East Timor: Timeline of the Coup Part I
Brian Guerin
The recent events in East Timor have been marketed by the western media, to the extent to which they have been reported, as a series of unrelated events: mobs rampaging through Dili, Australian / New Zealand intervention to restore order, elections and restored hope for the future to this already shattered country. As with most myths, it has a slight basis in reality, but even less so than most traditional myths.
The latest Western intervention is simply the latest phase of the war against East Timor, and has been in preparation for some time. The Australian contractors have stepped in replace their Indonesian predecessors, and despite assurances by Prime Minister John Howard to the contrary, they are in East Timor to stay. The great prize is East Timor’s extensive oil and gas resources in the Timor Sea.
In 1999 the Australian Government, under John Howard, sent in troops to head the UN military mission to effect the transition from Indonesian control to East Timorese independence. Canberra’s agenda was to ensure that Australia, rather than the former colonial power Portugal, exercised the greatest authority in the post-independent East Timor, and so secure its extensive oil and gas resources.
Australia explicitly refers to East Timor, and by extension the entire Pacific as well as East Asia, as “Australia’s own backyard,” a phrase used by US planners in referring to Latin America. Australia’s actions in 2006 confirm the desire of the dominant Western powers to sustain East Timor’s dependent economic and political status. [1]
In May 2006, John Howard stated that the emerging crisis in East Timor was due to the “poor governance” of the Alkatiri government. These remarks were sustained despite the protests of the Portuguese government. When Howard was pressed on whether there should be an East Timorese equivalent of the Pacific Solomon Islands - where Australian officials have taken charge of the finance ministries as well as the police and prisons – Howard stated that:
“On the one hand, we want to help; we are the regional power that’s in a position to do so. It’s our responsibility to help, but I want to respect the independence of the East Timorese. But then on the other hand, again, they have to discharge that independence or the responsibilities of that independence more effectively than has been the case over the last few years.”
Australia has been able to resist pressure from other interested parties due to the support it enjoys from the United States. Just as the Clinton administration supported the Australia-led 1999 intervention, Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice has made it clear that the US is fully backing the 2006 Australian military intervention in East Timor. In a telphone conversation with Australian Foreign Minister Alexander Downer she is reported to have asked: “What do you want us to do?” [2]
Within East Timor itself, the campaign to oust Alkatiri, the leader of the ruling party Fretilin, has been steadily underway for some time. It burst into the open a year ago, following Alkatiri’s decision to make religious education in schools optional rather than compulsory. This move to separate church and state brought forth a furious response from the Catholic Church. Demonstrations were held calling for the ousting of Alkatiri, and an end to his “extremist government.” In a pastoral note issued in April 2005 the Church hierarchy in Dili stated that the Timorese cabinet contained secret “Marxists,” whose presence endangered democracy. The government was following policies based on the “Chinese Model” and the “retrograde Third World.” [3]
According to a report in the Asia Times, the US ambassador to East Timor openly supported the church in its street protests against the government last year, attending one of the protests in person. [4]
In January 2005, a leading Fretilin member of the national parliament, Francisco Branco, denounced a prominent priest for waging a campaign to collapse the government. According to Branco, the priest had told churchgoers that a decision to send students to study in Cuba would turn East Timor into a communist country and Fretilin had a plan to kill nuns and priests if it won the next election.
When the military intervention was launched, the Australian media, taking its cue from the Howard government, stepped up the denunciations of Alkatiri.
Alkatiri and his supporters are neither “Marxists” or “communists,” nor are the Howard government and its media propangandists concerned in the least about the fate of the East Timorese people. Their opposition to Alkatiri is centred on the fact that his Fretilin faction has sought support from other major powers, such as Portugal and China, as a counter-weight to naked Australian imperialism. [5]
Alkatiri in particular raised the ire of Canberra during the protracted negotiations over the exploitation of the Timorese oil and gas reserves when he denounced the Australian government for its efforts to exercise total control over East Timor’s resources, which was Australia’s chief concern from the beginning.
After four years of intransigence from Howard and Downer, the Dili government was forced in 2005 to agree to delay the final settlement of the maritime border between the two countries for fifty to sixty years. Under international boundary law – which Australia has refused to recognise – East Timor is fully entitled to most of the oil and gas revenues. However, Canberra finally succeeded in having Dili drop its claim of national sovereignty over the key resource-rich zones of the Timor Sea for two generations, by which time the main oil and gas fields will be commercially exhausted.
If Alkatiri were an Australian ally in East Timor, rather than an obstacle, then the attitude of the Howard regime and the Australian media would have been rather different. For instance, the so-called dissident soldiers, whose “rebellion” ignited the crisis, would not have been portrayed as having legitimate grievances. Instead, the decision of the Timorese government to sack them after they engaged in strike action would have been supported. By holding discussions with the rebels, Austalian military commanders should have been denounced for organising a mutiny, breaking the law and creating the conditions for “terrorism.” The Timorese soldiers’ campaign for the removal of the Alkatiri government was remarkably convenient for Australian interests.
Those interests centre on the securing of Australia’s position in a region where other powers are attempting to extend their influence. According to the Australian Financial Review, the emerging rivalry between Japan and China is extending into the Pacific, posing a “real challenge for a government [Australia’s] that is always claiming to be on such good terms with Tokyo and Beijing.” [6]
Focusing on Australia’ long-standing economic concerns in the Pacific region, it continued: “It’s worth remembering that in 1920, Australian strategic planners were worried about Japan trying to get its hands on the rumoured oil resources of Portuguese Timor, but in 1975 there were fears that China would manipulate a leftish independent Timor for territorial advantage.”
Once the existence of oil and gas resources had been proved beyond all doubt, the rivalry between Japan and China for energy would pose increasing challenges for Australia. One method of dealing with these concerns was to ensure that a “reliable” regime was in place in Dili. This is a major factor underlying the power struggle inside East Timor.
Therefore control over the vast reserves beneath the Timor Sea – now valued at more than $30 billion due to the rise in world oil and gas prices – is at the heart of the dispatch of 1,300 troops and police to East Timor. [7]
The central concern of Canberra’s East Timor policy is domination of the Timor Sea, blocking access to all foreign rivals, apart from of course the United States. Successive Australian governments collaborated with the Portuguese colonial rulers until 1974, when Portugal’s fascist government collapsed. Around the same time, the first indications of Timor’s vast undersea wealth started to become apparent: oil exploration wells were driven offshore in the early 1970s and rights were granted to several companies. Observing this potential, and fearing “instability,” that is, radical nationalism seeking full control over indigenous resources as Portugal’s rule crumbled, Australia, following the United States, directly encouraged Indonesia, under General Suharto, to invade in 1975. Suharto’s military clique was installed by the US, UK and Australia in 1965, following the overthrow of Sukarno, who had followed a policy of economic nationalism and non-alignment. The coup involved the massacre of at least a million people, which was co-ordinated by the US, UK and Australia. The Australian Prime Minister at the time, Harold Holt, commented: ‘With 500,000 to a million communist sympathizers knocked off, I think it’s safe to say that a reinorientation has taken place.’ [8]
The 1975 Indonesian invasion of East Timor which followed resulted in the slaughter of 200,000 East Timorese over the next 15 years, fully one third of the population, genocide by any definition. World Bank loans of $630 million went into a “transmigration” programme that involved the shipping of Indonesian immigrants into East Timor to colonize the archipelago. [9] General Suharto agreed to negotiate the underwater Timor Sea boundary heavily in Australia’s favour, handing Australia nearly all the seabed reserves under the 1989 Timor Gap Treaty. [10]
After the fall of Suharto in 1998, when Portugal made efforts to restore its old influence, the Howard government sent troops to support the formation of an independent East Timor in 1999. The purpose of the Australian intervention was advertised as the protection of the Timorese people from attacks from Indonesian military and militia groups.
The facts speak otherwise. Within months, the Howard government was engaged in threatening and blackmailing the embryonic Dili administration to ensure that Australia, not East Timor, or anyone else, kept the lion’s share of the oil and gas. In February 2000, just before the Australian-led international force (Interfet) formally handed over power to troops of the UN Transitional Administration for East Timor (UNTAET), Australian representatives insisted on the signing of 2 critical treaties. [11]
The first treaty was a continuation of the Timor Gap Treaty, with the UN simply replacing Indonesia as Australia’s partner in the joint development zone. The second treaty cleared the way for a US-Australian-Japanese consortium to exploit the large Bayu-Undan field, which is located 250km south of Suai in East Timor and 500km northwest of Darwin, and is expected to yield up to 400 million barrels of liquefied petroleum gas (LPG), now valued at more at more than $5 billion. The agreement foisted on Dili, however, involved building a pipeline to Darwin, where the Houston-based ConocoPhillips has commissioned a $2.4 billion refining plant.
Both of these treaties were initialled by UN officials, and were designed to legally bind any incoming “independent” East Timor government. As for Timor’s people, in whose name name Australia had intervened, they were granted no say in these binding arrangements. [12]
In October 2000, the Howard government unilaterally rejected a UNTAET call for the realignment of the undersea boundary. If the borders were drawn at an equal distance from both coastlines, in accordance with international law, East Timor would be entitled to nearly all of the Timor Sea royalties and taxes.
Howard and his ministers issued thinly veiled threats of retaliation against East Timor if it dared take the dispute to the International Court of Justice. Australian Foreign Minister Downer directly linked the future of Australia’a aid program - 90% of which was devoted to military purposes - to the size of the royalties obtained by Dili. Downer’s colleague, Resources Minister Nick Minchin, warned that a border dispute would destroy “investor confidence” in the Timor Gap.
In March 2002, just 2 months before East Timor was proclaimed “the first newly independent country of the 21st century,” the Howard government announced that it would no longer submit to maritime border rulings by the World Court. East Timor’s Prime Minister-elect Mari Alkatiri denounced the move as an “unfriendly” act, “tying the hands” of his incoming government. [13]
In May, a week before Prime Minister Howard arrived in Dili for the Independence Day celebrations, Alkatiri was summoned to Canberra, where Australian government officials tried to force him to sign an agreement ceding most of the vast $25 billion Greater Sunrise field to Australia.
Australian-based company Woodside Petroleum, 34% of which is owned by Royal Dutch Shell, is the major shareholder in the Greater Sunrise field, in partnership with ConocoPhillips and Japan’s Osaka Gas. The area is thought to contain as much gas as the nearby North West Shelf, Australia’s largest resource development, also operated by Woodside. The North west Shelf has identified reserves of 100 trillion cublic feet, sufficient to make about 2 billion tons of LPG, enough to meet world demand for more than a decade.
Unable to secure full agreement immediately, Downer and other ministers demanded thatn Alkatiri accept some form of treaty as the new nation’s first “independent” act. Alkatiri duly obliged, but signed the May 20 document “without prejudice” to a final seabed settlement. [14]
From that moment on, the Howard government repeatedly refused to approve various agreements necessary to commence the Bayan, Undan and Greater Sunrise projects, thus starving the Timorese government of desperately needed revenue, until Dili agreed to delay or renounce its territorial rights.
The mercenary character of the “negotiations” was revealed in March 2003, when the transcript of a meeting between Downer and Alkatiri in November 2002 was leaked and published on the internet.
“We can stop everything,” Downer repeatedly declared, threatening to abort the talks. Alkatiri pleaded with Downer, “We want to accommodate all your concerns, but accommodating is one thing and scraping off a plate is another.” Downer reiterated that the boundary would not be redrawn, saying “you can demand that forever for all I care, you can continue to demand, but if you want to make money, you should conclude an agreement quickly.”
The Howard government therefore deliberately prolonged the border dispute, while continuing to draw revenues from the Timor Sea and East Timor sank deeper into poverty. During 2003 alone, Australia received $172 million in royalties from the fully operational Laminaria-Corallina field – twice as much as the entire budget of the East Timorese government.
Having received only a fraction of the oil revenue it was due, and with the steady elimination of international aid, the Dili government had little to spend on schools, health care, housing or job creation. 5 years after East Timor’s so-called “liberation” by Australia, half of its working people remained unemployed, 40% of the population were living on 50 US cents or less a day, life expectancy was júst 40 years and infant mortality rates were among the highest in the world.
During another round of border talks in April 2004, East Timor’s President Xanana Gusmao joined Alkatiri in a series of public pleas for relief from Australia’s merciless position. Alkatiri insisted that a new agreement granting East Timor a greater share of the offshore revenues was a matter of “life and death.” Speaking to the Portuguese newspaper Publico, Gusmao openly accused Australia of theft. In an interview with the Guardian, he warned of dire political consequences unless East Timor received a better deal. “We would not like to be another failed state. Without this we will be another Haiti, another Liberia, another Solomon Islands.”
Nevertheless, Canberra’s repeated diplomatic pressure was sustained until, in April 2005, Dili finally agreed to drop its border claims for fifty to sixty years.
The result of this piracy was that, in 2004-5, East Timor’s oil and gas revenues came to a total of just $25 million. This amount is forecast to rise to $75 million in 2007-08. Apart from the vast profits already being made by the oil corporations, the bulk of the country’s royalties, $550 million by April this year, are frozen in US treasury bonds in a Petroleum Fund at the insistence of the IMF and World Bank, supposedly to provide for the county’s future. [15]
The current Australian/New Zealand intervention follows a number of key decisions by the Fretilin-led government in Dili which sought to lessen, or at least counter-balance, Australian hegemony over the Timor Sea fields. In December 2004, Alkatiri, who was also East Timor’s Natural Resources Minister, announced that a consortium involving China’a largest state-owned oil group, China National Petroleum, and Norway’s Global Geo-Services would conduct a full seismic exploration of the Timorese side of the sea boundary. This immediately raised the prospect of East Timor being able to gain additional revenue from its own resources by opening licences to competing European and Asian interests.
During 2005, according to some media reports, Alkatiri’s government entered into talks with China’s PetroChina for the construction of refining capacity in Timor, cutting directly across Australian plans for the piping or shipping of all Timor Sea crude, from both sides of the border, to Darwin, Australia. Alkatiri also called for undertakings by Australia that it would not block the piping of oil from the Greater Sunrise field to Timor.
While many of the details remain obscure, these reports featured in media, diplomatic and business commentary in the build-up to the move by Australia and New Zealand. Writing in The Australian on May 9, columnist Philip Adams declared that Alkatiri’s “insistence on having gas production facilities in Timor’s Suai area rather than Darwin may open the door to China; PetroChina seems to have the deal stitched up. Many in the Western diplomatic and corporate communities think that’s too close for comfort.”
Loro Horto, the son of Timor’s Foreign Minister Jose Ramos-Horta, wrote in the Asia Times on May 27th: “There was also widespread speculation that Alkatiri planned to award a multibillion-dollar-gas-pipeline project to PetroChina, an invitation that would have won both the United States’ and Australia’s ire.”
In September 2005 Alkatiri started an international tour to attract oil and gas explorers to East Timor’s own offshore area of some 30,000 square kilometers, declaring that “Timor-Leste is open for business.” In November he reported that these efforts attracted more than 20 petroleum companies, “among them some of the biggest in the world.”
In January 2006, after 6 years of bitter negotiations, Alkatiri finally extracted a minor concession from the Howard government. Canberra reluctantly agreed to a 90-10 share, in East Timor’s favour, of the proceeds from part of the Greater Sunrise field - the 20% that lies in the so-called Joint Petroleum Development Area, which sits astride the disputed border line. The agreement shares equally (50-50) the royalties from the remaining 80% of Greater Sunrise, in what Australia claims as its exclusive jurisdiction.
Earlier the Australian government had insisted on a more aggressive siphoning of revenues to Australia. However, in response, the Timor parliament threatened to scuttle the April 2005 deal in which the Alkatiri government had agreed to abandon its claim for the redrawing of the boundary.
In February, the Dili government sought tenders for its own Timor Trough fields after the Chinese-Norwegian survey estimated that the area held half a billion dollars of light oil, and some 10 trillion cubic feet of gas (about 10% of the total estimated Timor Sea reserves). By the April 19th deadline, 5 companies had submitted bids, either individually or in consortia. They were Italy’s ENI, Portugal’s GALP (in which ENI is the majority shareholder), Brazil’s Petroleo Brasileiro (Petrobas), Malaysia’s Petronas and India’s Reliance. It is of the greatest significance that none were from the US and Australia. [16]
From this moment onwards, from early February, the destabilisation of the Alkatiri government began. On February 8th, some 350 officers and soldiers abandoned their posts and began a march to the Presidential Palace, claiming discriminatory practices within the military. These “petitioners” went on strike throughout March. The government in Dili responded by dismissing nearly 600 – one-third of the East Timorese army. This act ignited riots and total anarchy, which was rapidly exploited by an Australian-trained army rebel, Major Alfredo Alves Reinado, who threatened a guerrilla war unless Gusmao sacked Alkatiri.
On May 22nd, with Australian forces already on warships off the coast, Alkatiri announced that ENI, the Italo-Portuguese conglomerate, had won the rights to 5 of the 6 exploration areas, with Reliance gaining the remaining field. Alkatiri also confirmed that his government would call for bids for onshore exploration rights later in the year.
One immediate outcome of the eruption of unrest in East Timor and the arrival of Australian troops was the cancellation of a planned visit by Gusmao to China. The invitation had come from the Chinese President, Hu Jintao, and was to extend from from May 29th to June 3rd. Beijing’s interest in oil and gas exploration in the Timorese fields was to be part of the agenda.
By the dispatch of Australian troops and police to East Timor, the Howard government has moved to secure its interests in the Timor Sea, as well as the wider Indonesian archipelago. Despite the relentless propanganda about Australia respecting Timor’s sovereignty, the intervention has intensified, and is the latest chapter in the long history of Australian imperial operations against the country and people of East Timor.
The underlying agenda was outlined in a leaked Australian Defence Force (ADF) minute published in April 2006, in the Bulletin news magazine. The classified minute to the Chief of the Defence Force, dated May 10th, 2001, stated in no uncertain terms that: the primary goal of Australia’s ongoing military presence was to ensure that the fledgling Timorese government and its army was sufficiently amenable to Australian interests.
The document stated: “The first objective is to pursue Australia’s broad strategic interests in East Timor, namely denial, access and influence. The strategic interest of denial seeks to ensure that no foreign power gains an unacceptable level of access to East Timor, and is coupled with the complementary objective of seeking access to East Timor for Australia, in particular the ADF (Australian Defence Force). Australia’s strategic interests can also be protected and pursued more effectively if Australia maintains some degree of influence over East Timor’s decision-making.” [17]
This confidential minute, written by the ADF’s Strategic International Policy Division, related specifically to the ADF’s “Defence Co-operation” program in shaping the development of the East Timor Defence Force. It is an indication of classic US techniques in Latin America: controlling the military. It also sheds light on the real objectives of Australian strategic policy towards East Timor, as outlined by the Howard government itself. [18]
The Howard government used the “factional” in-fighting in East Timor’s government as a pretext to dispatch 1,300 troops on May 24th 2006. The resulting increase in the welfare of the East Timorese people was not apparent; 150,000 have fled to refugee camps, repeating the pattern during the 1999 violence engineered by Indonesia. Once Australian forces were in position in East Timor, the Australian government worked to ensure that they would control any new UN mission to East Timor. Meanwhile the “gangs” continued to destroy property and loot, without any interference from Australian and New Zealand troops. A campaign against Alkatiri had been under way in the Australian media for some time. [19]
The Howard government engaged in a diplomatic offensive to guarantee that Australia lead any UN operations in East Timor. This is particularly cynical as the US and Australia have consistently opposed calls by the UN, East Timor and Portugal for an extended UN presence in the country. As recently as early May, Washington and Canberra sought to prevent any extension of the UN mission.
This surfaced in a June meeting of the Security Council when Australian ambassador Robert Hill opposed a proposal by UN Secretary-General Kofi Annan for a formal peace-keeping operation to replace the current Australia-led force. The Howard government scheme, modeled on the Australian-led occupation of the Solomon Islands, is to retain exclusive military control, while simultaneously presiding over a multi-national police force and the installation of Australian officials in key administrative posts. Hill argued that a foreigner should be placed in charge of the East Timorese police force, in private suggesting former Australian Federal Police Commissioner Mick Palmer. [20]
Portugal and Malaysia, both of whom have police forces in East Timor, backed Annan’s call for full UN control of the military and police presence. Portugal’s ambassador Joao Salgueiro stated: “Timor-Leste is a child of the United Nations. So it needs the universality and impartiality of the United Nations, which must once again take a leading role.”
A meeting of foreign ministers from the Community of Portuguese Speaking Countries decided to send a mission to East Timor to assess the situation. Portuguese Foreign Minister Diogo Freitas declared: “East Timor is not a failed state. We have to defend the necessity of sending a United Nations force in which all member nations participate actively”. [21]
On the 19th June 2006, US ambassador to the UN John Bolton openly supported Canberra’s bid for dominance. Opposing “a UN presence forever” in East Timor, he stated that it was necessary “to support the Australians and New Zealanders who are there.” If the Solomon Island intervention is anything to go by, Australia will remain in East Timor for a long time to come. [22]
The divisions in the UN were reflected in the power struggle in East Timor itself, where Australia’s allies – President Xanana Gusmao and the Foreign Minister Jose Ramos Horta engaged in a barely veiled campaign to oust Alkatiri. Under East Timor’s constitution, the president does not have the power to fire the prime minister without a vote of no confidence in parliament, where Alkatiri’s Fretilin party has the overwhelming majority. As a result, the Australian media sought to create the basis for criminal charges against Alkatiri, with the aim of forcing him to step aside.
One such allegation, aired on Australian TV, was that Alkatiri, in league with the former interior minister Rogerio Lobato, had supplied weapons to former Fretilin fighters to form a death squad to be used against his political opponents. The crimes are alleged to have taken place amid the factional fighting which began that February, in which 600 rebel soldiers plus sections of the police force openly threatened civil war if Alkatiri did not resign. These “heroes of the anti-Alkatiri struggle” were, legally speaking, mutineers and traitors.
Neither Ramos-Horta, who has openly fraternized with these anti-Alkatiri forces, nor his Australian supporters, wish to test the alleged “tremendous support” for his leadership at the elections due next year; hence the successful effort to compel Alkatiri to resign. According to the Australian newspaper The Age, President Gusmao was contemplating using his constitutional powers to launch a judicial inquiry into the allegations unearthed by the Australian media, while Horta was considering a visit to the alleged leader of the Fretilin hit squad, Vincente “Railos” do Concecao, to gather evidence and report back to Gusmao. “The president is not indifferent, quite the contrary. He is attentive to these allegations, and…he’s garnering whatever information is available, and he will take action in due course if he has to,” Horta explained. [23]
Part II of this article.
Footnotes
[1] http://www.wsws.org/articles/2006/may2006/timo-m30.shtml
[2] Ibid.
[3] Ibid.
[4] Ibid.
[5] Ibid.
[6] Ibid.
[7] http://www.wsws.org/articles/2006/jun2006/etim-j06.shtml
[8] Pilger, John. The New Rulers of the World, Verso, London, 2002, p. 35
© The Tara Foundation, 2006
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East Timor I
