LETTER FROM EAST TIMOR

THE ADELAIDE REWIEW

Nine years on

I seem to be fated to deal with small, troubled islands. It’s nearly three years since, at the request of the Secretary General of the United Nations, Ban Ki Moon, I embarked on the task of helping to reunite Cyprus, an island of 9,000 square kilometres and just over one million people.

Fifteen years ago, as the newly installed Australian foreign minister, I started work on trying to end the civil war in Bougainville. It too is about 9,000 square kilometres in size but with only 180,000 people. With the help of New Zealand, we brought peace to Bougainville, a peace that has lasted ever since.

In May I spent two days in East Timor. It’s not quite an island nation but it takes up about half of an island. It’s twice the size of Bougainville and Cyprus and its population is about the same as Cyprus.

It also dominated my working life for quite a while. The politics of empire made East Timor Portuguese and Christian while the rest of the Indonesian archipelago was largely Muslim and run by the Dutch. The attempt by Indonesia in 1975 to incorporate East Timor into the rest of the archipelago never really worked. By 1998 it was clear it couldn’t work. East Timor would have to have the chance to vote for independence or the violence there would never finish.

The rest you know.

So on May 20 I sat as the guest of President Ramos Horta in the presidential enclosure for the ceremonies celebrating the ninth anniversary of East Timor’s independence. It was a fine ceremony for a small country. Neatly drilled soldiers marched past the President, the prime minister and various dignitaries with all the discipline of a passing out parade at Duntroon. A giant flag was ceremoniously hauled up a gleaming new silver flagpole. Through all this, a recording of Sousa and other well known marching tunes rounded off the martial occasion.

The only light note was when the recorded band played the Monty Python theme tune. Awards were solemnly given to worthy citizens and to the soon-to-retire Portuguese foreign minister. Curiously, the prime minister of Guinea Bissau was also given an award. So during a quiet moment in the ceremony, I Google-searched Guinea Bissau on my mobile.

In the 1990s, East Timor was seriously fashionable. Activists in the pseudo-intellectual bourgeois left wanted Australia to send its army into East Timor to liberate it from the Indonesians. We found a better way. And there we have it. A small, poor, proud new country celebrating its liberty and I was sitting quietly but with idle satisfaction at the back of the presidential enclosure watching.

In 1999 the Indonesian militias burnt every building in Dili to a cinder. Today, they’re all restored. There are new hotels and holiday apartments, plenty of shops and even traffic jams. Everyone complained about the traffic. I told them it was a sign of prosperity.In September 1999 the only traffic was military.

East Timor’s left the news cycle now. It’s a success. Not rich of course, although the deal negotiated over oil and gas has given East Timor a nest egg of $8 billion already with plenty more to come. And only 20 percent of East Timorese have electricity. There’s high unemployment and education needs much more investment. There are also nearly 500 Australian troops hidden away at a military camp called Camp Phoenix. Just in case. In 2006 the place blew up and we had to send troops to calm it down. They are due out in 2012.

But, for all these things, East Timor is a success and with robust democratic institutions.

Governments need to focus on solving problems and that applies in foreign policy as much as anywhere else. So these days, with East Timor and Bougainville solved and with the Solomon Islands under control, are there any islands Australia should be fixing up? There’s one; Fiji. It has a similar population to Cyprus and East Timor, it’s bigger than both. But it’s tragically subjugated by an eccentric dictator called Commodore Bainimarama. I met him from time to time. He struck me as pretty nutty.

Now I’m not volunteering to fix the problem. That’s the job of the current government. Well, it should be. They need to put their hearts into getting Fiji back to democracy. I’d like to see that beautiful country get back on its feet.

In the meantime, I struggle on in Cyprus. The President was in Canberra and even Adelaide in May. I hope one day to sit through a ceremony there to commemorate the reunification of the island – at the back with a sense of idle satisfaction.

– Alexander Downer