Dili[gent] Neighbour or Oil-Hungry Opportunist?

Background to the Indonesian Invasion
East Timor is a small half-an-island nation that shares its island with an Indonesian province. It sits nestled at the far eastern end of the Indonesian archipelagic sprawl and sits north of Australia. East Timor, one of the newest members of the world community, has had a tumultuous past. It was a contested island during the turbulent colonial expansion of the Dutch and Portuguese in the East Indies. In the late 1800s, it was divided into a Portuguese controlled eastern half of the island and a Dutch East Indies western side – as with other troubled former colonies, its division was negotiated in the grand hotels of Europe while its inhabitants’ lives were irreversibly changed.

The island was divided between Dutch and Portuguese colonial rule throughout the early 20th century. Portuguese control over East Timor was interrupted during the Second World War with the invasion of Japanese forces which responded to an Australian presence on the island. With the end of the Second World War, Portugal resumed its administration of East Timor. Finally in 1974, following a sudden military coup in Lisbon that put an end to Portugal’s colonial aspirations, Portugal divested itself of its colonies throughout the globe.[1] They consisted of economically marginalized territories, most with armed and growing freedom movements. Mozambique, Angola, Guinea Bissau, Macau, and Timor-Leste (East Timor) all gained their independence.

As East Timor was being evacuated by the Portuguese in 1975, a rebel force known as the Timorese Democratic Union Party (UDT) attempted a coup d’etat and was quickly toppled by the Revolutionary Front for an Independent East Timor (FRETILIN) which drove the UDT into the jungles of Indonesia and declared independence.[2] The UDT sought help from the Indonesian military and in response Indonesia launched an invasion of the eastern side of the island.[3] It maintained that it was merely protecting the Timorese from the grips of the communist FRETILIN forces.[4] FRETILIN had, in fact, endorsed a democratic style of governance.

Australian Involvement
Australia, portrayed as the regional policeman and current protector of East Timor, has long been intimately involved in the Timor question. Despite the positive media attention focused on Australia in recent years, Australia has long played an underhanded game for control over Timorese hydrocarbon resources. Australia signed a maritime agreement with Indonesia in 1972 that it then extended to include its rights over waters off the coast of East Timor in 1989.[5] Portugal protested against the Timor Gap Treaty – the Indonesian Australian treaty that carved up the Timor Gap’s oil and gas reserves without demarcating a boundary.[6] It claimed that Indonesia did not have the right to negotiate for East Timor’s sovereign waters as it had illegally invaded a sovereign nation. Consecuently UN Transitional Authority for East Timor (UNTAET) declared the 1989 Timor Gap Treaty illegal and as a result Australia signed a memorandum of understanding (MOU) with the UN in 2001 to allow it continued access to East Timor’s oil.[7]

Australia has long flip-flopped on its East Timor policies. The bottom line is that Australia, despite being wary of its heavily-armed Muslim neighbor[8] to the north, is very keen to gain control of the purported $30 billion worth of oil and gas lying under the Timor Gap.[9] Australia supported Indonesia’s invasion of East Timor justifying the military operation as a move against communism. Recently however, it has committed the bulk of the peacekeeping mission to East Timor. Its soldiers patrol the streets in conjunction with New Zealand forces and bring a semblance of order to the recently independent and extremely unstable country. The issue of control over the exploration and distribution of the undersea hydrocarbon reserves is at the heart of the Australian presence on the ground.

The Australian media, and most of the international media, have painted Australia’s involvement in East Timor as a humanitarian one aimed at bringing peace and stability to its newborn and poverty-stricken neighbor to the north. In 2006, East Timor’s then Prime Minister, Mari Alkatiri, claimed that Australia was trying to maintain East Timor unstable and economically dependent on aid in order to wrest control of resources from the infant government in Dili. Rob Wesley-Smith, a spokesperson for Australian-based Free East Timor, stated that “[despite the Timor Gap] area being disputed, almost certainly under UNCLOS (UN Commission for the Law of the Sea) rules, it belongs to East Timor”.[10] Furthermore, he added in an Inter Press Service News Agency interview that “…television images of Australian troops who arrived in Dili where they stood by watching as looting and burning went on made him wonder, if it was a part of a sinister plot by Canberra to declare East Timor a failed state "so that they could control the Timor Sea (oil) theft”.[11]

Current Situation
East Timor continues to be propped up by the Australian and New Zealand militaries and is being rebuilt by UNMIT, a UN peace-building mission. The present situation in Timor Leste is precarious as ever. The Australian-educated and backed President Jose Ramos-Horta is convalescing in a Darwin hospital after a botched assassination attempt launched by Alfredo Reinado – a graduate of the National Defence Academy in Canberra and the leader of a mutiny against the East Timorese government.[12]

The situation on the ground remains tense as Australian and New Zealand peacekeepers seek out and arrest members of Reinado’s armed guerrilla forces. The major events leading up the near assassination of President Ramos-Horta unfolded almost as a Sydney University professor had predicted in 2006.
[Professor of Political Science] Tim Anderson [believed] that the Howard government [planned] to impose a "junta' on East Timor led by Horta and an ailing Gusmao, which would also include Catholic bishop nominees. [He explained that the] presence of occupying (Australian) troops till next year's election might seriously undermine Fretilin's dominant position [in the country’s political arena].[13]
It is very possible that the Australian government was keen to replace Mari Alkatiri who was educated and later spent 24 years in Mozambique during the height of Marxist Mozambican political policies followed by Samora Machal. In fact, Australian military forces blocked the visit of Xanana Gusmao (the current Prime Minister) to China to finalize a deal between Petro-China and the Timor Leste government.[14]

What about the hydrocarbons lying under the Timor Gap? Oil and gas continues to be extracted despite calls by the Timor Leste government for a preservation of its resource wealth for future generations and until it has developed the infrastructure to extract and distribute its wealth of black gold. Currently, Woodside Australian Energy and Shell have the right to 89% of the hydrocarbon wealth in the largest of the oil fields in the Timor Sea, the Greater Sunrise concession.[15] In order to placate the government of Timor Leste and to not draw international criticism, Australia has drawn up plans for a “major resource shift” that permits East Timor to receive 90% of the revenue drawn from the Join Petroleum Development Area – an area that falls outside of the largely contested Timor Sea oil fields.[16] The bone that Australia has thrown to the newborn nation will “…be worth about $3 billion over 15 years… [and will allow] the government to function after donors withdraw”.[17] Canberra sees the $3 billion concession to East Timor as enough; this, of course is despite the fact that legally a nation is entitled to full sovereignty over all of its resources no matter how small and unstable it may be. It is unbelievable that blatant exploitation in an UN-monitored state does not draw more attention from the international media.

In light of decades of calls for a New International Economic [World] Order (NIEO) for developing nations and the inclusion of NIEO demands into Kofi Annan’s UN-endorsed Millennium Development Goals (MDGs), it would seem impossible for Australia to strong-arm a state recently blessed by the international community out of its sovereign rights over its own resource wealth. Australia should not be seen to be the benevolent regional power guided by its lofty humanitarian ideals in East Timor; instead it should be seen as a resource-grabbing realpolitik-adhering power intent on benefiting from the instability and weakness of its neighbours. Sure, Australian forces did save the life of East Timor’s president. However, saving that life had more to do with ensuring Australia’s unhindered access to Timorese oil than a moral duty to save the life of a Nobel Peace Prize recipient.



[1] Background Note: Timor-Leste; US Department of State: Bureau of East Asian and Pacific Affairs; February 2008; http://www.state.gov/r/pa/ei/bgn/35878.htm.
[2] Ibid.
[3] Ibid.
[4] Ibid.
[5] SibyelleKazorek; Timor Sea Oil – A Question of Sovereignty; Green Left Online; May 4th, 2005; http://www.greenleft.org.au/2005/625/34780.
[6] Ibid.
[7] Analysis by Kalinga Seneviratne; EAST TIMOR: Australia – Peacekeeper or Petroleum Predator?; Inter Press Service News Agency; June 22, 2006; http://www.ipsnews.net/news.asp?idnews=33714
[8] Indonesia is, in fact, the world’s largest Muslim nation. Its population is growing rapidly as is the threat of home-sown fundamental Islamism.
[9] K. Seneviratne; EAST TIMOR: Australia – Peacekeeper or Petroleum Predator?
[10] Ibid.
[11] Ibid.
[12] NZ Government Shocked By Horta Shooting; NZ Herald; February 11th, 2008; http://www.nzherald.co.nz/section/2/story.cfm?c_id=2&objectid=10491807.
[13] K. Seneviratne; EAST TIMOR: Australia – Peacekeeper or Petroleum Predator?
[14] Ibid.
[15] Quinton Temby; Timor’s Tutorial in Oil Politics; Asia Times Online; May 21st, 2003; http://www.atimes.com/atimes/Southeast_Asia/EE21Ae06.html.
[16] Ibid.
[17] Ibid.