EAST TIMOR-POLITICS: Timor’s Visibility Rises Slowly

By Farhan Haq Reprint | | Print |

UNITED NATIONS, May 30 1997 (IPS) - Jose Ramos Horta was eating at a Chinese restaurant in New York in the 1970s, when a waiter asked him where he was from. When he replied, “East Timor,” the waiter looked confused and asked him, “You’re an Eskimo?”

For decades, Ramos Horta, leader of the pro-independence National Council of Maubere Resistance, encountered similar confusion from people who either did not know where the small Pacific island state of East Timor was, or did not care about its fate.

All that has changed, and with marked progress so far this year. Ever since Ramos Horta and Timorese Bishop Carlos Ximenes Belo were jointly awarded the Nobel Peace Prize last year, the cause of East Timor, annexed in 1976 by Indonesia, has become more visible.

The surge in the Timor campaign was particularly apparent here Thursday, when U.N. Secretary-General Kofi Annan met with Bishop Belo, an advocate of better treatment for the largely Catholic Timorese people. U.N. spokesman Hiro Ueki described the talks as “very productive and useful”.

On the same day, a committee in the Massachusetts State Assembly moved a resolution, that would prohibit Massachusetts from entering contracts with businesses that deal with Indonesia. The legislation, which must be approved by the entire State legislature, is intended to penalise Jakarta for its treatment of East Timor. Similar selective purchasing laws are being considered by the state of Rhode Island and other localities, worrying European and Japanese companies that deal with Indonesia.

And in East Timor itself Thursday (election day in Indonesia), guerrillas of the leftist National Liberation Front, or FRETILIN, fought Indonesian troops in several cities. The combat left 14 people dead.

A day later, Ramos Horta met Bill Richardson, U.S. Ambassador to the United Nations, in the first meeting to take place between a U.S. government official and a representative of the Timorese pro-independence cause, of which Ramos Horta is “foreign minister”.

Such a flurry of activity may not mean much in terms of immediate changes in Indonesia’s 22-year occupation of East Timor. Ramos Horta himself doubts that June talks here between Portugal, still recognised by the United Nations as Timor’s colonial power, and Indonesia will lead to anything significant.

“The situation on the ground in East Timor leaves no room for optimism,” Ramos Horta contends. “There have been hundreds of arrests, and torture is rampant.”

Belo says the situation has even become worse since the Nobel Prize was awarded to the two Timorese. The prize, he said in Portugal this month, “brought much suffering” to Timorese because “the simple act of shouting ‘Long live the Nobel’ or ‘Long live Ximenes’ sets off arrests, questioning and torture.”

At the same time, the Nobel Prize, the inauguration of Kofi Annan as Secretary-General in January, political unrest in Indonesia, and even U.S. President Bill Clinton’s financial scandals, have all helped to put the spotlight on Timor.

Annan quickly declared the need for a fresh look at East Timor, noting that previous U.N. approaches had not worked for 22 years. Within a month of entering office, he named Pakistani diplomat Jamsheed Marker as the first regular U.N. envoy to East Timor. Marker has since met with Indonesian and Timorese leaders, including jailed FRETILIN leader Xanana Gusmao.

Annan has also met with both Belo and Ramos Horta. The change in mood has cheered the latter, who was repeatedly denied a chance to meet former secretary-general Boutros Boutros-Ghali. Ramos Horta has declared his support for Annan’s team even as he has downplayed chances for progress in the current Indonesia-Portugal talks. Portuguese diplomats have also voiced greater optimism that Annan has seized the initiative on Timor.

Perhaps as great a contribution to Timor’s cause has been made by the reports last year that Clinton’s re-election campaign received hundreds of thousands of dollars from the Lippo Group, a conglomerate run by Indonesia’s powerful Riady family. That funding may have put pressure on the White House to back down from its efforts to sell F-16 fighter planes to Jakarta and to back away from U.S. legislation which links military aid to Indonesia to improvements in that country’s human rights.

“The timing of the Riady revelations, in combination with (the) awarding of the Nobel Prize to East Timor’s resistance leaders, highlights the hypocrisy and skewed priorities of Mr Clinton’s Indonesia policy,” Jennifer Washburn, a research associate at New York’s World Policy Institute, wrote in The Washington Times last year.

Yet ironically, the contributions by the Lippo Group may not have had that much political effect in changing Washington’s policies, which have been pro-Jakarta ever since then-President Gerald Ford visited Indonesian President Suharto the day before Indonesia invaded East Timor.

Ramos Horta, for one, says he is “well impressed” with the Clinton administration and has wryly remarked that Lippo’s rumoured 200,000-dollar contribution “covers only one night in the Lincoln Bedroom,” a reference to Clinton’s use of the White House for high-priced fund-raising.

The cumulative effect remains that, for the time being, several different forces are encouraging the United States, the United Nations, and other actors involved in East Timor. But Sidney Jones, director of Human Rights Watch-Asia, cautions that the “small window of opportunity” for Timor may not last long after last October’s conferring of the Nobel Prize.

“The prize brought a brief flare of publicity to East Timor’s just but long-neglected cause, and then — just as Indonesia’s government hoped — world attention again turned elsewhere,” the Washington Post said in a March editorial. That may yet happen, but for now, the Timor conflict is still buzzing on the world radar.