Steven Gan – Today the people will decide. After 23 years of brutal Indonesian occupation, East Timorese will be given a choice: independence or autonomy. Some 450,000 people are due to vote in a historic referendum to either opt for a union with Indonesia or to put their half-island on the road to eventual independence.
A simple choice indeed. However, that decision had already been made more than two decades ago, and it is not going to change despite the recent violence by elements of the Indonesian military and their pro-integration militias to skew the vote in Jakarta's favour. Come today, the majority will choose, for better or worse, for East Timor to go it alone.
The road to freedom hasn't been easy. East Timor, a small territory in the eastern half of the Indonesian archipelago, declared independence from Portugal on Nov 28, 1975 after almost 300 years of colonialism.
Nine days later thousands of Indonesian paratroopers landed in Dili to begin a reign of terror that continues to this day.
That invasion was condemned by the United Nations Security Council. However, UN resolutions calling for the withdrawal of Indonesian troops and for East Timorese to be given the right of self-determination were ignored. Instead, for 30 years Western countries courted Suharto, the man who ordered the aggression.
Australia even went as far as recognising the annexation of East Timor by Indonesia.
Some 200,000 East Timorese, estimated to be around one-third of the population, died during the military crack-down and famine that follow. It was a genocide comparable to Pol Pot's Cambodia. Those who resisted were kidnapped, tortured, raped and buried in anonymous graves.
A few foreigners, too, lost their lives. Among them were five Australia-based journalists, killed in the East Timor border village of Balibo. An independent inquiry found that they had not been killed in crossfire during a skirmish as alleged by Indonesia but mown down in cold blood by invading troops.
Also shot dead was Malaysian student Kamal Bamadhaj. Kamal was in Dili as a translator for an Australian aid organisation in 1992 when Indonesian soldiers opened fire on mourners of a murdered activist at the Santa Cruz cemetery. At least 180 people, including Kamal, were killed in the massacre.
The deaths of their citizens, however, received a muted response from both Canberra and Kuala Lumpur.
That wasn't too surprising. After all, Australia sought to curry favour with the Suharto regime for lucrative business contracts while Malaysia turned a blind eye to the murder in the name of Asean brotherhood and solidarity.
The struggle in East Timor could have been easily forgotten by the world if not for the tenacity and determination of those resisting the Indonesian occupation. Their rag-tag rebel group kept the Indonesian military, whose elite forces were armed and trained by Western powers, on its toes. East Timorese in exile, led by Nobel Peace laureate Jose Ramos Horta, also dedicated much of their time and effort to marshalling global opinion against the Suharto regime.
But when the offer of a referendum came early this year from President B J Habibie, just about everyone was taken by surprise. Even independence advocates did not foresee that such a vote would come so soon, so that they had earlier mooted a peace plan that involved giving East Timor autonomy in the short term and a referendum to determine its own future in perhaps five or even 10 years.
The Indonesian military too were flabbergasted. Infuriated and knowing full well that East Timorese would not vote to stay with a nation that had treated them so harshly, they began scheming to have the vote called off or, if that was not possible, to ensure that the vote for autonomy would win the day.
Mysteriously, a crop of pro-Jakarta militia groups emerged to campaign, often violently, in favour of union with Indonesia.
Not surprisingly, the two-week campaign period in the run-up to the ballot saw a great number of pro-Jakarta rallies. Clearly the pro-independence forces were too intimidated to campaign openly.
Never mind, said jailed rebel leader Xanana Gusmao. "We have been campaigning for 23 years, he said.
He, like most people but for the Indonesian military and its militia cohorts, is confident that the vote will be an emphatic "No" to autonomy.
There are pervasive fears that the military-backed militias will launch a wave of terror around, or shortly after, the time of the ballot in an effort to derail the referendum. Already they have called for war if the vote does not go their way. Last week the International Federation for East Timor Observer Project, the largest international observer mission in the territory, sent an urgent appeal to UN Sec-Gen Kofi Annan.
"The UN must act quickly to ensure that the vote, and the days and weeks following the vote, are times of peace and not of slaughter," it urged.
There is no question that the ballot must go ahead. To postpone it for the third time would mean a victory to the forces of violence. In response to the mounting violence, the UN has increased the number of its police personnel in the troubled territory, but that is not good enough. Many have called for armed peace-keepers to be deployed immediately to stop the possible outbreak of another civil war. That call has, however, gone unheeded.
"I'm the witness to the suffering of my struggling people, and I'll bear witness to their liberation." These words were written on one of Kamal Bamadhaj's favourite T-shirts. Kamal did not live to witness the liberation of East Timor. Neither did many thousands of others whose graves litter the desolate landscape of East Timor, but their deaths will not be in vain.
Today, at long last, the people of East Timor will witness their own liberation. In the coming days and weeks, however, the world will decide whether East Timor will indeed witness peace, not slaughter.