Australia helped bring peace to Timor-Leste – but that doesn’t absolve it of a long appeasement of Indonesia

It is almost 25 years since the Australian-led International Force East Timor (Interfet) brought security and eventual peace to newly independent Timor-Leste.
Given the highly disciplined military operation led by a future governor general, Peter Cosgrove, that began in late September 1999 – saving countless East Timorese from the murderous militias backed by the Indonesian military – the anniversary is worthy of significant national remembrance.
Remembering, of course, is the opposite of forgetting. But only if the remembrance is grounded in intellectual rigour, unvarnished with diplomatic nicety and wilful ignorance and compromise – and, not least, if it is impelled by hard-headed historical truth. Principled history is, after all, the antithesis of propaganda.
All of which is why, 25 years on, there is still a need to honestly parse Australia’s decades’ long appeasement of Indonesia when it came to its brutal colonial oppression of the East Timorese. We should remember too just how, while promoting itself as the global saviour of Timor-Leste, the then federal Howard government simultaneously bent over backwards to afford Jakarta diplomatic cover for its military’s orchestration of pre- and post-ballot militia violence.
Australia only reluctantly stepped in, under enormous pressure from the US, to lead the UN-mandated military mission. This is indisputable as evidenced by diplomatic and defence leaks at the time (I published some of them) and by since-declassified US diplomatic and military cables.
It is now well established that Australia was heavily engaged, at the time of the militia violence, on spinning the diplomatic narrative in Jakarta’s favour (while Timor-Leste burned on our doorstep) by, among many other things, insisting that only “rogue elements” of the military were involved. The Australian government’s lies and obfuscations of the time stand well and truly exposed.
But equally disturbing now are the continuing revelations about the way various Australian forces have tried to shape posterity by messing with the way official history might record Australia’s Timor-Leste operations.
And so there has come yet another unedifying instalment about the near hysterical behind-the-scenes levels of diplomatic paranoia – and allegations of attempted censorship in the nefarious name of national interest – over the official history of Interfet, released in 2022 but, curiously, never promoted.
It is a hard-headed, meticulously researched, courageous work by the historian Craig Stockings, who would, if such things were truly judged on merit or valued by governments, be in line for every history award in the country – not to mention an Australia Day honour. Don’t hold your breath.
Stockings pushed back under enormous pressure to write a book that illustrates how Australia’s Department of Foreign Affairs and Trade gave diplomatic cover to Indonesian atrocities for decades and how Indonesian generals came to assume Australia’s “deep regret and concern” about Timor-Leste was superficial. The generals knew, he writes, that “Australian officials would speak and act about Indonesia’s actions in East Timor so as to minimise the public impact”.
“How such consistency might have been viewed from Jakarta cannot be over-emphasised.”
It seems fitting then that Stockings will deliver the keynote address to a symposium and exhibition – Tais, Culture & Resilience: woven stories from Timor-Leste – to coincide with the Interfet anniversary. He will talk about the critical nature, to eventual independence, of international solidarity with the Timorese against what was an Indonesian colonial military oppression of Indigenous resistance.
The East Timorese guerrillas endured for decades thanks to the solidarity of villagers (despite Indonesian troops massacring them) and clandestine resistance against an Indonesian military supported (including with arms and training) by successive Australian governments. International solidarity – which exposed Indonesian atrocities to the global community and loudly supported the independence movement – put enormous pressure on Jakarta, amplifying the importance of the 1999 independence vote and the plight of the East Timorese people.
Just as colonial and post-federation Australia sought to assimilate, through violent oppression and genocidal violence, Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander peoples, their language and customs, the East Timorese anti-colonial struggle involved a similar against-the-odds fight for the survival of language and identity in the face of an oppressor seeking to eradicate Indigenous culture.
The Australian and Indonesian histories of oppression of Indigenes here and in what is now Timor-Leste make for a profoundly kindred parallel.
This is where the mention of tais in the title of the symposium and exhibition featuring historian Stockings (a former army officer) has a critical resonance. The traditional cloth of East Timor, tais are mostly woven by women on simple looms. The techniques and historical stories associated with them are often passed down through many generations in a culture in which older women are revered for their knowledge, skills and wisdom. Tais are considered of such cultural significance they were added to Unesco’s list of intangible cultural heritage in need of urgent safeguarding in 2021.
The exhibition includes wedding tais (one each for bride and groom) displayed courtesy of Balbina da Conceição, an East Timorese war widow decorated for her long role in the local resistance. Another was woven by Juana dos Reis more than half a century ago. In 1977 she was among tens of thousands trying to escape Indonesia’s aerial bombings (including with napalm) of villages. She took the tais with her on a long and arduous journey.
Tais symbolise the human and cultural endurance of a people who were vastly overwhelmed but were never defeated by a ruthless colonial oppressor. If not for relentless international solidarity during decades when Australia opposed East Timorese independence and systematically played down Indonesian violence and oppression, and due to the fortitude of a resistance movement that was never fully crushed, Timor-Leste rose from the ashes of Indonesia’s brutal subjugation.
Yes, Australian troops did a wonderful job on the ground when the Howard government finally acquiesced to US pressure to send them in. For that they deserve limitless praise.
But 25 years on Australia still can’t claim to have been the global hero of Timor-Leste. Rigorous history has seen to that.