By Val Plumwood
The ANU provided a pleasantly legitimating academic atmosphere for the Centre for International and Public Law's conference from July 15 to 17 entitled "Australia and Human Rights: Where to from Here?".
The conference showcased bureaucratic efforts to conform to international human rights principles and legislation, and failed dismally to address the main human rights issues in Australia. It ignored activist groups, and largely ignored the key issues of police racism and violence to Aboriginal people, and of the absence of adequate checks on police powers, as well as growing human rights abuses involving homeless, unemployed and young people.
It also ignored two crucial areas in which Australia is currently a defendant before the International Court of Justice: the Aboriginal claim to sovereignty and Australia's de jure recognition of Indonesian sovereignty in East Timor.
The keynote speaker on the third day was foreign minister Gareth Evans, who often adopts the stance of a human rights advocate. Evans lifted the government's record of hypocrisy on human rights to a new level by speaking of the need of countries to be self-critical and to be consistent in condemning human rights abuses.
He did not explain how he reconciled that with the blatant inconsistency between Australian support for Indonesia in the East Timor case and the principle invoked to justify involvement in the Gulf War, that small nations should be protected from invasion by larger and more powerful neighbours. Nor did he explain how Australia's continued recognition of Indonesian sovereignty
could be reconciled with the 1970 Australian-
sponsored UN resolution that territory obtained by aggression should not be recognised.
At the conference, Evans amplified his previous record of apologising for the Indonesian role in East Timor and minimising the effects of the terror there. Evans has referred since December 1991 to the Dili massacre as an "episode" and an "aberration". He still maintained on July 17 that the Dili massacre was an action in which the army was "out of control", and not an act of policy of the Indonesian state, which, according to Evans, is distinct from the military.
Evans claimed that it was important to distinguish between cases, such as in China and Tibet, where human rights abuses were state policy and cases where they were not. This distinction provides the basis on which Evans regularly condemns the Chinese role in Cambodia, while discounting the similarity of Australia's role of support for an equally genocidal regime on its own borders in East Timor.
How can repressive policies which have been in place since 1975 and have wiped out one-third of the Timorese population be referred to as an "aberration"? How can the 25-year military rule of the Indonesian state be overlooked? How can Evans overlook the official announcements that the policies of repression will continue and intensify, and the replacement of the commander whose troops carried out the massacre by another one (General Syafei) who has promised even tougher action against dissidents, and said that "the army is determined to wipe out anyone who disrupts stability"?
Evans prefers to place weight on President Suharto's official "distancing" from the Dili massacre, and to draw a sharp moral distinction between states (such as China and Burma), which admit their human rights abuses as policy, and others. But this distinction may simply
accept and reward hypocrisy and concealment of abuses.
According to Senator Evans, there is nothing Australia can do except try to influence Indonesia. The Australian government has adopted the right course in expressing its views on the massacre to the proper (Indonesian) authorities, who promised to conduct an investigation and bring those responsible to justice.
But the results of the "investigation" are now known and make nonsense of the Australian claim to influence. The captured Timorese who organised a peaceful demonstration have been savagely punished; the soldiers who shot them down received minor punishments or none at all. Evans described this as an "unhappy disparity" (thus accepting a peaceful demonstration by the Timorese as a crime and one of comparable severity to that of the massacring soldiers). Evans repeated the Indonesian "explanation" that this disparity was due to "the fragility of the state and the fact that there were two different systems of law under which the two groups were tried" without critical comment on the way this reflects a colonial system.
Evans conceded that the Indonesian response was "not perfect", and spoke of his "heavy heart". But these alleged qualms did nothing to stop him announcing at the same time new levels of cooperation and a "joint defence" pact with the Indonesian military.
Defence ties too were presented as "a good way to influence and moderate behaviour". But presumably they are only so if Australia has the courage and principle to withdraw from them when it is clear that no moderation has occurred.
People with experience of East Timor who have recently returned report that the repression is worse now than ever before (Sydney Morning
Herald Letters, July 30). Continued Australian silence and announcements of increased military cooperation must be interpreted as further acceptance of and complicity in the terror in East Timor.