As East Timor struggles with its new relationship with Canberra, a book is being published on Australia's role in that extraordinary journey to independence from 1998. Titled "Deliverance – The Inside Story of East Timor's Fight for Freedom", it's the work of two Australian journalists, Don Greenless in Jakarta and Robert Garran in Canberra. It starts with the bold decision of Indonesia's distracted President, B.J.Habibie, to move for what became the independence vote in East Timor in 1999.

Presenter/Interviewer: Graeme Dobell, Canberra.

Speakers: Journalist Robert Garran, one of the joint authors of "Deliverance - The Inside Story of East Timor's Fight for Freedom".

Garran: "Habibie was a new president, he was under a lot of political stress, he was trying desperately to make his mark in the international community, he was more of an internationalist than many other Indonesian leaders had been because he'd spent many years in Germany. He understood the importance of foreign perceptions about the direction Indonesia was taking."

"At the same time within Indonesia there'd been quite a strong debate over quite a long period about the future of East Timor and the best way to take it forward, and this is another issue which hasn't really emerged very much in the public discussion about it. But for at least five or six years there'd be discussions under the Suharto regime about ways to provide some form of autonomy for East Timor. And Habibie was very beholden on a group of Muslim intellectuals who'd been promoting this argument privately within the Indonesian regime, and they had a big influence on his thinking, so [there was] a coalescence of a whole lot of factors."

Dobell: Why does a president who is uncertain in many ways weak, who's legitimacy is under question, why does he face down Indonesia's military and throw open this issue?

Garran: "Well that's another surprising part of the story which emerged from our research. The military didn't explicitly and overtly resist the decision. I mean they resented it, and they sought to undermine it but at the time it was made within the cabinet room they didn't oppose it."

"There's a nice story about a discussion between Alatas and Wiranto, the military commander when they're presented with Habibie's proposal and one of them says to the other, 'have you seen this proposal, you know, do you know what's going on here?' And they had a little discussion before the cabinet meeting about it, but they don't oppose it in the meeting. And there's several reasons why they perhaps didn't oppose it, one was probably they thought they could undermine the decision if it was going the wrong way, but the other one is they were really very ill-informed about sentiment in East Timor. They actually thought for a long time they would win, if there was some sort of process of self-determination that they'd win it."

Dobell: At the time there was a lot of debate and a lot of argument that Australia could have done more to head off the violence, to stop that use of militia. Do you judge that Australia did have an ability to have saved lives?

Garran: "Beyond what it did no I don't judge, I think Australia actually handled the diplomacy of that pretty well, there are a few stumbles as I said earlier, I think Alexander Downer wasn't straight with the Australian public in his comments in the first part of the year about what was known."

"But I don't believe that more international pressure would have achieved an earlier international intervention, I just think it was – there was enormous resistance in the Indonesian system to international intervention. And intervention without Indonesian support would have been regarded as an invasion, it would have caused enormous conflict, it would have caused enormous hostility between Indonesia and Australia and whoever the other countries were supporting the Australian position. And Australia alone didn't have the military strength to play that sort of game and it wasn't going to get international support in an environment where Indonesia didn't support the peacekeepers going in."

Dobell: How then do you mark the performance that we have seen from the United Nations and from Australia?

Garran: "It was successful for both Australia's point of view and the United Nations point of view. I mean of course, it goes without saying that you would have much rather had an outcome, which didn't involve the violence and the deaths that occurred in the mayhem."

"But it's very difficult I think to argue a plausible alternative scenario which would have led to a substantially better outcome, I mean other than the unlikely event that Indonesia all of a sudden became a benign, wise international player and decided that it was going to peacefully handover this territory that it had fought to keep for 25 years. I mean the alternative scenarios might sound attractive but they're just not realistic ones."