timor Sea oil
fields, from which it was earning US$1.7 million a day. In 2004,
Oxfam warned that tensions over access to oil ‘stand to push East
Timor to the brink of becoming a failed state through no fault of
its own’.53 Two years earlier, Alexander Downer had told Mari
East Timor’s Prime Minister Alkatiri: ‘We don’t like
brinkmanship. We are very tough… Let me give you a tutorial in
politics – not a chance.’54
The media in Australia were accused of conducting a ‘vendetta’
against Indonesia over East Timor after the deaths of five TV
newsmen in Balibo in 1975. Yet Jakarta was not without its
defenders in the Australian press, not least in News Limited’s
newspapers like The Australian, whose proprietor, Rupert
66
Murdoch, introduced East Timor campaigner David Scott as

‘trying to set up a communist base north of Darwin’.55
However, while Fairfax newspapers like the Sydney Morning
Herald were accused of a ‘vendetta against Indonesia’, its foreign
editor Peter Hastings argued that Australia should accept the
Indonesian annexation as a fait accompli.56 Even the Melbourne Age,
denounced as the ‘Spencer Street Soviet’ and more recently as
‘The Guardian on the Yarra’, infamously headlined a story about
famine in East Timor in 1980 with ‘Timor wins famine war’.57
Such was its cultural sensitivity in 1974, that the Age described
the people of the territory as ‘betel-chewing tribesmen’.58 Ten
years later, it described East Timor’s independence struggle as a
lost cause:
One fact does seem clear, however. Indonesia regards East

Timor as part of the nation. History may often surprise us all,
but the incorporation seems irreversible and an act of free choice
inconceivable… There is nothing to be gained by bullying the
Indonesians.59
Channel Nine, despite the deaths of two of its employees

(Malcolm Rennie and Brian Peters), gave airtime to B A
Santamaria and his pro-Jakarta and anti-communist views. In his
programme Point of View, he expressed the same opinions as he
did in his column in The Australian, and in his National Civic
Council’s magazine, News Weekly.
Public broadcasters in Australia like the ABC and SBS were
often attacked for their ‘anti-Indonesia campaign’, but they were
certainly not immune from government pressure, not least as the
ABC’s Radio Australia broadcast to Indonesia. The ABC’s bureau
in Jakarta was closed in 1981, and was not reopened until a decade
later. In order to avoid future misunderstandings with Jakarta,
officials of the Department of Foreign Affairs and Trade in
67
Canberra would have regular meetings with the ABC, ‘to discuss
where problems ‘might arise’.60
This was in anticipation of the launch of the Australia
Television International service in 1993, which was carried on the
Indonesian Palapa satellite. Far from being an outlet for the ‘East
Timor lobby’, when exclusive video footage of an interview with
guerilla leader Konis Santana was given to the channel, it was ‘lost’
en route to its studios.61 Even ABC domestic news coverage,
particularly from Darwin raised the hackles of Jakarta and
Canberra alike.62
While East Timorese who supported integration with
Indonesia may not have got a fair press in the Australian media,
such people had the advantage of having the Indonesian
government, and its supporters in Australia, to fight their corner.
Following the crisis in 2006, some commentators in Australia
have advocated turning East Timor into a satellite or vassal state,
along the lines of Papua New Guinea. Writing in The Australian,
Paul Kelly remarked:
The feature of East Timor’s brief history is that Portugal has

exercised more influence than Australia, notably on its language,
constitution and institutions. This is one of the reasons for its
failure. It is obvious that as ultimate security guarantor, Australia
must exert a greater authority.63
This had echoes of the US’s ‘civilising mission’ in the

Philippines, whose people were described by the Governor-
General, William Howard Taft, as ‘our little brown brothers’.64
Australia did, of course, exercise considerable influence on
Papua New Guinea’s language, constitution and institutions, but
with what results? Hank Nelson, a Professor of History at the
ANU, described white expatriate members of the territory’s
parliament as often ‘rambunctious, hard-drinking and
68
womanising while the blacks were uneducated and had scarcely

been into a town, let alone an Assembly with a Speaker and
ceremonial rules’.65
One of the white expatriate members of the territory’s House
of Assembly was John Pasquarelli, later advisor to Pauline
Hanson’s anti-immigration One Nation party. Writing about East
Timor in his column in the Melbourne Observer, Pasquarelli
jumped on the anti-Portuguese bandwagon: ‘Timor’s problems
are exacerbated by… the lunatic decision to have Portuguese as
the national [sic] language’.66
Compared to what – the use of English in Papua New Guinea,
still spoken by less than half the population? How many of
Pasquarelli’s constituents would have spoken English? Or for that
matter, how many of his fellow members of the House?
Not many, which is why he used Tok Pisin, just as his
counterparts in East Timor’s parliament use Tetum. It is, of
course, telling that while East Timor’s lingua franca is an
indigenous language, albeit with Portuguese influence, Papua
New Guinea’s derives at least 80 per cent of its vocabulary from
English.
While Fretilin has been depicted in the Australian media as
anti-Australian, many of its former ministers and current
members of parliament lived in Australia, are married to
Australians, and are still Australian citizens. While Fretilin has
been depicted in the Australian media as ‘Marxist’ or ‘communist’,
its real problem in government was that it was the worst of both
worlds: a socialist party which believes in fiscal conservatism.
Yet even this had advantages: it delivered little because it
promised little, whereas the Aliança da Maioria Parlamentar (AMP)
or Parliamentary Majority Alliance has promised more than it has
delivered, amid accusations of corruption.
69
Writing in The Australian, Paul Toohey remarked: ‘For those

who condemned the Fretilin government – and I was one of them
– it now seems that they were a better lot than the great libertines
who replaced them.’67
70
CHAPTER FIVE
PORTUGAL:
PORTUGAL:
EMOTION IS NOT
ENOUGH
We must face facts, it’s the raw and naked truth that we’re not capable
of penetrating international markets where competition is strong and
productivity is higher…
- Aníbal Cavaco Silva, President of Portugal
PORTUGAL is a country which is not well known, and even less

well understood, and if that is the case in Western Europe, then it
is manifestly even more so in Asia and the Pacific, a part of the
world in which Portugal has more of a past than a present, and
one which has long been a ‘no go’ area. Portugal’s continued
inability or unwillingness to engage with the countries of the Asia
Pacific region, particularly Indonesia and Australia, has
exacerbated misunderstandings over East Timor since 1999.
However, Portugal’s relations with East Timor have been
bedevilled by the lingering and pervasive concept of
‘Lusotropicalism’, the belief that the people in the colonies in
Africa and Asia were as Portuguese as the people of Portugal itself,
and therefore what is appropriate for Portugal is appropriate for
East Timor.
Unlike the British and the Dutch, the Portuguese, in common
with the French and Spanish, saw themselves as assimilationists,
rejecting racial segregation in favour of miscegenation. While this
sounds laudable in theory, in practice it meant the
marginalisation, if not abandonment, of indigenous languages and
cultures.
71
PORTUGAL: EMOTION IS NOT ENOUGH
The brainchild of Brazilian sociologist Gilberto Freyre,

‘Lusotropicalism’ was based on the premise that relations
between Portuguese and the ‘natives’ were friendly and that the
Portuguese had a ‘natural aptitude’ in dealing with different
cultures.1
Embraced by the Salazar regime, ‘Lusotropicalism’ became an
article of faith, particularly when it had to defend itself against
international criticism of its colonial policy. There was no colonial
empire, the Portuguese argued, only a pluricontinental nation, in
which the highest mountain was not in Malhão de Estrela in
Portugal, but Ramelau in Timor, one of several ‘overseas
provinces’.
It was, therefore, unsurprising that anyone who challenged this
would be subjected to vilification, and even abuse. When the
British historian C R Boxer, then living in Portugal, published
Relations in the Portuguese Colonial Empire 1415-1825, he received
hate mail from ordinary Portuguese. One postcard simply was
addressed to Canalha Boxer, Filho de Puta, bandido, ladrão de livros que
nos roubaste – ‘Bastard Boxer, Son of a Bitch, bandit, thief of books
that you stole from us’.2
Even today, there is still a considerable degree of self-
justification among Portuguese about their colonial past (‘we were
different’) and indeed, denial. In Portugal itself, what has been
described as a ‘well-constructed myth’ has resulted in a ‘no
problem here’ approach to race relations.3 There is no ‘black
armband version of history’, comparable to that in Australia or
elsewhere in the English-speaking world; expressing shame or
remorse over the country’s historical track record.
It is true that Portugal was politically unstable during 1974-75,
and was more preoccupied with having to resettle hundreds of
thousands of Portuguese, known as retornados, who had fled
Angola and Mozambique. Yet Portugal also failed to take
72
advantage of the international goodwill towards it following the

change of government in 1974.
Far from internationalising the East Timor issue, Portugal was
engaged in secret talks with Indonesia during 1974 and 1975,
which actively discouraged it from doing so. It made no effort to
involve the United Nations, by inviting it to send a fact-finding
mission to East Timor. The UN Special Committee on
Decolonisation, the so-called ‘Committee of 24’ met in Lisbon in
June 1975, but a fact-finding mission was not considered, nor
were leaders of political parties in East Timor encourage to attend
the meeting.4
Such a visit may not have prevented a subsequent Indonesian
takeover – a similar mission to the Western Sahara in 1974 did not
deter Morocco from its ‘Green March’ into the territory the
following year – but it could have helped to internationalise the
issue.
Portugal’s last Governor in East Timor, Mário Lemos Pires,
told the Commission for Truth, Reception, and Reconciliation in
2003 that:
The United Nations should have been the principal player in

this process…I think it would have been better for Portugal
[and] for the East Timorese decolonisation process if Portugal
had internationalised the problem from the moment that the
need for self-determination was recognised in 1974…The
Portuguese Government did not ask the United Nations to be
present in the territory…I think that was a mistake.5
In a meeting with the National Commission for

Decolonisation in Lisbon in February 1975, a government
delegation from Portuguese Timor stressed ‘the urgent need to
clearly define a policy’, and defended ‘the internationalisation of
the Timor issue through the UN, especially an appeal to the
73
Third World countries as the only safeguard against Indonesian

military intervention’.6 Yet the Commission only accepted
internationalisation as a last resort, and rejected it again in June
1975.
In September 1975, the Portuguese and Indonesian Foreign
Ministers met in Rome, in which they urged talks between ‘all
parties in Portuguese Timor… aimed at ending the armed strife
and bringing about a peaceful and orderly process of
decolonisation’.7 As José Ramos Horta recalled:
The Indonesians did not want an East Timorese involvement in

the Rome talks and the Portuguese did not insist on it. The
Indonesians did not want any United Nations involvement in
the Rome talks, and the Portuguese went along with that, too.
As it happened, the Rome talks were a Portuguese recognition of
Indonesia as a principal party to the Timor question – a more
principal party than the East Timorese themselves!8
In much the same way that Australia’s stance on East Timor

was influenced by the experience of West New Guinea, perhaps
Portugal’s leaders were similarly haunted by the experience of
Goa, which Salazar had refused to relinquish. President Costa
Gomes later remarked that he thought that an Indonesian
takeover of East Timor would be no different from India’s
takeover of Goa fourteen years before.9
Although Portugal restored diplomatic relations with India in
1974, backdating recognition of Indian sovereignty to 1961, it
made little effort to restore links with Goa, and did not open a
consulate there until as late as 1991. Until 2006, Portugal’s
diplomatic corps in New Delhi consisted of only two officers, and
there is not a single Portuguese media correspondent in the whole
of India.10
74
Despite accusations of left wing leaders in Lisbon supporting

Fretilin in East Timor, many communists and socialists in
Portugal saw integration with Indonesia as a preferable to either
continued Portuguese rule or independence. Not only would this
rid Portugal of an embarrassing relic of colonialism, but also rid it
of a continuing financial burden. It was only at China’s insistence
that Portugal remained in Macau in the 1970’s, although it
withdrew its military forces.
Although Portugal had withdrawn most of its forces from East
Timor during 1975, it had two brand new corvettes, the João Roby
and Afonso Cerqueira patrolling the coast, ‘showing the flag’.11 On
the day that Indonesia invaded East Timor, they sailed away.
As a result of Portugal’s support for East Timor’s self-
determination, and the suppression of the Portuguese language
during the Indonesian occupation, there has been a great deal of
importance attached to the revival of the Portuguese language by
East Timor’s leaders, most of whom were educated during the
Portuguese era.
Yet while it was the Topasses, mixed-race and assimilated
people, who spread Portuguese cultural influence throughout
Southeast Asia, rather than the Portuguese themselves, it was a
form of Tetum, not Portuguese, which developed as a contact
language in Timor. Indeed, as late as the 1870s, the most
important foreign language in Dili was Malay, as in much of the
archipelago.12
Portuguese creoles developed in several parts of Indonesia,
including Java, Ambon and Ternate, but not in East Timor. The
only Portuguese creole ever used in East Timor was brought by
people from Larantuka in Flores, which was only used in the
Bidau district of Dili, and had died out by the 1960s.13
By contrast, in the Malaysian state of Malacca, there are still a
few thousand people who speak Papia Kristang, a Portuguese
75
creole, despite the lack of contact with Portugal since the

seventeenth century.
In fact, despite Lusotropicalism’s Brazilian origins, for much of
Brazil’s history, the contact language between the Portuguese, the
Indians, and the African slaves was Nheengatú, a form of the Tupi
and Guaraní languages, developed by the Jesuits. Significantly, it
was also the language used by mestiços, rather than Portuguese.
Miscegenation did not necessarily result in assimilation.
Also known as Língua Geral or ‘general language’, it remained
the main language of Brazil until the late eighteenth century,
when Brazil saw increased Portuguese migration. At this time, the
Portuguese government expelled the Jesuits from the Portuguese
Empire, and banned use of the language with which they had
become identified.14
By contrast, Guaraní in Paraguay, is today not only the only
indigenous language in the Americas to be an official language
(alongside Spanish) but the only one in which the overwhelming
majority of speakers are not indigenous peoples.
This does not mean that Portuguese should not be an official
language in East Timor, but rather that it has to adapt to a very
different environment from that of 1975, in which it had a captive
audience. Until 1975, Portuguese was the sole medium of
instruction in schools, Tetum and other local languages were
largely oral languages, and there was limited contact with
Indonesia and Australia. There was no daily newspaper, and no
television.
Today, it no longer has that captive audience. There is far
greater exposure to Indonesian and English, and more
significantly, Tetum is now widely used for written
communication, from newspaper articles to internet discussion
forums.
76
Even Portugal’s Secretary of State for Foreign Affairs and

Cooperation João Gomes Cravinho acknowledged this when he
stated that Portuguese teachers going to work in East Timor
should attend courses in learning Tetum.15
However, this was seven years after the Australian linguist Dr
Geoffrey Hull advocated this in an address to the Conselho
Nacional de Resistência Timorense (CNRT) – National Council of
Timorese Resistance Congress in 2000, in which he said that
‘such a tribute to the main language of the people would make it
clear to all that the work of restoring the Portuguese language in
East Timor has no neo-colonialist ulterior motives.’16
Although the Portuguese and Brazilians are not the only
foreigners in East Timor guilty of not making the effort to learn
Tetum, the fact that Portuguese, rather than English or
Indonesian, is an official language, places a greater duty of care
upon them than, for example, Australians or Indonesians. While
Portuguese-speaking foreigners may wish to speak to East
Timorese in Portuguese, the reality is that there are many people
who are neither able to do so nor willing to learn.
Using Tetum to communicate with such people is preferable
to using English or Indonesian, and the fact that Tetum is heavily
influenced by Portuguese should allow them to learn the language
more quickly than other foreigners.
The difficult and sometimes thankless task that Portuguese
language teachers have faced in East Timor has been exacerbated
by different Portuguese organisations competing with each other.
In 2006, João Paulo Esperança, a Portuguese teacher living in East
Timor (and one of the few Portuguese to speak both Tetum and
Indonesian) described the absurdity of the situation:
When I arrived in Timor six years ago, to work for an institution

teaching Portuguese at the national public university, the ‘rival’
was the Portuguese Ministry of Education, which had a hundred
77
and fifty teachers in the field and was willing to cede some to
give lessons to students. The Instituto Camões… quickly
recruited a group of teachers here to give classes to the
[university]. Shortly after the ‘enemy’ became the Foundation of
Portuguese Universities (FUP)... As the Instituto Camões also
supported a course with the same objectives, there would be at
the same time, at the same college, two degree courses… which
operated in adjacent classrooms, but with their backs to each
other.17
Any language policy involving a ‘language shift’ is problematic,

but in East Timor these problems have been exacerbated the
absence of Portuguese-Indonesian and Indonesian-Portuguese
dictionaries, much less other Indonesian-language materials for
learning Portuguese.
Visiting a bookshop in Dili, Esperança noticed the number of
foreign language dictionaries from Indonesia’, in which he
counted:
one English-Indonesian dictionary, one Indonesian-English

dictionary, one Swedish-Indonesian [!] dictionary, two different
German-Indonesian dictionaries, one Indonesian-German
dictionary, one German-Indonesian and Indonesian-German
dictionary, one Italian-Indonesian dictionary, one Tetum-
Indonesian and Indonesian-Tetum dictionary, one Korean-
Indonesian and Indonesian-Korean dictionary, one French-
Indonesian and Indonesian-French dictionary, one French-
Indonesian dictionary, one Indonesian-Spanish dictionary, one
Spanish-Indonesian dictionary…18
But no Portuguese-Indonesian or Indonesian-Portuguese

dictionaries. While an Indonesian-Portuguese dictionary was
compiled in 2004, by the National Institute of Linguistics in East
Timor, neither the Instituto Camões, nor other Portuguese
78
cultural organisations like the Fundação Oriente showed any

interest in publishing it. However, as it had been involved with
the Portuguese translation, the Instituto Camões held the rights to
the work, thereby preventing anyone else from publishing it
elsewhere.
For several years, there have been discussions between the
Indonesian Embassy in Lisbon, Universidade Católica and
Gramedia about the compilation of a Portuguese dictionary,
which have come to nothing. The Indonesian Embassy in Lisbon
also compiled two Portuguese-Indonesian phrasebooks Conhecer a
Língua Portuguesa and Mengenal Bahasa Portugis, but it has not been
published commercially.
The irony is that were such dictionaries to become available,
the number of words in Indonesian derived from Portuguese
would become evident to speakers of both languages.
gereja/igreja, sepatu/sapato, garpu/garfo, roda/roda, pesta/festa, palsu/falso,

Sabtu/Sábado, terigu/trigo, keju/queijo, mentega/manteiga, lelang/leilão,
meja/mesa, bendera/bandeira, Minggu/Domingo, jendela/janela,
boneka/boneca, serdadu/soldado, Paskah/Páscoa, Natal/Natal,
bendera/bandeira, aula/aula.
This problem should have been anticipated as far back as the

mid-1990s, when Indonesian-educated East Timorese arrived in
Portugal unable to speak Portuguese. Unfortunately, there has
been a dogmatic belief among Portuguese language advocates in
East Timor, and among the Portuguese themselves, that,
following liberation from Indonesian rule, people in East Timor
would miraculously become Portuguese speakers.
And yet, the Instituto Camões expects the language of Camões
to be taught in Indonesia without any such materials. Maria
Irmler, then its lecturer in Jakarta, told me that she had been
feeling the lack of them ‘in every day of my work’. Nevertheless,
79
that has not discouraged her Indonesian students, who learn

Portuguese because they consider it to be an interesting European
language, with the added bonus of historical links with Indonesia.
East Timor is a non-issue for them, as it should be, and of no
more relevance than Vietnam and the Philippines are to
Indonesians who want to learn French or Spanish.
However, if Portugal wants its language to be taught in
Indonesian universities, it should get Portuguese-educated
politicians in East Timor to stop talking about their graduates as
sarjana supermie, and even worse, references to Indonesian as ‘a
language of donkeys’.19 The problem with those Portuguese who
say that the East Timorese should ‘forget’ Indonesia and its
language is not that they are unrealistic, but that they never put
forward alternatives, be it in terms of trade, education or popular
culture. By turning completely against the teaching of Indonesian
in the absence of a viable alternative, East Timor has risked
throwing the baby out with the bathwater.
Portuguese is at an even greater disadvantage in Asia than it is
in other parts of the world: not only because it lacks the status and
prestige of other Western languages, and secondly, learning
languages is on commercial or utilitarian grounds, rather than
learning for learning’s sake. This is amply illustrated by the often
dismissive attitude of many Indonesian-educated people in East
Timor towards learning Portuguese. The fact that the Externato
de São José in Dili not only continued to teach in Portuguese
under Indonesian rule, but also taught Latin and Greek, reinforces
the stereotype of Portuguese language advocates as out of touch
with East Timor’s geographical and economic realities.
Unlike those in Africa or the Americas, the use of Western
languages other than English in post-colonial states in Asia
declined rapidly after the departure of the European colonial
power, as there was an indigenous language ready to take the place
80
of the old colonial language, for example, Dutch in Indonesia and

French in Indochina, as the language of the state. This accounts
for the ‘abolitionist’ sentiments towards Portuguese among some
Indonesian-educated people in East Timor.
Portuguese is not widely taught at universities in the Asia
Pacific region; some universities, like the National University of
Singapore, do not even teach Spanish. It is not even widely taught
at universities in Australia. One Portuguese language lecturer,
who had lived and worked in Australia for many years, told me
that ‘you cannot promote Portuguese in Australia against the
wishes of the Australian public.’ But what made him think that
Australians were against it? He continued:
To do that, before you may send in anything related to a

language programme, you need to create a different cultural
awareness and that depends upon a strong policy of cultural
awareness: It is my belief that, to create a language program in
Australia, you need a strong programme of history, culture,
sociology, literature, tourism, etc. for a few years – TAUGHT
IN ENGLISH – before you create a language program.
This struck me as being a shockingly defeatist attitude. It was

both insulting to the intelligence of Australians, and to the
Portuguese language. If Portuguese could be taught at universities
in Indonesia, a country where Portugal has had a far worse press
than it has in Australia, then why not in a Western country where
there are 56,000 people of Portuguese origin?
It is not the job of universities, in Australia or elsewhere, to
promote cultural awareness of Portugal, much less tourism, trade
and investment. It is the job of organisations like the Instituto
Camões, Turismo de Portugal, and AICEP, the Portuguese
investment agency, none of which are represented in Sydney, the
largest city in Australia, and one of the most cosmopolitan in the
81
region. Yet the Instituto Camões decided to promote the teaching

of Portuguese at a university in New Zealand, where there are few
Portuguese migrants and there is no Portuguese embassy.
João Paulo Esperança has written about Portugal’s continued
inability and unwillingness to engage with the Asia Pacific region.
Visiting East Timorese studying at university in Yogyakarta, he
noted ruefully that there were far more facilities for people
wanting to learn French than Portuguese, and that the local
French Cultural Centre was larger than its Portuguese
counterpart in Dili.20 He could have made the same conclusion
about facilities for studying German in Bandung and Surabaya.
However, setting up Portuguese Cultural Centres across
Indonesia would be putting the cart before the horse, as Portugal’s
links with Indonesia are negligible compared to those of France
and Germany, or even small countries like the Netherlands,
Switzerland, Belgium and Denmark.
The paradox is that Portugal is a small country with a big
language, but the reason why this is the case is because of Brazil.
Of course, pooling resources with Brazil in promoting the
Portuguese language would mean swallowing a great deal of pride
on Portugal’s part. The orthographical accord between
Portuguese-speaking countries, which involved harmonising
Brazilian and European spelling, still rankles with Portuguese,
who resent using ‘Brazilian’ spelling.21 Yet Malay and Indonesian
have had a common orthography since 1972, despite still being
considered two separate languages.
An obvious framework for international cooperation in
promoting the Portuguese language worldwide would be the
Comunidade de Países de Língua Portuguesa (CPLP) the Portuguese-
speaking equivalent of the Commonwealth and La Francophonie.
However, even the CPLP countries alone may not be effective,
and they might need to form a common front with Spanish-
82
speaking countries in pooling their resources, within an ‘Ibero-

American’ framework.
It is notable that while the Instituto Camões is represented in
other Portuguese-speaking countries, including Brazil, Spain’s
equivalent, the Instituto Cervantes is unrepresented in other
Spanish-speaking countries. Admittedly, the Alliance Française is
well represented in Canada, as is the British Council in the US,
but while others expand, Portugal mainly consolidates.
Still, at least there is an advantage in Portugal being poor, in
that it has been unable to engage in anything as delusional as
France has in Cambodia. In 1989, the French funded the Institut de
Technologie de Cambodge, in which instruction was entirely in
French. Posters around the campus proclaimed, optimistically ‘La
Francophonie Existe!’ and ‘La Francophonie Toujours!’22 Any
attempt to introduce English as a medium of instruction has been
met with French threats to withdraw funding.
One advantage that Portuguese has in East Timor is that it has
had far more influence on Tetum than French has ever had over
Khmer in Cambodia, which, unlike Vietnamese, is not even
written in Roman script.
Nor has Portugal’s reputation in East Timor been as tarnished
as that of France in Rwanda, where its support for the French-
speaking Hutus, who butchered English-speaking Tutsis during
the 1994 genocide, was motivated by language considerations.23
In Portugal, East Timor was at least a national issue, unlike in
Brazil, which only jumped on the East Timor bandwagon in 1999.
Even now, most people in Brazil know and care about East Timor
as much as people in the US do about the Solomon Islands. A less
charitable explanation for Brazil’s involvement is that, as in
Angola and Mozambique, is that it is to clear up the mess of
Portugal’s incompetent imperialism.24
83
Brazil should have a considerable advantage over Portugal, in

that it does not have the historical or colonial baggage, and should
be able to promote Portuguese as it should be promoted, on
purely commercial and geopolitical grounds, as the language of a
regionally important country, which, like Indonesia and Australia,
is a member of the G20.
In fact, it is thanks to Brazil, not Portugal, that as many people
in Asia speak Portuguese as they do – as a result of Brazilian
migration, there are 317,000 Portuguese speakers in Japan,25 more
than in East Timor, Macau and Goa combined, and are living
proof that being a Portuguese speaker in Asia is not a handicap.
Yet it is almost as if Brazil has an inferiority complex about
Portuguese. Is it a symptom of wishing it had been a colony of
somewhere other than Portugal? Or because Portuguese nearly
did not become widely spoken in Brazil? A worrying symptom of
how Brazil sees the Portuguese language is the fact that it has a
museum dedicated to it. While a museum is not necessarily a
place for redundant relics of the past, it is not the best way to
promote a modern language either.
To paraphrase the old joke, Brazilian Portuguese is the
language of the country of the future, and always will be.
However, irrespective of what future Portuguese may have in East
Timor, it is Brazil’s language, and it needs to take the promotion
of that language more seriously. It was, apparently, Charles De
Gaulle who said that ‘Brazil is not a serious country’.
Brazilians may resent that notion, but what have they done to
dispel it? Certainly, Brazil is known as a place that likes to have
fun – carnival, football, samba and in 2016, the Olympics – but
there is more to it than that. It has a world-class aircraft industry;
Airnorth, which flies between Darwin and Dili uses Embraer
aeroplanes, and while Australians may dismiss Brazil as too poor
84
and far away to be of commercial importance, their country

exports left-hand drive Holden Commodores to Brazil.26
Brazil has no equivalent of the Instituto Camões, although it
may not need one. The irony is that people in Southeast Asia have
had exposure to Brazil through its telenovelas, but as these are
invariably dubbed (Escrava Isaura in Chinese, Sinha Moça in Malay
and Terra Nostra in Indonesian) people there could be forgiven for
thinking that Brazilians did not speak Portuguese at all.
The reason why Brazilian and other South American telenovelas
are dubbed is because of an assumption that nobody wants to
learn Portuguese, or even Spanish, but that is no reason why
audiences in the region cannot watch them in the original
language with subtitles.
Despite the popularity of learning English, satellite channels
like HBO, Star World and BBC Entertainment all subtitle their
English-language programming in Asian languages. By contrast,
Portugal’s RTPi does not even subtitle programmes in English,
nor does Brazil’s Record. This is surprising, as while RTPi is
publicly funded, Record is a commercial channel.
The practice of subtitling in local languages is hardly an alien
concept in Portugal, where dubbing is rare compared to either
neighbouring Spain, or Portuguese-speaking Brazil. Not only
there is there a strong preference for watching foreign television
dramas or films in the original language, but even on television
news. Whether people are speaking in English or Tetum, their
dialogue is subtitled, not dubbed over.
East Timor badly needs a counterweight to Indonesia and
Australia, not just cultural one, but a geopolitical and economic
one. While Portuguese-speaking countries are poorly equipped to
perform the latter role, it helps that the country which is best
equipped to do so, China, sees Portuguese as an asset, not as a
handicap, and recognises the language’s commercial value. Indeed,
85
there may soon be more Portuguese speakers in Macau than there

ever were under Portuguese rule.27
These growing links with the Portuguese-speaking world have
more to do with Brazilian soya and Angolan oil than with
Portuguese literature or Macau’s colonial heritage, hence the fact
that there are now direct flights from Beijing to São Paulo and
Luanda, but no longer ones between Macau and Lisbon.
In fact, while talk between the CPLP countries about
launching an international Portuguese-language television
channel remains just talk, Teledifusão de Macau (TdM) has gone
ahead and launched its own,28 with China Central Television to
follow suit in 2010.
Helping East Timor and promoting the Portuguese language
are both laudable objectives for Portugal, but they are distinct, and
it is not always necessary or desirable to do one in order to achieve
the other. It is like being parents of Siamese twins: while they care
about them both, it would make life so much easier for them, and
for the parents, if the two were not joined at the hip.
In fact, linking the two can be often be counter-productive,
being of little benefit to people in East Timor, and causing further
damage to the image of the Portuguese language. If it is not
unreasonable to ask ‘does East Timor need the Portuguese
language?’ it should not unreasonable either to ask ‘does the
Portuguese language need East Timor?’
Among many Portuguese, there is a feeling that Portugal is
wasting its time in East Timor, and that they should cut their
losses and return home. Certainly there are people in Jakarta,
Canberra and Dili who would shed no tears if they did. However,
it is in no one’s interest that the Portuguese throw in the towel. It
would be letting them off the hook.
Not only would they be giving up on East Timor, but they
would also be giving up on Asia. If they find the idea of forging
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strong ties with Asia and the Pacific too much of a burden, then
that is all the more reason why they should be forced to do so. But
why should it be a burden? Other small countries in Europe, like
Denmark, are actively involved in trade with Asia and the Pacific.
Or indeed, the Netherlands. The Dutch once feared that were
they to lose the East Indies, their country would be no more
important on the world stage than Denmark,29 yet both the
Netherlands and Denmark have a far higher profile in the Asia
Pacific region than Portugal.
Ignoring a whole continent, particularly one of growing
importance as Asia, is a sign of ‘Third World’ status, and in this
regard, Portugal is more like an African or South American
country than a European one. It cannot be a mere coincidence
that the poorest and least developed country in Western Europe is
the one which has fewer trade links with Asia than other countries
in the region.
Fortunately, however, there are Portuguese in East Timor who
do not see the country in isolation from the Asia Pacific, but in
the context of it, and have taken advantage of the ability to travel
around the archipelago as freely as any other foreign nationals, or
indeed, as their ancestors did centuries ago. And while many react
with horror at the suggestion that they should learn Tetum, never
mind Indonesian, there are some who have learnt both.
One of them, Margarida Gonçalves, told me about the hostility
that she encountered from other Portuguese for learning both
Tetum and Indonesian. It was, she told me, as if she had
‘committed lèse majesté’. She told me how she once viewed
Indonesia, and how she views it now:
‘I once burnt cuddly toys marked ‘MADE IN INDONESIA’. I

hated Indonesia and Indonesians, without really ever realising
who they were. That was more than fifteen years ago. I became
passionate about Timor, but I would only really start to
87
understand the country when I understood Indonesia. It was

like that. Now, I only hate Suharto and his coterie of generals.’
‘But after having been immersed in some of the cultures of

Indonesia, I have discovered that the country is not at all like
what the propaganda of the 1990s had me believe. It is that
propaganda (understandable at the time) which is nowadays an
affront to those Portuguese sailors who signed treaties in Sunda
Kelapa with the Bataks, sang with the inhabitants of Manado,
prayed with those of Flores, Ende, Solor, Alor and Rote and left
descendants from Aceh to Ambon.’
‘Fernão Mendes Pinto did not describe these people in such

rabid and hateful terms as do the majority of Portuguese of the
present day. And today, in the information society in which we
live, I think that it is inexcusable.’
They are far worthier successors to the likes of Fernão Mendes

Pinto, who travelled and traded in Southeast Asia in the sixteenth
century, than those ‘big fish in a small pond’ in Dili who thumb
their noses at local cultures and languages.
Portugal cannot be a player in East Timor unless and until it
becomes a player in the wider region. Its decline as a world power
began when it ceased to be a player in Asia. A past, however
glorious, is not a substitute for a future.
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CHAPTER SIX
THE UN: WHAT

‘INTERNATIONAL
INTERNATIONAL
COMMUNITY’
COMMUNITY’?
If the U.N. Secretariat building in New York
lost ten storeys, it wouldn’t make a bit of difference.
- John Bolton, US Ambassador to the United Nations
FOLLOWING the war in Iraq in 2003, Guardian columnist

Jonathan Freedland advocated that the country be placed under
UN administration, as East Timor had done. He wrote ‘think of it
as the East Timorification of Iraq. Maybe that’s not a slogan for a
street-march banner, but the peace camp has to put its victory in
the last argument behind it - and fight the battle ahead.’1
He could not have chosen a worse model. At least the US and
British forces in Iraq were able to communicate with each other in
the same language. They also had actually heard of the country,
and knew what language the people spoke. By contrast, the UN’s
Transitional Administration in East Timor (UNTAET) recruited
staff from 113 of its member states,2 most of whom would not
have known East Timor from East Grinstead or Tetum from
Teton.
Being governed by two countries is problematic enough; as the
people of Vanuatu know from when their country was the Anglo-
French condominium of the New Hebrides, known as the
‘Pandemonium’, with two heads of state, two flags, two languages,
two currencies, two education systems, two police forces, but
three legal systems, for the British, French, and the Islanders
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THE UN: WHAT ‘INTERNATIONAL COMMUNITY’?
themselves.3 In 1964, Australia had rejected Portugal’s offer of a

similar arrangement in East Timor, yet nearly forty years later,
became involved in a far more cumbersome arrangement.
People in the UN have been described as ‘liberal imperialists’,
but the term could not be more inappropriate. For a start, the
term itself is an oxymoron, as imperialism is, by definition,
illiberal. It needs to be; otherwise it would not be able to maintain
its control. Furthermore, UN staff can be as contemptuous of
their host country as any expatriate administrators in the days of
empire. On arriving at Dili Airport, one seasoned UN official,
who had flown first class all the way from New York, bellowed:
‘You call this a capital city?’4 Yet if Dili had been like Tokyo, why
would the UN have been required at all?
Writing in 2003, Helen Hill pointed to the ‘failure to establish
an effective and sustainable communications and transportation
system in [East] Timor during the period of United Nations
transitional government,’ the consequences of which are still felt.
Under UNTAET public telephones were not repaired, nor

public transport revived to its former strength, nor the Post
Office, with its banking system. Legislation on radio was left till
the last moment. Donors were wary of funding television.5
When I was in contact with UNTAET’s Information

Technology, Posts and Telecommunications Department, my
impression was of people who were not given enough time and
resources to do the job properly. Its deputy head, Erik Mackinlay,
had come from Bosnia, and returned to the former Yugoslavia not
long after, this time to Kosovo, after being in East Timor for little
over a year.
Of course, it is significant that while the UN made a rapid exit
from East Timor, a place dubbed ‘Quickfixville’,6 it remains in
Kosovo, despite the declaration of an independent state. There
90
were, and are, significant differences between the two places:

Indonesia relinquished its claim to East Timor, while Serbia
remains adamant that Kosovo remains part of its national territory.
In the case of Kosovo, there were neighbouring countries, and
regional organisations, like the European Union, which have had
long-standing interests in the former Yugoslavia and in a position
to lighten the UN’s burden.
Indeed, in Bosnia, the High Representative, charged with
overseeing the Dayton Peace Agreement, is ex officio the EU’s
Special Representative in the country. ‘Overseeing’ that
Agreement, is sometimes construed as acting like an imperial
Viceroy,7 or perhaps more like the Resident or High
Commissioner in a British protectorate.
In East Timor, by contrast, the Association of South East Asian
Nations (ASEAN) had long regarded the territory as an internal
affair of Indonesia, and its members were as lukewarm about the
emergence of a new state in 1999 as they were in 1975. While they
bristled at how Australia took charge of the peacekeeping
operation, ASEAN states like Malaysia would have been less
welcome in East Timor than Australia or New Zealand, or even
Pacific countries like Fiji, because of their support for Indonesia
in the past.
Another important difference is that the people of Kosovo had
had considerable experience of self-government, not only within
Yugoslavia, but even Serbia, as an autonomous province. Such was
the degree of autonomy that it enjoyed that Kosovo functioned as
a separate constituent republic within Yugoslavia in all but name.
While most people in the province were Albanians, rather than
Serbs, the idea of union with Albania, then under the Maoist rule
of Enver Hoxha, was not attractive. Only in the 1980s, when the
government of Slobodan Milosevic stripped Kosovo of its political
and cultural autonomy, did separatist demands grow, with the
91
provincial government holding its own referendum on

independence.
East Timor, by contrast, had not originally been regarded as
part of the Republic of Indonesia, having not been part of the
Dutch East Indies. Shortly before his death, the former
Indonesian Foreign Minister, Subandrio, told Singapore academic
Bilveer Singh, that ‘Papua’, as the Indonesian half of New Guinea
was now known, ‘has always been part of our soul. It can never be
separated…’ East Timor, on the other hand, was ‘more of an
appendix. Its loss was not fatal. But Papua is one of our legs.’8 East
Timor was manifestly not Indonesia’s Kosovo, a place with
historical and cultural resonance.
Certainly the UN administration in East Timor was too short,
lasting less than three years, and should have continued in some
form even after independence in 2002. The UN Mission of
Support in East Timor (UNMISET) should have had a much
larger role in the running of government departments, which
were headed by people appointed on political loyalties than on
their abilities.
Yet the assumption of the UN was that there was nothing that
the East Timorese could do that could not be done better by
foreigners, and if foreigners could not do the job, then it was an
impossible task. In fact there many instances where East
Timorese, with some training, could have done the job infinitely
better than foreigners.
Take, for example, translation work. In Lonely Planet’s Guide
to East Timor in 2004, Tony Wheeler remarked how ‘difficult’ it
was to translate from Indonesian to Portuguese, as few Portuguese
could speak Indonesian, and how it had to be done via English.9
Yet why was this work not given to those East Timorese who
could speak both Portuguese and Indonesian fluently, not least
those living in Australia and Portugal? Why were they not trained?
92
In fact, translating from English to Tetum has also been

problematic, because while there was a Tetum-English dictionary,
there was no accompanying English-Tetum volume. There was,
however, a Malay-Tetum dictionary (the use of the world
‘Indonesian’ was deemed politically incorrect) which I could use,
with the result that translation from English to Tetum had to be
done via Indonesian.
Perhaps the most negative attitudes towards East Timor’s
choice of languages came not from monoglot English speakers,
but from Indonesian-speaking Westerners, usually, but not
always, Australians. Having the advantage of speaking a language
which was widely understood, they worked on the basis that ‘all
you need is Indonesian’. One told me that Indonesian was ‘so
useful’, that it was ‘hard for us to learn another language’.
Fortunately, this dismissive view is not shared by international
agencies in East Timor, which, while recognising the continued
usefulness of Indonesian, see the language as auxiliary to Tetum.
Indeed, even Greg Sheridan, the foreign editor of The Australian, a
newspaper whose leader writers once called for Indonesian and
English to be East Timor’s official languages, asked:
How many of our personnel in East Timor – be they army,

police, aid workers, diplomats or others – speak Tetum?
Whatever our military doctrine, the practice of the past 10 years
shows us that we need a lot of soldiers who speak Tetum…10
Although as a Brazilian, the UN’s Special Representative in

East Timor, Sérgio Vieira de Melo, shared a language with
Portuguese-educated leaders, he was aware of the language’s
limited use, and learnt Tetum, which no Portuguese Governor
ever did.11
While many different languages have made a valuable
contribution to East Timor’s linguistic heritage, a less welcome
93
contribution has been UN jargon, for example, the term ‘capacity

building’, used instead of ‘education’ or ‘training’. Unfortunately,
East Timorese now use it liberally, translating it into Tetum as
hari’i kapasidade. They talk of people having the ‘capacity’ instead
of ‘competence’.
One legacy of the UN administration was its decision to
establish a defence force for East Timor. For many years,
independence leaders had argued against having an army (the first
Fretilin member I met told me that an independent East Timor
would not have one) and José Ramos Horta reaffirmed this
position in his Nobel Peace Prize acceptance speech.
Certainly, the violence in 1999, and the continuing threat from
militias was a factor in the decision to establish the defence force,
but it was a long term solution to a short term problem. By the
time peacekeepers left in 2005, the militias had ceased to be a
major threat.
UNTAET commissioned a report from King’s College
London, which did not consider whether or not there should be a
defence force at all, but rather, the shape that it should take and
how large it should be.12 No consideration was given to the merits
of having a paramilitary police force, with a single command.
One model for such a force could have been that of the Indian
Ocean island of Mauritius, which has 10,000 personnel, in a
country comparable in population and size to East Timor. It
incorporates a paramilitary Special Mobile Force, the Coast
Guard, and a Police Helicopter Unit. Such a force may not have
been immune from the regional divisions which sparked the
violence in 2006, but it could have avoided the rivalry between the
Defence Force and National Police.
Unfortunately, the idea of abolishing the army is now regarded
with hostility in East Timor, perceived as part of an Australian
conspiracy to turn the country into a protectorate.
94
In deference to Indonesia, troops from Muslim Jordan were

brought into the Peacekeeping Force (PKF), with a battalion
being stationed in Oecussi. During that time, local children began
complaining to the Australians that the Jordanian troops had
offered them money and food in exchange for oral sex and
intercourse. At one point, Australians and Jordanians nearly came
to blows, with Australian Steyrs and Jordanian M16s pointed at
one another.13
There was even worse behaviour, with two Jordanians
evacuated home with injured penises after attempting sexual
intercourse with goats. Soon after, people started calling the
animals ‘Jordanian war brides’.14
East Timor was the first country to be governed by the United
Nations. Unlike Zimbabwe, which reverted to the status of a
British colony for a few months between 1979 and 1980, there
was no prospect of Portugal doing the same after Indonesia
rescinded its claim to East Timor.
In 1995, Richard Woolcott argued that ‘the assertion that
Portugal is the administering authority [in East Timor] is fatuous,
except in the most arcane interpretation of UN General Assembly
resolutions’.15 Yet it was the fact that Portugal remained the de jure
administering authority that differentiated East Timor from Aceh,
which had always been recognised as part of Indonesia.
Writing in the Sydney Morning Herald in 2006, George Quinn
claimed that were it not for the Asian financial crisis, and the
demise of the Suharto regime, ‘Indonesia and East Timor’s
secessionists [sic] would have hammered out a resolution of their
differences such as has been worked out in Aceh, and East Timor
would have remained part of Indonesia’.16
However, the most likely scenario would have been a stalemate
between Indonesia and Portugal, given that the Suharto regime
continually ruled out autonomy for East Timor, and refused to be
95
involved in any talks at the UN that would have involved East

Timor being separately represented. Although there was an All-
Inclusive East Timorese Dialogue (AIETD), it was not allowed to
discuss the political status of the territory.17
More importantly, were it not for the change of government in
Jakarta in 1998, and the subsequent change of policy on East
Timor, it is questionable as to whether Indonesia would have had
any incentive to change policy on Aceh, over which its sovereignty
was not in question.
Although the UN refused to recognise the decision by the
‘People’s Assembly’ to approve East Timor’s integration with
Indonesia in 1976, it had acquiesced in Indonesia’s incorporation
of West New Guinea, by recognising the similarly stage-managed
‘Act of Free Choice’ in 1969. Indeed, when Australian Prime
Minister Robert Menzies had suggested to António Salazar that
East Timor’s future should be a matter for the UN, Salazar
described this as naïve, pointing out that the UN had overseen the
transfer of West New Guinea to Indonesian sovereignty in 1962,
without an act of self-determination.18
Perhaps the strongest argument against independence for West
Papua is not that the Indonesian military would behave as
vindictively as it did in East Timor, but rather that the UN would
leave yet another fragile and skeletal state, poorly prepared for
independence.
The limits of international law were demonstrated when
Portugal took Australia to the International Court of Justice (ICJ)
in 1991 over the signing of the Timor Gap Treaty with Indonesia.
Portugal argued that there was a binding obligation under
international law not to recognise the acquisition of territory by
force, and therefore, the treaty between Australia and Indonesia
was unlawful.
96
Indonesia, on the other hand, did not accept the jurisdiction of

that Court, meaning that while there were only two parties to the
case, there were three parties to the dispute. In 1995, the Court
ruled that it had no authority to rule on the case as Indonesia had
not given its consent to jurusdiction.19
Two months before East Timor gained independence, which
would have allowed it to take Australia to the ICJ over its dispute
over oil reserves, Australia ceased to recognise the Court’s
jurisdiction over maritime boundary disputes.20
In 1950, the UN completely deprived the former Italian
colony of Eritrea of the right of self-determination, on the
grounds of its close political and economic association with
Ethiopia, or landlocked Ethiopia’s access to the sea. Instead,
Eritrea became ‘an autonomous unit federated with Ethiopia’ in
1952.21 The federal arrangement did not last, with the Ethiopian
government stripping Eritrea of its autonomy before finally
dissolving its parliament in 1962.
This led to a war between the Eritrean Liberation Front and
the Ethiopian government, first the pro-Western regime of
Emperor Haile Selassie, and from 1974 until 1991, the Marxist
military junta or Derg, led by Mengistu Haile Mariam. In 1993,
the UN established the UN Observer Mission to Verify the
Referendum in Eritrea (UNOVER), in which 99.79 per cent of
the electorate voted for independence.22
Even in the case of Western Sahara, where Morocco had
accepted the need for an act of self-determination, disagreements
over who should be entitled to vote, and the options that should
be offered in a referendum, have resulted in stalling since 1991.
In fact, before Morocco began its ‘Green March’ into Western
Sahara in 1975, it had sought an Advisory Opinion from the
International Court of Justice, to determine if: a) the territory
were terra nullius at the time of its colonisation by Spain: and b) if
97
it were not, what were the the legal ties between this territory and
Morocco and Mauritania?23
The Court decided that there were ties between the territory to
both Morocco and ‘the Mauritanian entity’, but that these did not
imply sovereignty or rightful ownership over the territory, nor did
they apply to self-determination ‘through the free and genuine
expression of the will of the peoples of the Territory’.24
In addition, in October 1975, a UN mission which had visited
Western Sahara, reported that it ‘did not encounter any groups
supporting the territorial claims of neighbouring countries and
consequently had no say of estimating the extent of their support,
which appeared to be submerged by the massive demonstrations
in favour of independence’.25
Yet unlike Portugal, which always maintained that it was the de
jure administrative power in East Timor, Spain had agreed to
relinquish sovereignty of the Western Sahara. In November 1975,
shortly before the death of General Franco, a treaty was signed
with both Morocco and Mauritania, between which the territory
would be divided. In return, Spain would have a 35 per cent stake
in a company mining phosphate deposits.26
In the case of the UN General Assembly, many countries had
reasons to vote for, vote against or abstain from resolutions from
East Timor between 1975 and 1982. Indonesia was backed by the
ASEAN countries, India, and most Muslim countries. Those
countries which supported East Timor were mainly the five
Lusophone African countries and a few others, including Algeria,
Cuba, and South Yemen,27 as well as Greece and Iceland.28
While it made sympathetic noises about East Timor at the UN,
Brazil always maintained diplomatic relations with Indonesia,
although not without some friction. In 1987, José Ramos Horta,
wrote:
98
A Brazilian trade mission to Indonesia was called off abruptly.

Brazilian businessmen were told that their Government’s position
on East Timor was hampering trade relations between the two
countries. Sure enough, the businessmen (who had probably never
heard of East Timor and couldn’t have cared less if they had) carried the
message to Itamaraty. Arch-pragmatists, the Brazilians tried to play
both sides: pleasing the Lusophone community by sponsoring the
[UN] draft; placating the Indonesians by letting them know that
Brazil would not ask other countries to support it.29
However, were the Brazilians interested in trade links with

Indonesia, any more than they were in supporting East Timor’s
right to self-determination? Perhaps conservative and anti-
communist military leaders like Geisel and Figueiredo would have
found much in common with Suharto, but would they have seen
any point in meeting him, or vice versa?
If the UN is of limited use, then what of other international
organisations, which encompass far fewer countries, few of which
can find anything on which to agree?
In 2008, there was a suggestion by Francisco Lopes da Cruz,
Indonesia’s Ambassador to Portugal, that Indonesia should
become an observer member of the CPLP.30 If there had been any
mention of this in the media in Indonesia, it is likely that it would
have been met with incomprehension and ridicule. Indonesians
might well think that it might be better to seek membership of the
Commonwealth, given the far greater interest in learning English
than other western languages, least of all Portuguese.
The reality is that Indonesians know and care as much about
their country’s Portuguese heritage, as the Portuguese do about
their Arab one. The name of an Indonesian island, Flores, comes
from Portuguese, but the name of a region of Portugal, the
Algarve, comes from Arabic. Using the same criteria, Portugal
could seek observer status at the Arab League. (Brazil, which has
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had some Syrian and Lebanese immigration, already has.)

The Commonwealth does not even expect members to have
English as an official language, which Malaysia has not done since
1968, and which formerly Portuguese Mozambique has no plans
to do. The CPLP was founded in 1996; a year after Mozambique
joined the Commonwealth, which sent alarm bells ringing in
Lisbon, although Guinea-Bissau had joined La Francophonie
sixteen years earlier.
Unlike the Commonwealth, the CPLP allows regions of
countries to be associate members; hence the fact that while Hong
Kong’s links with the Commonwealth ended with British rule,
Macau has observer status in the CPLP, as a Special
Administrative Region of China.
In fact, it is a sign of insecurity that Portugal felt the need to set
up a Commonwealth-style club at all. There is no Spanish-
speaking equivalent, although King Juan Carlos of Spain is head of
the Organisation of Ibero-American States or OEI, which
includes both Portugal and Brazil.
On the other hand, if the Commonwealth did not exist, there
would have been no need to invent it. The reason why it is of any
importance is not because of what it is, but who its members are:
countries like India, South Africa, and Malaysia; as well as Canada,
Australia, New Zealand, and Britain itself. The US has never been
a member, while Ireland left before the rules were changed to
allow republics to be members.
Every two years, British Prime Ministers and Foreign
Secretaries attend the Commonwealth Heads of Government
Meeting (CHOGM) in the knowledge that they will be given
moral lectures from their former colonies, or in the case of
Mozambique, from one of Portugal’s. If East Timor joins, then
there will be another. In an article in the Sunday Telegraph in 2003,
Kevin Myers wrote:
100
Mozambique’s President Chissano is demanding that Zimbabwe

be re-admitted to full membership of the Commonwealth.
Good on Mozambique, whose historic right to be in the
Commonwealth is precisely zero. Unlike Ireland, the US,
Burma or Sudan, who aren’t present in Abuja, Mozambique was
never part of the British Empire. But one of the more absurd
fictions of the Commonwealth is its denial of its origins: that it
is a club of the former ruled and the former ruler.31
An even more absurd international organisation, if it can be

regarded as such, is the Non-Aligned Movement, to which
Indonesia, as a founder member, still attaches some importance. It
was in the city of Bandung in 1955 that the first (and only) Afro-
Asian Conference was held.
Yet what does Indonesia have in common with Cuba? Or
Singapore with Burkina Faso? Or Brunei with Honduras? It is
undignified for Singapore to maintain the pretence that it is a
‘Third World’ country. I remember a Tanzanian girl at school
asking me about Singapore. ‘Is it as nice as everyone says?’ she
said. When I replied that it was, she said: ‘But what about the
slums? There must be slums!’ Her logic was that all countries in
Southeast Asia were like countries in Africa or South America.
In fact, even some Indonesian commentators have openly
questioned the value of the Movement. Writing about the Middle
East in the Jakarta Globe, Taufik Darusman remarked:
That the conflict has been embedded with a religious twist by

officials since time immemorial has more to do with the
anachronistic Asia-Africa solidarity and the hapless Non-Aligned
Movement than faith.32
He also added:
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It is noteworthy that this so-called Asia-Africa solidarity was

nowhere to be seen as Indonesia, year after year, took a beating
at the UN after it ‘accepted’ East Timor as part of the nation in
the early 1970s.
Yet if Suharto’s Indonesia resented African countries’ interest

in East Timor, then why did it allow South Africa’s Nelson
Mandela to meet Xanana Gusmão when he was still in prison?33
A source of resentment in East Timor has been the high
salaries and living conditions of foreign UN staff. In 2000, many
of them did not live in Dili at all, but on the Olympia, a luxury
floating hotel moored offshore.34 The UN’s use of bottled water
imported from Indonesia, also rankled with local people,
reinforcing an attitude of ‘them and us’.
However, the cost of supplying 1.5 litre bottles of water to UN
staff worked out as 37.5 US cents per bottle, in total US$4 million
a year.35 Were local suppliers to provide this to the UN instead,
they might be able to sell it at a premium, which would distort the
market and disadvantage an already poor people.
In the miniseries Answered by Fire, Canadian policewoman Julie
Fortin snaps ‘I’m here to pay my fucking mortgage!’ within
earshot of her East Timorese interpreter. While it may have
sounded crass, it could have been anyone serving with the UN, in
East Timor or elsewhere. While I do not have a mortgage to pay,
there is a limit to how much even I am prepared to do on a pro
bono basis. There are many things that I would be able and willing
to do in East Timor in addition to having paid employment, but I
would not be able and willing to do them instead of it.
A common complaint is that while large amounts of money
have been spent on East Timor, US$8.7 billion, relatively little is
being spent in East Timor. Certainly a great deal is spent on
foreign consultants, not least with the World Bank. The argument
is that these people are professionals, like bankers and lawyers, and
102
expect to be paid accordingly.36 Indeed, while the six-figure

salaries of these foreign consultants may be distasteful to local
people, it should be even more distasteful to people in developed
countries, out of whose taxes these salaries are paid.
Yet did the Marshall Plan in Europe after the Second World
War involve consultants? Or people like the UN official who
said: ‘This is going to be a very poor country for a very long time,
and we cannot build what the East Timorese cannot then afford to
run’?37 If the US had taken a similar attitude towards Europe in
1945, Italy, France and Greece would have ended up with
communist governments.
Indeed, helping other countries did not always involve highly-
paid consultants. Shortly before his death, Herb Feith wrote about
how he and Australians like him saw Indonesia in the 1950s,
where he worked as a civil servant on a local salary, and becoming
fluent in the language:
We were young; we were a bit radical, so we also saw ourselves

as engaging in a form of protest, staying with Indonesian
families and hostels rather than European enclaves, riding our
bikes when other slack people were being driven in cars. We saw
ourselves as particularly against white colonial attitudes, against
expatriate lifestyles and so on. In fact we had a pretty a strong
sense of our own moral superiority towards them.38
An international forum which should have a future is the G20,

which started out as the G7. It is not an organisation in the sense
of the UN; it has no secretariat, no headquarters, and no staff,
which is exactly as it should be. While it has only twenty
members, one of which is in fact the European Union, it is
neither a rich man’s club nor a white man’s club, with its
membership including China, India, Indonesia, Brazil, Saudi
Arabia and South Africa. Nor is it the World Bank in which the
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president is always from the US, or the International Monetary

Fund (IMF) in which the managing director is always from a
Western European country. It may not be inclusive, but it is
extensive.
While Portuguese speakers have long complained that their
language is not a working language of the UN, the fact that Brazil
is a member of the G20 should be far more effective in increasing
its international status and prestige. The same should also apply to
Indonesian. There should be more people in the world who speak
both Portuguese and Indonesian, not because of East Timor, but
because there should be stronger trade links between the two
regional giants.
Yet even now in East Timor, people still arrive knowing little
or nothing about the country, and leave it much the same. In
August 2009, the blog Dili Insider quoted one expatriate who, after
having been in the country for three months, asked: ‘what
language are the locals speaking?’39 He could have been forgiven
for asking that in remote rural areas, but in Dili?
‘Where do they find these people?’ I asked someone. ‘From the
bottom of the barrel’, she replied.
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CHAPTER SEVEN
SPEAKING IN
TONGUES
For all of our languages,

we can’t communicate.
- ‘Natives’, Christy Moore
WHENEVER people say something dismissive about East Timor’s

language policy, it is usually prefaced with ‘I can see why they
would want to do that, but…’
Sadly, the issue of language is one that has brought out the
worst in East Timor and its people, when it could so easily bring
out the best in them. There are few other issues that can bring out
such negative attitudes: paranoia; posturing; selfishness;
ignorance; prejudice and crass insensitivity.
It has certainly brought out the worst in foreign journalists,
particularly Australian ones, whose coverage of language issues in
East Timor has been negative and sensationalist, depicting the
country as a ‘Tower of Babel’.1 Yet while there remain legitimate
concerns over language policy, the role of Tetum, the country’s
lingua franca, and its rapid development as a modern language, has
all too often been ignored.
Of course, nobody would suggest that Tetum, Portuguese,
Indonesian and English were mutually intelligible. On the
contrary, people choose languages because of what they are not as
well as what they are – some people choose Portuguese because it
is not Indonesian, others Indonesian because it is not Portuguese,
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others English because it is neither, and others Tetum because it

is none of the others.
However, the four languages do share a great deal of
vocabulary, which facilitates the learning of one language by
speakers of another. This is not limited to the Portuguese
loanwords in both Tetum and Indonesian, which entered those
languages over four centuries ago, but the new Portuguese
loanwords that have entered Tetum in the past decade.
While some people talk dismissively about ‘Portuguese-like
Tetum’ thinking that Portuguese is as unrelated to most other
European languages as Basque, Hungarian, or Finnish, most of
these new loanwords are, in fact, intelligible to speakers of other
languages such as English and, increasingly, Indonesian.
Or should that be ‘English-like Indonesian’? Duncan Graham,
an Australian journalist based in Indonesia has written about
attempts to keep Indonesian ‘pure’ in the wake of an ever-
increasing flood of English loanwords:
If [Education Minister Bambang Soedibyo] is serious then we’re

going to hear some bizarre speeches as the words Presiden,
demokrasi, delegasi, perspektif, kampanye, informasi, problem, sistem,
partisipasi, strategic planning, sosial, politik, ekonomi, krisis, teori, fakta
and scores of others get deported.
Can you imagine any official harangue which doesn’t contain

most of the words above – all lifted from English with the
spelling warped to satisfy local palates?2
Similarly, these ‘lusisms’, or Portuguese loanwords in Tetum

are very similar to English loanwords in Indonesian, because they
are what are known in linguistics as ‘cognates’ - words that are
similar to their equivalents in another language, and have the same
root.
106
prezidente/presiden, demokrasia/demokrasi, delegasaun/delegasi,

perspektiva/perspektif, informasaun/informasi, problema/problem,
sistema/sistem,partisipasaun/partisipasi, estratejia/strategi,
planu/plan, sosiál/sosial, polítika/politik, ekonomia/ekonomi, krize/krise,
teoria/teori, faktu/fakta.
While English is a Germanic language, much of its modern

vocabulary is of Latin or Greek origin (via French) and so many
words are similar to their equivalents in Portuguese and other
European languages:
president/presidente, democracy/democracia, delegation/delegação,

perspective/perspectiva, information/informação, problem/problema,
system/sistema,participation/participação, strategy/estrategia,
plan/plano,social/social,politics/política, economy/economia, crisis/crise,
theory/teoria,fact/fa(c)to.
There is a growing overlap between the vocabulary of Tetum,

Portuguese, Indonesian and English, and language teaching in
East Timor should therefore have a greater emphasis on this
‘transferable vocabulary’. In fact, it is increasingly more
appropriate to talk of these loanwords as internationalisms, rather
than ‘anglicisms’, or ‘lusisms’.
In a recent interview, the Indonesian ambassador to Portugal,
Francisco Lopes da Cruz, said that 80 percent of Indonesian
words with the suffix ‘-si’ were similar to their equivalents in
Portuguese, which have the suffix ‘-ção’.3 For example, imigrasi in
Indonesian (from immigratie in Dutch) is similar to imigração in
Portuguese (or imigrasaun in Tetum). Of course, there are obvious
exceptions as nasi, which means ‘rice’ not nação or ‘nation’.
Despite Dutch being a Germanic language, unlike Portuguese,
the influence of French and Latin has meant that many Dutch
loanwords in Indonesian resemble Portuguese loanwords in
Tetum, such as:
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frambus/frambueza, aktualitas/aktualidade, redaktur/redatór,

persik/pésegu, pabrik/fábrika, advokat/advogadu, kanker/kankru,
kampanye/kampaiña, kasus/kazu, mebel/mobília, hipotek/hipoteka,
provinsi/provínsia, lisensi/lisensa, gratis/grátis, nomor/númeru,
mesin/mákina, supir/xofer, karta/kartaun
Some Portuguese-educated East Timorese even complain

about Portuguese loanwords ‘not being used the right way’, i.e.
transliterated to reflect phonetic pronunciation. Yet do
Indonesians complain about English loanwords in their language
‘not being used the right way’ and advocate that they use the
original English spelling instead, for example, flexible instead of
fleksibel, or arrogant instead of arogan?
Indeed, there are examples of Portuguese loanwords in Tetum
being ‘Indonesianised’, for example, ezije, uza and presiza
(‘demand’, ‘use’ and ‘need’) as ijiji, uja and persija. A common
feature of Indonesian-educated East Timorese is the confusion
between ‘z’ (or ‘s’) and ‘j’.
The effect of lusification on Tetum is evident, even among
those who do not speak Portuguese at all well. When I have proof-
read essays in English written by East Timorese students, I have
noticed other instances of confusion between English and
Portuguese words, for example, ‘comparation’ (from comparação)
instead of ‘comparison’, ‘recourse’ (influenced by recurso) instead
of ‘resource’, or ‘explorator’ (influenced by explorador) instead of
‘exploiter’.
Another interesting trend has been attempts to make English
loanwords in Tetum sound like Portuguese ones, for example,
developmentu, akuntabilidade, manajementu and estafe. The Tetum
word for ‘bankrupt’, bankarrota, similar to bangkrut in Indonesian,
has a Spanish equivalent bancarrota, but not a Portuguese one. This
108
is similar to what has happened in Brazilian Portuguese, with

‘sport’, ‘stock’ and ‘train’ becoming esporte, estoque and trem.
Of course, Tetum is only one of thirteen indigenous languages
spoken in East Timor, and is still not widely spoken in some areas,
for example, in the enclave of Oecussi, people speak Baikenu, a
form of the Dawan language used in the Indonesian part of the
island, and Lautem, the easternmost district, where people speak
Fataluku, a Papuan language.
This has prompted some foreigners to question Tetum’s
suitability as a lingua franca, with some dismissing it simply on the
grounds that it is not widely spoken in these areas, and arguing
that Indonesian is more useful. Yet there is a difference between
not wanting to speak a language with foreigners and not being able
to speak it at all.
When I travelled by bus to East Timor from Kupang, I met a
young man from Lospalos, the main town in the Lautem district,
returning from university in Indonesia. He was unresponsive
when I spoke to him in Tetum, but happily spoke it with the
driver and other passengers.
In any event, not only do 80 per cent of the population of East
Timor already speak Tetum, but the figure is only likely to
increase as the language continues to make inroads into more
remote areas of the country. In fact, as late as 1980, 39 per cent of
people in Indonesia did not speak Indonesian at all, although this
number had halved a decade later.4 In East Timor itself, census
figures in 1990 showed that while up to 85 per cent of people
between 15 and 19 spoke Indonesian, among people between 40
and 44 this proportion dropped off sharply to only 35 per cent for
males and 17 per cent for females.5
It is also important to distinguish between the two different
forms of Tetum used in East Timor: the pure form spoken as a
native language in rural areas, known as Tetun-Terik, and the
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creolised form influenced by Portuguese, used as a lingua franca,

known as Tetun-Prasa or Tetun-Dili.
In some countries, like Iceland, there has been a trend towards
linguistic purism. However, whereas Iceland is in the fortunate
position of being an isolated island, with a single language, East
Timor is wedged between two regional giants, from which it faces
tremendous pressure, economic, political and cultural, and also
has a population that speaks separate, and often mutually
unintelligible, languages. It is not a case of keeping a language pure
as keeping it distinct.
The problem, for example, with Luís Costa’s Tetum-
Portuguese dictionary is not that the Tetum vocabulary it uses is
pure, but that its modern vocabulary is far too limited, giving rise
to the belief that Tetum is ‘a language devoid of technological
diversity’.6
Modern vocabulary has to come from somewhere. If people do
not want to use loanwords from other languages, so be it, but why
should people wait years until some committee coins a pure
word? Even if somebody decides that the Tetum word for
‘helicopter’ is to be liras nakdulas (literally ‘spinning wing’) are
people to be prevented from using elikópteru or helikopter? In any
event, many of these ‘pure’ words are actually ‘calques’, or
translated loanwords, like the German word for ‘telephone’,
fernsprecher, which translates as ‘far speaker’, like the Greek tele fone.
(Increasingly, German speakers use the word telefon instead.)
But this is not to suggest that the development of Tetum is
only about borrowing and transliterating words from Portuguese
or another language. On the contrary, there are many lusisms in
the official Tetum vocabulary, for example: deverdekaza for
‘homework’, abregarrafas for ‘bottle opener’ and abrelatas for ‘can
opener’ which can be complemented, if not replaced, by existing
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Tetum words, knaar uma (literally ‘work home’) maklokek botir

(‘opener bottle’) and maklokek kaleen (‘opener can’).
Ironically, many of these ‘lusisms’ are calques such as luademel
which means ‘honeymoon’, or arrañaseu which means ‘skyscraper’.
Since the Portuguese lua de mel and arranha-céus and the
Indonesian bulan madu and pencakar langit literally mean ‘moon of
honey’ and ‘scraper of sky’, perhaps their Tetum equivalents could
be fulan bani-been and maksukit lalehan.
Indeed, while many people use either Indonesian or
Portuguese numbers, there are Tetum equivalents that can be
used instead, including ordinal numbers, for example, dahuluk,
daruak, datoluk, dahaat, dalimak and daneen for ‘first’, ‘second’,
‘third’, ‘fourth’,’fifth’ and ‘sixth’. Perhaps one reason why
Indonesian or Portuguese numbers are commonly used is that
they have fewer syllables than Tetum ones. For example, twelve
is duabelas in Indonesian and doze in Portuguese, in Tetum it is
sanulu-resin-rua, literally ‘ten-plus-two’, but this could be
contracted to sanulu-rua.
The fact that Tetum has been heavily influenced by
Portuguese, does not mean that it is any less of a language in its
own right, any more than the fact that English has been heavily
influenced by French does. Tetum is, and always will be, an
Austronesian language, not only with similarities to languages in
Indonesia and Malaysia, but also the Philippines, and even places
as far away as New Zealand, Hawaii, and Madagascar.
For example, ‘one’, ‘two’ and ‘three’ in Tetum, ida, rua, and tolu
are similar to isa, roa, and telo in Malagasy. The words for ‘dog’ and
‘cat’ in Tetum are asu and busan, are similar to aso and aso and pusa
in Tagalog, while the word for ‘fire’ in Tetum, ahi, is identical to
those in Hawaiian and Maori.
While it is unlikely that many Tetum speakers will learn these
languages, or vice versa, there is no harm at all in them being more
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aware of this common Austronesian heritage, as opposed to seeing

the surrounding region through a narrow ‘Australo-Indonesian’
prism.
In fact, the distinction between the two forms of Tagalog in
the Philippines, is similar to that between the two forms of Tetum
in East Timor. One of them, a creolised form influenced by
Spanish, is the basis of the national language, Filipino, and the
other is the form used by native speakers, although both are
referred to as Tagalog.
Similarly, East Timor could make a clear distinction between
the varieties of Tetum, with Tetun-Dili being known as ‘East
Timorese’, and the Tetun-Terik simply as ‘Tetum’ or ‘Tetun’.
While the former, as the national lingua franca, would be creolised,
the latter, as just one of many languages in the country, could be
kept pure.
If East Timor is to be known as ‘Timor-Leste’, then perhaps its
people and its first official language might be called ‘Timor-
Lestean’. It helps that ‘-an’ sounds similar to ‘oan’ in Tetum (in
which ‘Timorese’ is ‘Timor oan’, literally ‘Timor child’) and ‘ana’
in Mambai, which also means ‘child’.
For people who have previously studied French and Spanish,
Portuguese grammar, despite some anomalies, is largely similar to
that of other Romance languages. On the other hand, for people
in East Timor who were educated in Indonesian, which does not
use verb conjugations, or even verb tenses, Portuguese grammar
can be a shock, and, consequently, often a turn-off.
João Paulo Esperança recognises this failure by Portuguese
authorities to recognise the usefulness of Indonesian in teaching
Portuguese in East Timor:
Another serious shortcoming from the strategic point of view is

not exploiting the Indonesian language. Don’t get me wrong,
dear reader, I’m one of those who considers Indonesian as a
112
latent threat to a distinct Timorese cultural identity, and I think

it is important to provide support for the development of
Tetum. But it is sometimes useful to use the weapons of the
adversary (Falintil used American weapons captured or bought
from the military occupiers, they did not fight them with the
surik – a traditional sword – in the name of cultural purity).7
By contrast, many Indonesian books for learning English

explain how verb tenses are used, if not always correctly. For
example, in one dictionary, akan is translated as both ‘will’ and
‘would’, despite the future and conditional having different
meanings – mungkin akan would be closer to ‘would’.
Portuguese, unlike English, has two verbs for ‘to be’ ser and
estar, but these can be explained in Indonesian using the words
adalah and berada. For example, the sentences João está em Díli and
João é o nosso professor in Portuguese (‘João is in Dili’ and ‘João is
our teacher’) can be translated into Indonesian as ‘João berada di
Dili’ and ‘João adalah guru kita’ respectively.
In fact, it may not always be necessary to use Indonesian at all,
but explain Portuguese verb tenses using Tetum. At the Espaço por
Timor cultural centre in Lisbon, I bought a Tetun-Terik grammar
manual, which sets out the past, present, conditional and
subjunctive using such words as sei (‘shall’), karik (‘maybe’) or ona
(‘already’). Unlike Indonesian or even Tetun-Dili, it still has verb
inflections. In Tetun-Dili, the verb ‘to eat’, han, remains the same,
but in Tetun-Terik, ha is conjugated as:
ha’u ka – I eat
ó ma – you (sing.) eat
nia na – he/she/it eats
ami ha – we eat
imi ha – you (pl.) eat
sira ra – they eat
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One East Timorese friend remarked that ‘Tetun-Terik is very

hard, it has grammar!’ – yet every language does. Unfortunately,
as Tetum and other languages in East Timor have traditionally
been vernaculars, they are erroneously called ‘dialects’, despite
Baikenu and Fataluku being as closely related to Tetum as
Portuguese and Finnish are to Danish.
One Portuguese man, who had grown up in East Timor, said
that the East Timorese could only learn Portuguese through
immersion. According to one of them he had spoken to, that was
how they had learned Indonesian. ‘Vox populi!’ he proclaimed. But
it was not – many East Timorese who came to Portugal to study at
university had dropped out. I would counsel him against going
back there again, as it would break his heart. The vox populi is
more along the lines of ‘I hate Portuguese language [sic]’ or
‘Portuguese no good! Portuguese bad!’
A common feature of media coverage of language issues in East
Timor is the depiction of Tetum as being undeveloped, and
inadequate for use as a modern language, as illustrated by the
following comments:
Tetum is used in daily interaction but some experts say it is mainly a

spoken language and has to be developed further for wider usage.8
Who are these ‘experts’? Do they even speak the language?
While sufficient for everyday conversation, Tetum does not possess the rich
vocabulary required to express sophisticated concepts and is not much use,
for instance, in teaching a biology course or writing a judicial decision.9
This argument is now increasingly tenuous. The problem with

Tetum is no longer a lack of vocabulary, but a lack of written
material available in the language. Even now there remains an
inferiority complex about the use of Tetum as a written language,
114
partly a legacy of both the Portuguese and Indonesian education

systems, neither which did anything to promote it. This difficulty
in visualising Tetum words is common to both Indonesian and
Portuguese-educated people alike.10 This has even given rise to the
belief among some foreign observers that most young East
Timorese speak Indonesian as their ‘first language’.11
The reluctance to use a traditionally oral language for written
communication is commonplace even in Western countries. In
Switzerland, Romansch is now the country’s fourth official
language, despite being spoken by less than one per cent of the
population, but many native speakers prefer to use German for
official communication.12 Even among the few who speak the
language, there are disagreements between speakers of different
dialects over what constitutes ‘standard’ Romansch.
While there are different spelling forms in use in Tetum, some
for indigenous words, or transliterated Portuguese loanwords,
they are not substantially different from the official orthography.
More importantly, there is a growing consensus over vocabulary,
even among people who have had sharply different opinions on
the use of Portuguese.
Reviewing Geoffrey Hull’s Standard Tetum-English Dictionary in
2000, Catharina van Klinken advised against using it to write in
Tetum, ‘as a lot of it won’t be understood’.13 Some Indonesian-
educated people have criticised Hull’s work because of the large
number of Portuguese loanwords, yet I met a Portuguese-
educated East Timorese in Dili who criticised van Klinken’s
Tetun-English Wordfinder because of its use of Indonesian ones.
I had not seen the book, but when I did I found that, apart
from Indonesian-influenced spelling and a few Indonesian
loanwords, van Klinken’s use of Portuguese-derived words was
comparable to Hull’s.
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There is a degree of paranoia among many Portuguese

language advocates in East Timor about bilingualism, whether it
be in government or in education, as if to suggest that the use of
Tetum will undermine the role of Portuguese, and reduce it to
merely a decorative language, an ‘anachronistic add-on for some
formal occasions’.14
The thinking of East Timor’s leaders, has been that Tetum can
only be fully promoted as an official language once Portuguese has
been ‘securely restored’,15 but a language cannot be made a
language of the people simply by using it as the language of the
State and its institutions, be they parliament, the ministries or the
courts.
The experience of post-independence Ireland demonstrates the
flaws of a statist or state-centric approach. Not only was
proficiency in the Irish language made compulsory for many posts
in the public service, but passing school examinations and
entering university.16
Fortunately, Tetum and Portuguese in East Timor do not
suffer from the same disadvantages as Irish. Tetum was never
sidelined by Portuguese as Irish was by English, and anything
written or broadcast in the language will be accessible to a wide
audience. Similarly, while Portuguese may not be used in the
surrounding region, it is still one of the world’s major languages,
with no shortage of written and audio-visual material available, via
satellite television and the internet.
There is also a problem in that while a language might be used
in the classroom, it is left there. Children in East Timor might
study Portuguese in school, but when they go home, they will
watch an Indonesian sinetron, and listen to Indonesian pop songs.
Australian linguist Catharina van Klinken identified just one of
the reasons why Portuguese was such a problematic language for
young people in East Timor: ‘they don’t have exposure to it.’17
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Indeed, the tendency to consider Portuguese as a ‘high’

language in East Timor, and the insistence of using it in situations
where it is not understood, is reminiscent of how Arabic is used in
many Islamic schools in Indonesia. In 2005, Yusman Roy, a
Muslim preacher in East Java was jailed for two years. His crime
was to lead prayers in Indonesian rather than Arabic. He was later
released, but had no regrets about taking on the traditionalists and
fundamentalists. He told the Jakarta Post:
The problem with many Muslims in Indonesia is that they don’t

think for themselves… They stand in the mosque and mumble,
but they don’t understand what the clerics are saying because
they don’t know Arabic. What’s the problem with using
Indonesian? God understands everything we think and say
whatever the language.18
Of course, neither Portuguese nor Arabic are dead or high

languages, but many East Timorese and Indonesians could be
forgiven for thinking that they were.
There is a misconception that according official status to one
language precludes people from learning or using another. Many
people complain about Portuguese being the ‘national language’ of
East Timor, unaware that it is neither the national language nor
even the sole official language. While some people are aware that
Indonesian and English are working languages under the
Constitution, they are divided as to whether this status gives them
too little recognition, or too much: ‘as long as deemed necessary’
can be taken to mean ‘indefinitely’.
Originally, in April 1998, the first conference of the CNRT,
held in Portugal, decided to adopt Tetum as the national language
and Portuguese as the official language in an independent East
Timor. At the time, José Ramos Horta stated that English would
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be taught at school from primary level, but there would be no

place for Indonesian in the new education system.19
In 1999, Xanana Gusmão took a more pragmatic line on the
continued use of Indonesian:
Bearing in mind our history, present reality and the economics

and culture of the regions surrounding our country, we must
develop our Tetum language, generalise and perfect people’s
command of the Portuguese language, and maintain the study of
the Indonesian language.20
Contrary to claims in the Australian media, support for

Portuguese as an official language was neither confined to Fretilin
nor to people who had been in exile during the Indonesian
occupation. Xanana Gusmão had never set foot in a Portuguese-
speaking country before 1999, while Bishop Carlos Ximenes Belo
chose to return to East Timor under Indonesian rule, rather than
remain in Portugal. Even Mário Carrascalão, who banned the use
of Portuguese while he was Indonesia’s Governor21 said:
‘Portuguese will give us an identity. It is part of our cultural
background.’22
If ever there were a case of returned exiles imposing a language
on a country, it was in Rwanda. After the genocide in 1994, people
who had been living in exile in Uganda returned to the country
and declared that Rwanda would henceforth use English, not
French, as an official language alongside Kinyarwanda.23 (Paul
Kagame, now the country’s President, served as an officer in the
Ugandan Army.)24
Although the change was on economic and geopolitical
grounds, there were also emotional ones, namely resentment of
France. Madagascar has also adopted English as an official
language, alongside both Malagasy and French.25 However,
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Equatorial Guinea, a former Spanish colony, has made French its

second official language, with plans to make Portuguese its third.26
In fact, the official status of a language is of secondary
importance to how widely it is actually used. For example, English
is spoken by only 38 per cent of people in Hong Kong, where it is
an official language,27 but 87 per cent in the Netherlands, and 86
percent in Denmark where it is not.28 In Britain, the US and
Australia, English has no official status at all, while Italian was not
declared the official language of Italy until 2007.29
While Spanish remained an official language in the Philippines
until 1973, this was a dead letter, as it had long since given way to
English, a legacy of US influence, as well as Filipino. A similar
experience happened in Malta under British rule, where Italian
was downgraded in favour of English and Maltese, but Malta’s
proximity to Italy has meant that the language is now more widely
spoken than it was when it had official status.
As a result of international migration, many countries have
sizeable numbers of people who do not speak the main language
of the country. For example, in Northern Ireland, few East
Timorese migrant workers speak English, despite having lived
there for years. Consequently, government departments and local
authorities now translate documents into Tetum, something that
their counterparts in East Timor have all too often failed to do.
While many East Timor government websites are entirely in
English, Dungannon and South Tyrone Borough Council’s
website not only has pages in Polish, Lithuanian, Russian,
Portuguese, Irish and Ulster Scots, but also Tetum.
Until recently, only one daily newspaper in East Timor, Jornal
Nacional Diário was published entirely in Tetum and Portuguese,
but all local news articles are in Tetum, with foreign news in
Portuguese being from newspapers in Portugal or the Lusa news
agency. In the other two daily newspapers, Suara Timor Lorosae
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and Timor Post, most local news articles are now in Tetum, rather
than Indonesian, but as most foreign news is from Indonesian
newspapers or the Antara news agency, Indonesian has a
disproportionately high profile.
Indeed, even Jornal Nacional Diário now carries sport and show
business from Indonesia, illustrating that Indonesian, unlike
Portuguese, or English, is still a language of popular culture.
Similarly, Indonesian television channels, widely available in East
Timor via satellite, have had an even more captive audience. Until
2007, the TVTL signal was confined to Dili, and in much of the
country, it can still only be received via satellite.
A positive, albeit short-lived development in East Timor in
2005 was the introduction of a bilingual Tetum-Portuguese
weekly newspaper called O Jornal Lia Foun. This included
Portuguese translations of local articles written in Tetum (or vice
versa) as well as Tetum translations of articles from Público and
Lusa. Unfortunately, disagreements over funding with the
Portuguese Embassy in Dili, which had already given support to
another local newspaper, Jornal Nacional Semanário, it folded within
the year.
Although Singapore has been mooted as an example of a
multilingual education system, there has been relatively little
opportunity for children to study a third language beyond English
and their mother tongue (Chinese, Malay and Tamil) with only a
few schools offering French, German or Japanese.
Indeed, when it comes to the merits of multilingualism, there
is little that the East Timorese have to learn from people in
Singapore. And while Singaporeans of all races know how to sing
their national anthem, Majulah Singapura, in Malay, most cannot
understand the words. When Singapore despatched a relief
mission to Aceh following the Tsunami in 2004, few members,
apart from Malays, could speak Malay, let alone Indonesian.30
120
However, where East Timor can learn from Singapore and

other countries, is in the use of bilingual documents and
multilingual public signs. In Singapore, many public signs are in
all four official languages, unlike in East Timor, where they are in
either one official language or the other, but not both.
A more appropriate model for East Timor’s education system
could be that of Luxembourg, to which multilingualism is central.
For the first four years, teaching is in Luxembourgish, to which
German is added. Then, the medium of instruction changes to
German, to which French and English are added, for the next four
years. Finally, for the last four years, teaching is in French, with
children learning another European language, in addition to
Luxembourgish, German and English.
When I have suggested something similar for East Timor, the
reaction has been that it would ‘dilute Portuguese’. No, it would
simply acknowledge the reality that East Timor, like Luxembourg,
is multilingual.
Others claim that it would be a ‘Tower of Babel’, yet this has
already been the case. In school classrooms, teachers from
Portugal and Brazil, in addition to having to teach students who
speak very little Portuguese, have been unable to understand the
Indonesian language textbooks still used by their students, as well
as their local colleagues. Diane Almeida, a Brazilian teacher
working in East Timor, told me:
‘I don’t know if any Portuguese-Indonesian dictionaries exist. We

need to find one, because in our work here we need to translate
syllabus textbooks in Indonesian into Portuguese. We often count
on the Timorese themselves to help us, and do a lot of work with
the help of an Indonesian-English dictionary, but much of it is lost
in translation.’
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One implausible excuse that I was given for why a Portuguese-

Indonesian dictionary had never been compiled was because
Portugal and Indonesia did not have diplomatic relations. Yet
political objections could have easily have been overcome by
calling it a ‘Portuguese-Malay dictionary’, with Indonesian words
included.
There should be less emphasis on compulsion to learn languages,
and more emphasis on exposure to them, for example, through
subtitling of television programmes and films. In Croatia,
Brazilian telenovelas are shown in the original language with
subtitles, rather than dubbed, even though few people there have
an interest in learning Portuguese. Indeed, when I stayed with an
East Timorese family in Britain, we were all able to follow a Hindi
movie on DVD with English subtitles.
Yet dubbing could have its uses in East Timor, as a way of
raising the status of Tetum as a modern language. One idea I had
was to dub television dramas and feature films from the
Philippines into Tetum. ‘Why the Philippines?’ a relative asked,
‘why not Albania?’ To the best of my knowledge, he has never
met an East Timorese or an Albanian, but if he met one, he would
be able to work out which one looks more like his wife, who is a
Filipina.
Like the East Timorese, the Filipinos are of mainly
Austronesian stock, are predominantly Catholic, have an Iberian
heritage, and are not Indonesian. Having them talking in Tetum
would look no more bizarre than Brazilians or Venezuelans
talking Indonesian. In addition, not only would the East Timorese
be watching upwardly mobile people in smart clothes, living in
nice houses and driving new cars speaking their language, but they
would also be watching upwardly mobile people who look like them
speaking it.
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Writing in 2000, Dionisio Babo Soares raised concerns about

the introduction of the Portuguese language policy:
Cautious measures need to be taken and decisions on sensitive

issues such as language need to be handled carefully because
these could become a source of negative feelings in a still-
traumatised society.31
This was written before the decision by the Constituent

Assembly to declare both Tetum and Portuguese official
languages in 2001, but those concerns are still valid, as East Timor
has yet to create an environment in which people do not feel
threatened or disadvantaged by the use of languages that they do
not speak.
As in other countries where there has been a language shift,
there will be many people who do not want to make that shift, do
not want to learn a new language, and want to go on using the
language that they already speak. While languages in Europe like
Welsh and Basque are now being actively promoted after centuries
of official prohibition, most people in Wales and the Basque
Country, by choice, still do not speak them.
It is likely that most Indonesian-educated people in East Timor
will never learn Portuguese, nor indeed will many people
educated in Indonesian after independence. The best way of
healing these divisions is through the use of Tetum, which is
spoken, in some form or other, by most people of all generations.
All too often, languages can be used as a means of excluding
other people. That is certainly how many people see Portuguese
in East Timor. However, even indigenous languages can be used
as a weapon. For example, Brigadier-General Taur Matan Ruak
would address soldiers in Fataluku,32 which was even less
intelligible to speakers of Tetum and related languages than
Portuguese.
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SPEAKING IN TONGUES
On the other hand, while people should have the right not to
learn a language, this should not give them the right to behave like
a ‘dog in the manger’, and deny others to learn that language if
they so wish.
Unfortunately, many people, not necessarily monoglot English
speakers, cannot understand that for many others, multilingualism
is the norm. I speak around a dozen languages in varying degrees
of fluency, which I tend to downplay, because people who are
multilingual are either looked upon as eccentrics or incredibly
gifted. ‘You’re quite a linguist!’ people say. Well, no, I am not.
Being able to speak several languages does not make you a linguist
any more than being good at arithmetic makes you a
mathematician. In fact, there are many linguists who are
monolingual.
Most East Timorese who I know speak between three and five
languages, and speak most or all of them during the course of an
evening without a second thought. One friend of mine speaks
Fataluku, Tetum, Indonesian, Portuguese, English, and
Cantonese – not because he has Chinese ancestry, but because he
lived in Macau.
What right have people to lecture him about what language is
more important for him than others, particularly when they
would not dream of doing that to people in Europe who speak
Welsh or Basque?
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CHAPTER EIGHT
AIR-
AIR-LOCKED
AND E-
E-LOCKED
I hope that someone gets my message in a bottle.
- ‘Message in a Bottle’, The Police
‘MY FRIEND,’ the official at the Ministry of Infrastructure in Dili

said, ‘everything here does not work’. To prove his point, the
electricity went off three times during our meeting.
In his book The Bottom Billion, Paul Collier offered this advice
to countries in the developing world landlocked with bad
neighbours: ‘Don’t be air-locked or e-locked’.1 While East Timor
is not landlocked, and now has amicable relations with its two
giant neighbours, it remains cut off by limited or inadequate air or
electronic communication links with the rest of the world.
This was exacerbated by the departure of the Indonesians in
1999, which not only saw the destruction of most of the local
infrastructure, but also the withdrawal of Indonesia’s
telecommunications and postal services, as well as flights and ferry
services from Kupang, and elsewhere in Indonesia.
In June 1999, I wrote to the International Telecommunication
Union (ITU) about assigning a country code to East Timor,
assuming that it were necessary at all. Even if it had voted for
independence, I would have had no problem with East Timor
continuing to use the Indonesian area codes +62 390 (for Dili) or
+62 399 (for Baucau) at least for a transitional period.
Following the break-up of the Soviet Union and Yugoslavia,
the new countries that emerged sought all the trappings of
125
AIR-LOCKED AND E-LOCKED
independent statehood: flags; armies; embassies; currencies – and

international dialling codes. While Canada shares the code +1
with the US, only Kazakhstan was happy to continue sharing the
code +7 with Russia, and during the 1990s, the ITU began
assigning new country codes. Not only were these assigned to
former Soviet and Yugoslav republics, but also to European
microstates which had previously been part of their larger
neighbours’ telephone systems.
When Liechtenstein decided to take control of its
telecommunications from Switzerland, and adopt its own code, it
was entirely amicable. During 1999, the Swiss area code +41 75
was phased out, and the new international code +423 was phased
in. Despite the change, international calls were still routed via
Switzerland, and Liechtenstein telephone numbers were still
listed in the telephone directory for the neighbouring Swiss
canton.
When I wrote to the ITU, I had hoped that any changes to East
Timor’s telecommunications would be similarly seamless.
Subsequent changes that year, however, were anything but. Along
with everything else, the departing Indonesian military and local
militias laid waste to the telecommunications infrastructure.
Telkom Indonesia withdrew its services from East Timor, and
anyone attempting to call a number there using the Indonesian
code would hear the recorded announcement: ‘The number you
have dialled is incorrect… nomor ini salah…’ To this day, Telkom
Indonesia payphones remain on the streets of Dili, neither
repaired nor removed, ten years after the Indonesian withdrawal.
As an interim measure, Australia provided international access
to East Timor using the code +672, used for Norfolk Island and
its Antarctic territories. The irony was that +672 had originally
been assigned to Portuguese Timor, but was never brought into
use.
126
The UN, however, connected its telephone network in East

Timor to its switchboards in New York, Rome and Darwin.
When I spoke to someone in the Information Technology, Post
and Telecommunications department in Dili in 2000, I dialled a
number in Manhattan, and then an extension number.
To add even more confusion, people were also using satellite
telephones in areas where there was no mobile phone signal,
which required yet another international code.
In early 2000, the ITU finally assigned a country code to East
Timor, +670. When the ITU told me this, I was surprised, as I
thought that this was the code for the Northern Marianas, a US
territory in the Pacific. However, in 1997, the code had been
withdrawn from use, when the Northern Marianas adopted the
North American area code +1 670.
This resulted in a great deal of confusion, as many
international carriers, particularly in the US, continued to list
+670 as being the code for the Northern Marianas, several years
after East Timor’s independence. Some carriers even list the two
destinations together, as ‘East Timor Saipan’, Saipan being the
main island in the Marianas.
Initially, few people were using the +670 code to call East
Timor, which could only be used to call landlines. Most people
were using Telstra’s mobile phone service in East Timor, which
used Australia’s international code, +61, and Australian mobile
phone numbers.
Telstra had no desire to remain in East Timor, and did not bid
for the US$16 million contract to build a new
telecommunications network. At the time, East Timor’s leaders,
like José Ramos Horta had no regrets. In an interview with the
ABC, he said:
Telstra did not put much back into East Timor, in terms of
infrastructure, they simply piggybacked on what was there, what
127
was not destroyed by Indonesia. They made millions and

millions of dollars out of East Timor’s situation and I don’t
think anyone will be missing them... when they leave and other
companies take over. There will be no farewell (or) goodwill.2
In May 2003, shortly after its withdrawal from the country,

Telstra raised the cost of a three-minute call to a mobile in East
Timor from A$3.35 to A$9.44.
The only company to build for the contract, at least officially,
was Portugal Telecom. Another bidder, the Australian
entrepreneur Robert Cooksey, had put together a consortium
called Telekomunikasaun Timor Lorosae, backed by BT and
Siemens. Owing to disagreements over how and when the bid had
to be submitted, it was not considered.
Cooksey had claimed that he could not submit the bid on time
because flights to Dili were fully booked by visitors to the
independence celebrations. East Timor’s Minister for
Communications, however, claimed that Cooksey had been
permitted to file documents by e-mail, but these had not been
submitted on time either.3
While using Telstra had helped many East Timorese in the
diaspora to call their families at relatively little cost, this was an
interim measure, as many were later shocked to learn when
Telstra withdrew its services in 2003.
Whatever pride they might have felt in using their homeland’s
own country code for mobiles as well as landlines, was cancelled
out by the greatly increased expense. Many of those carriers that
had implemented the +670 code for calls to East Timor were
charging disproportionately high rates, in the region of US$3 a
minute.
When I complained to Timor Telecom about the cost of
calling East Timor, its response was that other companies’ prices
were not its responsibility. However, telecom operators like BT
128
argued that their international call charges reflect how much they
have to pay for termination costs.
Timor Telecom’s website states that it has signed roaming or
SMS agreements with operators in Morocco, or Hungary, but
how many East Timorese are in those countries, compared with
the UK or Ireland, where there are many of them? Timor
Telecom has not yet signed agreements with many operators in
the world, not least in the UK. For example, I cannot send a text
message to East Timor from my Orange mobile phone, or vice
versa because Timor Telecom has not signed an agreement with
Orange.
Two years after it had introduced its own country code,
Liechtenstein announced that at least 1220 telecom operators
around the world had confirmed that they had implemented the
+423 code. How many of them have implemented +670 for East
Timor, how long did it take them to get round to it, and how
much are they charging?
In 2004, Timor Telecom told me that:
The main connection route to East Timor is via Marconi

(Portugal) and Marconi has informed every telecommunication
operator worldwide regarding the allocation of 670 to East Timor.
All this has been made through the International
Telecommunication Union.
Leaving aside the absurdity of routing calls to East Timor via a

country on the other side of the world, there is nothing that the
ITU can do to ensure that telecommunication operators comply.
The onus is on Timor Telecom and Marconi Portugal. East
Timor is still not an ITU member state, seven years after
independence, and six years after it was first proposed. All that it
would take would be a signature, and yet it remains in the
decision mode.
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The ITU allocates country codes under Recommendation

E.164, which, as the name suggests, is nothing more than that.
There are many instances of states using their own dialling
arrangements for calls to other countries, and there is nothing that
the ITU can do to stop them. In fact, in deference to China, the
code used by Taiwan, +886, is listed as ‘reserved’, not assigned to
any country.
Similarly, until 2007, Spain refused to recognise Gibraltar’s
country code +350, and treated it as part of its numbering plan.
This meant that when calls from the rest of the world were routed
via Spain, people would hear a recorded announcement telling
them that the number they had dialled did not exist, even though
they were using the correct international code.4
This caused considerable problems for Gibraltar, a small
territory with an economy based on offshore finance, shipping
and tourism, all dependent on international communication.5
What Gibtelecom decided to do was take a proactive approach, by
cutting its termination costs and encouraging least cost routing
carriers to route their calls directly to Gibraltar. Following Spain’s
recognition of the +350 code, the problem has effectively been
resolved.
The cost of international calls from East Timor can also be
disproportionately high, because of the charge bands that Timor
Telecom uses. The countries in the lowest charge band, Group 1,
are, understandably, Indonesia and Australia as well as Portugal.
Countries in Group 2 are those in the surrounding Asia-Pacific
region, those in Group 3 are the US, Canada, Brazil and the
Portuguese-speaking countries of Africa, while those in Group 4
are France, Germany, Spain, Sweden and the UK. All other
countries are in Group 5, which is the highest charge band.
As with many other telephone companies, Timor Telecom’s
assumption is that the lower the volume of calls to a destination,
130
the higher the cost should be. Yet why should anyone be made to
pay a premium for calling a particular country, simply because few
others do?
The company which I use for my calls to East Timor tells me
that I am the only customer to call that destination, but its charges
are reasonable. It has nothing to lose in offering me telephone
calls to a low-volume destination, because it has no overheads or
ongoing charges to pay.
Certainly there are people from Guinea-Bissau in East Timor,
I have met one, but there are many people from Ireland, Norway,
Egypt and India, who have to pay twice as much to call home. It is
fortunate that those East Timorese working in Ireland live in
Northern Ireland, rather than across the border in the Republic,
as their families would be paying US$1.53 a minute rather than 90
cents.
In fact, charging local or discounted rates for cross-border
telephone calls is commonplace in many parts of Europe, and
indeed Asia. Calls from Malaysia to Singapore are still charged at
domestic rates, not international ones, while calls from Singapore
to Indonesia’s Riau province are charged at a lower rate than those
to the rest of Indonesia.
Although the use of fixed line telephones or landlines has
decline, particularly in poor countries where mobile phone
ownership has taken off, they are still essential for most offices.
The whole point of telephones in an office is that they are not
mobile; they are fixed, and cannot be lost or stolen by employees.
In fact, not all wireless telephone networks are mobile. There
are many fixed wireless networks, in which subscribers are
connected either through an aerial on their roof, or through a
telephone with a wireless terminal inside the building. (Telkom
Indonesia uses the latter for its FlexiHome service.)
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Subscribers have numbers with local area codes, and calls to

and from landlines are charged at the same rate as those using the
fixed telephone network. One mistake that East Timor made was
to allow TT to charge the same for calls between landlines as
landlines to mobiles. Free calls to and from landlines would
certainly be an incentive for people to use them.
Another technology that people have been too hasty to write
off is the fax machine, which is still useful in a place where the
postal service barely functions, call costs are high, and where
internet connections are unreliable. Even in developed countries,
faxes are useful during postal strikes. Yet a year after Timor
Telecom began operations in East Timor, its office still did not
have a separate fax line. The Prime Minister’s office, on the other
hand, did not have a fax machine at all.
The obvious solution is to have fax-to-email, with local
telephone numbers, although given the cost and difficulty of
calling East Timor from the rest of the world, services with US or
other numbers might still be required. Services like eFax allow
subscribers to send and receive fax messages via the Internet, and
offer telephone numbers in different countries.
However, in many countries, there are still faxmail services,
similar to voicemail, allowing people to retrieve fax messages
remotely by dialling an access number and a personal
identification number (PIN). This offers more security and
privacy than having faxes for different people being printed off
and filed together in a post office or shop.
One telephone company which has expressed an interest in
entering East Timor’s telecoms market is Digicel, owned by Irish
entrepreneur Denis O’Brien, which has been offering mobile
phone services in the Caribbean, and more recently, the Pacific.
When Digicel entered Papua New Guinea, the incumbent
operator, Telikom PNG, reacted by refusing to enter an
132
interconnection agreement. Consequently, Digicel subscribers

could not call Telikom PNG subscribers or vice versa, until 2008, a
year after the operator had entered the local market.6
It remains to be seen whether or not Digicel will enter East
Timor, but at least the threat of competition has prompted Timor
Telecom to improve its services. In September 2009, the Chief
Executive Officer of Portugal Telecom, Zeinal Bava, announced a
new strategic plan for Timor Telecom, which would increase
fixed line and mobile coverage to 90 per cent of the population
within the next four years, introduce and expand 3G technologies,
and build an underwater fibre optic cable, which would connect
East Timor with the international data network and allow cheaper
and faster Internet services.7
It also remains to be seen if Timor Telecom will actually
deliver these services. It was not until 2007, four years after it
entered East Timor, that Timor Telecom introduced a voicemail
service for its mobile phone subscribers.
There is still no broadband internet service available, either
through telephone lines (ADSL) or wireless (WiMAX). Even by
the standards of poor countries in the region, East Timor’s
internet services are inadequate. Vanuatu, a country with only
215,000 people has ADSL, while Fiji, with only 840,000 people,
offers WiMAX. In Ta Van, one of the poorest and remotest areas
in Vietnam, villagers are able to access broadband internet via a
satellite connection and WiMAX.8
Some people in East Timor have smuggled in VSAT (Very
Small Aperture Terminal) equipment from Indonesia, which
allows them to connect to the Internet via satellite. Given the
popularity of satellite television, the sight of a satellite dish on
somebody’s roof does not arouse suspicion.
A Thai company, IPSTAR, has resellers for its satellite
broadband services, not only in Indonesia, but also in Australia
133
and New Zealand. An Australian company, Oceanic Broadband,

uses similar services not only to provide wireless broadband in the
Pacific, but also telephone services and pay-TV. In the absence of
other technologies, why should East Timor be denied this one,
which is readily available? It would not be difficult for Timor
Telecom to become a reseller, which would provide it with an
attractive new product.
The argument against opening up the telecommunications
market to competition is that it is too small to support more than
one operator. This is based on the assumption that new market
operators would need to build their own infrastructure.
Yet would this need to be the case? A more effective solution
would be to split Timor Telecom into two companies, one
wholesale, the other retail. In many countries, former telecom
monopolies, like BT in the UK or Telstra in Australia, have been
required to give new market entrants access to their fixed line
network, in what is known as local loop unbundling.
Consequently, while BT and Telstra continue to own the
telephone lines in homes and offices, people can access other
telephone and broadband internet services without needing to
have a new line installed. Even cable companies like Virgin Media
in the UK use BT lines in areas where they do not have their own
infrastructure. In a case of history coming full circle, the Post
Office in the UK, from which BT was split in the 1980s, now
offers a fixed line telephone service which, despite being in
competition with BT, is provided by BT’s wholesale division.
In the 1990s, Telstra and Optus in Australia spent millions
building separate networks, with each digging up streets to lay its
own cables. In Sweden, by contrast, Stockholm built its own fibre
optic cable network, which private companies could then pay to
use.9 This allowed operators to offer services without having to
build their own infrastructure, and brought in revenue for the
134
city. Australia’s National Broadband Network (NBN) will work

on a similar basis, as an open access network, although it is to be
built by a public private partnership.
All of East Timor’s communications services could also work
on an open access basis, be they fixed line or mobile telephones,
broadband internet or pay-television. Companies could either
resell services from Timor Telecom’s wholesale division, or offer
their own services via the open access network.
Curiously, while East Timor has yet to join the International
Telecommunication, it has joined the Universal Postal Union
(UPU) despite the decreasing importance of postal services. Yet
while they are of decreasing importance, they still remain useful.
Under Indonesian rule, each district capital in East Timor had
a post office and there were deliveries to street addresses as well as
post office boxes. Following the Indonesian withdrawal, all of this
disappeared, and has never been reintroduced. Not only is the
idea of door-to-door delivery a distant memory or a pipe dream,
but in Dili, there is a waiting list for PO boxes stretching back
more than a year.
One possibility would be to have a general delivery or poste
restante service, not for foreign travellers, which is usually the case
in other countries, but for residents. Instead of items of mail being
sorted by name, they would be sorted by street address, but
instead of the mail being delivered to the recipient, the recipient
would collect the mail over the counter.
In fact, in the UK, mail sent to a PO Box address is collected
over the counter, with box holders showing a card instead of
opening a box themselves with a key. Mail to a street address can
also be redirected to a PO Box number and vice versa.
Even the postcode system was not reintroduced after the
Indonesian withdrawal. ‘Postcodes are something we will be
dealing with at a later stage’, UNTAET told me in 2001, ‘it does
135
not have priority right now.’ Yet all that it needed to do was to
adapt the old Indonesian postcode ranges, with Dili 88000
becoming TL-1000 and Baucau 89000 becoming TL-2000, and so
on. While it may not be viable to have automated sorting in East
Timor, postcodes could still be useful for sorting by postal
administrations overseas, not least Indonesia and Australia.
Andorra has a separate postcode system from both France and
Spain, with AD and three digits for the parish, but La Poste and
Correos (both of which provide postal services in Andorra) will
recognise AD500 as being the postcode for Andorra la Vella, and
sort mail automatically.
Some British overseas territories now have them just to avoid
mail being sent to the other side of the world. For example, all
mail to the Falkland Islands now has the postcode FIQQ IZZ, to
avoid it being sent to the Faeroe Islands, Iceland or Falkirk in
Scotland.10 As well as being more dignified than having to put ‘via
Darwin, Australia’ on items of mail, a postcode system would help
people in East Timor to order items online - although Hong Kong
and Ireland do not have one at all.
Post offices in East Timor could easily offer other services,
including banking, thereby saving privately owned banks the
expense of setting up their own local branches. In many countries,
post offices are being subsumed into privately-owned shops (in
Australia and New Zealand, they are already known as post shops)
although in the UK, one local council took over the running of
post offices from Royal Mail when they were threatened with
closure.11
Even outbound international mail takes months to reach its
destination, because of disputes between Correios de Timor and
the Indonesian airline Merpati over payment. The only item of
mail that I have received with East Timor stamps and postmarks
was a letter dated 10 September 2006, which I did not receive
136
until 18 December of that year. The fact that it was from the then
Prime Minister made no difference; it spent three months in an
ever-growing pile of letters gathering dust. In a reversal of history,
mail from Portugal to Indonesia now takes less time to arrive than
mail from the former ‘27th Province’.
There are historical and political reasons why depending on
Indonesia for air links is not a good idea for East Timor.
Following the coup attempt in August 1975, the Portuguese
government sent Colonel José Gomes as an envoy to mediate, but
Darwin airport had closed in the wake of Cyclone Tracey in 1974,
depriving East Timor of an alternative air link to Indonesia. When
Gomes attempted to fly to East Timor via Jakarta, the Indonesian
authorities refused him entry, forcing him to return to Lisbon.12
Today, the reasons why depending on Indonesia for air links is
not a good idea are more practical. Even under Indonesian rule,
there were no direct flights between Jakarta and Dili, which was
only served by flights from Denpasar in Bali, and not only treated
East Timor as an appendage of Indonesia, but an appendage of
Bali, an outer region. It is the equivalent of the only direct flight
from Ireland to Britain being to Blackpool instead of London.
Following independence, this is still the case. East Timor’s
main air links are with Denpasar and Darwin, neither of which is
well served by international flights, compared to Singapore, or
even Jakarta. Many flights to Darwin from London even involve
flying from Perth, Brisbane, Sydney or Melbourne, rather than
Singapore.
It has been virtually impossible to book flights between
Denpasar and Dili online – Merpati’s ‘internet reservations’ page
had the words ‘under construction’ on it for several years.
Although it was possible to reserve flights from a mobile phone
using text messaging, the number could not be accessed from
outside Indonesia. When I tried to book a Merpati flight through
137
Flight Centre in London, I was told that the airline was not
‘ticketable’.
Although it has been updated since then, any attempt to book
flights online results in the message: ‘We could not find any
flights or seats available on the date selected’. However, at least
Merpati stated clearly that it only accepted credit cards issued in
Indonesia, which saved people in other countries time and
frustration up front. While the safety record of Lion Air, which
has the unnerving slogan ‘We Make People Fly’, left much to be
desired, my main source of concern was that it kept on rejecting
my credit card payment, without explaining why.
The only way that I could book a flight from Singapore to
Kupang was the old-fashioned way, which involved going into
Lion Air’s office in Singapore and buying a paper ticket. Earlier, I
had tried to telephone Lion Air’s call centre in Jakarta, but the line
quality was so poor that I could barely hear anyone. When I tried
to contact the call centre to confirm my return flight, I was told
‘your voice is not good enough!’
When I mentioned the idea of East Timor having its own
airline, even a domestic one, to one of the country’s trainee
diplomats, he said: ‘we can’t have our own airline!’ It was a bit of a
knee-jerk reaction, but to be fair, he had a point. Many countries
have wasted millions setting up flag carriers, and wasted even
more keeping them going.
European airlines like Italy’s Alitalia and Greece’s Olympic
have only narrowly escaped bankruptcy, while oil-rich countries
in the Middle East shared an airline, Gulf Air, until the 1990s,
when they began setting up their own airlines. (The airline is now
owned entirely by Bahrain.)
Yet East Timor did have an airline before – Transportes Aereos de
Timor (TAT). Founded in July 1939, it operated scheduled
passenger services linking Dili with Ataúro, Baucau, Maliana,
138
Oecusse and Suai, although perhaps it would have been wiser of

the Portuguese to have spent money on improving the road
network rather than on domestic flights. International flights were
operated on behalf of TAT by Merpati, between Dili and Kupang
once a week, while Trans Australian (now part of Qantas)
operated an F.27 service from Baucau to Darwin.13
Today, there are no domestic flights within East Timor, while
the service between Dili and Kupang was suspended after less
than a year in 2006. This was operated by Merpati on behalf of a
company in East Timor called Kakoak Air.14
Jeremias Desousa has been trying to set up Timor Air for years.
In 2008, he announced that Timor Air was going to start flying
between Darwin, Dili and Denpasar, and would compete directly
with both Merpati and Airnorth. This was in a joint venture with
an Australian company, SkyAirWorld, which was due to start in
February 2009. Unfortunately, SkyAirWorld collapsed in March
of that year, with debts of US$37 million, and had its aircraft
repossessed.15
This was the second time in seven years that plans to launch
Timor Air had had to be shelved. In 2002, the length of Dili
Airport’s runway meant that it could not use the aircraft it had
wanted,16 which has remained a stumbling block for airlines since.
Under the Portuguese, the main international airport in
Baucau, the second largest city, with Dili Airport only able to
handle small turboprop aircraft. After the Indonesian takeover,
Baucau was used by the Indonesian air force, and Dili’s runway
was expanded, although to this day, it remains too small for most
large jets.
Baucau is 120 kilometres east of Dili, but even with paved
roads; it takes three hours to reach the capital. During the
Portuguese era, it was faster to travel between Baucau and Dili by
barge. However, it is not unprecedented for a country’s
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international airport to be located in the second largest city; while

Suva is Fiji’s capital and largest city, Nadi is the country’s main
international airport. One benefit of using Baucau would be that it
could help promote economic development outside of the capital,
and with it, improvement of the transport infrastructure.
Nevertheless, at this stage of East Timor’s development, it is
questionable as to whether the country would need an
international airport that could accommodate large wide-bodied
aircraft. Even Royal Brunei, despite being the flag carrier of a
fabulously wealthy sultanate, did not expand its network outside
the surrounding region for the first fourteen years of its existence.
Instead, it concentrated on serving regionally important airports
like Singapore, Bangkok and Kuala Lumpur. Later on, it started
flying to London via Singapore and Dubai.
There have been plans to extend Dili’s runway from 1800 to
3300 metres, although this could require land reclamation.
Wellington Airport in New Zealand, which has had similar
problems with expansion, has been able to accommodate wide-
body Boeing 767s, despite having a 1936 metre runway. However,
few flights to Wellington use such large aircraft, and even smaller
ones like the Boeing 737 and Airbus A320 cannot take off from
the airport fully loaded.
In 2008, a twice-weekly service between Singapore and Dili
was established by a company called Austasia Airlines, which
chartered an Airbus A319 from SilkAir, a subsidiary of Singapore
Airlines. Not only was it no longer necessary either to change
planes in Darwin, or to have an overnight stay in Bali, but it also
meant that Dili was no more than two stops from Europe, not
least Portugal. Even more revolutionary was Austasia’s use of
online booking, using a website based in Canada. Unfortunately,
the cost of a standard return economy fare between Singapore and
Dili – US$840 – was nearly as much as the cost of a non-stop
140
flight between London and Singapore. Although there were

discounted fares, these could only be booked through approved
travel agents, none of which would have allowed customers to
book online.
However, it would have been better for the airline to bypass
Denpasar, and fly to Singapore via Jakarta, from where it could
link up with flights to the Middle East and Europe. Alternatively,
it could have flown between Darwin, Dili and Singapore, thereby
bypassing Indonesia altogether.
As the service is operated as a charter, rather than by an airline
in its own right, it is not possible to book the flights through
SilkAir, as it is not a SilkAir destination. Yet many travel websites
do not take account of this, and only link to SilkAir.
Nor is it possible to have codeshares. TAP and Singapore
Airlines are both members of the Star Alliance, as is Lufthansa,
with which TAP already has a codeshare agreement and offers
flights from Lisbon to Singapore.
Portugal and Singapore now have an ‘Open Skies’ agreement,
despite the fact that TAP has no interest in flying to Singapore,
and Singapore Airlines has no interest in flying to Lisbon,
although it could be a stopover en route to North America. TAP
stopped flying to Bangkok in 1998 after only a year, and Macau
after only two, although it still has a stake in Air Macau. Singapore
Airlines suspended flights to Madrid in 2004, although it still flies
to Barcelona.
In fact, not only are Star Alliance members pooling their
resources, but they are even painting their aeroplanes in the same
livery. While British Airways was ridiculed for dropping the
Union Jack on its tailfins in favour of multicoloured ‘ethnic’
designs, they were at least more appealing than the black and grey
livery now used by TAP and Lufthansa (though not Singapore
Airlines.)
141
In fact, in January 2008, the Portuguese charter airline,

euroAtlantic, flew directly to Dili from Lisbon using a Boeing 757,
carrying 140 officers of the Guarda Nacional Republicana (GNR).17
Perhaps euroAtlantic could operate services between Portugal and
East Timor on behalf of Timor Air, just as it does on behalf of
STP Airways of São Tomé e Príncipe, in which it has a 38 per
cent stake.
One route that I envisaged was Lisbon-Rome-Male-Dili-
Sydney. Even if few people wanted to fly between Portugal, East
Timor, and Australia, there would be enough people wanting to
travel to the Maldives from Italy and Australia to ensure that the
aircraft did not fly half-empty. (The cynic in me suggested that
most of the passengers from Lisbon would disembark in Rome.)
I once designed a logo and a route map for an East Timorese
airline, ‘Loriku Air Timor-Leste’ which I called after a bird,
similar to Indonesia’s Garuda Indonesia. Whereas the ‘Loriku’ is a
species of parrot, Garuda is a mythical bird in Hindu and
Buddhist legend. I sent a picture of it to someone in the embassy
in Beijing, who took it more seriously than I did:
Is it a proposal from the company? Is the airline an existing one?

Is it operating already? Who is the owner? Will they consider
stopping at the major cities in China? Especially, the ones that
have the most outbound tourists from China?
I had to break it to her that it was just an idea. Yet not so long
ago, so was an independent East Timor. If you don’t have a
dream, then how are you going to have a dream come true?
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CHAPTER NINE
ECONOMICS:
POLITICS FOR GROWN-
GROWN-UPS
It does not matter if a cat is black or white,
as long as it catches mice.
- Deng Xiaoping
‘SEEK YE first the political kingdom, and all else shall be added
unto you….’ Thus spake Kwame Nkrumah, first leader of
independent Ghana, who led his country into economic
meltdown. Hong Kong, on the other hand, sought the economic
kingdom, albeit partly as it had no choice. While no representative
democracy, either under Chinese rule, or British rule before 1997,
Hong Kong would be a strong candidate for it, because of its
economic freedom.
Of course, it is not surprising that East Timor is an intensely
politicised place, nor has it been without good reason. During the
Suharto era in Indonesia, economic development was used as a
smokescreen for political repression, in East Timor, and in
Indonesia itself. The word consensus was also tarnished,
becoming a euphemism for the Suharto regime getting its way.
But the word ‘political’ is overused in the context of East
Timor. If people don’t like something, it must be ‘political’. If
there is a reason why something has not happened, it must be
‘political’. And if they think something is innovative, they call it
‘political’. ‘Politics is a good thing, it’s like a car or a train to take
you to your destination…’ said one East Timorese. I worked out
later that he meant ‘policy’, not ‘politics’, but it was still
misguided.
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ECONOMICS: POLITICS FOR GROWN-UPS
One friend of mine from East Timor returned home and set
up his own political party, which fared poorly in the parliamentary
elections in 2007. When another friend who was visiting East
Timor asked me if I had a message for him, I replied: ‘get out of
politics and get into business’.
If people in East Timor are not being political, they are being
religious. One Fretilin supporter I know, to my considerable
annoyance, would greet me as ‘comrade’, but later on, he
suggested that I should become a numerary of Opus Dei. (He was
originally a seminarian.) This was puzzling, as Opus Dei
membership does not lend itself to left-wing views, even
liberation theology.
When asked why India’s economic growth lagged behind that
of China, the chairman of Peregrine Investment Holdings in
Hong Kong, Philip Tose, replied: ‘One word: democracy.’1 In the
case of East Timor, the Philippines, Spain, Portugal and Latin
America, and why their growth has lagged behind the rest of the
world, that one-word answer might be ‘Catholicism’.
However, it does not follow that Catholicism is a stumbling
block to economic development. While Spain and Portugal have
been relatively poor, Belgium and Ireland have been relatively
prosperous, while the ‘north-south’ divides in Italy and France are
based on region, not religion. Chile, one of Latin America’s most
advanced economies, may have had immigration from northern
Europe, as has the south of Brazil, but it remains as
predominantly Catholic.
This antipathy towards commerce may be a legacy of East
Timor’s Portuguese past. Portugal had few commercial interests
in East Timor, apart from sandalwood and coffee, and it was only
as late as March 1974, that it showed any interest in exploiting
East Timor’s oil reserves, causing annoyance in Australia.
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(Portugal had granted an oil exploration and drilling lease for what
Australia claimed was part of the Australian continental shelf.)2
Writing about Portugal’s renewed involvement in East Timor
in 2002, Bill Nicol described it as a ‘vulture’ descending on the
‘slim pickings of the Timorese carcass’. He claimed that, ‘as in
earlier times’, the interests of the Portuguese ‘are primarily
commercial’.3 In fact, with the exception of Timor Telecom,
Portugal’s interests in East Timor are not in investing in the
future, but in preserving faded relics of its colonial past.
The fact that the Portuguese had a trading empire in Asia in
the sixteenth century is irrelevant: Italians and Swedes are now far
more ubiquitous today, forging links through investment and
tourism. ‘It’s not just about trade,’ one Portuguese said, ‘it’s about
heritage and culture’. Talking about East Timor, another said ‘it’s
about language, religion, and costumes [sic]...’ Indeed, but which
ones: East Timor’s or Portugal’s?
By contrast, such was the commercial importance of Indonesia
to the Dutch, that one of the colony’s Governors-General, de
Jonge, had been a director of Royal Dutch Shell. And why else
would the East Indies have originally been governed by the Dutch
East India Company, rather than the Dutch Crown?
Yet this belief that Portugal’s campaign for East Timor’s self-
determination had commercial motives was held by Indonesian
President B J Habibie, who, according to Australian Ambassador
to Jakarta, John McCarthy, saw Portugal’s interest in East Timor
as ‘exploitative’ and motivated by oil in the Timor Gap.4
In many parts of the world, economic power has been the
preserve of non-indigenous ethnic groups; in East Africa, it has
been the Indians, in Southeast Asia, it has been the Chinese, once
described by King Vajiravudh of Thailand as ‘the Jews of the
East’.5
145
East Timor has been no exception: during the Portuguese era,

it was the Chinese, mainly from Taiwan, most of whom left after
the Indonesian invasion, with most going to Australia.
There has been a lack of entrepreneurship or business acumen
in East Timor, compared to places like Somalia, where the state
has ceased to exist, but the culture of private enterprise has never
been stronger. It is the birthplace of anarcho-capitalism, looked
upon admiringly by libertarians as an example of what can be
accomplished without government regulation. When I told an
East Timorese friend that Somalia had one of the best
telecommunications systems in Africa, despite there being no
functioning government, he looked at me with astonishment and
incomprehension: ‘But how?’
The obvious answer is that if you have the money to set up
your service and there is a demand for it, then it will do well,
although the absence of a legal system may make it difficult to
enforce contracts. Or ensure that people pay – one mobile phone
company in Somalia, NationLink, calls on customers’ clan elders,
families, or the local Muslim sheikh to make sure debts are paid.6
In fact, under UN administration, East Timor did experience a
form of anarcho-capitalism, but unlike Somalia, it was exclusively
by foreigners, for foreigners, with even foreign labour being used.
A sad reflection of the economic situation was the fate of a project
called Bele Halo (‘can do’ in Tetum) which was launched in May
2000, with the objective of helping businesses in East Timor
participate in international markets, but folded three months later.
On its website read the following message:
Please note that this site has been temporarily [!] closed due to
failure to be funded. We apologise for this. We have tried our
best and were not supported. We wish all East Timorese
business luck.
146
Sadly, Bele Halo had quickly become ‘La Bele Halo’, or ‘can’t
do’.
Another important difference is that Somalia has a very large
and very entrepreneurial diaspora, in the Middle East, Europe and
North America as well as Africa, which not only supports families
back home through remittances, but also helps support them in
business. By contrast, many East Timorese working abroad are in
low-paid jobs and do not have disposable income, much less
venture capital, and are mainly concerned with helping their
families.
Of course, many people of the anti-interventionist or ‘Walk
On By’ school of foreign policy, like the British columnist Simon
Jenkins,7 are often also members of the immigrationist ‘Let Them
All In’ camp.8 ‘So what if their countries go up in smoke or
become bloodbaths’, they argue, ‘if they can come here and do the
jobs no one else will do? [read: that no one else will do under
those conditions]’.
While there is something of a cop-out about the ‘Let Them All
In’ school of thought, one can hardly blame people in countries
like East Timor from wanting to seek a better life overseas. I
remember telling an official in East Timor’s foreign ministry
about the people moving to live and work in the UK, and was
astonished by her negative response. ‘Brain drain…’ she
complained.
That would be understandable if East Timor were a developed
country, like Ireland or New Zealand, with highly educated and
skilled people leaving in droves, but not one in which people were
leaving to work in factories. Not only was it a case of brawn drain
rather than brain drain, but it was also a case of money gain –
remittances from migrant workers go a long way back in their
countries of origin.
147
Did the Democratic Republic of East Timor want to forbid its

citizens from leaving, as the German Democratic Republic did
until 1989? Would she have preferred that the Indonesian
authorities had not allowed her and her family to emigrate to
Australia? In fact, she did not even know that anyone born in East
Timor before independence, including her, was entitled to
Portuguese nationality, enabling them to work in the European
Union without visas or work permits.
On the way back from a visit to East Timor, I told a family
friend in Singapore about how many people wanted to come to
Europe to work. ‘But aren’t these the kind of people East Timor
needs?’ she asked. Well, one could argue that Filipinos, Sri
Lankans, and Indonesians, working in Singapore and elsewhere
are the kind of people that those countries need, but that is not the
point.
At least East Timorese working in Europe are able to send
home more money than if they were living in Southeast Asia or
the Middle East, and have better working conditions. While
Malaysia is near East Timor, and has a language that most East
Timorese can understand, the low pay and poor working
conditions outweigh those benefits. Indonesian migrant workers
in Malaysia, particularly women, are often badly treated, with
their employers locking them inside their houses, or taking away
their passports. As an East Timorese friend living in the UK told
me, ‘why would we want to be slaves there when we’re already
citizens here?’
If people from the Philippines and Brazil, who do not have the
benefit of being entitled to nationality of an EU member state,
seek to come to the UK in large numbers, then why should the
East Timorese, who do, not do the same?
Ironically, while the view of English as the key to economic
prosperity has almost resulted in a ‘cargo cult’ in East Timor,
148
many East Timorese working in the UK, speak very little English.
Despite being in an English-speaking environment, they resent
the suggestion that they should learn it, on the grounds that they
are too busy working long hours.
East Timor finds itself in a similar situation to Malta sixty years
ago. Then a self-governing British colony, Malta was so poor and
overpopulated, that it had a Minister for Emigration, which it saw,
in the words of its then Prime Minister, Paul Boffa, as a ‘safety
valve’.
Were it possible for my Government to send 50,000 registered

prospective emigrants in one day, I would do so... Let them keep
their religion but they should strive to become Australian and
after two generations or three their children will be able to say
that their grandfather was Maltese but they were Australian.9
Similarly, Mauritius had a Minister of External Affairs and

Emigration, who subsequently also acquire the portfolio of
Tourism. On the one hand, his job was to encourage his own
people to leave their country, and on the other, to attract visitors
from abroad.
There are other places where emigration has been a fact of life,
such as Cape Verde, which has a large diaspora in the US (larger
than the population of Cape Verde itself) and Western Europe,
with as many living in France, Italy, or the Netherlands as in
Portugal.
During the Indonesian occupation of East Timor, the existence
of oil and gas reserves in the Timor Sea, was seen by supporters of
independence as proof that an independent East Timor could be
economically viable. Yet while these reserves were large enough
for Australia to seek to carve up with Indonesia, they would not be
enough for East Timor to be as wealthy as Brunei. Or Kuwait,
which had briefly experienced the same fate as East Timor,
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becoming the 19th province of Iraq in August 1990, before being

liberated six months later.
For decades, Brunei has talked about diversifying its economy,
but has had little incentive to do so. In the meantime, it continues
to maintain a generous welfare state, with free education and
health care (even flying patients to Singapore for treatment) as
well as subsidised housing and car loans. While the ethnic
Chinese dominate commerce, the sultanate provides jobs in the
public service to the Malay majority. Only now is the country
trying to diversify into ecotourism, and position its large
underused airport as an international hub to rival Singapore and
Bangkok as a stopover on the way to Australia and New Zealand.
Ecotourism has also often been mooted as a source of revenue
for East Timor, which would be preferable to the mass-market
model. Rather than seek to become ‘another Bali’, or ‘the new
Thailand’, East Timor should look to places like the Seychelles as
a model for its tourism industry.10
The Fretilin government chose to establish a Petroleum Fund
similar to that of Norway (now called the Pension Fund)
restricting the spending of oil revenues, which would be saved for
future generations. José Ramos-Horta, by contrast, said that
‘romantic people, poets who don’t have a sense of reality, always
talk about saving the money for future generations. I’m not going
to save money for any future generation. If I have my way, I’ll
spend it today on starving, malnourished children and on old
people who have dry skin showing their bones.’11
Norway’s circumstances were completely different from East
Timor; it was already a developed country, and would have
remained one without the discovery of oil. Although it could fund
its generous welfare state from oil wealth, Norway still chooses to
fund it through high levels of taxation instead, although not
without criticism domestically.
150
The populist Progressive Party, the second largest party in the

country’s parliament, advocates cutting taxes and use oil revenues
to fund public services. Siv Jensen, the party’s leader remarked:
‘To me it’s strange that a country as rich as Norway has worse
roads than Sweden… There are also a number of unsolved
problems in welfare and health care that many other countries in
Europe have managed to solve – countries without oil money.’12
Yet compared to how other developing countries have spent
these revenues, a Petroleum Fund may have been the lesser of two
evils for East Timor. In Angola, the amount of ‘petrodollars’
embezzled in 2001 was US$1.2 billion.13 (By way of comparison,
East Timor’s Petroleum Fund only has revenues of US$5 billion.)
In 1975, the Venezuelan energy minister Juan Pablo Pérez
Alfonso, famously described oil as ‘the devil’s excrement’. He
said: ‘It brings trouble… waste, corruption, consumption, our
public services falling apart. And debt, debt we shall have for
years.’14 However, it is not only oil-rich countries which have
been cursed.
Nauru, and how it used its phosphate revenues, is a textbook
example of what East Timor should not do. During the years
when the small Pacific island’s economy was booming as a result
of phosphate revenues, Nauru Phosphate Royalties Trust invested
the revenues in real estate. In 1972, it built an office tower in
Melbourne’s central business district, officially known as Nauru
House, but less kindly as ‘birdshit tower’.15
At one point, Air Nauru was flying to thirty destinations
around the Pacific, despite the fact that its fleet of seven aircraft
flew at 20 per cent capacity, or sometimes, with no passengers at
all. When the phosphate revenues dwindled in the early 1990s, the
fleet was cut back to a single aircraft, and, like the country itself,
Air Nauru found itself struggling to survive. So desperate was the
151
government to keep the airline operating, that it switched

diplomatic recognition from China to Taiwan.16
Even after becoming bankrupt, the country continued to spend
beyond its means. As late as 2001, it was employing 95 per cent of
islanders in work, paying for all education, including university in
Australia, and flies people to hospitals in Melbourne for
treatment, although hospitals there threatened to turn them away
until medical bills were settled.17
More ominously, when Nauru became independent in 1968,
and took ownership of the phosphate industry, the UK, Australia
and New Zealand, which had jointly governed the island, forced
its government to borrow against its future earnings, something
that East Timor under Fretilin had resisted doing.
The fact that East Timor’s oil reserves are more limited, and
more finite, means that it has the incentive to diversify sooner
rather than later. Oil revenues should be used to build up an
infrastructure that will not only support the growing tourism
sector, but possibly even manufacturing, as has Mauritius.
Not only has Mauritius prospered thanks to upmarket tourism
(a lesson here for East Timor) but also thanks to its role as an
Export Processing Zone (EPZ). It is a far cry from the situation at
independence in 1968, when its economy was dependent on
sugar, and a high-cost low-efficiency, import-substituting
manufacturing sector.18
Of course, it is going to be a considerable challenge for East
Timor to develop its own manufacturing industries when so
many products are readily available from Indonesia, or even
further away, like Brazil.
The usual dismissal of Portuguese-speaking countries in East
Timor is that they are ‘poor and far from us’,19 and therefore their
goods would be unaffordable. Yet supermarkets in Dili sell frozen
152
chickens from Brazil for as little as US$2 each. (More worryingly,

so do open-air markets, where they are allowed to thaw.)
Are they subsidised by the Brazilian government or given away
free by the producers as a sign of Lusophone solidarity? No. The
reason why they are so cheap is because of economies of scale.
Brazil is a very large country with a very large poultry industry,
exporting 3.6 million tonnes of poultry a year to 153 countries.20
In fact, there are many East Timorese working in the poultry
industry, in Northern Ireland, although it is questionable as to
how competitively these chickens could be priced compared to
locally bred ones in East Timor, never mind cheap frozen imports
from Brazil. Yet while importing these goods from neighbouring
Indonesia might be more geographically correct, would it do
anything more to encourage self-sufficiency in East Timor?
Indeed, despite having far greater economies of scale than East
Timor, Indonesia has always imported food from other countries,
including grapes from Chile and apples from the US. Even Bulog,
the Indonesian state agency with a monopoly on the distribution
of many basic commodities, continued to import rice well into the
1990s.
Nevertheless, Indonesia also exports goods to the most
unlikely of markets; in one supermarket in the English Midlands,
I came across shampoo from Indonesia, complete with price tag in
rupiah, while Indomie noodles are produced under licence in
Nigeria, from where they are exported to the UK.
The term ‘globalisation’ is often misconstrued to mean
homogenisation. What it should mean is that no market is too ‘far
away’ from another, and distance is no longer the stumbling block
that it once was.
Manufacturing industries should not be about import
substitution, or at least, not exclusively, but about making what
the rest of the world wants to buy. Many import-substituting
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industries have only produced what most local people cannot

afford to buy, and the rest of the world has no need to.
New Zealand is an example of what not to do: until 1998, it
had a car assembly industry, which, while saving the country
export dollars, earned it none. It became even more unsustainable
when import restrictions were removed, and used cars from
Japan, cheaper and better equipped than identical locally
assembled models, flooded the market. Even Toyota New
Zealand took to importing used models from Japan and
reconditioning them locally.
By contrast, Toyota Indonesia exports its home-grown Kijang
model to neighbouring countries, and in the 1990s, was even
exporting to countries as far away as South Africa and Suriname,
which, like Indonesia, is a former Dutch colony that drives on the
left, and has a large Javanese population.21
Similarly, most cars in East Timor are imported second hand
from Japan, Singapore and Australia, rather than brand new. I
even saw one car with an East Timor number plate superimposed
onto a Singapore one. Despite having stopped assembling cars
decades ago, Singapore has a profitable business in exporting used
ones which would otherwise be scrapped.
One thing that struck me when I was in Dili was the number
of Rover cars (as opposed to Land Rover four wheel drives). I had
not seen so many since I had left the UK. It seemed appropriate as
Rover, like the British Embassy in Dili, was now defunct. But
why were there so many of them? ‘Because no one else will buy
’em!’ laughed an Australian. Actually, it was because despite being
built in the UK, they were thinly disguised Honda models, so
easier to find spare parts for them than, say, Volkswagens or
Peugeots.
One industry that could be developed is telecommunications,
with East Timor using its telephone numbering as a revenue
154
generator. In 2000, East Timorese economist João Mariano

Saldanha gave the example of Guyana, where revenue from
telecommunications traffic accounted for 40 per cent of the
country’s GDP. Understandably, he did not advocate that East
Timor rent its numbering space to companies providing sex chat
lines.22
One possibility would be providing numbering space for
mobile phone services in other countries, as Monaco has done in
Kosovo and Liberia. Kosovo has yet to be allocated a separate
country code from Serbia, but despite its distance from Monaco,
calling numbers with the +377 prefix is not disproportionately
high, and nor are there roaming charges.
In Liberia, LoneStar mobile phones originally also used a
Monaco prefix +377 47, but this changed to a Liberian one +231
6. However, there was some continuity; as the unique six digits of
the subscriber’s number remained the same. By contrast, when
Telstra withdrew its mobile phone service from East Timor, new
numbers had to be allocated from scratch.
Similarly, many other countries, like Estonia, offer their
numbering space for global SIM cards. These allow people to use
their mobile phones in most countries around the world, without
incurring roaming charges for incoming calls, although coverage
is limited, and usually unavailable in East Timor. In order for East
Timor to offer a similar service, of course, it would need to ensure
that the cost of calls from the rest of the world were not
disproportionately high.
Many small countries have also used their internet country
names as a way of generating revenue, the best known example
being Tuvalu’s ‘.tv’ leased to a company in the US, for use by
television stations. Similarly, the Federated States of Micronesia’s
‘.fm’ is used for FM radio stations, while Moldova’s ‘.md’ is used
for Medical Doctors.
155
In fact, in 1997, when East Timor was still under Indonesian

occupation, it managed to get its own internet domain, .tp (from
Timor Português) with the help of an Irish company, Connect
Ireland. While ‘.tl’ (for either Timor Lorosae or Timor-Leste would
have been more appropriate, ‘TP’ was used by ISO (the
International Organisation for Standardisation) for Portuguese
Timor, which in the eyes of the UN, the territory still was.
In 2002, Connect Ireland’s director, Martin Maguire, proposed
using ‘.tp’ for as an abbreviation for ‘telephone’, as a way of
generating revenue. This would allow a universal, worldwide
directory to be compiled through a system such as
‘firstname.lastname.tp’, or ‘phonenumber.tp’ in which people
could keep updated contact details about themselves for the world
to see.23
This never materialised, partly because the intention was to
change the domain to ‘.tl’, although that would have been better as
an abbreviation for ‘telephone’ than ‘.tp’. For example, whereas
‘.tp’ could only be an acronym for téléphone in French, or telepon in
Indonesian ‘.tl’ could represent telefone in Portuguese, telefoon in
Dutch, or telefon in Turkish.
However, this idea was never pursued, and has since been
overtaken by events: in March 2009, the domain ‘.tel’ was
introduced, for precisely the purpose that Maguire had envisaged.
Even now, many web addresses with the ‘.tp’ domain are still
in use, while their ‘.tl’ domain equivalents are inaccessible. For
example, Timor Telecom’s timortelecom.tl address no longer
functions, despite it belonging to the country’s only telecom
operator, and internet service provider.
One of the justifications for high call costs in countries like
East Timor is that the domestic market is too small. However, a
telephone company in a small country need not confine its
services to its domestic market. On the contrary, thanks to Voice
156
over Internet Protocol (VoIP) services, a telecom operator in a

small country can have a global market. The best known VoIP
service, Skype, is based in Luxembourg, a country with less than
500,000 people. In addition to making free calls to other users,
people can also use VoIP services to make calls to regular
telephone numbers, and receive calls on telephone numbers.
For example, the Australian Defence Force (ADF) in East
Timor has a connection to a service called MyNetFone, on which
personnel can make and receive telephone calls as if they were
using a landline in Australia.23 As it uses a satellite connection, it
completely bypasses Timor Telecom.
If the MyNetFone subscriber has a number with a Melbourne
area code, people calling that number from Melbourne will need
only pay for a local call, even if the subscriber is in Dili. If the call
is from another MyNetFone subscriber, the call is free, which is
just as well, as MyNetFone charges US$3.40 a minute to call East
Timor. Skype is not much better, charging US$1.65. An
additional advantage is that subscribers can receive calls on
numbers in several different countries, with some companies
offering numbers in the US and UK free of charge.
As many VoIP services simply resell other companies’ services
under their own brand name, there would be no need for Timor
Telecom or other operators in East Timor to build and maintain
their own local infrastructure. They could, however, offer
operators reduced call to East Timor, thereby addressing the
problem of disproportionately high termination costs. If Timor
Telecom’s plan for an undersea cable connection went ahead, and
bandwidth became readily available at reduced cost, then perhaps
it might become viable to base such services in East Timor itself.
In other countries, like Bangladesh, local internet service
providers have acted as ‘gateways’, allowing international carriers
to bypass the local telecom monopoly and cut the cost of calls to
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those countries, which benefited the large numbers of

Bangladeshi migrants working overseas. However, when the
government tried to clamp down on these services, they were
unable to reach numbers in Bangladesh, although these services
have now been licensed.25
As East Timor is likely to remain a low volume destination,
there would be a limited market for inbound international calls,
but the market for calls to Indonesia, which has a growing
number of migrant workers in neighbouring countries and the
Middle East, would be much larger.
In East Timor, there are signs with the slogan Sosa Iha Rai
Laran, Hari’i Timor-Leste – ‘Buy Local, Build East Timor’. Perhaps
a better slogan would be Sosa Iha Rai Laran, Fa’an Ba Rai Li’ur –
Buy Local, Sell Abroad.
East Timor must be a libertarian’s nightmare. While
libertarians distrust the state but do not expect it to provide them
with anything, people in East Timor distrust the state it but expect
to provide them with everything. On the other hand, there are
people like Mari Alkatiri, who expect people to trust a state that
provides them with nothing.
‘We need to push the people to work for their livelihood, not
to depend on social spending,’26 he told Time magazine, but what
did he do to encourage investment? Rather than being used for
welfare payments or a large public sector, public spending could
instead be used for wage subsidies or ‘workfare’ schemes, with
foreign investors receiving tax breaks.
‘If the people of Mozambique could eat slogans’, wrote
Edward Theberton in 1984, ‘they would be fat’.27 If the people of
East Timor could eat slogans, they would be morbidly obese.
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CHAPTER TEN
THE
THE BUCK STOPS
IN DILI
Emancipate yourselves from mental slavery,

none but ourselves can free our minds.
- ‘Redemption Song’, Bob Marley
‘I WOULD ask you to be patient and understanding’, José Ramos

Horta, then Prime Minister, told me, adding that ‘a new
democracy faces many demands and they all take time’.
No, not all of them do. Many things that I have advocated that
should be done in East Timor could be done in days, others can
be done in minutes. How do I know this? Because I have been
able and willing to do them myself on behalf of the government.
But what was the response? ‘Yes, please’? ‘No, thanks’? Neither –
it was ‘these things can only be improved over time…’
Even Western expatriates seem to indulge the ‘only over time’
mindset, believing that the country needs time to ‘mature’. This
suggests that a country is like a child, when it is not. It is a far
more complex entity, in which some people are more mature than
others, and there are people from other countries who are able
and willing to help.
Another idea along these lines is that countries should be
allowed to learn by trial and error, like a child learning to ride a
bicycle rather than be helped along. Yet while it is patronising for
Australians to talk of ‘hand holding’ for East Timor, letting
national governments ‘make their own mistakes’ can have
159
THE BUCK STOPS IN DILI
devastating consequences for the people of the country

concerned.
In his preface to Michele Turner’s book Telling – East Timor:
Personal Testimonies 1942-1992 wrote:
There will be some who say: wait for changes of liberalism and
democracy to emerge in Indonesia itself. Wait until some new
kind of federal arrangement emerges to permit the Timorese to
live in association with the vast republic around them… Just
wait. Yet, for some, each day is painful… For such people, the
demand to wait is unconvincing.1
If the demand to wait for political freedom for East Timor was
unconvincing then, how much more unconvincing is the demand
to wait for economic and social development now? A road does
not pave itself ‘with time’. A house does not build itself ‘with
time’. A telephone network does not become more reliable ‘with
time’.
In one internet discussion, an East Timorese lamented the lack
of progress over the last ten years since self-determination. ‘Don’t
rush,’ a Western contributor replied, ‘it will come, with time…’
He was rebuked by another East Timorese, who said that ‘with
time’ was just a diplomatic way of saying ‘never’.
‘East Timor is a timeless place so ditch your watch’. Ryan Ver
Berkmoes wrote in the chapter on East Timor in Lonely Planet’s
Southeast Asia on a Shoestring. ‘Go with the flow’, he said, ‘and
you’ll be relaxed even the restaurant preparing your meal seems to
be growing the plant’.2 Yet in one restaurant in Dili where I ate, it
was someone born and bred in East Timor, not a Western
expatriate, who was being bossy towards the waitresses.
When I was being kept on stand-by, waiting to know whether
or not I had a job in East Timor, a friend from there told me: ‘on’t
rush, you’ll need time to prepare’. Yes, but that was not the point.
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In order to prepare for something, you need to know when it is

going to happen. Time is for preparation, not procrastination.
Talking about the lackadaisical attitude towards time in East
Timor, someone told me: ‘that’s how they lost their country!’ I
had to disagree with her: in 1975, people in East Timor were
deprived of time, and made decisions when they were caught
between a rock and a hard place.
One thing that can appear unnerving about some East
Timorese is that they laugh and smile at things that are anything
but funny. Perhaps that’s how they dealt with many things in their
history, however horrific or traumatic. Or maybe it’s like the
Maori custom of sticking out your tongue as a way of warding off
evil, which Westerners find hilarious, but Maori find anything
but.
Whatever the reason is, East Timor bureaucracy is no laughing
matter at all. When Hiroyuki Hata, a retired businessman from
Japan, worked as an advisor to the then President, Xanana
Gusmão, he had difficulty getting used to how East Timorese
dealt with time.
Although bills had to be signed by the President within a
month of passage by Parliament, some crucial documents took
more than twenty days to reach him. This left Hata with only a
few days for him to review them and make his recommendations
to the President. Sometimes, he received bills more than a month
after they passed Parliament.
Finally, Hata expressed his concerns to the President in a
report, in which, he said ‘I recommended that time be valued
more. I don’t know how he took it because I never asked him.’3
However, there is no questioning the ability and willingness of
East Timorese to work hard when they go abroad, compared to
their local counterparts. Indeed, one source of consolation for the
East Timorese, is what somebody visiting a developing country
161
once said about the work ethic of its people. He remarked that, ‘to
see your men at work made me feel that you are a very satisfied
easy-going race for whom time is no object.’4 Which country’s
people was he describing? Jamaica? El Salvador? Gambia? No,
Japan in 1915!
Unfortunately, rather than being used as an incentive to
address issues in East Timor, the experience of other countries is
used as an excuse not to do so. ‘Other problems had these
problems, even Indonesia…’ is one popular refrain. Yes, as did
many European countries, but the question is: how did they
overcome them? Answer: by addressing them.
The word ‘priority’ has to be one of the most abused in East
Timor’s lexicon, used to stifle criticism and close down debate.
‘We have other priorities’ means ‘it doesn’t matter to us, so it
shouldn’t matter to you.’
Of course, there are things which do require time and money,
which, while desirable, are not priorities. For example, building a
railway in East Timor might be desirable, but it would involve a
huge amount of time and money, which would be better spent on
improving its roads and airports instead. It is, therefore, not a
priority.
Even in wealthy countries, it took decades before projects like
the Channel Tunnel between Britain and France, or the railway
between Alice Springs and Darwin in Australia were finally built.
In East Timor, it would also mean having to blast holes into
mountains in order to drill tunnels. Therefore, I do not advocate
that the country consider building a railway for a very long time.
Yet looking at some of the things that East Timor’s leaders do
regard as priorities, I wonder if they are any more extravagant or
unnecessary. In 2007, a report called Força 2020 described, in great
detail, plans to expand East Timor’s defence force to comprise an
army, navy and air force. It was larger and more detailed than the
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entire National Development Plan produced at independence five

years earlier.
There are also plans for a new Parliament building, which,
unlike the Ministry of Foreign Affairs and the Presidential Palace,
would be financed by East Timor itself, not by China. Whatever
next? A monument with bronze statues built by the North
Koreans, like those in Zimbabwe, Namibia, and now, Senegal?
The assumption is always that everything involves time, effort,
and money, when not everything does. Therefore, it is
unreasonable to talk of something that can be done in minutes, at
no cost, in terms of whether or not it is a priority. ‘It won’t make
any difference!’ I can hear people say, but if it doesn’t cost them
anything, and I am prepared to do it for them, then what do they
stand to lose?
While one advisor to the Ministry of Foreign Affairs went to
the time and trouble of setting up an embassies and consulates for
East Timor, he seemed affronted by my suggestion that the
Ministry’s website should be updated so that people knew where
they were. But why? Updating a webpage is not a herculean task.
Besides, an embassy is not a safe house for the resistance; its
whereabouts should be public knowledge, not shrouded in
secrecy.
If I were that desperate to update the government’s websites, I
could have learned to become a hacker, and do the job for them,
whether they asked me to or not. However, without them giving
me up-to-date information – ‘you can ask our public affairs
people, I guess’ – there’s not much point.
‘A website is easy to establish, but a truly great website requires
an enormous amount of regular updating and expertise’, José
Ramos Horta told me. Not necessarily: under the UN, there was
one basic but informative East Timor Government website, which
was abruptly shut down before independence. Following
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independence, every ministry tried to set one up, as did the Prime
Minister’s Office, which chose to use a company in the UK! And
what was he implying? That he knew more about web design than
me?
In fact, in 1999, before the vote on independence, Horta had
seen the potential of the internet, and advocated that hackers
attacked Indonesian websites. Connect Ireland, the company that
had established a ‘virtual East Timor’ in cyberspace, condemned
this,5 which might be why the company was later sidelined.
Often the problem is not that people are not doing enough
work, but that they are doing too much. ‘It ain’t easy street,’
someone told me – I never said it was – ‘we’re doing two or three
jobs at once here’. Yes, and in some cases, they are doing the same
jobs at the same time, and duplicating resources in the process.
For five years, the public broadcaster RTTL has been barely
able to maintain a basic website, much less stream audio and
video. Yet, in 2009, a website called timortoday.com appeared,
with radio and TV news items (hosted on YouTube) produced by
local journalists with the support of USAid.
This created a bizarre scenario: on the one hand, neither RTL
nor TVTL have any presence on the internet, which would give
them an international presence and allow them to reach the
diaspora. On the other, hardly anyone in East Timor is able to
listen to or watch timortoday.com’s output, because few people
have internet access, and internet connections are excruciatingly
slow.
In fact, RTL and TVTL are available across the region via the
Indonesian satellite Telkom 1, covering an area from Darwin to
Taipei. RTTL has become, more by accident than by design, an
international broadcaster, at the cost of just US$1.3 million,6 yet
has failed to take advantage of this as a means of ‘soft diplomacy’.
It would be easy for an internet service provider in, say, Hong
164
Kong, to pick up the RTTL broadcasts via satellite, and then

stream them over a far faster internet connection than that
available in East Timor.
One East Timorese said: ‘maybe they don’t want to broadcast
to their enemies…’ Yet what were Voice of America and Radio
Moscow doing during the Cold War, if not that? In fact, in 1975,
José Ramos Horta expressed concern about Indonesia’s plans to
broadcast television via satellite, which could be received in East
Timor.7 If the Indonesians could provide cheap – or free – TV
sets, they would have a powerful propaganda weapon.
Indeed, one Indonesian blogger, Tony Hamidi, who could
watch TVTL, wrote that using English and Indonesian subtitles
could help the channel to promote East Timor in the surrounding
region.8 It could certainly dispel the notion that East Timor is
using Portuguese (or Tetum) to thumb its nose at its neighbours.
However, TVTL has been wary of showing programming
which its target audience in East Timor itself would enjoy, never
mind an international one, even when people have been prepared
to provide it free of charge. When local production houses offered
to do just that, TVTL told them that they would have pay for their
programmes to be screened, or find independent funding to cover
the costs.9
With professionals like these, who needs amateurs? In his 2007
book The Cult of the Amateur, Andrew Keen denounced how the
Internet had given rise to user-generated content on blogs and
video-hosting sites like YouTube. Highlighting the threat that this
content posed to professionally-produced material, culturally and
economically, Keen called for ‘cultural gatekeepers’10 to filter it
out.
That is laudable, and may be feasible, in developed countries
with professional journalists and producers, but in a country with
almost none, it would be a disaster. Could you imagine the daily
165
newspaper Suara Timor Lorosae and RTTL as ‘cultural

gatekeepers’? Thanks to sites like YouTube and Blogger, now
both owned by Google, the weekly newspaper Tempo Semanal has
put both these organisations to shame. In addition, while TVTL
turns its nose up at locally produced music videos, people have
put them up on YouTube.
Of course, anybody can preach, and many people who do are
not taken seriously. In 2000, the Australian linguist Geoffrey Hull
advocated the subtitling in Tetum of foreign non-Portuguese
television programmes and films.11 (Why not Portuguese ones as
well? Perhaps they could be subtitled in Indonesian or English
instead.) He suggested that this could be made compulsory,
although it is difficult to compel people to do things that they
have no means of doing. And given that the National Institute of
Linguistics has an annual budget of just US$6000,12 it is hardly in
a position to act as a ‘language police’, like its equivalent in
Canada’s French-speaking province of Quebec.
However, it was not enough for me just to preach, I wanted to
practise what others were only preaching. And what was more, I
wanted to show that it could be done with next to no money and
resources. Yet there are still people doing things the expensive and
time-consuming way.
The Brazilian Ambassador to Dili told me that Canal Futura
was still training TVTL to use subtitling equipment which had
been donated, yet I could have given them a couple of free
programs which would done the same thing in a fraction of the
time. ‘You make it sound so easy!’ somebody once exclaimed.
Well, it is, in the same way that writing something using
Microsoft Word is easier than using a hammer, chisel, and piece
of rock.
As impressive as timortoday.com’s work was, its international
appeal was limited by the fact that it was in Tetum. So why not
166
subtitle the output in English? In fact, YouTube allows users to

have subtitles in several languages, including Indonesian and
Portuguese, with the option of being able to translate them
automatically into even more.
I have to say that, unlike the guy at the Ministry of Foreign
Affairs, timortoday.com’s response to my offer of help was
exemplary. Did its director start spouting mumbo-jumbo about
‘priorities’ or ‘capacity building’? No. Did he change the subject
and start talking about bandwidth or Virtual Private Networks?
No. And did he react with self-justification and admonish me to
‘be more understanding’? No, not at all. He actually took me up
on it. He told me:
We just added the subtitles to the piece. They look great!!!

Thanks so much for doing this for us. Much appreciated.
Next time you are up this way, dinner is on me.
Aw, shucks. Sadly, I fell behind because of the increased

amount of material to translate and other pressures. However,
although it would have been nice for other people to have picked
up from where I left off, at least I had been given the opportunity
to improve things, and did not have to pay for it myself.
There is an ingrained belief among many people, East
Timorese and Portuguese alike, that everything is for a reason, and
cannot, therefore, be challenged or altered, however absurd.
When I mentioned to one East Timorese that Dili Airport was
listed as being in Indonesia, he said perhaps it was because East
Timor wasn’t a member of the relevant organisation. But why
should that be relevant to anything? Singapore is not a member of
the Organisation of the Islamic Conference, but does that mean
that its member states should consider it part of Malaysia?
There is an appalling lack of communication between people
in East Timor. For years before I went to East Timor, people
167
there would tell ‘although you’re very far away, it’s as if you’re
with us’. In other words, I was closer to them than they were to
each other.
‘Your comments suffer for not being here’, a government
advisor in Dili once wrote to me. I resented that, because a) she
hadn’t actually read them, and b) they referred to people,
publications and institutions of which she had never heard, and
vice versa, despite them all being within a one-mile radius of one
another.
Earlier, I had told her about Connect East Timor, an Australian
NGO setting up a radio telephone network in rural areas of the
country. She had never heard of it, and asked how I had. ‘On the
Foreign Ministry website,’ I said, this being before it stopped
being updated. ‘I’ve never hear of it and I work in the bloody
Ministry!’ she exclaimed.
As a result, people develop very different perceptions of the
same country. It is reminiscent of the Indian fable of the blind
men and the elephant, in which one of the men grabs a tusk and
thinks that the elephant is like a spear, another feels its side and
thinks it is like a wall. As John Godfrey Saxe puts it in his poem:
And so these men of Indostan

Disputed loud and long,
Each in his own opinion
Exceeding stiff and strong,
Though each was partly in the right,
And all were in the wrong!
Also embarrassing is how badly informed East Timor’s

diplomats can be about their own country. In October 2009, East
Timor’s Ambassador to Malaysia announced a Memorandum of
Understanding with that country to train teachers. Malaysia’s
Deputy Education Minister, Dr Mohammed Puad Zarkashi told
168
the press that ‘I was told that in Timor-Leste, they don’t have any
institute for teacher training... so, what we can do, maybe, is
accept a few teachers from Timor-Leste to be trained here’.13
That prompted an irate response from the director of the
Instituto Católico para Formação de Professores, who confirmed that
there was such an institution, and gave a detailed account of what
it did, how teachers were being trained, and how only two had
dropped out, because they had accepted scholarships to study
abroad. He remarked: ‘What may need to be put in place by the
government is a special institution to adequately train people for
the role of being an ambassador and to emphasise their
responsibility to be aware of what is actually happening on the
ground within Timor-Leste.’14
Indeed. There has been some suggestion that East Timor
should have an embassy in London, given that there is a large
number of East Timorese in the UK. Even a consulate in Belfast
might be an idea.
Perhaps it is appropriate that there are so many East Timorese
in Northern Ireland, a place with many similarities to their
homeland. One of them is a divided, dysfunctional entity in
which people live parallel existences, do not communicate with
one another, and do not identify with the institutions of the state
in which they live, while the other is a country in Southeast Asia!
Some people claim that this is unnecessary as almost all of the
East Timorese in the UK have Portuguese citizenship, and even if
they do not speak either Portuguese or English, there are enough
of them who can act as interpreters.
However, embassies should do more than provide consular
services to their citizens; they should promote political, cultural
and economic relations with the host country. Some countries
have lost sight of that, like Portugal, which still has six consulates
in France, despite it being a European Union country and much
169
smaller than Brazil or the US. Until 2007, it had ten, two of
which were within reach of the Embassy in Paris.
By contrast, British passport applications in Portugal are
processed in Madrid, and US passport applications in East Timor
are processed in Jakarta. The fact that there is no longer a British
Embassy in Dili is irrelevant – Singapore, for example, may not
have embassies in the Netherlands, Spain or Brazil, but all of
those countries have embassies in Singapore.
East Timor’s embassies and consulates should also be its trade
missions, unlike those of Portugal, which duplicates resources in
Singapore, by having a separate consulate and AICEP delegation
instead of combining them. By contrast, many Australian
consulates are operated by Austrade, meaning that the trade
commissioner in Dubai is also consul-general.
East Timor should also have something in the UK which
many other countries have, but Portugal does not, namely, an All-
Party Parliamentary Group. Indonesia has always had one, which
once defended it over East Timor. Spain has always had one,
which has defended it over Gibraltar, but where were the MPs to
defend Portugal over the case of Madeleine McCann, the little girl
who went missing while on holiday in the Algarve? Perhaps
Portugal can get away with resting on its laurels, but East Timor
should not. As George Bernard Shaw said: ‘It is better for a parent
to be a horrible warning than a good example’.
People also need to stop taking personal offence at criticism of
their organisations or their countries. I might use an English-
speaking country as an example of how Portugal or Brazil might
lift their game, but often I do not. If I suggest that they could learn
from Singapore, Luxembourg, Denmark or Paraguay, does it
mean that people there are anglo-saxônicos? No, it means that they
are getting things right while Portugal and Brazil are getting them
wrong.
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However, I also get tired of the ‘glass half empty’ approach to

things by other people regarding East Timor. ‘What about the
people who are illiterate?’ – what about the people who aren’t?
‘What about the people who don’t have electricity?’ – what about
the people who do?
Yet while I don’t like mediocrity, there are times when I accept
that some things are as good as they are going to get, and could
have been a lot worse. Take, for example, the feature film Balibo,
which at the time of writing has yet to be released commercially
outside Australia. (I saw a preview of it.) The idea of doing a
feature film on East Timor is not new, but because of sensitivity
of the subject matter, it is questionable whether one could have
been made in Australia during Indonesian rule.
If it were, it would probably have provoked a reaction similar
to that of Saudi Arabia to the British film Death of a Princess. Based
on the story of a Saudi princess and her lover, executed for
adultery, it so outraged the Saudi royal family that it led to the
expulsion of the British ambassador, cancelled trade deals, travel
bans and condemnations by government ministers, not only in
the UK, but in Australia, where it was also shown.
Yes, I have issues with the Balibo film, it’s not how I would
have done a film on East Timor. (For a start, I wouldn’t have
focused on what happened in Balibo.) However, Robert Connolly
is a professional film maker, while I am not. And while the film
has been attacked from left and right, for different reasons, it did
not dumb down and sex up and pander to people’s base instincts.
One East Timorese I met wanted to make a feature film about
East Timor. He wanted to cast Hugh Jackman in the role of Greg
Shackleton, on the grounds that he looked just like him. I pointed
out to him that there were other actors who look like Greg
Shackleton, but they wouldn’t expect six or seven-figure salaries.
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After a trip to East Timor, I emailed a link with some

photographs, which summed up what I thought of the place:
charming and tragic in equal measure. One reply I got back was:
‘A depressing place, it seems’. I resented that. There are many sad
sights, not least the burnt-out buildings, some of which were
torched after independence, but I didn’t feel depressed by them.
What did depress me was how people some looked at me as
some kind of great sage, not just locals, but expatriates. When
somebody introduced me as ‘the boffin’, I was taken aback. ‘It’s a
compliment’, he added. ‘I know’, I said, ‘but I’m just a jack-of-all-
trades’. ‘And a craftsman of all!’ my friend added. Sadly I’m not.
I’m entirely self-taught.
I would see my role in East Timor as being a dogsbody, or to
use the Latin term, factotum or ‘do all’, like faz-tudo in Portuguese,
which translates, more charitably, as ‘handyman’. But I would still
expect to be paid. While people in the government have told me
that ‘we’re keen to have you here – but you’ve got to find the fun-
ding!’ – the UNDP would have taken one look at my CV, thought
‘weirdo’, and given the ‘fun-ding’ to someone else.
When Australian soldiers left East Timor in 1944, they
dropped leaflets with the mangled Portuguese message ‘Os vossos
amigos noa [sic] vos esquecem’ or ‘Your friends do not forget you’.
This gave rise to a chant in Tetum, which went ‘Hodi uluk amigu,
ida mos ami, hodi ikus amigu, soe ona ami’.15 Roughly translated, it
means: ‘When you needed friends, we were your friends, now you
have new friends, you throw us away’.
Sadly, it is East Timor’s own leaders who are doing the
throwing away. Or perhaps it’s just pride. ‘I have the matter in
hand locally’ means ‘I know that you can do this for us, free of
charge, but it’s beneath my dignity to take you up on your offer’.
Nobody is suggesting that East Timor’s leaders should not
forge close ties with people who once would have given them the
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brush-off, had them deported, or in the case of Indonesia, would

have had them jailed or killed. And I would not begrudge them if
they had chosen to use the services of Hill and Knowlton or
Burson Marsteller to do their public relations, as Suharto’s
Indonesia once did. In the interim, however, they should
remember that friends in foul weather are friends in all weather,
and that they are still useful.
Forgiveness has its limits. If official apologies from politicians
are meaningless and false, then so is forgiveness for one’s enemies.
Horta may call it ‘cold pragmatism’, but in reality it is just laziness.
What does East Timor get out of it? On the other hand, the
problem with those who say that East Timor cannot have the rule
of law until it has justice, is not that they are being unrealistic; it is
that they are doing their country a disservice.
Did their loved ones die for a country governed by mob rule,
impunity, or the law of the jungle? Irrespective of whether
Indonesia agrees to hand over officers to an international tribunal
now or decades into the future, the greatest tribute that the people
of East Timor can pay to those who fought and died for
independence is to build a state governed by the rule of law.
Yet I still resent being patronised and given the brush-off by
people who were not so long ago being patronised and given the
brush-off themselves. Granted Horta is now President of East
Timor, but what does that matter to people who have never heard
of his country and couldn’t have cared less if they had?
Sometimes it’s better to be a nobody in a large wealthy
country than a somebody in a small poor one. The American
writer P J O’Rourke once said ‘I’d rather be a junkie in a New
York jail than king, queen and jack of all you Europeans’.16 (Note
to Australians, New Zealanders and other ‘ex-colonials’: British
people are Europeans and always have been.) I can see his point.
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People may dislike what I write, but no one, to the best of my

knowledge, dislikes me enough to want to kill me.
I once thought of an independent East Timor as being a
Catholic Brunei, oil-rich, but with an abundance of pork and
alcohol, in which I could get a well-paid sinecure with generous
perks. East Timor does not have the money for sinecures, and its
leaders should be reminded of that fact at every opportunity, and
even if it were to offer me that well-paid sinecure, I would be
using the money from it to do something worthwhile.
But I am not completely without hope for East Timor or its
people. Granted I have met many East Timorese who, while
charming, are irresponsible, and get away with doing as little as
possible, but I have also met ones who are decent, intelligent, and
highly competent people in whom I have confidence.
They should remember what the president of Fretilin, Xavier
do Amaral, said in a radio broadcast, in 1975:
What are we, our brother Timorese? Are we crops, buffaloes or

goats to be sold? What are we, brother Timorese? Are we slaves
who can be sold? What are we, brother Timorese? We are men
like other men. We are men and we are able to run our country
like the Portuguese, Australians, Africans and the Indonesians.
We are a people with our own cultural values. We have the
strength and brains of 615,000 people. Our country is fertile. We
have our own culture. We can run our country. There are so
many smaller and poorer countries in the world.17
Despite the intervening years and changing circumstances, that

message still has resonance today.
174
EPILOGUE
SIGNS OF CHANGE?
EAST TIMOR had received some media attention in 1996 when
the Nobel Peace Prize was awarded to Bishop Carlos Ximenes
Belo, but it was no nearer self-determination than Tibet was after
the Dalai Lama had got the award seven years earlier. An
Indonesian government spokesman scoffed at the Nobel
Committee’s decision, and remarked: ‘What next? An Oscar?’
As it happened, Horta thought that a feature film on the
Indonesian invasion of East Timor might help to bring the plight
of his country to the attention of the world. When he was in New
York, he had been in discussions with an American director, Dean
Stoecker, but they had foundered.
For a start, the fact that the East Timorese were Catholics
made them decidedly unfashionable in Hollywood, compared to
Jews, Buddhists, or even Scientologists. Where was East Timor’s
champion, its Steven Spielberg, its Richard Gere, its Tom Cruise?
The story of the five newsmen who were killed in the town of
Balibo would make a good thriller, Dean conceded, but the fact
that they were from Australia limited the story’s appeal to a US
audience. Couldn’t they be Americans instead?
And the story needed romance and sex in order to sell; none of
the men had daughters, but surely that could be changed. ‘We
could have the daughter of that reporter, Greg Schmockwitz…’
Dean suggested. ‘His name was Shackleton!’ Horta interjected.
‘Whatever,’ Dean continued, ‘and she has an affair in Dili with an
Indonesian officer…’
‘What was wrong with just telling what really happened?’
Horta thought. Did David Puttnam feel the need to dumb down
175
SIGNS OF CHANGE?
and sex up the story of Dith Pran in The Killing Fields? Did
Richard Attenborough take such liberties with the story of Steve
Biko, when he made Cry Freedom?
Although Suharto’s defenders argued that Indonesians were
more concerned with full stomachs than with free elections, there
were growing signs of discontent with his rule, and claims of
human rights abuses were becoming harder to cover up or refute.
The Wikileaks website, to which anyone could upload
confidential documents, was full such gems as Indonesian torture
manuals.
It may have become harder to refute these claims, but that
didn’t mean that Indonesia’s allies weren’t trying harder. While
surfing through the satellite TV channels in his hotel room, Horta
came across Sky News, which was reporting a debate in the
British House of Lords, on, as luck would have it, arms sales to
Indonesia. Responding for the Government, the Foreign Office
Minister, Baroness Kennedy, said ‘there is no evidence that
weapons sold to Indonesia are being used for internal
repression…’
Knowing that he would lose it if he kept listening to ‘that
woman’, as he called her, Horta switched over to RTPi, and news
of the plummeting value of the Portuguese escudo. It was now
valued at 685,324,762 to the euro, and the Assembly of the
Republic was holding an emergency debate on pegging the escudo
to the Angolan kwanza.
Following his successful state visit to Indonesia, President
Woolcott had arrived back in Whitlam, DC (District of Canberra),
as the national capital was now called. As Gough Whitlam had not
lived to see the establishment of a republic, many had thought it a
fitting tribute that the capital should renamed in his honour.
There had even been proposals to erect a giant bronze statue of
the former Prime Minister on top of Parliament House, but after
176
much debate, it was decided to have the statue overlooking Lake

Gough Whitlam instead. In 2005, it was finally completed, with
Whitlam standing with his arms outstretched, and the words ‘It’s
Time’ on the base.
The visit to Indonesia had been deeply symbolic for Woolcott,
for a republican of long standing, a crowning achievement both
professionally and personally. Not only was the Commonwealth
of Australia now a republic, but it was with him as President, and
the country could now be accepted by its Asian neighbours as one
of them. Or could it?
To the Turnbull government’s dismay, Indonesia had vetoed
Australia’s accession to the Asia Pacific Economic Community.
What ever did Australia have to do next to get into the club?
It had signed the controversial Treaty of Friendship and
Cooperation, under which Australia had granted Indonesia
numerous privileges and concessions, none of which were
reciprocal. Under the Treaty, Indonesia had extraterritorial
jurisdiction in Australia, meaning that its citizens could only be
tried in Indonesian consular courts, not in Australian ones.
More disturbingly, people could be extradited to face trial in
Indonesia without any admissible evidence being required. As a
result, most East Timorese in Australia, even those who had
become citizens long ago, had emigrated to Brazil or Angola. In
retaliation, Whitlam broke off diplomatic relations with Brasilia,
and demolished its former embassy, which was to be used as the
site of the impressive new Indonesian Consular Court building.
As his motorcade drove through the leafy avenues of Keating
en route to Yarralumla Palace, something did not seem right to
the President. Granted it was not the liveliest of places, but the
mood seemed sombre.
Suddenly, the President’s mobile phone started ringing. It was
the Ambassador to Jakarta, Peter Woolcott. ‘Dad,’ he said, ‘what’s
177
SIGNS OF CHANGE?
the latest in Australia?’ The President seemed puzzled. ‘Well,

nothing strange or startling to report, but...’ he asked. ‘No, Dad,
it’s Suharto,’ Peter interjected, ‘he’s just collapsed and died.’
178
NOTES
INTRODUCTION
1. Funu: The Unfinished Saga of East Timor, José Ramos Horta, Red Sea
Press, 1987, page 191
2. See ‘But Who Are These Western Crusaders to Be Lecturing Asians?’
Philip Bowring, International Herald Tribune 15 September 1999
3. ‘The tragedy that is Timor’, Tom Hyland, The Age 11 June, 2006
4. See http://www0.un.org/peace/etimor/DB/db200502.htm
5. The Australian, 6 December, 1991
6. ‘Blinded by propaganda’, John Roughan, The New Zealand Herald, 3
June 2006
7. East Timor’s new President: Jose Ramos Horta, Sunday Profile, ABC
Radio National, 20 May 2007
CHAPTER ONE
1. ‘The Low-Profile Laureate’, New York Magazine 25 Nov 1996

2. Lord Cranborne, U.K. Secretary of State for Dominion Affairs, to
Commonwealth Government Cablegram 689 LONDON, 13 October
1941
3. ‘East Timor - the new Thailand?’ Max Anderson, The Sunday Times
23 October 2005
4. ‘Downhill all the way since Habibie let go’, The Australian, Greg
Sheridan, 26 September 2006
5. Richard Shears, Daily Mail, 12 February 2008. See also
http://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-513557/President-East-Timor-
shot-failed-coup-country-Gurkhas-peace.html
6. Quoted by Gerard Henderson in ‘Fledgling nation simply wasn’t
ready’ Sydney Morning Herald, 6 June, 2006
179
7. ‘Bring our troops home in 2006’, Correlli Barnett, The Spectator, 31
December 2005
8. The Bottom Billion: Why the Poorest Countries Are Failing and What Can Be
Done About It, Paul Collier, Oxford University Press, 2007, page 126
9. ‘Antidote to parochialism’, Inside Indonesia November 2001
10. ‘The nation builder’, Paul Keating, Sydney Morning Herald, 1
February, 2008
11. ‘Normality far off for East Timor’, George Quinn, The Canberra
Times, 26 September 2006
12. ‘The legacy of Australian decisions is meltdown in Timor’, George
Quinn, Sydney Morning Herald, 2 June 2006
13. ‘Indonesia Essential for the Future of East Timor’, George Quinn,
The Canberra Times, 26 June 2001
14. Sheridan, supra.
15. A A Gill, The Sunday Times, 21 August 2005
16. ‘Talking Portuguese: China and East Timor’, Michael Leach, Arena
Magazine, December 2007
17. A traveller’s dictionary in Tetun-English and English-Tetun from the land of
the sleeping crocodile, East Timor, Cliff Morris Baba Dook Books, 1992
18. ‘School boxes help East Timorese to rebuild a shattered education
system’, Paul Vallely, The Independent, 2 January 2006
19. Anderson, supra.
20. The New Asian Hemisphere: The Irresistible Shift of Power to the East,
Kishore Mahbubani, PublicAffairs, page 15
CHAPTER TWO
1. United Nations General Assembly Official Records, 12th Session,

First Committee, 912th Meeting, 26 November 1957
2. Commonwealth of Australia, Senate Foreign Affairs, Defence and
Trade References Committee Report, Official Committee Hansard, 6
December 1999, page 984
3. ibid.
4. Telling – East Timor: Personal Testimonies 1942-1992, Michele Turner,
UNSW Press, 1992, page 72
180
5. John G Taylor, Indonesia’s Forgotten War: The Hidden History of East

Timor, Pluto Press, 1991, page 21
6. Timor: A Nation Reborn, Bill Nicol, Equinox Publishing, 2002, page 90
7. Chapter 3: The History of the Conflict, Chega! Commission for
Truth, Reception and Reconciliation, Timor-Leste, page 27
8. ‘Hindsight has not cleared the vision of an atrocity’,
Gerard Henderson, Sydney Morning Herald, 18 August, 2009
9. ‘Timor: The Final Solution’, Four Corners, ABC Television, 15 June
1998
11. ‘Pro-Jakarta party in Timor snubs Lisbon talks’, The Age, 5 March
1975
12. ‘Portugal told Menzies that Jakarta would take E Timor’,
Greg Sheridan, The Australian, 27 July 1999
14. ibid, page 29
15. Documents in Australian Foreign Policy: Australia and the Indonesian
Incorporation of Portuguese Timor 1974-1976 ed. Wendy Way, Department
of Foreign Affairs and Trade and Melbourne University Press, 2000,
Document 54, page 24
16. Chapter 7.4: Arbitrary detention, torture and ill-treatment, Chega!
page 18
17. Chapter 3, Chega! page 96
18. ‘Intelligence Wars: Behind the Lance Collins Affair’, Background
Briefing, ABC Radio National, 30 May 2004
19. The Hot Seat: Reflections on Diplomacy from Stalin’s Death to the Bali
Bombings, Richard Woolcott, HarperCollins Publishers, Sydney, 2003,
page 149
20. British Embassy in Jakarta, Confidential Internal Memorandum,
Subject: Timor, January 2, 1976
21. Chapter 7.1: Self Determination, Chega! Commission for Truth,
Reception and Reconciliation, Timor-Leste, page 41
22. Taylor, supra, page 128
181
NOTES
23. ‘East Timor Relief Operation, Concerning: Situation in Timor,

Report of the activities of the delegation from 1-15 September. Darwin’,
International Committee of the Red Cross, 16 September 1975
24. Relatório do Governo de Timor, Presidência do Concelho dos Ministros,
Portugal, page 306
27. Commonwealth of Australia, Official Committee Hansard supra,
page 983
28. Record Group 59, Department of State Records, Executive Secretariat
Briefing Books, 1958-1976, Box 227, President Ford’s Visit to the Far
East - Indonesia Nov-Dec. 1975
29. Ramos Horta, supra, page 187
30. ibid, page 58
31. ibid, page 97
33. ‘No escaping the burden of good intentions, Cavan Hogue,
The Australian, 12 March, 2007
36. ibid.
37. Chrystello, J Chrys, East Timor: The Secret Files,
Contemporânea, 2001, page 28
38. Last Flight Out of Dili, David Scott,
Pluto Press Australia, 2005, page 66
39. Turner, supra, page 175
40. ibid, page 182
41. ‘Indonesian immigrants to East Timor face uphill battle’,
Andreas Harsono, American Reporter, 29 July 1998
42. ‘Arndt shared insights of rare social benefit’ P P McGuinness,
The Australian, 9 May 2007
43. Children to starve as funding for food runs out, Yemris Fointuna,
The Jakarta Post, 8 July, 2009
44. Nicol, supra, page 254
182

46. ‘To struggle for freedom: Indonesia yesterday, East Timor today’,
Peter Carey, Inside Indonesia, January-March 1997
47. ‘East Timor and Human Rights in Indonesia: A Fresh Look,’
Telegram 02365 from US Embassy Jakarta to State Department, 5
March, 1993
48. Nicol, supra, page 255
49. ‘Timor-Leste readies for modest 10th anniversary’, Yemris Fointuna,
The Jakarta Post 30 August 2009
50. ‘Why Australia should reopen its consulate in East Timor’, Peter
Hastings, Sydney Morning Herald, 12 June, 1975
51. Gough Whitlam, ‘Indonesia and Australia, Political Aspects: the
Indonesian Connection’, seminar at the Australian National University,
30 November 1979
53. ‘Refugees: it’s a massacre’, Michael Smith, The Age, 27 August 1975
54. ‘Bleating Hearts’, Eric Ellis, The Bulletin, 28 May, 2003
55. ‘Dig in to save Timor’, Greg Sheridan, The Australian, 26 May 2006
56. ‘Communal Conflict in Viqueque and the “Charged” History of ‘59’,
Janet Gunter, The Asia Pacific Journal of Anthropology, Vol. 8, No. 1, March
2007, page 29
57. ‘The Defence of East Timor: A Recipe For Disaster?’ Desmond Ball,
Pacifica Review, Volume 14, Number 3, October 2002
58. ‘Timor-Leste: Security Sector Reform’, International Crisis Group
Asia Report N°143, 17 January 2008, page 5
59. Relatório do Governo de Timor, supra, page 31
60. McGuinness, supra.
61. Per Memoriam ad Spem, Indonesia-Timor-Leste Commission for
Truth and Friendship, 2008, page 45
62. ibid, page 115
63. ibid, page 46
64. ibid, page 115
65. ‘Fledgling nation simply wasn’t ready’, Gerard Henderson,
Sydney Morning Herald, 6 June, 2006
183
NOTES
CHAPTER THREE
1. Dutch Culture Overseas: Colonial Practice in the Netherlands Indies 1900-

1942, Frances Gouda, Equinox Publishing, 2008, page 61
2. ‘East Timor - Debunking the Myths around a Process of
Decolonization’, Remarks before the National Press Club, Washington
DC, 20 February, 1992, published in Voice for a just peace: a collection of
speeches Ali Alatas, Gramedia Pustaka Utama, 2001, page 509
3. ‘Direct ballot: Show Horta East Timorese again choose integration’,
Antara, 27 March 1999
4. ‘Communal Conflict in Viqueque and the “Charged” History of ‘59’,
Janet Gunter, The Asia Pacific Journal of Anthropology, Vol. 8, No. 1, March
2007, page 29
5. ibid, page 30
6. ‘Pejuang 1959 akan reuni dan menulis buku sejarah’, Antara, 15
January 1996
7. ‘Malik to visit Timor over “unrest” report’ The Age, 4 April 1972
8. ‘Indonesia “would aid rising”‘ The Age, 5 April 1972
9. Indonesia, Bruce Grant, 1967, Penguin Books, page 30
10. ‘Peaceful and quickly over’, Satyindra Singh, Indian Express,
24 December, 1998
11. Goa, James Maude Richards, C. Hurst, 1981, page 75
12. ‘Goa: But Not Gone’, Time Magazine Friday, 27 January, 1967
13. The Portuguese in Goa, Teotónio R de Souza, Goa Publications Pvt.
Ltd, 2008
14. ‘Unwrapping Goan Identity’, Semana de Cultura Goa,
Teotónio R de Souza, 2008, page 18
15. ‘The Making of Tim-Tim’, Robert Kroon, Time, 14 June, 1976
16. ‘Get out, Fretilin told’, Michael Richardson, The Age,
4 December 1975
17. Colonization, Decolonization and Integration: Language Policies in East
Timor, Indonesia Nancy Melissa Lutz, American Anthropological
Association Chicago, 20 November, 1991
18. Advance Report of the National Commission of Inquiry into 12
November 1991 incident in Dili, 26 December 1991, in East Timor and
184
the International Community: Basic Documents Heike Krieger and Dietrich

Rauschning, Cambridge University Press, 1997, page 257
19. ‘East Timor and Human Rights in Indonesia: A Fresh Look,’
Telegram 02365 from US Embassy Jakarta to State Department, 5
March, 1993
20. Merle Calvin Ricklefs, A history of modern Indonesia since c. 1200,
Stanford University Press, 2001, page 204
21. ibid.
22. John G Taylor, Indonesia’s Forgotten War: The Hidden History of East
Timor, Pluto Press, 1991, page 13
23. Memorandum of Conversation between Presidents Ford and Suharto, 5 July
1975, Gerald R. Ford Library, National Security Adviser Memoranda of
Conversations, Box 13, July 5, 1965
24. Dr. Sun Yat-Sen and Macau – A Photographic Commemoration on the
Occasion of the 140th Anniversary of his Birth Exhibition, Chan Shu Wing,
Macau Government Tourist Office
25. ‘The 12-3 Incident’ Macau Encyclopedia, Macau Foundation, 2008
26. The Hong Kong Reader: Passage to Chinese Sovereignty
Ming K. Chan, Gerard A. Postiglione, East Gate Books, 1996, page 45
27. ‘The 14th Dalai Lama’s “Middle Way” ridiculous’ Yue Li, Tibet
Magazine, September 2007
28. Ali Alatas, The Pebble in the Shoe: The Diplomatic Struggle for East Timor,
Aksara Karunia, 2006, page 101
29. ‘The nation builder’, Paul Keating, Sydney Morning Herald,
1 February, 2008
30. ‘There are two kinds of dictator: ours and theirs. Ours are better’,
Niall Ferguson, The Sunday Telegraph, 17 December 2006
31. ‘Suharto as I knew him’, Richard Woolcott, The Australian, 28
January, 2008
1 February, 2008
33. ‘First Steps – Timor Independence: Birth of a Nation’,
Don Greenlees, Robert Garran, The Australian, 20 May 2002
34. ‘Downhill all the way since Habibie let go’, The Australian,
Greg Sheridan, 26 September 2006
35. ‘Indonesia revises Timor autonomy plan’, David Watts,
185
NOTES
The Times, 20 April 1999

36. ‘Critical notes on Jakarta’s proposal for a Special Autonomous
Region of East Timor’, Adérito de Jesus Soares and Nuno Rodrigues,
Sa’he Study Club, 18 May 1999
1 February, 2008
page 129
40. Telegram 6284 from US Embassy Jakarta to State Department,
‘Situation in East Timor,’ May 13, 1976
41. Clementino Amaral, testimony to the CAVR National Public
Hearing on The Internal Political Conflict, 1974-76, 15-18 December
2003.
42. ‘East Timor Conference in Manila Tests Southeast Asia’s “Good
Neighbor” Policy’, Michael Richardson, The New York Times, 9
December, 1993
43. Negligent Neighbour: New Zealand’s Complicity in the Invasion and
Occupation of Timor Leste, Maire Leadbeater, Craig Potton Publishing,
2007, pages 182-185
44. Timor: A Nation Reborn Bill Nicol, Equinox Publishing,
2002, page 228
45. ‘Goa and East Timor: Contrasting Histories’, Heinz Arndt,
Quadrant July-August 2001
46. Timor: A Nation Reborn Bill Nicol, Equinox Publishing, 2002, page 71
47. Funu: The Unfinished Saga of East Timor,
José Ramos Horta, Red Sea Press, 1987, page 32
48. Chrystello, J Chrys, East Timor: The Secret Files,
Contemporânea, 2001, page 36
49. ‘Getting an education’, Angie Bexley, Inside Indonesia, April-June 2009
50. ‘An island that holds promise for Malaysia’, Balan Moses, New Straits
Times, 7 January 2005
51. The Indonesian National Revolution- 1945-1950, Anthony Reid,
186
Longman Pty Ltd, 1974, page 3

52. ‘Russia denies it illegally annexed the Baltic republics in 1940’,
Associated Press, 5 May 2005
53. ‘Habibie Truly Admired the “Little Red Dot”‘,
Today, 20 September 2006
54. ‘Remembering Suharto: Five Ambassadors Reflect’
USINDO Report, United States Indonesia Society, 7 March, 2008
CHAPTER FOUR
1. ‘Dictatorships and Double Standards’, Jeane Kirkpatrick, Commentary,

November 1979
2. ‘The Nation Reviewed’, Don Watson, The Monthly, June 2006
3. ‘East Timor: Remembering the past to secure the future’, Heinz
Arndt, Australian Financial Review, 23 April 1999
4. ‘Indonesia at the ANU – why so late?’ Anthony Reid, Asian Studies
Association of Australia – 17th Biennial Conference, 1-3 July 2008
5. ‘The trouble with the Jakarta lobby “conspiracy”‘, Peter Rodgers,
The Age, 9 August 2004
6. ‘What Australia lost in Timor’, Richard Woolcott, Sydney Morning
Herald, 8 March, 2003
7. Arndt, supra.
8. Interview, Centre for Independent Studies, Winter 2000
9. Indonesia Update, Quarterly Bulletin, Research School of Pacific and
Asian Studies, Australian National University, September 2002
10. ‘Whitlam defends role in East Timor’ PM,
ABC Radio National, 26 June 2002
Document 37, 24 September 1974
12. ‘Why Australia should reopen its consulate in East Timor’,
Peter Hastings, Sydney Morning Herald, 12 June, 1975
13. Documents, Document 59, 24 November 1974
14. ibid, Document 64, 10 December 1974
187
NOTES
15. ‘Pro-Jakarta party in Timor snubs Lisbon talks’,

The Age, 5 March 1975
16. Hastings, supra.
18. Fighting Spirit of East Timor: The Life of Martinho da Costa Lopes Rowena
Lennox, Pluto Press Australia, 2000, pages 184-185
19. Ramos Horta, supra.
20. ‘Our model dictator’, John Pilger, The Guardian, 28 January 2008
21. ‘Latham should dump his anti-Americanism’, Gregory Hywood,
The Age, 29 April, 2004
22. ‘Malaysia Premier Demands Apology’, Philip Shenon,
The New York Times, 9 December, 1993
23. Keating spurns Timor refugees’, The Guardian, 11 October 1995
24. Last Flight Out of Dili, David Scott, Pluto Press Australia, 2005,
page 287
25. ‘The Jakarta Lobby: Mea Culpa?’ Scott Burchill,
The Age 4 March 1999
26. ‘Keating and Howard slug it out over East Timor’,
AM, ABC Radio National, 5 October, 1999
27. Sydney Morning Herald, 1 January, 2006
28. ABC Radio National, supra.
29. ‘Howard didn’t want Timor free’, Michael Costello,
The Australian, 8 April 2005
30. ‘The Road to INTERFET: Bringing the Politics Back In’,
Clinton Fernandes, Security Challenges, vol. 4,
no. 3 (Spring 2008), page 84
31. ibid, page 90.
32. ‘Labor policy ups ante for autonomy in East Timor’,
Don Greenlees, The Australian, 18 October 1997
33. ‘Downer hails Timor troop withdrawal’, I Stewart,
The Australian, 28 July 1998
34. Fernandes, supra, page 86
35. ‘Freedom Hopes Mount’, G. Green, The Age, 13 January 1999
36. Costello, supra.
37. ibid.
188
38. ‘Truth, Death & Diplomacy in East Timor’ Mark Aarons,

The Monthly, April 2006
39. ‘Fledgling nation simply wasn’t ready’, Gerard Henderson,
Sydney Morning Herald, 6 June, 2006
40. Scott, supra, page 194
41. Hansard: Senate, 18th May, 1976
42. ‘The Royal Family of Australian Communism’,
Fred Wells, The Bulletin, 9 February 1963
43. ‘The Price of Freedom - 2003’, Paul Monk, Quadrant,
November 2003
44. Graham Freudenberg, A Certain Grandeur, Sun Books, Melbourne,
1977, page 18
45. Secret cable, 5 February 1963, released by Australian Government in
2002
46. ‘E.G. Whitlam launches Bill Nichol [sic], “Timor - A Nation
Reborn”‘, It’s Time, Whitlam Institute, June 2002
47. ‘No escaping the burden of good intentions, Cavan Hogue,
The Australian, 12 March, 2007
48. James Dunn, Timor: A People Betrayed Jacaranda Press, 1983, page 81
49. Hogue, supra.
50. ‘You got him in, so help kick him out’, Hal G.P. Colebatch,
The Australian, 16 April, 2008
1 February, 2008
52. Documents, Document 54, page 314
53. Shakedown: Australia’s Grab for Timor Oil, Paul Cleary,
Allen & Unwin Academic, 2007, page 79
54. ‘Australia rapped over E Timor oil’, BBC News, 19 May, 2004
55. Scott, supra, 53
56. ‘Interpreting where neighbours stand’, James Dunn and Peter
Hastings, Sydney Morning Herald, 2 November, 1979
57. ‘Timor wins famine war’, Henry Kamm, The Age, 29 January 1980
58. ‘Touch of Timor horse-trading’, The Age, 24 October, 1974
59. ‘Understanding Indonesia’, The Age, 5 July, 1984
60. Distant Voices, John Pilger, Vintage, 1994, page 262
61. ibid.
189
NOTES
62. Scott, supra, 59

63. ‘A weightier role in Dili’, Paul Kelly, The Australian, 2 June 2006
64. The Far East: A History of the Impact of the West on Eastern Asia,
Paul Hibbert Clyde, Prentice-Hall, 1948, page 288
65. ‘The amazing man behind Pauline Hanson: Bill Birnbauer,
David Elias and Duncan Graham profile John Pasquarelli’,
The Age, 30 March 1997
66. Melbourne Observer, 7 June 2006
67. ‘Pires charges show justice a casualty of Ramos Horta attack’,
Paul Toohey, The Australian, 7 March, 2009
CHAPTER FIVE
1. ‘The colour that dares not speak its name: schooling and “the myth of
Portuguese anti-racism”‘, Marta Araújo, Centre for Social Studies,
University of Coimbra, Portugal, International Conference Equality and
Social Inclusion in the 21st Century: Developing Alternatives, Belfast, 2006
2. ‘The controversy over Charles Boxer’s Race Relations in the Portuguese
Colonial Empire 1415-1825’, J S Cummins, L De Sousa Rebelo, Portuguese
Studies, Annual, 2001
3. Araújo, supra.
5. Mário Lemos Pires, testimony given to the CAVR National Public
Hearing on the Internal Political Conflict 1974-76, 15-18 December
2003, Chapter 7.1: Self-Determination, Chega! page 12
6. ibid.
7. Ramos Horta, supra, pages 59
8. ibid, pages 59-60
9. From the Place of the Dead: Bishop Belo and the Struggle for East Timor,
Arnold S Kohen, Lion Publishing, 1999, page 107
10. ‘Portugal and Goa in the 21st Century: Towards an Alliance of the
Small’, Constantino H. Xavier, Goanet Reader, 16 November 2008
11. East Timor: Nationalism and Colonialism, Jill Jolliffe,
University of Queensland Press, 1978, page 10
190
12. ‘Current Language Issues in East Timor’, Dr Geoffrey Hull,

public lecture given at the University of Adelaide, 29 March, 2000
13. ibid.
14. ‘Language Born of Colonialism Thrives Again in Amazon’,
Larry Rohter, New York Times, 28 August 2005
15. ‘Cravinho quer pôr portugueses a falar tétum’, Diário de Notícias,
4 September 2007
16. ‘East Timor: Identity, Language and Educational Policy’, Geoffrey
Hull, address to the CNRT National Congress, 25 August, 2000
17. ‘Ensinar Português em Timor’, João Paulo Esperança, Timor 2006, 29
June 2007
18. ‘Após uma década de apoio à reintrodução da língua portuguesa em
Timor, João Paulo Esperança, Hanoin Oin-Oin, 16 July 2009
19. ‘Writing on human skin’, University of Oxford History Faculty Alumni
Newsletter, No. 3, 2005
20. Esperança, 2007, supra.
21. ‘Acordo Ortográfico é “acto colonial” do Brasil’,
Miguel Sousa Tavares, Expresso, 20 September 2009
22. Language Choice in a Nation under Transition: English Language Spread in
Cambodia, Thomas Clayton, Springer, 2006, page 172
23. ‘Rwanda to switch from French to English in schools’,
Chris McGreal, The Guardian, 14 October 2008
24. ‘The Samba and the Fado’, John Fitzpatrick, Brazzil, 2 March 2003
25. ‘An Enclave of Brazilians Is Testing Insular Japan’, Norimitsu
Onishi, New York Times, 1 November 2008
26. ‘GM Holden Celebrates 10th Year of Exports to Brazil’,
Holden press release, 28 August 2007
27. ‘China Sees Advantages in Macao’s Portuguese Past’, James Brooke,
New York Times, 21 October 2004
28. ‘TDM Launches Satellite Channel on AsiaSat 5’, AsiaSat press
release, 8 October 2009
29. Dutch Culture Overseas: Colonial Practice in the Netherlands Indies 1900-
1942, Frances Gouda, Equinox Publishing, 2008, page 49
191
NOTES
CHAPTER SIX
1. ‘Timor’s model can serve Iraq’, Jonathan Freedland, The Guardian, 29

October 2003
2. ‘UN acts at last on sex crimes in Timor’, Lindsay Murdoch, Sydney
Morning Herald, 30 August 2006
3. ‘New Hebrides: Whither Pandemonium?’ Time, 9 December 1974
4. ‘Peacing East Timor back together’, Peter Alford, The Australian, 27
June 2000
5. ‘Dispelling the Myths of Timor’, Helen Hill, Arena Magazine,
February-March 2003
6. ‘Struggling East Timor, a country of little hope’, Jane Perlez,
International Herald Tribune, 12 July 2006
7. ‘Message from America: we’re independent’ Mark Steyn,
Daily Telegraph, 7 July 2002
8. Papua: Geopolitics and the Quest for Nationhood, Bilveer Singh,
Transaction Publishers, 2008, page 62
9. Guide to East Timor, Tony Wheeler, Lonely Planet 2004, page 137
10. ‘Our role in East Timor is long term’, Greg Sheridan, The Australian,
February 14, 2008
11. ‘Two New Zealanders pay tribute to Sergio Vieira de Mello’,
Phil Goff and Andrew Ladley, New Zealand Herald, 21 August 2003
12. ‘The Defence of East Timor: A Recipe For Disaster?’ Desmond Ball,
Pacifica Review, Volume 14, Number 3, October 2002
13. ‘Bleating Hearts’, Eric Ellis, The Bulletin, 28 May, 2003
14. ‘Hushed rape of Timor’, Mark Dodd, The Weekend Australian, 26
March 2005
15. ‘Making a Tardy Issue of East Timor’, Richard Woolcott, International
Herald Tribune, 6 March, 1995
16. ‘The legacy of Australian decisions is meltdown in Timor’, George
Quinn, Sydney Morning Herald, 2 June 2006
17. ‘Belo will not participate in AIETD’, Lusa, 18 October 1998
18. Commonwealth of Australia, Senate Foreign Affairs, Defence and
Trade References Committee Report, ‘East Timor’, Chapter 6,
‘Australian Policy: Indonesia’s Incorporation of East Timor’, page 117
192
19. Case Concerning East Timor (Portugal v. Australia), International Court

of Justice, Judgment of 30 June 1995 in East Timor and the International
Community: Basic Documents, Heike Krieger and Dietrich Rauschning,
Cambridge University Press, 1997, 465
20. Australian declaration under paragraph 2 of Article 36 of the Statute
of the International Court of Justice 1945, lodged at New York on 22
March 2002.
21. Eritrea: Report of the UN Commission for Eritrea, Report of the Interim
Committee of the General Assembly on the Report of the UN Commission for
Eritrea, UN General Assembly Resolution 390 (V), 2 December 1950
22. Eritrea: Birth of a Nation, Government of Eritrea, Department of
External Affairs, 1993
23. UN General Assembly Resolution 3292 (XXIX), 13 December 1974
24. Summary of the Summary of the Advisory Opinion of 16 October
1975, International Court of Justice
25. United Nations Visiting Mission to Spanish Sahara, General Assembly
Official Records, 1975, General Assembly, 30th Session, Supplement 23,
UN Document A/10023/Rev.
26. The Western Saharans. Background to Conflict, Virginia Thompson and
Richard Adloff, Barnes & Noble, 1980, page 175
27. Funu: The Unfinished Saga of East Timor, José Ramos Horta,
Red Sea Press, 1987, page 154
28. ibid, 142
29. ibid, page 139
30. ‘CPLP: Indonésia pretende estatuto de observador - embaixador
Lopes da Cruz’, Lusa, 19 November 2008
31. ‘Abuja is a bunfight for kleptomaniacs’, Kevin Myers, Sunday
Telegraph, 7 December 2003
‘SBY, Council Offer Right Perspectives on Gaza’, Taufik Darusman,
Jakarta Globe, January 12, 2009
33. ‘Mandela met jailed Timor rebel leader’, Reuters, 23 July 1997
34. Alford, supra.
35. ‘UNTAET Bottled Water Facts’, The La’o Hamutuk Bulletin,
La’o Hamutuk, April 2001
36. ‘East Timorese go begging as foreign advisers rake it in’, Paul
Toohey, The Australian, 25 April 2009
193
NOTES
37. ‘A nation built on ashes’, Peter Alford, The Australian, 26 June 2000
38. ‘Antidote to parochialism’, Inside Indonesia November 2001
39. ‘Speaking in Foreign Tongues’, Dili Insider, 20 August 2009
CHAPTER SEVEN
1. ‘East Timor’s Tower of Babel’, Dennis Schulz, Fernando de Freitas,

Sydney Morning Herald, 16 August 2002
2. ‘Bahasa Indonesia: As pure as the driven word’, Duncan Graham,
Jakarta Post, 11 August 2006
3. ‘CPLP: Indonésia pretende estatuto de observador - embaixador
Lopes da Cruz’, Lusa, 19 November 2008
4. ‘National Language and Nation-Building’, Lucy R Montolalu and Leo
Suryadinata, in Language, nation and development in Southeast Asia, ed. Hock
Guan Lee, Leo Suryadinata, Institute of Southeast Asian Studies, 2007
5. ‘East Timor: Education and human resources development’, Gavin W
Jones, in Out of the Ashes: The Destruction and Reconstruction of East Timor
James J Fox and Dionisio Babo Soares, Crawford House Publishing Pty
Ltd, page 48
6. Schulz, de Freitas, supra.
7. ‘Ensinar Português em Timor’, João Paulo Esperança, Timor 2006, 29
June 2007
8. ‘East Timor drowns in language soup’ Ahmad Pathoni, Reuters, 23
April, 2007
9. ‘In East Timor, language creates a headache’, Sebastien Blanc, Agence
France Presse, 11 July, 2007
10. ‘Letting go of Indonesian’, Marie Quinn, Inside Indonesia,
April-June 2009
11. ‘Poverty-stricken, a divided nation struggles to cope’,
Antony Funnell, Canberra Times, 9 December 2002
12. ‘Official Romansh still has some way to go’,
Swissinfo, 21 September, 2006
13. ‘How standard?’ Catharina van Klinken, Inside Indonesia, January 2000
14. Timor: A Nation Reborn Bill Nicol, Equinox Publishing, 2002, page
327
194
15. ‘Current Language Issues in East Timor’, Dr Geoffrey Hull,

public lecture given at the University of Adelaide, 29 March, 2000
16. Wars of Words: The Politics of Language in Ireland 1537-2004,
Tony Crowley, Oxford University Press, page 141
17. ‘Choosing a native tongue’, Michael Kessler, The Guardian, 18 April
2002
18. ‘Fighting to pray in peace’, Duncan Graham, The Jakarta Post, 22
November 2006
19. ‘From Opposition to Proposition: The National Council of
Timorese Resistance (CNRT) in Transition’, Pat Walsh, Australian
Council for Overseas Aid, 1999
20. Quoted by Geoffrey Hull, Studies in Languages and Cultures of East
Timor, University of Western Sydney, Volume 2, 1999, pages 2-3
21. ‘The Dili dynasty’, Eric Ellis, Financial Times, 31 May, 2002
22. ‘Divided by an uncommon language’, Peter Kammerer, South China
Morning Post, 19 May 2002
23. ‘Rwanda to switch from French to English in schools’,
Chris McGreal, The Guardian, 14 October 2008
24. ‘Kagame: Quiet soldier who runs Rwanda’, BBC News,
14 November, 2000
25. ‘Ravalomanana renforce ses pouvoirs et adopte l’anglais’,
Radio France International, 5 April 2007
26. ‘Obiang convierte al portugués en tercer idioma oficial para entrar en
la Comunidad lusófona de Naciones’, MISNA, 13 July 2007
27. Summary results of the 1996 Population By-census Hong Kong Census
and Statistics Department, 1996
28. ‘Europeans and their Languages’, Eurobarometer, European
Commission, February 2006
29. ‘Italian becomes official language... of Italy’, Reuters, 30 March, 2007
30. ‘In search of an Asian lingua franca’, Philip Bowring, International
Herald Tribune 28 May, 2005
31. ‘Challenges for the Future’, Dionisio Babo Soares, in Out of the Ashes:
The Destruction and Reconstruction of East Timor James J Fox and Dionisio
Babo Soares, Crawford House Publishing Pty Ltd, page 271
32. ‘Timor-Leste: A complex crisis’, Tapol Bulletin, July 2006, Tapol
195
NOTES
CHAPTER EIGHT
1. The Bottom Billion: Why the Poorest Countries Are Failing and What Can
Be Done About it, Paul Collier, Oxford University Press, 2007, page 60
2. ‘Timor tells Telstra good riddance’, Geoff Elliott, The Australian,
February 19, 2002
3. ‘Portuguese likely to be East Timor’s telco’, Jill Jolliffe, The Age, 30
May 2002
4. ‘UK and Spanish officials to discuss Gib’s phone crisis’, Panorama, 16
February 2001
5. ‘The Government finds the Opposition’s attitude to the telephone
problems incomprehensible’, Government of Gibraltar Press Office, 21
May 2001
6. ‘Digicel announces full interconnection across Papua New Guinea’,
Digicel press release, 19 June 2008
7. ‘PT’s strong bet and commitment in East Timor’, Portugal Telecom
press release, 22 September, 2009
8. ‘Wimax brings remote Vietnamese villagers new voice’, Telecom Asia,
February 2008
9. Extending Open Access to National Fibre Backbones in Developing Countries,
Tracy Cohen and Russell Southwood, 8th ITU Global Symposium for
Regulators
10. ‘Rammell welcomes new Postcode for the Falkland Islands’, Foreign
and Commonwealth Office, 19 May 2003
11. ‘Councils may take over threatened post offices’, Lewis Carter,
Daily Telegraph, 10 March 2008
12. Chega! Chapter 3: The History of the Conflict, Commission for
Truth, Reception and Reconciliation, Timor-Leste page 44
13. World Airline Directory, Flight International, 21 May 1974
14. ‘Kakoak Airlines and Indonesia’s Merpati Nusantara Airlines to serve
Kupang-Dili route’, Antara, 8 March 2005
15. ‘SkyAirWorld’s last jet is repossessed’, Steve Creedy, The Australian,
18 March, 2009
16. ‘East Timor Air rolls towards takeoff, eyes 717s’, David Fullbrook,
Air Transport Intelligence, 23 April, 2002
196
17. ‘euroAtlantic at Dili Airport transporting GNR military staff to

Timor’, euroAtlantic Airways press release, 29 January 2008
CHAPTER NINE
1. East and West: The Last Governor of Hong Kong on Power, Freedom and the
Future, Chris Patten, McClelland & Stewart, 1998, page 94
2. ‘Canberra, Lisbon, head for row’, Hugh Armfield, The Age, 26 March
1974
3. Timor: A Nation Reborn, Bill Nicol, Equinox Publishing, 2002, page
326
4. ‘First Steps – Timor Independence: Birth of a Nation’, Don
Greenlees, Robert Garran, The Australian, 20 May 2002
5. ‘Indonesia crisis: Chinese suffer for their success as mobs target the
“Jews of the East”‘, Stephen Vines, The Independent, 16 May 1998
6. ‘Somalia: The land of opportunity’, BBC News, 15 November, 2001
7. ‘Blair reinvented the Middle Ages and called it liberal intervention’,
Simon Jenkins, Sunday Times 3 June 2007
8. ‘Immigrants are good for us. Let them stay - and pay their taxes’,
Simon Jenkins, Evening Standard 10 March 2009
9. The Safety Valve, Fr Lawrence E. Attard, Publishers Enterprises Group
(PEG) Ltd, 1997
10. ‘East Timor Identity, Language and Educational Policy, Geoffrey
Hull, address to CNRT National Congress, 25 August, 2000
11. ‘Timor’s Future’, Mark Aarons, The Monthly, August 2007
12. ‘Trouble brewing in oil-rich Norway’, Ivar Ekman,
New York Times, 18 November, 2005
13. ‘Angolan Government Accused of Embezzling Oil Money’,
This Day, 16 November 2004
14. Ekman, supra.
15. ‘Britain urged to help pay off “cheated” islanders’, Robert Milliken,
The Independent, 17 August 1993
16. ‘Taiwan switch keeps Air Nauru flying’, Robert Keith-Reid,
Islands Business, 19 January, 2006
17. ‘Nauru: Paradise well and truly lost’, The Economist,
197
NOTES
20 December 2001
18. ‘Aid, Shocks and Trade’, Paul Collier, East Timor: Development
Challenges for the World’s Newest Nation, Hal Hill, João Mariano de Sousa
Saldanha, Asia Pacific Press, 2001 page 348
19. ‘East Timor drowns in language soup’ Ahmad Pathoni, Reuters, 23
April, 2007
20. ‘Pret a Manger’s “fresh” chicken sandwich with frozen meat from
Brazil’, Robert Mendick and Andrew Downie, Daily Telegraph, 31
October 2009
21. ‘Javanese in Suriname strive to preserve origins’ Santo Koesoebjono,
The Jakarta Post, 14 March 1999
22. ‘Fiscal issues for a small war-torn Timor Loro Sa’e’, João Mariano
Saldanha in Out of the Ashes: The Destruction and Reconstruction of East Timor
James J Fox and Dionisio Babo Soares, Crawford House Publishing Pty
Ltd, page 250
23. ‘Irish Eyes Smile on Dot-TP’, Stewart Taggart, Wired, 3 March 2002
24. Satellite VoIP for Dili Air Services, VoIP News, 22 January 2007
25. ‘3 private operators win int’l gateway licences for VoIP’, The Financial
Express 20 February, 2008
26. ‘Hands Off Our Oil!’ Tom Dusevic, Time 24 May, 2004
27. ‘Black Marx’, Edward Theberton, The Spectator, 6 July 1986
CHAPTER TEN
1. Telling – East Timor: Personal Testimonies 1942-1992, Michele Turner,

UNSW Press, 1992, page xv-xvi
2. ‘East Timor’, Ryan ver Berkmoes’, Southeast Asia on a Shoestring China
Williams, Lonely Planet, 2008, page 128
3. ‘As population ages, more retirees use decades of business experience
to help people overseas’, Rita Takenaka, Asahi Shimbun, 7 October 2006
4. Bad Samaritans: The Guilty Secrets of Rich Nations and the Threat to Global
Prosperity, Ha-Joon Chang, Random House Books, 2008, page
5. Press Release from Connect Ireland Communications Ltd,
19 August 1999
6. ‘Telkom wins $1.3 million tender in Timor-Leste’,
198
Antara, 14 April 2007

page 255
8. ‘Siaran Timor-Leste Bisa Dinikmati di Indonesia’, Situs Tony,
1 May, 2008
9. ‘A hybrid popular culture’, Annie Sloman, Inside Indonesia,
April-June 2009
10. The Cult of the Amateur: How Today’s Internet Is Killing Our Culture,
Andrew Keen, Currency, 2007, page 65
11. ‘East Timor: Identity, Language and Educational Policy’,
Geoffrey Hull, address to the CNRT National Congress,
25 August, 2000
12. ‘Timor Leste – A Ilha Insustentável’, Pedro Rosa Mendes,
Público, 25 November 2008
13. ‘Malaysia, Timor-Leste Sign MOU On Education’,
Bernama, 22 October 2009
14. ‘Teacher training in East Timor - a different perspective that is
grounded in the reality on the ground’, email from Br Fons van Rooij
fms, 23 Oct 2009
15. Turner, supra, ix
16. Holidays in Hell, P J O’Rourke, Vintage Books, 1989 page 203
17. Timor: A Nation Reborn Bill Nicol, Equinox Publishing, 2002, page
169
199
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203
INDEX
Aarons, Laurie 62 army xxiv, 33, 94

Aarons, Mark 61, 62, 63 Arafat, Yasser 55
Aceh 45, 48, 88, 95, 96 Arndt, Heinz xxv, xxvi, 49, 55
‘Act of Free Choice’ 96 Arriens, Jan 20
‘Act of Integration’ 48 ‘Asian values’ 51
‘Afro-Asian solidarity’ 101 Asiaweek 3
African National Associação Social Democrática
Congress (ANC) 49, 66 Timorense (ASDT) 17
Age newspaper 31, 54, 67 assimilation 36, 42, 71, 75
Associação Democrática para a Integração de Association of South East Asian
Timor-Leste com a Austrália (Aditla) 19 Nations (ASEAN) 48, 92, 99
Airnorth 85, 140 Ataúro 22, 109
Air Nauru 152 Austasia 140
All-Inclusive East Timorese Australia
Dialogue (AIETD) 96 and G20 84, 104
air travel 26, 137-142 condominium 20
Alatas, Ali xxii, 37, 45, 46 foreign policy 59, 60, 66
Alkatiri, Djafar 33 media 11, 32, 67, 68, 70, 118,
Alkatiri, Maharus 33 military involvement xxvi, 4, 5
Alkatiri, Mari xxii, 19, 31, 33, 49, oil interests 66, 67, 96, 97
as Prime Minister 50, 67, 158 Parliament 59
Alitalia 138 relations with Indonesia xxiii, 54, 57-
Alor 88 60
Amaral, Clementino 48 relations with East Timor 125
Ambon 75, 88 Second World War 25
Amin, Idi 45 support for integration 56, 57
anarcho-capitalism 146 support for ANC 66
Andorra 136 support for ZANU 66
Angola 25, 27, 38, 74, 84, 86, 151 Australian Broadcasting Corporation
Anguilla 5 (formerly Commission) (ABC) 68. 121,
Annan, Kofi 8 127
Answered by Fire 5, 8, 102 Australia Television International 68
apartheid xix, xx, 49 Radio Australia 68
Aruba 46 Australian newspaper 25, 27, 65, 67, 68,
Asiaweek magazine 3 69, 70, 05
Associação Popular Democrática Australian National
Timorense (Apodeti) 19, 22, 33, 38, University (ANU) 54, 55
40, 43 Austronesian languages 112
Arabic language 36, 99, 117 Austronesian peoples 113, 123
Argentina 3 autonomy 43, 46, 47
204
INDEX
television 85
Bahrain 139 Brunei 4, 15, 38, 101, 150, 174
Baikenu language 109 oil wealth 150, 174
Badan Koordinasi Bunak language 32
Intelijen Negara (BAKIN) 18, 20 Buried Alive: The Story of East Timor 2
Badan Urusan Logistik (Bulog) 153
Badan Penjeledik cable, fibre optic 133
Kemerdekaan Indonesia (BPKI) 38 Cairncross, Frances 7
Bali 137, 140, 150 calques (translated loanwords) 111
Balibo (feature film) 8 Cambodia xvii, xviii, xxii,
‘Balibo Five’ 8, 67, 171 French language 10, 83
Baltic States xx, 50 Canada 126, 130, 140, 166
Bangladesh 157 Cantonese 124
Barnett, Correlli 6 capitalism 10, 62
Barry, Robert Cape Verde 2, 149
Baucau 37, 48, 126, 137, 140, 141 Carnation Revolution 26, 44
airport 140, 141 Carrascalão, João
Bava, Zeinal 134 Carrascalão, Manuel
Begin, Menachem 55 Carrascalão, Mário
Belgium 82, 145, Catholicism xxi, xxii, 49, 51, 122, 144
Beyond Rangoon 8 Catholic Church 28, 58
bilingualism 116, 120, 121 coffee 144
Bidau 76 Comissão de Acolhimento, Verdade e
blogs 165, 166 Reconciliação (CAVR) 20, 73
Bono xxv Conselho Nacional de Resistência
Boxer, C R 72 Timorense (CNRT) 77, 118
Brazil 71, 72, 76, 84, 85, 104 Commission for Truth and
and East Timor 84, 121 Friendship (CTF) 45
and G20 14, 84, 104 Centre for Strategic and
aircraft industry 85 International Studies (CSIS) 32
indigenous languages 76 Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) 35
Lusotropicalism 71, 72, 76 Channel Nine 68
relations with East Timor 84 Chile 57, 65, 156, 165
migrant workers in Japan 84 China 14, 20, 21, 22, 36, 37, 43, 44, 45,
military leaders 99 75, 86, 104
Portuguese language 84, 104 and Angola 86
television 85 and Brazil 86
‘brain drain’ 147 and CPLP 100
Brereton, Laurie 60 and East Timor 21, 86
Britain 4, 12, 63, 100, 119, 122, 162 and Fretilin 20, 22
Portuguese Timor 4 and G20 104
military involvement 599 4 and Hong Kong 44
British Broadcasting and Indonesia 21
Corporation (BBC) xxiii, 12, 85 and Macau 36-37, 43, 75
radio xxiii, 12 and Tibet 21, 44, 45
205
INDEX
Chinese language 36, 27, 85, 120 and Trade (DFAT), Australia 56, 59, 68
Chinese people 43, 145, 146, 150 Desousa, Jeremias 139
Chomsky, Noam xxv development 27-29, 140, 143, 144, 163
‘civil war’ 22-23 dialects 115
cognates 106 dictators 53-54
Collier, Paul 6, 126 ‘Dictators and Double Standards’ 53-54
Comunidade de Países de dictionaries 12, 78, 79
Língua Portuguesa (CPLP) 83, 86, 99, Digicel 132-133
100 Dili xxv, xxvii, 2, 17, 22, 24, 25, 27, 75,
common currency 52 78, 85, 88, 90, 102, 104, 109, 120, 125,
Commonwealth 4, 99-101, 126, 135, 136, 137, 139, 152, 154, 160
communism 18, 20, 23, 66, 67 Dili Airport 2, 90, 139, 140, 167, 168
Connect Ireland 155, 156, 164 Dinoy, Jose 29-30
Connolly, Robert 171 domains (internet) 156
consultants 103 Downer, Alexander 61, 67
consulates 57-58, 163, 169-170 dubbing 85, 122
Australia 57-58 Duarte, José Manuel 17
East Timor 163, 169-170 Dunn, James 24, 63
Cook, Robin 6 Dutch East Indies 35, 36, 39, 41
Cooksey, Robert 128 Dutch language 36, 107-108
Cosgrove, General Peter 5 in Indonesia 36
Costa, Luís 111 loanwords in Indonesian 107-108
Costa Lopes, Martinho 58
country codes (telephone) 126-130 e-commerce 7
Cranborne, Lord 4 East Timor
Cravinho, João Gomes 77 air links 26, 137-142
Croatia 122 autonomy within Indonesia 43, 46, 47
Cuba 6, 21, 50, consulates 163, 169-170
Cunha, Tristão de Bragança 39 decolonisation 18, 24, 58, 74, 74
Cunningham, Gary 8 economy 29, 81, 86, 118, 140, 143
customs union 52 education 26, 28, 29, 50, 80, 115, 116,
Cyprus 47 118, 121
embassies 142, 163, 169, 170
Dadra and Nagar Haveli 49 government xxv, 24, 33, 62, 70
Darusman, Taufik independence, 2002 xxiv, xxvii, 92,
Darwin 23, 26, 67, 68, 85, 127, 136, integration with Indonesia 17, 19, 22,
137, 139 33, 38, 40, 47, 48, 56, 57, 68, 75, 96
Dawan language 109 invasion 8, 21, 22, 24, 25, 32, 40, 58,
Death of a Nation 8 62
Death of a Princess 171 language policy 77, 105, 118, 123
decolonisation 18, 24, 58, 74, 74 militias xxiv, 33, 34
democracy 41, 46, 50, 143, 144 relations with Australia 66, 67, 125
Denmark 82, 87, 119, 170 relations with China 20-22, 86
Denpasar 137, 139, 141 relations with Indonesia 37, 50, 52,
Department of Foreign Affairs 125
206
INDEX
relations with Portugal 71, 73-76 exile 25, 26, 31, 32, 118
relations with West Timor 17, 23 exports 152, 153
resistance xxv, 34, 68, 163 Export Processing Zone (EPZ) 152
self-determination 6-8, 5, 15, 37, 56, Externato de São José 40, 80
60, 61, 63, 74, 75, 96, 145
telecommunications 125-127, 128, Fairfax press 67
130, 132, 133, 134, 146, 138, 147, 156 Falkland Islands 3, 136
tourism 150 famine 28, 58, 67,
unilateral declaration of Fataluku language 109, 114, 124
independence 21, 24, 66 fax 132
east-west divisions 32, 33, 94 Feakes, Graham 57
economics 5, 29, 44, 45, 86, 143-158 federalism 41, 42, 43
ecotourism 151 in India 41
education 26, 28, 29, 39, 41, 78, 79, 80, in Indonesia 41, 42, 43
81, 89, 93, 108, 112, 115, 116, 120, Feith, Herb 6, 103
121, 123, 147, 150, 152, 168 Falintil Força Defesa de
Indonesian 29, 50, 79, 80, 81, 108, 112, Timor-Leste (F-FDTL) 33
115, 116 Figueiredo, João 99
Portuguese 75, 78, 80, 108 fiscal conservatism 70
post-independence 78, 114, 116, 118 Fiji 91, 140
university 50, 78 Filipino language 112
electricity 30 Finlandisation 48
emigration 149 fixed line telephones 127, 131, 132,
enclaves 17, 37, 49, 52, 109 134, 135
Ende 88 Flores 75, 76, 88, 99
English language Força 820 162
as official language 93, 100, 118, Forças Armadas de Libertação
119, 121 Nacional de Timor-Leste (Falintil)
as working language 117 Ford Gerald 43
in Hong Kong 119 Forrester, Geoff 56
in India 39 France 82, 83
in Malaysia 35, 100 Fraser, Malcolm 56, 66
in Philippines 119 support for Robert Mugabe 66
in Rwanda 118-119 Frelimo 18, 49, 82, 83, 103
in Singapore 120, 121 French language 78, 83, 82, 119
entrepreneurship 146 in Cambodia 83
Equatorial Guinea 119 in Indonesia 82
Eritrea 97 in Rwanda 83, 119
Esperança, João Paulo Freudenberg, Graham 63
Estonia 50, 144 Frente Revolucionária de Timor-Leste
mobile phones 144 Independente (Fretilin) 18-24
Ethiopia xviii, 97 accusations of communism 18, 20,
euroAtlantic Airways 142 23, 66
European Union (EU) 91, 104, in government 62, 70, 152
148, 169 Freyre, Gilberto 72
207
INDEX
Hill, Helen 90
Gaza Strip 47 Hindi language 35, 40, 122
Geisel, Ernesto 99 Hogue, Cavan 25, 26, 65
Geldof, Bob xxv Hong Kong 44, 45, 100, 119, 136,
Germany 82, 130, 143, 144
German Democratic Republic 148 China 44
German language 82 economic freedom 143
Ghana xxiv, 143 English language 119
Gibraltar 2, 130, 170 ‘one country, two systems’ 44, 45,
globalisation 153 Hotel Rwanda 8
Goa xviii, 25, 36, 37, 39, 40, 41, 65 Howard, John 46, 60, 61
English language 40 East Timor 46, 60, 61
freedom movement 39 letter to Habibie 46, 61
Indian takeover, 5, 49 39, 65, 74, 84 relations with Indonesia
legal system 41 Huang Hua 44
merger with Maharashtra 39
Portuguese language 40 Iceland 98, 110, 136
referendum, 555 39 immigration 10, 47, 65, 69, 100,
statehood 39 144, 147
Gomes, Francisco da Costa 74 imports 152, 165
Gomes, José import substitution 152
Google 13 India xviii, 1, 14, 35, 36, 39, 40, 41, 49,
blogs 165, 166 65, 74, 75, 98, 100, 104, 131, 144
Google In Your Language 13 democracy 41
YouTube 13, 164, 165 economic growth 144
Greece 98, 103, 138 English language
Greek language 80, 107, 110 federalism 41
vocabulary 107, 110 Goa 36, 39, 40
G20 14, 84, 103, 104 regional languages 40
Guaraní language 76 support for Indonesia 98
Guinea-Bissau 65 Indomie 153
Gurkhas 4 Indonesia
Gusmão, Xanana xxiv, 20, 48, 55, 102, and G20 14, 84, 104
118, 161 Aceh 45, 48, 88, 95, 96
Guevara, Che xxiv, 55 development 27, 28
economy 45, 66, 143, 153, 154
Habibie, B J xxii, xxiii, 46, 51, 61, 145 education 29, 50, 79, 80, 81, 108, 112,
offers autonomy 46 115, 116
offers referendum 47, 61 financial crisis xxii, 96
letter from Howard 46, 61 infrastructure
Harradine, Brian 62 integration of East Timor 17, 19, 22,
Hastings, Peter 58, 67 37, 38, 40, 48, 56, 68, 75, 96,
Hata, Hiroyuki 161 invasion 8, 21, 22, 24, 25, 32,
Hawke, Bob 56, 59 40, 58, 62
Henderson, Gerard 18, 19, 34, 61, 62 Java 27, 42, 75
208
INDEX
Maluku 48 International Telecommunication

militias in East Timor xxiv, 33, 34 Union (ITU) 125-127, 129
Papua 92, 96 internationalism 6
under Habibie xxii, xxiii, 46, 51, 61, internet 5, 6, 60, 133-135, 147, 164, 165,
145 166
under Suharto 37, 43, 45, 47-49, 53- blogs 165, 166
56, 58-60, 62, 66, 95, 99 domains 156
under Sukarno 37, 53, 62, 65 broadband 133-135
regional languages 39 Google 13
relations with Australia xxiii, 54, 58-60 satellite 133
relations with East Timor 37, 50, 52, streaming 5, 164, 165
125 websites 13, 164, 165
transmigrants 27 YouTube 13, 164, 165
universities 50, 80 interventionism 5, 6, 60, 147
West New Guinea 16, 37, 39, 62, 63, invasion 8, 21, 22, 24, 25, 32, 40, 58, 62
65, 68, 74, 96 Iran 53
West Timor 17, 28, 29 Iraq xxii, 89, 150
Indonesian language 35, 36, 49, 76, 82, Ireland 130, 132, 137, 138, 145, 148, 157
92, 93, 104, 105, 106, 117 Irish language 117
as working language 117 Islam xxi, 49, 51, 95, 98, 117, 146, 167
differences from Malay 36 isolationism 3
Dutch loanwords 107-108 Israel 47
English loanwords 106, 107 Italy 52, 103, 119, 138, 144
Portuguese loanwords 79, 106, 115 Italian language 78, 119
in East Timor 49, 76, 92, 93, 109 in Italy 119
numbers 111 in Malta 119
spelling 82
industry 29, 150 Jakarta 20, 47, 50, 58, 68, 80, 88,
infrastructure 27, 29, 33, 125, 126, 134, 137, 138, 141, 170
140, 152, 157 ‘Jakarta lobby’ 55, 56
Instituto Camões 79, 80, 82, 83 Japan 50, 161, 162
Instituto Cervantes 83 in Indonesia 38
integration with Indonesia 17, 19, 22, in Portuguese Timor 4, 26
33, 38, 40, 47, 48, 56, 57, 68, 75, 96 migrants from Brazil 84
International Committee of the used car exports 154
Red Cross (ICRC) 58 Java 27, 42, 75
International Court of Justice (ICJ) 97, Javanese people 27, 35, 154
98 Javanese language 35, 117
jurisdiction 97, 98 Jenkins, Simon 147
Timor Gap Treaty 97, 98 Jesuits 75, 76
Western Sahara Advisory Opinion 98 Jordan 95
International Force Jornal Nacional Diário 120
East Timor (InterFET) xxiii, 4, 5
International Monetary Kakoak Air 140
Fund (IMF) 104 Kazakhstan 5, 126
209
INDEX
Keating, Paul 9, 45, 46, 47, 54, Lusa (news agency) 120
56, 59, 60, 66 Lusotropicalism 71, 72, 76
attacks Howard 60 Luxembourg 2, 121, 157
East Timor 59 education 121
foreign policy 45-47, 59-60, 66 languages 121
relations with Indonesia 45-47, 59-60
Keen, Andrew 165 Macmillan, Harold 63
Kelly, Paul 68 Macau 23, 36, 43, 44, 75, 84, 85, 86,
Kirkpatrick, Jeane 53 100, 124, 141
Kissinger, Henry 24 and CPLP 100
Klibur Oan Timor Asuain (KOTA) de facto Chinese sovereignty 44, 75
Konkani language 39 Portuguese language 86
Kosovo 4, 90, 91 Portuguese rule 43, 44, 75
autonomy within Serbia 91 ‘one country, two systems’ 44
military intervention 1999 16 ‘12-3’ protests 1966 43
UN administration 92 return to China 44
Kupang 29, 109, 125, 138, 139 Mackie, Jamie 55
Kuwait xxii, 149 Madagascar 112, 120
Maharashtra 39
La Francophonie 83, 100 Mahathir Mohamed 59
language issues 105-123 Mahbubani, Kishore
media coverage 11, 105, 114 mail 27, 136
language policy 77, 105, 118, 123 Majapahit Empire 15
Larantuka 76 Makassae language 32
Latin 11, 12, 36, 80 Malacca 75
vocabulary 108 Malagasy language 111, 119
Latvia 50 Malay language 2, 12, 35, 36, 82, 84,
Lemos Pires, Mário 22, 74 120, 122
Lesotho 52 differences from Indonesian
Liberia 156 in Malaysia 35, 100
liberation theology 145 in Singapore 122
libertarianism 147, 159 spelling 82
Liechtenstein 127, 130 Malaysia xxii, 35, 51, 91, 100, 131, 148
Liem Bian-Kie 47 Maldives 142
Lifau 17 Maliana 17, 138
Língua Geral (Brazil) 76 Malik, Adam 38
Lion Air 138 malnutrition 28
Liquiçá 34 Malta 119, 149
Lithuania 50 emigration 149
literacy 171 Italian language 119
loanwords 106, 107 Maltese language 119
Lobato, Nicolau 2 Maluku 48
Lopes da Cruz, Francisco 107 Mambai language 112
lorosa’e 32 Mandela, Nelson xx, 32, 55, 102
loromonu 32 Maori 161
210
INDEX
Maori language 12, 111 Nadi Airport (Fiji) 140

Marathi language 39 National Civic Council (NCC) 68
Marconi 129 National Commission for
Marshall Plan 103 Decolonisation (Portugal) 74
Matan Ruak, Taur 124 National Development Plan 163
Matignon Accords 46 Naueti language 32
Mauritania 98 Nauru 151, 152
Mauritius 94, 149, 152 Netherlands 4, 17, 35, 39, 41, 42, 46,
emigration 149 50, 62, 82, 87, 119, 145, 149, 170
Export Processing Zone (EPZ) 152 commercial interests 145
paramilitary police force 94 East Indies 35, 39, 87, 92, 145
tourism 150, 153 West New Guinea 39, 41, 62, 63, 65
McGuinness, Paddy 27, 28, 33, West Timor 17
media 8, 11 New Caledonia 46
mestiços 30, 76 New Hebrides (see also
Mendes Pinto, Fernão 88 Vanuatu) 88, 133
Menzies, Robert 26, 63, 96 New Zealand 2, 3, 5, 8, 9, 81,
Merpati 137, 138 140 91, 101, 111, 134
migrant workers 120, 148, 149 News Limited 67
militias xxiv, 33, 34 Nheengatú language 76
Millard, Ian 4, 5 Nicol, Bill 18, 28, 29, 56, 145
miscegenation 71, 75 Nigeria 45
mixed race 71, 75 Nkrumah, Kwame 143
mobile telephones 127-129, 131-135, Nobel Peace Prize 55
137, 146, 155 Non-Aligned Movement xix, 101, 102
roaming 129, 155 North Korea 163
SMS 129 Northern Ireland 119, 132, 153, 169
Mobutu Sese Seko 45, 53 Northern Marianas 127,
Monaco 155 Norway 131, 150, 151
Monk, Paul 62
Morocco 73, 97, 129 Oecussi 17, 52, 95, 109, 139,
and Western Sahara 73, 97 official languages 76, 77, 93, 100, 112,
Movimento Anticomunista (MAC) 23 115, 116, 118, 119, 121, 123
Mozambique 18, 26, 27, 31, 38, 49, 74, Australia 119
100, 101, 158 Britain 119
support for East Timor 31 East Timor 77, 93, 112, 115, 118, 123
relations with South Africa 49 Equatorial Guinea 119
Mugabe, Robert xxi, 66 Hong Kong 119
support from Australia 66 India 35
multilingualism 120, 121, 124 Indonesia 35
Murdani, Benny 6 Italy 119
Murdoch, Rupert 67 Madagascar 120
music 167 Malaysia 35, 100
Myers, Kevin 101 Paraguay 76
Philippines 119
211
INDEX
Rwanda 118 relations with East Timor 71, 73-76

Singapore 121 relations with Indonesia 37, 65
United States 119 support for integration 75
O Jornal Lia Foun 120 under Salazar 19, 25, 37, 65, 72,
Olympia (floating hotel) 102 74, 96
‘one country, two systems’ policy 44, 45 Portugal Telecom 128, 133, 137
Operasi Komodo 22 Portuguese colonialism 19, 36, 42, 43,
Opus Dei 142 44, 71, 74, 75
assimilation 36, 42, 71, 75
Palestinian territories 47 in Brazil 72, 76
Pancasila 51 in East Timor 4, 17, 20, 26, 37, 38,
Papia Kristang 76 64-65, 74, 126, 156
Papua 92, 96 in Goa 25, 36, 37, 39, 40, 65, 74
Papua New Guinea 68, 69, 70, 132 in Macau 43, 44, 75
Papuan languages 32, miscegenation 71, 76
Paraguay 76, 170 Portuguese language
paramilitary police force 94 as official language 39, 76-77,
Park Chung-hee 53 116-118, 119, 123,
parochialism 3, 6, 5, 8 dictionaries 78, 79
Partido Trabalhista 19 grammar 112
Pasquarelli, John 69 in Brazil 76, 104
‘People’s Assembly’ 40, 96 in East Timor 75, 76, 84, 121
petroleum (see also oil) 3, 66, 67, 85, in Goa 25, 36, 37, 39
97, 138, 144, 150, 151, 152, 174 in Macau 86
Petroleum Fund 150, 151 loanwords in Tetum 106, 115
Peters, Brian 8 loanwords in Indonesian 79, 106, 115
Philippines 10, 31, 48, 69, 79, 111, numbers 111
119, 144, 149 promotion 9, 81-84, 86
phosphates 98, 151, 152 spelling 82
PIDE (Portuguese secret police) 25, 26 teaching 121
Pilger, John 7 Portuguese creoles 75, 76
Pinochet, Augusto 45, 46, 53 in Indonesia 75
Polícia Nacional de in Malacca 76
Timor-Leste (PNTL) Portuguese Timor 4, 17, 20, 26, 37, 38,
political parties 19, 20, 23, 24, 30, 33, 74 64-65, 74, 126, 156
politics 143 neutrality in Second World War 4
popular culture 80, 120 postal services 125, 135-37
Portugal 18, 24, 58, 74, 74, 87-88 postal union 52
Carnation Revolution 26, 44 priorities 162
commercial interests 144, 145 public relations 174
decolonisation of East Timor 18, 24, public telephones 126
58, 74, 74 purism, linguistic 110
Lusotropicalism 71, 72, 76
neutrality in Second World War 4 Quadrant magazine xxvi
relations with Asia 71, 87-88 Quebec 166
212
INDEX
Quinn, George 95 Australian 68

Brazilian 85
radio xxiii, xxvii, 12, 20, 21, 40, 68, 90, Chinese 86
155, 164, 165, 174 East Timorese 120, 164, 165
Radio Australia 68 Macau 86
Rádio e Televisão de Portugal (RTP) 85 Indonesian 120, 165
Rádio e Televisão de Portuguese 85
Timor-Leste (RTTL) 164, 165, 166 Saudi Arabia 104, 171
Rádio de Timor-Leste (RTL) 164 Scott, David 62, 67
Radio Netherlands 33 Scrine, Gil 3
Ramos-Horta, Arsenio 33 Second World War 4, 25. 42, 103
Ramos-Horta, José xvii, xix, xx, xxiv, self-determination
xxvii, 13, 18, 24-26, 30, 31, 32, 45, 47, East Timor 6-8, 5, 15, 37, 56,
49, 55, 57, 74, 94, 98, 118, 127, 150, 60, 61, 63, 74, 75, 96, 145
159, 163-165, 174 Eritrea 98
at UN 31 Indonesia 41
exiled by Portuguese 26 West New Guinea 63, 97
in government 159, 163-165 Western Sahara 97, 98, 99
Nobel Peace Prize 55 Serbia 92, 156
referendum, 5877, 5 sexual violence 34
regional divisions 32, 33, 94 Seychelles 151
Reid, Anthony 50 Shah of Iran 53
Reis, Vicente 20 Shackleton, Greg 8, 171
religion xxi, xxii, 49, 51, 122, 117, 144 Sheridan, Greg 93
remittances 147 Sikkim 49
Rennie, Malcolm 8 SilkAir 140, 141
Romansch 115 Singapore 51, 121, 122, 132, 138, 139,
Rome talks, 563 74 141, 142, 149, 151, 155, 168
Rote 88 ‘Asian values’ 51
Royal Brunei 140 education 121
Rudd, Kevin 60 English language 121
Russia 14, 50, 126 Malay language 122
Rwanda 119 used car exports 155
Singapore Airlines 141
Sahe see Vicente Reis Sinhala 35
Salazar, António 19, 25, 37, 65, 72, Soares, Dionisio Babo 123
74, 96 Soetardjo petition 41
Saldanha, João 155 Solomon Islands 5, 84
sandalwood 144 Solor 88
San Marino 52 Somalia 16, 146
Santa Cruz killings xxii, xxv, 40 anarcho-capitalism 146
Santamaria, B A 54, 68 ‘failed state’ 16
satellite state 18, 47, 68 South Korea 50, 53
satellite television 68, 85, 86, 116, 120, South Africa xix, xxii, xxv, 32, 49, 52,
134, 164, 165 66, 104, 154,
213
INDEX
apartheid xix, xx, 49 Telekomunikasaun Timor Lorosae 128

support for East Timor 102 telephones 128-131, 132, 133,
‘south-south cooperation’ 14 134, 138, 147, 156
Soviet Union 20, 21, 32, 38, 50, 125 call costs 128-131
and Baltic States 50 fixed line 127, 131, 132, 134, 135
and East Timor 20, 21, 38 mobile phones 128, 130, 132, 133,
and Indonesia 21 134, 138, 147, 156
Soweto riots xxv public 126
Spain 36, 98, 100, 130, 136, 144, 170 satellite 127
dispute over Gibraltar 130 television 68, 76, 85, 116, 120, 133,
Western Sahara 98 165, 166
Spanish language 10, 11, 76, 78, 80, via satellite 68, 85, 86, 116, 120,
81, 83, 119 133, 165, 166
in the Philippines 119 Televisão de Timor-Leste
Special Autonomous Region of (TVTL) 164-166
East Timor (SARET) (proposed) 46, 47 Telikom PNG 132-133
Special Broadcasting Service (SBS) 68 Telkom 1 satellite 164
special territory (Indonesia) 45 Telkom Indonesia 121, 126, 131
Sri Lanka 35 Telstra 127, 128, 134, 155
Stahl, Max 7 Ternate 75, 88
Stewart, Tony 8 Tetum 2, 12, 13, 17, 70, 75, 76, 57, 78,
Sting xxv 83, 85, 87. 89, 93, 105-124, 146, 165
subtitling 85, 122, 165-167 as lingua franca 70, 109, 110
Suara Timor Lorosae 121 as official language 112, 116, 123
Subandrio 93 development 114
Suharto 37, 43, 45, 47-49, 53-56, 58-60, grammar 113, 114
62, 66, 95, 99 numbers 111
and Australia xxiii, 54, 58-60 Portuguese influence 108
and East Timor Portuguese loanwords 106, 115
and Portugal 37, 65 spelling 12, 108, 115
and US 24, 29, 45, 52, 53, 59 ‘Tetum’ vs ‘Tetun’ 12
Sukarno 37, 53, 62, 65 Tetun-Dili 110, 113
and West New Guinea 62 Tetun-Terik 110, 113-114
Sun Yat-sen 43 vocabulary 106, 110, 111, 115
Suriname 154 Thailand 2, 15, 31, 145, 150
Sweden 131, 135, 152 Theberton, Edward 95
Switzerland 82, 116, 127 Tibet xix, 44, 45
Sydney Morning Herald 18, 58, 67, 95 time management 159-162
Timor (island) 2, 3, 16
Taft, William Howard 69 Timor Air 139, 142
Tagalog language 111, 112 Timor Gap Treaty 66, 97
Taiwan 43, 44, 45, 130, 146, 152 Timor Sea 66, 150
Tamil language 40, 120 Timor Post 120
telecommunications 125-127, 134, 146 Timor Telecom 128-130, 133, 134, 145
Teledifusão de Macau (TdM) 86 Timor-Leste 13, 3, 112
214
INDEX
timortoday.com 164, 166 89, 101, 103,

Tjan, Harry 20, 47, in the Philippines 69
Tok Pisin 70 relations with Indonesia 24, 29, 45, 52,
Toohey, Paul 70 53, 59, 63
Tomodok, Elias 49 world power 14
Topasses 75 Universal Postal Union (UPU) 136
Tose, Philip 144 universities 50, 54, 78
TAP (Portuguese airline) 141
Transportes Aereos de Van Klinken, Catharina 115, 116
Timor (TAT) 138, 139 Vanuatu 89, 133
tourism 81, 82, 131, 146, 150, 153 VSAT (Very Small Aperture
Bali 150 Terminal) 133
Maldives 144 Vieira de Melo, Sérgio 93
Mauritius 150, 153 Vietnam xvii, xviii, 79, 83, 133
Portugal 82 Viqueque uprising 25, 32, 37, 38, 65
Seychelles 151 Indonesian involvement 25, 37
Thailand 150 suppression by Portuguese 37, 38
Toyota 154 vernacular languages 114
trade 14, 44, 59, 80, 82, 87, Voice over Internet
88, 104, 145, 170 Protocol (VoIP) 5, 156, 157
translation 79, 92, 93
Tupi language 76 water, bottled 102
Turkey 47 Watson, Don 54, 65
Turner, Michele 17, 27, 160 West Bank 47
West New Guinea 16, 37, 39, 62,
Uganda 45, 118, 119 63, 65, 68, 74, 96
União Democrática West Timor 17, 28, 29
Timorense (UDT) 19, 20, 22, 31, 33 Western Sahara 13, 74, 97, 98
unilateral declaration of cession by Spain 98
independence 21, 24, 66 claimed by Mauritania 98
United Nations (UN) xix, xxiii, xxv, claimed by Morocco 74, 97, 98
xxvii, 5, 16, 21, 23, 31, 34, 44, 53, 58, proposed referendum 97
60, 65, 72, 74, 89-105, 127, 156, 163 UN mission 97
UN Development Programme xxv, 172 Whitlam, Gough 16, 17, 23, 30, 32,
UN General Assembly 43, 56, 57, 58, 60, 63, 65
resolutions 95, 98 East Timor 16, 17, 23, 30, 56, 57, 58,
UN Special Committee on 60, 63, 65
Decolonisation 58, 74 foreign policy 60, 65
UN Mission of Support in relations with Indonesia 43, 58, 63
East Timor (UNMISET) 93 support for integration 17, 56-58
UN Transitional Authority in visits East Timor 58
East Timor (UNTAET) xxiv, 89, 90, visits UN 58
94, 135 Willessee, Don 57
United States 14, 24, 29, 39, 41, 43, WiMAX (wireless broadband) 133
48, 52, 53, 59, 63, 69, 83, 84, Wolfowitz, Paul 52
215
INDEX
Woolcott, Richard 21, 45, 55, 56, 57, Yogyakarta 45, 82

66, 95 YouTube 13, 164, 165
work ethic 161-162 Yugoslavia, 5, 90, 91, 125, 126
working languages 117
World Bank 103, 104 Zaire (now Democratic
Republic of Congo) 45, 53
Xavier do Amaral, Francisco 25, 34, 174 Zimbabwe 66, 95, 101, 163
Ximenes Belo, Carlos 118 Zimbabwe African
National Union (ZANU) 66
Yemen 116
216
Throughout its history, East Timor has been a lesson in what not
to do: how not to run a colony, how not to run a province, how
not to prepare a territory for independence, and how not to treat a
smaller neighbour.
While many foreign commentators have been prompt to write

East Timor off as a ‘failed state’, they conveniently ignore the fact
that other states are also to blame for its failings, particularly
Portugal, Indonesia and Australia, as well as the United Nations.
East Timor’s first ten years since self-determination have been

marked by denial, naïveté, ignorance, prejudice, incompetence,
maladministration, and an unwillingness of people from different
countries to work with each other instead of against each other.
Yet despite all this, East Timor remains a place with hope.
Photo by Ken Westmoreland

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A Pretty Unfair Place

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a pretty

– Gareth Evans, Australian Foreign Minister, 1990

Copyright © Ken Westmoreland 2009

All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced or

Printed in Great Britain

Hugh O’Shaughnessy; Humberto Ribeiro; Irena Cristalis; James

JAKARTA, 8 JUNE, 2008. It was President Suharto’s birthday.

Western Sahara, or to use its official title, the Sahrawi Arab

While there had been a glimmer of hope that the Suharto

years of throwing good money after bad, Brussels lost patience,

Maybe not, Horta thought, but it doesn’t mean it never will.

restrict comments. (It was later revealed to be the same person,

to Mohammed, instead of taking Mohammed to the mountain.

WHENEVER I hear the words ‘East Timor’ and ‘fashionable’ in the

We Timorese only wished that Indonesia was a Vietnam, run by

human rights, Christian agencies of mercy would race with each

As a six-year old in North Yorkshire in 1978, I can remember

Portuguese in much the same way as Europeans regarded the

invasion, General Benny Murdani, was Catholic, and the first

plain that Portugal, and the UN, would have to recognise

Administration in East Timor (UNTAET) was established. Yet

By contrast, poor old Suharto’s Indonesia supposedly had no

Programme, also involved me having to write my own terms of

although that would have just led to me being branded as a bitter

IN BRITAIN, I still frequently have to deal with people who have

After I had been corresponding with it for nearly a year, a US

‘Timorese’ is the obvious alternative, but are the people in the

served in East Timor for six months, there were some

His Majesty’s Government in the United Kingdom agree that

It is still a matter of some debate as to whether or not Japan

And why did he put the word ‘country’ in quotation marks?

By all means, let people in Britain denounce New Labour’s

I have a young son, and when he is older I don’t want him to be

The late Australian academic Herb Feith, one of the country’s

in the van of enlightenment on things like racism and

However, parochialism, is not objectionable because it is

Sadly, disagreements in East Timor over the use of Portuguese

everybody in Latin America is a socialist revolutionary; or that

Among some supposedly culturally sensitive people there is a

While internet services from Google like YouTube and Blogger

Nor do I expect everyone to be a world citizen. Most people in

HISTORY is not necessarily written by victors, but it is invariably

East Timor cannot be a nation state, because it is based on artificial

Most national boundaries in the region are those inherited

When it was pressing its claim to West New Guinea at the UN

[T]he attempt to link West Irian to east New Guinea would

Certainly, colonial boundaries are not sacrosanct, and there are

Netherlands, which occupied the west of the island in 1640,

In what way would they have ‘got to live together? ‘João’,

It is, therefore, far from clear that increased contact between

Support for independence came from Fretilin, a communist party.

When East Timor’s decolonisation began in 1974, the Cold

In fact, Mari Alkatiri, later to become Fretilin’s leader after

Indonesian radio broadcasts to East Timor not only denounced

They yelled ‘Communist!’ as they beat and kicked Sahe’s body

Fretilin did not, in fact, declare itself to be a Marxist-Leninist

In an interview for ABC Radio National, Richard Woolcott,

Indonesia was seriously afraid that if an independent East Timor

Yet in his memoirs, Woolcott portrayed the Soviet Union as

I recall asking the Soviet ambassador how the Soviet Union

Although China recognised Fretilin’s unilateral declaration of

Apropos the Fretilin delegation’s visit to Peking and the Chinese

paid to their support of Fretilin: there were occasions when

By 1990, diplomatic relations between China and Indonesia