East Timor betrayed

The Guardian spoke to Gareth Smith on his return from East Timor 
early last week where he had been a volunteer district electoral officer 
with the United Nations election monitoring agency UNAMET, working on the 
registration of voters for the August 30 referendum.

I am feeling very shattered — heartbroken and angry. We made promises to 
the people of East Timor that UNAMET would not leave East Timor, that we 
would be there after August 30 whatever the result.

We put up posters saying this, to reassure them. Even though we didn't 
spell out that there would be armed protection, nevertheless the 
implication was made.

The Timorese response was always the same: "we do not want to die again, we 
do not want 1975 to come back again."

On July 16 I was in Viqueque Province in the southeast, at a place called 
Makadiki. At 10.30am two British-made Hawk jet aircraft screamed overhead, 
absolutely terrorising the people, sending them scattering.

A priest said this is typical of what the Indonesians do. "This is to let 
us know that they are going to take us back to 1975 if we choose 
independence."

So thankyou British Aerospace, and the assurances that the British 
Government received from Indonesia that those aircraft would only be used 
for "external defence".

The other thing that sticks in my craw is the emphasis placed on the May 5 
agreement between Portugal, the UN and Indonesia. Whenever people expressed 
concern they were told: look, here's the agreement.

It says nothing here about violence at the end of the poll, and it's signed 
by the UN. Indonesia signed it, and Indonesia is going to honour its 
commitments. It is a legal document.

The document contained an obligation for Indonesia to withdraw all 
its military from East Timor in the lead-up to the popular consultation.

And in a blaze of publicity they embarked their troops at Dili and off they 
sailed.

But they just went to the horizon, turned to the right and then sailed up 
to Los Palos where they landed the troops on the beaches at night.

Just simply reinserted them.

Obviously Australian intelligence and the UN knew about this trickery and 
yet they still insist on giving the Indonesian Government the benefit of 
the doubt. Their martial law [declared Tuesday, September 14] is treated as 
a sort of magic mantra. There is no excuse for this.

It's like asking neo-Nazis to run a Jewish orphanage...

I think it is either naivety of a very high order or there is criminal 
negligence involved in this.

Vacuum

In a sense the United Nations played into the hands of the militias by 
publishing 20,000 copies of a booklet in Bahasa, Portuguese and Tetun 
languages which laid out in detail what would happen if the autonomy 
package were chosen.

So the militias were able to hold this official document emblazoned with 
the logo of the UN and UNAMET all over it, and say, now this spells out 
what will happen here if you elect for special autonomy.

But there was nothing to hold in the other hand to say that if you reject 
autonomy, then this is the kind of future you can look forward to.

There was nothing published, even though the public information unit said 
that there would be a similar publication.

So there was something very concrete and tangible with the imprimatur of 
the United Nations and there was a vacuum on the other side, and that 
vacuum was filled by the militias and the military.

They said, see, we are going to go back to 1975 — widespread killing, 
mayhem and chaos.

In Luca, in the mountains, the military commander of Battalion 406 used to 
go from house to house where internally displaced persons now live, telling 
people: if you choose independence you are going to choose murder, you are 
going to choose for your villages to be burnt to the ground; we will make 
sure that that happens.

Q: So the Australian Government, or the United Nations, was not exactly 
ignorant of what was going to happen?

Of course not, if for no other reason than that district electoral officers 
like myself received many reports from people about intimidation and 
threats, and that the Catholic priests told us about a massive build-up of 
arms.

In Kupang I saw the young boy militia arrive. They had an M-16 carbine in 
the passenger seat of the lead vehicle. There were five vehicles.

They went up to our registration centre and showed the gun, but didn't get 
out of the vehicle. Then they photographed East Timorese in the civic 
education program being conducted at the centre.

Then they went to volley ball courts, where every day in the afternoon 
people play volley ball. They levelled their guns at the players, 
photographed them, and said we will identify you from the photographs, and 
if any of you are known independence supporters you are going to be 
executed if you choose independence.

The volleyball courts are 15 metres away from the police station.

In fact the police had a weight lifting centre virtually on the volley ball 
pitch itself. So they were right there watching all of this.

Collusion

And where did the militia hole up? They went to the TNI (military) base on 
the hill, their vehicles went into the army compound and they lived there 
hosted by the Indonesian military.

Information on this open, brazen collusion was fed back to the United 
Nations.

Two utterly traumatised East Timorese who had infiltrated the militia 
group, had carefully documented all the negotiations of this group with the 
TNI including details of Indonesian military rank, name, number, the kinds 
of weapons involved, etc.

That document was taken to UNAMET headquarters and given to the military 
liaison officers. Similar data must have been coming in from every district 
electoral officer in East Timor.

Details of intimidations and threats were typed up by the Australian police 
in my case, and in most cases people said don't let our names go to the 
Indonesian police.

There is already a huge body of human rights data recording violations and 
abuse.

We had reports of mass graves from the 1970s and the 1980s in Uato Lari and 
of a huge mass grave in the Mattebian mountains. That's where Indonesia's 
airforce had been bombing and napalming the people in the 1970s and the 
beginning of the 1980s.

People let down

Why wasn't there international condemnation when Indonesia failed to honour 
its agreement of May 5? Why didn't the Australian Government start beating 
a drum about that?

They just let Indonesia get away with it. They appeased Indonesia and they 
did it in many ways.

To give an example: when the militia showed their guns in Uato Carbau, I 
wrote a report to the Viqueque regional electoral committee, which is the 
body to receive all complaints of electoral malpractice. But I was told by 
the regional co-ordinator, "I'm sorry, but the committee doesn't exist."

Why? Because of the terror campaign, the CNRT  [Council of National 
Timorese Resistance] representative had fled for his life into the 
mountains. Because he wasn't on the committee, the committee couldn't be 
formed.

It seems to me that UNAMET's view was, we have an opportunity to have an 
election, let's go for it, even though there are all of these infringements 
of the agreement; let's not antagonise Indonesia, let's do it.

I can understand that as a strategy. They had already delayed the vote by a 
fortnight as it was, but in the process of doing that the Indonesian 
military had got the notion that they could run roughshod and do what they 
liked.

Links with military

Q: Some reports say that some of the militias are actually Indonesian 
military or police ...

Oh yes, people said that they recognised Kopassus special forces [elite 
military] individuals. They remember them very, very well, because they'd 
seen their loved-ones butchered and the faces of their killers were seared 
on their memories.

They've seen the same people now dressed in Polri (police) uniforms and 
here we had the United Nations saying that the Indonesian police are 
responsible for security. No wonder the people had difficulty believing us.

We've all got certificates of congratulations, individually signed by Ian 
Martin the head of the UNAMET Commission on behalf of Kofi Annan, saying 
what a wonderful, fantastic job we've all done.

Overwhelming support for independence

And yes, that's absolutely true. It only took two months basically to run 
the whole thing from registration to the conduct of the poll under really 
bad conditions. Quite a few people went down with malaria, living 
conditions were really bad and yet it was done.

And the popular turnout was 98 point something percent. Some of them had to 
walk for six hours to get to the voting centre. Some of them camped 
overnight to make sure that they could vote, in spite of being told that 
their villages would be burnt while they were away voting.

They came and they demonstrated a massive vote for independence. But on the 
other hand, the result was announced without any security in place to 
protect the people, even though it was 100 percent certain that once the 
result was known — and if it favoured independence — there would be a 
massive violent backlash.

And yet the international community had nothing in place to protect those 
people.

Promises not honoured

Q: So what did the United Nations actually do after the election? Did 
they start pulling out?

Yes, even before the election result was known, we were being shipped out 
from our provinces.

In my case, we were based three hours drive away from Viqueque. We were 
driven to Viqueque in convoy, then we were taken by helicopter to Dili and 
flown out from Dili very quickly.

They quite clearly realised that once the result was known the shit would 
hit the fan and our lives would be in even more danger than usual.

And yet the local people working for the UN were just left. They wanted to 
run away and hide, but many of them had to remain behind to wait for their 
salaries which Dili was tardy in providing. Surely to God it should have 
been an absolute priority to get their salaries in their hands very fast.

When they were shooting around us at the Viqueque UNAMET headquarters, it 
coincided with a conference of district electoral offices. We were all 
there.

Then we heard the gunfire in the next street to us and we heard the 
terrible sound of people wailing and screaming so we all clustered inside.

The local people, our interpreters and drivers, had invested us with a 
protective ability for them. When they saw us scattering and hiding they 
must have realised with a terribly rude awakening that look, UNAMET is not 
going to be protecting you guys.

Q: It must make you wonder about the UN?

I think its bound with red tape and bureaucratic and diplomatic niceties. 
Jamsheed Marker [UN special representative for East Timor] keeps saying the 
Indonesian Government have given assurances to safeguard security in the 
province, but it's absolute bullshit.

Charnel house

Q: What do you think will happen now?

I think that eventually there will be a multinational peace keeping force 
which may not wear blue berets, it may not be a UN force, in fact I don't 
think it will be a UN force. It may be Pacific Rim countries, what they 
call a coalition of the willing.

But I'm afraid that by the time that this force gets into East Timor, I'm 
afraid they are going to find a charnel house.

In Rwanda, 800,000 people were machettied to death in 100 days; here we are 
talking about people under the discipline and direction of an Australian-
trained military and armed with automatic weapons and hand grenades, not 
just machetes.

I think the killing rate will be far higher than Rwanda. It will be an East 
Timor equivalent of Hiroshima.

The Indonesians have been in East Timor for a quarter of a century. Of the 
four thousand two hundred people we registered, 99 percent could not even 
sign their own names.

Young people in their 20s, beautiful young people, idealist, strong young 
people. When we offered them a pen to sign their names, they had to turn it 
down and put their thumbs on an ink pad and put a thumb print on a 
registration card.

What a bloody condemnation!

Most of the rivers have no bridges over them. We had to drive over rocks 
and pebbles on the river bed to cross the river. In the wet season the 
river is totally impassable.

And yet, if by any freak of the imagination this little tiny country gets 
its independence, the Indonesians are going to destroy — blow up with high 
explosives — every single thing that Indonesia may have built in East 
Timor. They will have trashed all that they can use. There will be no 
infrastructure.

All the doctors, teachers, nurses, they've already gone from East Timor, 
fled, pulled out.

Australian trained

I went to a party held in our honour by Bupati, the "top dog" representing 
Indonesia in Viqueque; I'm sitting next to a closely-cropped individual who 
spoke perfect English. I said, "I must compliment you on your English, it's 
excellent. Where did you do your studies?".

"Oh", he said, "I've spent quite a bit of time in Australia at Kanungra 
[the military base south of Brisbane on the Gold Coast]". So here we have, 
on the ground in East Timor, a colonel in the Indonesian army who has been 
trained in Australia.

When we raised this matter with the Department of Foreign Affairs and 
Trade, the response was, "Oh, but look, when we train the Indonesian 
military we train them like we train our own; we train them about human 
rights, we train them about military law".

All I have to say is: look at the results.

Where is the benefit to be seen in all this Australian investment with the 
training of Indonesian military? They've just been taught to kill better. 
That's all they've learnt. 

Australian weapons

Q: What weapons does Australia supply?

Australia's assistance includes supplying Indonesia with the Australian 
army rifle, the Steyr, which is one of the most advanced weapons in the 
world.

Some people with detailed military knowledge had induced one of the police 
to part with his automatic weapon and examined it closely.

They told me that the barrel of that gun was a modification to make it a 
higher-velocity-firing weapon so it had greater penetrative ability and 
that the modification had been supplied by Israel.

So we've got collusion from many countries here.

Australia's obligations

Q: What can the Australian people do and what should we be pressuring 
the government to do?

Well the very first thing is the immediate cancellation of the recognition 
of the legality of Indonesia's invasion of East Timor.

It's because of our recognition that John Howard now is hamstrung, assuming 
that he has the will to act, because he says, "We have to have Indonesia's 
permission".

Why? Because East Timor is recognised by Australia as legitimate 
Indonesia's property. The rest of the world doesn't and neither does the UN 
recognise that. So that's the first thing that has to be completely 
reversed right now.

All military co-operation with Indonesia has to be cancelled.

I think strenuous action needs to be taken to get Australia to apply 
pressure in the international arena to persuade Japan, the IMF and the 
World Bank to cancel large loans to Indonesia.

The Suharto family and their cronies must have all their investment 
accounts in Australia frozen.

All their property in this country must be confiscated; they have large 
holdings of land here and prime building sites in our central building 
districts. For example, Raine & Horne, the real estate agents, have links 
to the Suharto family, so does Video Ezy. 

All that wealth needs to be frozen, so it can be returned to the legitimate 
owners, the people of Indonesia and the people of East Timor.

The Timor Gap Treaty needs to be rescinded by Australia and we need to 
facilitate in Australia the setting up of an East Timor Republican 
Government.

We must ensure that Xanana Gusmao can leave the Jakarta British embassy and 
find political asylum here in Australia so he can work with his colleagues 
as a government in exile, supported and funded and helped in every way by 
Australia.

Australians should boycott Indonesian-made goods, should boycott Garuda 
Airlines.

There is so much that we can do right now to make life hellishly difficult 
for the Indonesian bureaucracy.

I'm glad to see the unions are taking a lead. Who would be doing that if it 
weren't for the unions? No one. So God bless them.

Given that [former Labor Prime Minister] Keating always boasted of his 
fabulous relationship with Suharto and Habibie and no doubt [former Labor 
Minister for Foreign Affairs] Gareth Evans had his special links and 
connections — where are these "prime movers" in the Australian-Indonesian 
relationship? Why aren't they in Jakarta right now brokering deals?

Malcolm Fraser went all the way to Yugoslavia to negotiate for Pratt and 
the other guy — two people. I think the media here ought to be beating a 
path to Keating's door and saying, "What the hell are you doing about this? 
You've been the architect of this?"

Q: You've seen and experienced some awful things. And it must be hard 
knowing you've had to leave behind people who are now going through a worse 
time.

Yes. How many of them are alive now? They said, "Mr Gareth, please tell 
everybody about us and what's happening.

"I promised them I would do that, and that's exactly what I'm doing and 
thankyou for assisting me."