By Rob South
PERTH — Addressing the inaugural meeting of the Murdoch University Student Law Society on the topic "State Rights versus Human Rights" on August 3, former prime minister Gough Whitlam was confronted with questions on East Timor before the audience of 500.
When asked by representatives of Friends of East Timor and the East Timorese community in exile about his ongoing position on the brutal invasion and occupation of East Timor by the Indonesian regime, Whitlam responded angrily by repeating his views.
These stand in direct contravention to the principles of the United Nations, international law and indeed the very stance on human rights which he put forward in his keynote address.
By using distortion, half-truths, "straw men" and large-scale omission of relevant facts, Whitlam continued his advocacy for the Suharto regime. From a man highly regarded by many on the progressive side of politics, this advocacy is a major obstacle to the achievement of a just solution for the long-suffering East Timorese people, and for the new democratic movements in Indonesia.
His arguments are the same, if more blatant, as those currently used by the Australian government; indeed, he is widely regarded as the personal architect of the East Timor policy. Whitlam's main strategy in the debate is to blame the victim.
He made almost no reference to the 200,000 people killed since the invasion, except to question the validity of this figure, which is accepted by all major human rights groups, including Amnesty International.
Whitlam concentrated instead on the period prior to the invasion, seeking to discredit the Timorese, the Portuguese, indeed anyone except himself and the Indonesian regime. He grossly exaggerated the disruption caused by the 10-day civil conflict in August 1975, and neglected to mention that this conflict between Fretilin and UDT, who both sought independence, was the direct result of a large-scale Indonesian destabilisation campaign which sought successfully, even if temporarily, to divide the East Timorese political elite.
These 10 days of fighting, sparked by aggressive Indonesian propaganda and infiltration, were tragic. Compared, however, to the civil conflicts that have often accompanied other countries' transitions to independence, including Indonesia's, the fighting between the East Timorese was minor in scale: at most, 2000 people died.
Whitlam felt he could say in 1994, after 100 times that number have been killed by the Indonesian military, that the August 1975 fighting "was a Rwanda", a grotesque statement. That the internal conflict was over by September, and the Indonesians invaded in full-strength in December, was similarly ignored.
Whitlam tried to say that Fretilin's declaration of independence nine days before the invasion somehow obligated the Indonesians to continue their plans. He did not mention that Fretilin repeatedly appealed to the Portuguese and to the world for the colonisers to return and continue the decolonisation process, nor that the declaration was a last-ditch attempt to gain international attention when the invasion was obviously coming.
Whitlam did not tell those assembled that in 1975 he had rejected out of hand any role for Australia as a mediator, had scorned urgent Portuguese requests to re-establish an Australian consulate in Dili and seized shipments of petrol to East Timor that were vital for the distribution of food aid in mid-1975.
Australia's ambassadors to the United Nations worked with the Indonesians to suppress Timorese appeals to the Decolonisation Committee prior to the invasion. Yet all Whitlam said of his role in that period was, "Suharto and I pressured the Portuguese to return" — a complete fiction.
Eager to portray himself as an anti-colonialist, he has repeatedly railed against the Portuguese as "the last and the worst of the European colonisers". Yet this argument has little relevance, as the East Timorese were undergoing the transition to independence, and can hardly be held responsible for the failings of the Portuguese (who certainly never killed a third of the population).
Whitlam continued his long-standing war of words against Fretilin, accusing its members of "seeking the perks [of office] without elections" — again ignoring the fact that East Timor's first democratic elections for village heads took place in March 1975, and that national elections were planned for as soon as Indonesian border incursions and killings ceased.
The solidarity between Fretilin and other nationalist movements in Portuguese colonies, notably Frelimo in Mozambique, was a target for Whitlam's diatribe. "Mozambique", he said "is hardly a model of democracy". (The logical extension of Whitlam's position would be support for the former South African incursions and sponsored terrorism in that nation.)
The current Indonesian regime is hardly notable for its democratic credentials, yet this did not stop Whitlam from telling the audience, "President Suharto is an honourable man". He went on to describe his first meeting with Suharto, over dinner in 1966, omitting the fact that 1966 was the year of the horrendous military massacres of the Indonesian left, up to 1 million people, which were directly coordinated by the "honourable" Suharto.
It is ironic that Whitlam should be such a staunch defender of the New Order regime, given that an Indonesian who espoused similar domestic policies to Whitlam's would have been killed or imprisoned by Suharto's military.
The specific question asked by Friends of East Timor, regarding Whitlam's uninvited visit to the United Nations in 1982, was never answered. Whitlam addressed the Decolonisation Committee in that year in a vain attempt to have East Timor removed from its agenda, in direct contravention of ALP policy at the time.
Despite his self-perception as an influential diplomat, the international delegates were unimpressed by his defence of Indonesia's colonialism. The delegate from Guinea-Bissau advised, "You have knocked at the wrong door, Mr Whitlam". In the words of one observer of the exchange, "Whitlam was embarrassed — but not ashamed".
Whitlam always confronts his critics with the fact that he has visited East Timor and is therefore more informed than his opponents. At Murdoch that evening, he again repeated the lie that his one and only three-day visit in 1982 had been at the invitation of the International Committee of the Red Cross. In fact the visit was arranged solely with the Indonesian authorities, and he spent his time consorting with Javanese generals. The ICRC has formally denied ever inviting him to East Timor.
He also referred to "this false thing about famine [in 1982]", meaning no doubt the well-documented starvation that was occurring in the prison camps of occupied Timor.
Whitlam later discredited himself further when responding to a question from Francisco Soares, Perth's Fretilin representative. Soares, who fought against the Indonesian invasion, and was captured and tortured over a long period of time before escaping to Australia, was told by Whitlam that among migrants to Australia "some of them for good reason have left their countries, others for less valid reasons ... people who have left their country so often have an incentive to justify why they left it".
Whitlam, like Evans, is keen to portray East Timor not as the international crime that it is, but as an internal problem for Indonesia. He said that it was "counterproductive to suggest the break up of Indonesia" — but the East Timorese have never suggested this; they merely ask that Indonesia respect international borders.
Whitlam misrepresented the situation again when he stated that "no-one has recognised East Timor as an independent nation, not even Portugal". The reason for this is that East Timor is not yet an independent nation under international law, but a territory whose decolonisation process is not yet complete. Many countries and the United Nations have repeatedly affirmed the inalienable right, not yet exercised, of the Timorese to choose their own future, with independence as a viable choice.
Similarly, Whitlam did not contextualise his statement that "there has not been a vote in the UN on East Timor for at least 12 years". The simple reason is that in 1982 the question was presented to the good offices of the secretary-general to find a negotiated solution, which means procedurally that countries are unable to vote on the issue until the secretary-general returns it to the General Assembly.
For Whitlam the problem of East Timor is not the fact that the Indonesian occupation has rivalled the worst excesses of history in its repression and human toll; rather it is a problem of "freelance journalists [who] sell their product through exaggeration".
In a recent interview with Friends of East Timor, Konis Santana, the leader of the armed resistance in East Timor and co-chairperson of the National Council of Maubere Resistance, affirmed that the primary role of solidarity work in Australia must be the reversal of the Australian government's shameful position.
It is important then that we refute the weak, illusory but often repeated arguments trotted out by people such as Gareth Evans and Gough Whitlam, a man so influential and yet evidently so dedicated to absolving himself from any guilt that he is prepared to continue with the distortion and falsehood that encouraged the Suharto regime to invade East Timor in the first place.