Australia failed to fulfil its duty of care to the Timorese people who were placed at risk by our Government's policy, says Tony Kevin.
On April 10, Radio Australia carried this news story around the Asian region: "A former diplomat says Australia sullied its reputation by being ready to sacrifice East Timor lives. Retired ambassador Tony Kevin told a Senate inquiry that Australia saw the Timorese as expendable in pursuit of big prizes and the rush to last year's vote."
"This is why I find Mr Howard's and Mr Downer's statements that they have no regrets for anything Australia did in East Timor last year indeed that they take great pride in what was done sad and disturbing. I am distressed that the Australian Government's high-risk and manipulative policy in 1999 effectively made our country an accessory before the fact in the deaths of large numbers of East Timorese, the deportation of 200,000 people and the almost total destruction of their society. I feel a sense of dishonour as an Australian."
Four senators attended the Foreign Affairs Committee session on April 10. Senator Ross Lightfoot closely interrogated my testimony. Other senators present (Hogg, Brownbill and Payne) also put searching questions. The session was on Parliament House closed-circuit television and is now in Senate Committee Hansard. There were no subsequent questions in Parliament. No newspaper or journal apart from The Australian carried any report of the testimony. No ABC news or current affairs program reported it. No public affairs institute registered the testimony. Is this not strange? Given the seriousness of the allegation and its presumably responsible source, why the huge silence? What does this say about Australian political culture? Perhaps we do not like to hear bad news about ourselves.
We were horrified at what we saw from East Timor on our TV screens through September. For a few weeks then, a terrible doubt almost broke through our comfort level. Some of Australia's top international affairs analysts and editors offered various versions of a disturbing critique: that the tragedy of East Timor during September ought to have been foreseen by Australia. Some of these commentators went further, suggesting that Australian policymakers had foreseen the possibility and had factored it into their planning: "Canberra's massacre we had to have". These concerns flickered briefly in the public consciousness, and then vanished.
The story was shelved as attention moved to the drama of Australia's InterFET deployment and, in foreign policy news, the meaning of the new "Howard doctrine" on Australia's regional relations. Little more was heard of the disturbing questions about Australia's possible share in accountability for East Timor's tragedy, until my April 10 senate testimony.
Senator Lightfoot's question whether I was "raking over the old coals trying to find some embers there" deserves a public consideration. My testimony was based entirely on published sources, including intelligence reports leaked and published during 1999. I made a detailed comparison of what intelligence and other reports were coming into the Australian Government and when, compared with what ministers were saying to Parliament, the media, and foreign governments at those same times. I concluded that a misleading information policy had been followed, at least from February to May and possibly also from May to August 30 [voting day].
The discrepancy between the intelligence and the policy articulation was so great over these seven months that it cannot credibly [however charitably] be attributable to naivety, gullibility or ineptitude. And there was logic in the policy. In the first phase, February-May 1999, the key Australian policy goal was to keep President B. J. Habibie's fast-track timetable to a UN-supervised August 30 referendum [without UN peacekeepers] on schedule at all costs. This required shrugging off as unreliable or inconclusive a huge quantity of hard intelligence and eyewitness reports warning of a likely scorched-earth campaign if the East Timorese voted for independence. After the May 5 Indonesian-Portuguese-UN agreement to hold a referendum on August 30, Australian ministers became a little more frank in admitting the dangers facing the East Timorese people. Now, the election program having been more firmly secured in the UN calendar, the policy priority was to build up international pressure on Indonesia to respect the outcome of the forthcoming election, to get the world more engaged in East Timor as a human-rights issue, and to address the credibility problem in Washington where East Timor was seen as internationally insignificant.
At the same time, Australia could not afford to excite international human-rights anxieties to the point where the UN or US might decide the risks to the East Timorese people were so great that the exercise must be postponed until after Indonesia had an elected president. Australia was determined to keep moving the process forward while we had the chance to do so. When the vote was held on August 30, it was certainly Australia's hope that despite all the prior threats and intimidatory violence, the Indonesian Army (TNI) and their outrider militias would accept the reality of the 80 per cent vote for independence, and logically abandon their opposition. But the fact that they did not do so that they proceeded with the scorched-earth policy they had threatened all along was evidently no great surprise to the Australian Government. Australia was ready with a swift diplomatic strategy to secure a UN-endorsed "coalition of the willing" peacekeeping force in record time, to convince President Bill Clinton who just happened to be in New Zealand at the time, and to have our soldiers ready to deploy to Timor at a few days' notice. In Minister for Foreign Affairs Alexander Downer's apt words on September 4, Australia had "calibrated this pretty much right all along". The only problem is: the Timorese people, who seemingly were never consulted by Australia as to whether they wanted their lives and society to be put at such terrible risk, fell victim to this failed policy of deterrence. East Timor became Australia's own "town we had to destroy in order to save it". And Indonesia not just the perpetrators of the criminal actions in Timor, but wide sections of the Indonesian educated community feel angry with Australia for having in some sense betrayed their country: first, by encouraging their weak interim President Habibie to maintain a policy that Australia must have known from its intelligence was being hugely subverted from within his own government and military; and then, finally, by humiliating Indonesia in the eyes of the world when General Wiranto's policy of intimidation ended so bloodily. Whether or not my critique is 100 per cent correct, it has raised important questions of Australia's degree of accountability which have not yet been answered (or, for that matter, asked at the political level). Having launched an active Australian diplomacy for East Timor in February 1999 in which, as Howard and Downer have said, Australia played a very large role did our country fulfil its duty of care to the Timorese people who were placed at risk by the policy? In my judgment, based on present public information, Australia did not. The question also follows whether it is appropriate for Australian ministers to continue to approach Indonesia on the premise that Australia played an entirely noble role in last year's East Timor events, and that any reconciliation between our two neighbouring countries must be based on eventual Indonesian acceptance of this self-evident truth. If my analysis of what happened last year has any validity, it may take more than just time to heal these Indonesian wounds.
The continuing frictions and disruptive incidents in our bilateral relations suggest that a more courageous pursuit of self-knowledge leading to reconciliation may be needed in both countries, and not just in Indonesia. Perhaps we all Australians, not just our present Government need to look more searchingly into what happened in our own country's East Timor diplomacy during 1999.
[Tony Kevin was Australia's Ambassador to Cambodia 1994-97. He is now a Visiting Fellow in the Research School of Pacific and Asian Studies, Australian National University). The full April 10 testimony is in the Senate Foreign Affairs Committee Hansard.]