The Government commissioned an official history of our operations in Timor and then censored the historian, removing an entire chapter. The partially redacted chapter obtained by MWM confirms lies told by the Howard Government. Rex Patrick reports.

In 2015, the Australian Government commissioned the War Memorial to write an official history of our peacekeeping operations in East Timor. UNSW history professor Craig Stockings was engaged as the War Memorial’s official historian and spent the next two years writing Volume One. It took another three years for it to be cleared for publication by Department of Foreign Affairs and Trade (DFAT) bureaucrats.

The official history was embroiled in controversy, resulting in a series of exchanges between Stockings and DFAT in late 2019, with DFAT seeking to censor the document. The then head of DFAT and now Governor of South Australia, Francis Adamson, wrote to Professor Stockings warning that an “honest history” of Australia’s peacekeeping role in Timor would touch “raw nerves”.

To eliminate information that DFAT didn’t like, Adamson suggested that the first nine chapters of the book dealing with the lead-up to Timor’s vote of independence be reduced significantly. Indeed, she thought a couple of chapters ought to do the job, deftly glossing over Australia’s tortured diplomatic acquiescence to Indonesia’s 1975 invasion of East Timor and two decades of downplaying atrocities and human rights abuse.

Stockings resisted, and hence, we ended up with a no-thrills launch of the book in December 2022 that DFAT hoped no one would notice.

Neither confirm nor deny. Head officially stuck in the sand on East Timor spy scandal

We know about DFAT’s efforts at censorship because I FOI’d the correspondence, and after a five-year fight in the Information Commissioner’s domain, an order was made for the release of all the documents.

The Government has appealed, and in the last month, they have filed their arguments in the Administrative Review Tribunal (ART), with one affidavit heavily redacted and a second completely redacted, with the Government even seeking to suppress who their witness is or what Agency he or she comes from.

Entire chapter missing in action

What had been disclosed in the documents that have been released was the fact that one part of the official history, Annex 2, so offended the Government that they wanted it removed in its entirety.

This was an astonishing revelation. There was no such chapter in the published version of the official history. Remarkably, DFAT has succeeded in suppressing a major part of the story. Our troops were sent to deal with a violent militia, and the official history of the deployment excludes a chapter that explained who they were fighting and the strategy that the enemy employed.

It’s almost a Faulty Towers moment. As far as DFAT was concerned, it was a case of “Don’t mention the war”, or rather “Don’t mention the enemy”!

I therefore sought access to the expunged book under FOI.

On the eve of Christmas, a redacted version was reluctantly released. Whilst some of the document is redacted, it confirms that,

in 1999, the Howard Government engaged in acts of lying and deceit upon the Australian public.

A quarter of a century after pro-Indonesian militias massacred and burnt their way across East Timor, DFAT has been covering up the Indonesian military’s control over the violence and former Foreign Minister’s deceit on his knowledge of the situation.

Background to the censorship

In 1971/72, Australia and Indonesia negotiated their seabed boundaries. The outcome was very favourable to Australia, with the boundary drawn well north of the median line between the two countries. This was purportedly achieved by Australia in return for support for the concept of “archipelagic waters” in the 1982 United Nations Convention on the Law of the Sea (UNCLOS).

In 1974, when Portugal announced its intention to withdraw from its colonial possessions, which included East Timor, a number of indigenous political parties formed in Timor, with the two most popular, UDT and Fretlin, forming a coalition in 1975 with a unified goal of self-determination. A third party, APODETI, had a goal of integration with Indonesia. Internal disputes saw the coalition split, and violent grabs at power eventually resulted in a short civil war in August/September 1975, from which Fretlin emerged with control.

In September, Indonesia deployed as many as 200 special forces soldiers into Timor, and in October, a conventional assault commenced. Five Australian journalists, the ‘Balibo Five’, were executed by Indonesian troops in the border town of Balibo on 16 October 1975.

On 7 December 1975, Indonesia invaded Timor. Previously secret DFAT files show that the Whitlam Labor Government encouraged the action. It meant the favourable sea boundary line would be extended between Australia and Timor, delivering Australian and multinational oil and gas companies a bonanza prize.

Between 1975 and 1999, successive governments from the duopoly, Fraser, Hawke, Keating and Howard, quietly supported the Indonesians to the benefit of the oil and gas companies.

Over the same period, between 90,000 and 202,000 Timorese died as a consequence of resisting the Indonesians and pursuing freedom.

Disrupting the Independence Referendum

By 1998, a financially troubled Indonesian Government were spending significant funds dealing with the resistance in Timor. They decided and announced that the United Nations would be called in to hold a referendum to determine whether Timor was to have greater autonomy within Indonesia or independence.

Along with Australia (until pressure for supporting independence from the international community overwhelmed the Australian Government’s loyalty to the oil and gas companies), the Indonesian military, the TNI, opposed independence. They were worried about other ‘independence’’ trouble spots in Irian Jaya, Aceh, Ambon and Kalimantan but had also spent 15 years and lots of casualties trying to quell the Timorese.

And so the TNI decided that the prospect of an independent East Timor was unacceptable, and they set about disrupting the referendum, creating, organising, directing and supporting an on-ground militia. They targeted known supporters of independence for detention, assault, sexual violence, torture and murder. Their families were often destroyed, and family members faced sustained violence themselves, including sexual assault.

The strategy was to suppress the independence movement and serve as a signal as to what might happen if they voted for independence.

While all of this was happening, and despite the Australian government knowing otherwise, the government was denying TNI’s involvement.

Then foreign minister Alexander Downer told ABC Radio in February 1999 that the government could not confirm reports the Indonesian military was arming militias in East Timor. “The Indonesian military are denying this,” he said. “It’s obviously very hard for us to verify one way or the other.”

According to Downer the problem was one of a few “rogue elements” – local pro-Indonesian militias – and that the Indonesian military could be trusted to provide security for the self-determination ballot.

Alexander Downer’s lies

However, a series of leaked Defence and DFAT documents, reported through 1999 by The Age, ABC Radio and TV, the Bulletin magazine and other media outlets, told a very different story.

For example, a secret Defence Intelligence Organisation brief, dated 4 March 1999 and reported by the ABC AM program on 23 April, reported that “The [Indonesian] military in East Timor are clearly protecting, and in some instances operating with the militias … [Indonesian military chief] General Wiranto is at least turning a blind eye … the military will continue to support intimidation and violence or at least won’t prevent it. Further violence is certain and Dili will be a focus.

Although still heavily censored, especially in regard to DFAT and Australian intelligence community assessments of TNI activities, the expunged but now released draft chapter from the official history

confirms the Government knew about the Indonesian military’s orchestration of militia violence.

There is no doubt whatsoever that the Howard Government knew the truth, and Foreign Minister Downer’s refusal to tell that truth helped take diplomatic pressure off Indonesia.

This wasn’t by accident. It was by design.  Another leaked document, a DFAT cable first published in 1999, showed the Howard government was not merely reluctant to argue for an international peacekeeping presence in East Timor but actively worked against the idea. Then DFAT Secretary Ashton Calvert told the US State Department that talk about peacekeeping was “defeatist”.

In any case DFAT’s preferred outcome was for East Timor to move towards “autonomy” but remain part of Indonesia.

The newly released official history chapter shows those arguments were made in full knowledge of the Indonesian military’s orchestration of atrocities in an effort to prevent East Timor from becoming independent and with a clear expectation of the violence that would follow an independence vote in the absence of an international peacekeeping presence.

Read the full (redacted) chapter here.

Despite the obvious risks, the East Timorese people did vote for independence, and Australia eventually did send in peacekeepers, though only after the Indonesian military had torched Dili, thousands of people died, and tens of thousands were forcibly removed to squalid camps in West Timor.

Between the text and the documents that DFAT held, as evidenced in the footnotes, it is impossible for any honest person to deny that the Government knew what was happening on the ground in East Timor prior to the independence vote.  It wasn’t a few “rouge elements” as Downer claimed.  It was the Indonesian military pulling the strings.

DFAT and Downer knew this, but told a different story to the Australian public and the world.

An inconvenient truth

DFAT has been covering up for Downer for a quarter of a century. They’ve been denying the truth about Australian policy toward Timor for half a century – all the way back to Prime Minister Gough Whitlam’s acquiescence to the prospective Indonesian invasion in 1975 and the duplicity of both the Whitlam and Fraser Governments over the Indonesian military’s murder of the Balibo Five journalists.

It’s a track record of shame that’s continued to the present day with the 2004 spying on the new Timorese government’s sea boundary negotiating team, defrauding Timor for the benefit of Woodside, and the current Labor Government’s refusal to support Timor-Leste’s plans for energy development in favour of schemes that would maximise Australia’s exploitation of gas reserves for the benefit of Japanese and Korean industry.

All along, it’s been about a grab for oil and gas, pursued through the most cynical realpolitik diplomacy shrouded in deceit and secrecy – even to the point of attempting to censor and re-write history.

More to come

I’m still fighting in the ART for the complete exchanges between DFAT and the official historian, even if I can’t currently see their evidence or who their key witness is, and will now commence a new fight against the extensive redactions in the expunged chapter.

But there’s even more censoring underway with Volume Two of the official history stuck in purgatory as the War Memorial refuses to exclude elements of history from that volume. That controversy sits with Prime Minister Albanese at the moment.  Will he have the courage to do the right thing and let the truth be told?  I fear not. Time will tell, but I’ll be keeping up the fight.

Spies Like Us: how Timor’s oil and gas delivered justice to Bernard Collaery

 

This post was originally published on Michael West.