EAST TIMOR:
IMPERIALISM AND HUMANITARIAN PRETENCES

Sukumar Muralidharan, in People's Democracy, the newspaper of the 
Communist Party of India (Marxist), gives an Asian perspective on events in 
East Timor and Australia's involvement.

Small nations do not propound strategic doctrines when they lack the 
military weight to execute them. They obediently follow the roles they are 
cast in by their senior partners. Australian Prime Minister John Howard 
seemed to be disregarding these basic rules of international political 
engagement when he recently enunciated a new strategic doctrine with far-
reaching implications for the Asia-Pacific region.

He elicited a reaction of outrage from his Asian neighbours, prompting him 
to quickly retract. But the parameters underlying Australia's newly 
awakened imperial ambitions had by then been clearly spelt out.

The so-called "Howard doctrine" conceives of Australia playing the role of 
imperial accessory in the Asia-Pacific region. The US is evidently 
overstretched in its enforcement role and needs a loyal deputy to assist in 
the fringe areas where the imperial order may be fraying.

This is precisely the term used by Howard to characterise Australia's 
emerging role in the Asia-Pacific region. In an interview with the 
Australian magazine, The Bulletin, late in September, Howard drew 
out what he considered an interesting contrast between the "humanitarian 
interventions" in Kosovo and East Timor.

Whereas in Kosovo, he pointed out, there had been "massive American 
involvement", in the case of East Timor, Australia had performed the role 
of the "deputy" with the US acting as the "lender of last resort".

As a country which has not played a very prominent international role, 
Australia is yet to develop the sophistication to disguise imperial 
ambitions behind grand humanitarian rhetoric.

Howard's locutions in fact, reveal a basic confusion between the 
terminology of the banker and the coarsened language of the American wild 
west.

Critics were quick to spot the implications of his choice of words — 
Australia, said most commentators, was assuming the role of a gun-slinging 
"deputy" in the Asia-Pacific region to the global "sheriff" that the US has 
become.

Incriminating associations 

Australia has been eagerly seeking the role of arbiter from the first 
stirrings of trouble in East Timor. Distracted by its engagements elsewhere 
and unable to quickly shake off the legacy of its complicity in the 
Indonesian regime's crimes, the US was unable to formulate a clear strategy 
for the region.

Early in September, the US State Department subtly made it known that 
Australia bore the responsibility for seeing through the process of 
independence that began with the East Timorese referendum.

It was, they said, Howard's letter to Indonesian President Burhanuddin 
Habibie last December, which had impelled Indonesia to recognise the East 
Timorese right to self-determination.

Australia of course, proved a rather biased referee. Military cooperation 
with the Indonesian army and in particular its infamous special security 
services wing, Kopassus, continued till last October, when Australia 
suspended the latter component in growing alarm at the evidence of 
atrocities in East Timor.

Once the process of self-determination was set under way, Australia made it 
clear that military co-operation with Indonesia would continue, though not 
with Kopassus.

And despite overwhelming evidence that the Indonesian military was training 
militias for a brutal crackdown, Australia continued to insist that its 
presence in East Timor was essential for the peaceful conduct of the 
referendum.

All the while, the Australia armed forces were being prepared for 
intervention. The two-faced policy was revealed — perhaps unwittingly — 
in Howard's address over Australian television networks on September 20.

"Months ago", he said, "we made ready an additional brigade of the 
Australian army in case Australian forces were needed for peacekeeping 
operations in East Timor. As a result, we were able to respond immediately 
to the United Nation's request, not only to participate but also to lead 
the multinational force."

Howard also sought to invoke a hoary tradition for the Australian military, 
which failed to win him much applause. "Our soldiers", he said, "go to East 
Timor as part of a great Australian military tradition, which has never 
sought to impose the will of this country on others, but only to defend 
what is right."

Traditionally subordinate role

There is partial truth in these statements. Australia has never sought to 
impose its own will, since it has had no geopolitical aspirations 
autonomous of its imperial patrons.

Since the Boer War at the turn of this century, Australia has had a record 
of military operations in subordination to either Britain or the US.

It was a junior partner to Britain in crushing the communist movement in 
the Malayan peninsula in the 1950s, and an understudy of the US in the 
Korean and Viet Nam wars. More recently, Australia sent troops to the 
faraway Gulf, to partake of the war of destruction against Iraq.

But East Timor represents the first occasion that Australia has assumed the 
lead role in an external military operation — a "deputy" to the US with 
its own autonomous zone of enforcement.

Faced with a storm of protest, the "Howard doctrine" was quickly disowned 
by its author. "I make it clear", he said in a statement to parliament, 
"that the Government does not see Australia as playing the role of the 
deputy for the United States, or indeed any other country in the region and 
neither does the Government see the United States itself playing a role as 
a regional policeman".

However, there has been no retraction of the other components of the newly 
assertive Australian posture. These include a massive increase in the 
defence budget and a role in safeguarding the maritime routes of the Indian 
Ocean.

More ominously, Australia's new strategic posture seems to suggest its 
active political tutelage over much of Asia. An editorial in The Sydney 
Morning Herald (September 17) spells out the rationale in the following 
terms:

"The crisis in East Timor, after all, is also a reminder that we live in an 
unpredictable, and potentially unstable, world. To the north, the 
complexion of Indonesia's post-Suharto politics, together with the 
country's ability to deal peacefully with other separatist challenges, is 
uncertain.

"The China-Taiwan conflict may erupt into a shooting war. Beyond that is 
the simmering conflict on the Korean peninsula. To the west, rising 
tensions between Pakistan and India are particularly dangerous, even to 
their distant neighbours, because both possess nuclear weapons.

"Even to the south it is conceivable that, before long, Australia may 
become locked in a conflict over competing claims to the resources of the 
Antarctic continent."

Impact of Asian meltdown 

The mood change in Australia has undoubtedly been induced by the many 
repercussions of the Asian economic meltdown in 1997. Till mid-1997, 
unprecedented levels of economic growth seemed to be propelling the entire 
region towards the epoch that the Western media were calling "the Asian 
century".

All through this phase of growth, Australia was keenly prospecting for a 
role within Asia, even at the cost of detaching itself from traditional 
allegiances to the mother nation, Britain.

As the tide of speculative finance began to recede from south-east Asia, it 
left in its wake wrecked currencies and social and political schisms that 
had barely been papered over through a decade of illusory prosperity.

All of a sudden, Indonesia began to appear not so much as the anchor of 
capitalist stability in the region, but as the breeding ground for every 
manner of economic and political disruption.

The global capitalist fraternity realised that it could no longer be party 
to the repression in East Timor, but had somehow to seek to contain and co-
opt the political aspirations of the occupied territory.

The possibility of a new role in Asia dawned on the Australian leadership 
with the force of revelation shortly afterwards. Here is how Howard puts it 
in his infamous recent interview:

"We looked as though we were knocking on their door, saying `Please let us 
in', instead of realising we were always somebody they would want to have 
in because of our particular strength that (now) has been demonstrated.

"Despite the inevitable tensions that are involved (in East Timor) and some 
of the sensitivities, this has done a lot to cement Australia's place in 
the region."

Indonesia invaded East Timor on December 7, 1975 — one day after US 
President Gerald Ford and Secretary of State Henry Kissinger left Jakarta 
after a state visit.

Kissinger tried in the following weeks, to distance himself from the 
invasion, publicly announcing a cutoff of arms transfers to Indonesia, only 
to clandestinely assure them of resumption within a month.

Australia was among the countries that heartily applauded this robust 
display of "Kissingerian realism" in dealing with a problem that had 
serious security implications for the entire region.

It followed up within a year, by recognising the annexation of East Timor.

Pragmatism demanded that a treaty be concluded at the earliest with 
Indonesia, to enable Australian mining companies to exploit the marine 
resources of the Timor gap which separated the two islands. 

The same crass pragmatism today underlies the transformation of Australia 
into the guardian of East Timorese rights.

As John Howard proudly proclaimed on national television on September 13: 
"There are no permanent alliances — only permanent interests".

From a colony of Indonesia to a protectorate of Australia — true 
independence clearly remains a distant prospect for the people of East 
Timor.

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