Critical Times

By Bob Boughton, June 2007
From the Australian Socialist website

The parliamentary elections in Timor-Leste on June 30 2007 will determine whether or not the country continues on an independent progressive development path or falls into line behind the dominant conservative powers in the region, especially Australia, the US and Indonesia. If the latter is the outcome, the Australian left will be left to ponder why so many of our country=s so-called progressive commentators got things so wrong.

Almost exactly one year ago I flew into Timor-Leste’s capital Dili in the midst of a violent crisis which had engulfed the country for over a month. The trigger, a demonstration by mutineering soldiers on 28th April 2005, had escalated into gun battles in some of Dili’s streets and in the hills to the south between loyalist troops of the national army FALINTIL-FDTL and members of the national police force, PNTL who had aligned themselves with the army mutiny, along with several irregular armed groups. As the government lost control of the streets, Australia positioned warships and troop carriers off the coast. In mid May, as the violence escalated, the government was forced to invite in Australian, Malyasian and NZ troops, and Portuguese riot police, as a peacekeeping force. In the weeks before I arrived, the Australian and international English speaking media had been making increasingly-frenzied calls for the government of FRETILIN’s Mari Alkatiri to resign, blaming them for the deterioration in the security situation. From Australia, it had been virtually impossible to get any news outlet to listen to, let alone report, FRETILIN’s version of events. A comrade, Peter Murphy, with whom I had worked for many years in solidarity with FRETILIN, decided to try to help FRETILIN counter the media bias by working with the English language media in Dili, and I agreed to help. Peter did the first shift, and I arrived a week later, staying for nearly two weeks. I returned again briefly in September and October, and then for two months in December January. I came again in April 2007, and have been here for the last three months. During my time here, I work by day on a research and development project in my academic field, helping the Ministry of Education with a national campaign to address the very high rate of adult illiteracy (nearly 50%, and much higher in rural areas.) By night and on weekends, I continue the work I began in June last year, helping FRETILIN deal with the English language media. Most days, I get to see and speak with several of FRETILIN’s leaders, and many of its rank and file militants, both from Dili and the districts. I never stop wondering how it happened that this extraordinary party, and the exceptional group of political activists and supporters which it mobilises at both leadership and grass roots level, was deserted by the Australian left at a time when it most needed their solidarity. Make no mistake, FRETILIN is a genuine mass left social democratic party. When the crisis came, it was well on the way to implementing the most progressive independent program for social and economic development in the region. In September 2005, it won 58% of the vote in local elections, almost the same vote it had attained in the last national elections in 2001. It had plenty of problems, internally and externally, but by comparison with the motley group of political opponents it faced, it is by far the best choice for anyone with a left progressive perspective. The FRETILIN government of Mari Alkatiri was eventually forced to resign, on 21 June 2006. It was defeated by the combined effect of small scale armed rebellions, targeted arson and looting attacks on key institutions and the homes of its middle level leaders, mass demonstrations in the capital organised by the ultra-conservative Catholic Church leadership and opposition parties, and defections from within its own ranks by a disaffected group who had failed in a leadership challenge to the dominant faction led by Mari Alkatiri at the May 2006 Congress. Neither singly or even in combination, however, would these factors have produced a successful coup, were it not for the machinations of two of the country’s resistance heroes, Xanana Gusmao and Jose Ramos Horta. In a bizarre ‘dance with the devil’, these two men chose to accept and exploit the thinly disguised support of their old enemies, John Howard’s Liberal Party of Australia and pro-Indonesian and pro-’autonomy’ Timorese in their own country with links to the Indonesian military business class. Xanana and Horta are the key to understanding why the Australian left refused to defend Alkatiri. Originally both FRETILIN members, they had left in the 1980s, at a particularly bleak stage in the struggle against the brutal military occupation of Indonesia=s dictator Suharto. In their official biographies, which circulate widely in Australia, they justify this decision as a turn away from an extreme Marxist national liberation ideology espoused by FRETILIN’s leaders towards a more inclusive national front strategy. Australian journalists such as Mark Aarons repeat this as fact. The reality is both more complex and less flattering to the sizable egos of these two men, who, while they undoubtedly played key roles in the liberation struggle, were by no means as central as they would now like everyone else to believe. Xanana and Horta actually supported at various times a strategy of accommodation with the Indonesian occupiers, a policy they were unable to impose on the independence movement because of FRETILIN’s opposition, both internally among the guerrilla fighters and the clandestine movement, and externally within the diplomatic front. From the mid 1990s on, both men worked very hard to marginalise and isolate FRETILIN, but they never succeeded, and, to the surprise of those who had uncritically accepted the Horta-Xanana story, FRETILIN emerged as the party with majority support at the end of the period of UN administration in 2002. The conservative Catholic Church, which had been promised a great deal by Horta and Xanana, was unable to influence the FRETILIN government as it had hoped, and neither could the Australians or the Indonesians. Most importantly, against several attempts by Horta as Foreign Minister to concede, Alkatiri drove a very hard bargain with Australia over the sharing of revenue from the Timor Sea oil and gas fields. This revenue is now bringing substantial returns, and in the 2006/2007 year, these were earmarked for the expansion of major social programs. These included universal free education and free public health care, which almost certainly would have consolidated FRETILIN’s mass support, especially in the rural areas where 80% of the population live. Australian journalists, even progressive ones, have been seduced by the romantic mystique that attaches to Horta and Xanana, in ways they would be ashamed of if an Australian or western leader had pulled the same tricks. There is something of racism in this, a kind of reverse double standard, where yesterday’s left wing heroes are immune from scrutiny, even when they have clearly sold out their old principles for personal gain. While things have not come to this yet, Australian commentators should be wary of a ‘Mugabe effect’ overtaking Xanana and the failure of a heroic resistance leader to make a successful transition to democratic politics. He has shown no qualms, for example, about mobilising his old resistance networks who intimidate his political opponents, up to and including with violence. Both Xanana and Horta, with a good deal of assistance from media advisers, at least one of them from the Liberal Party, have constantly set out to deceive their own people, in their desperate efforts to discredit FRETILIN and gain the prize of power they so clearly believe is rightly theirs. Xanana calls his party CNRT, in a country where half the population is illiterate, using the same initials and an almost identical flag to those of the united front that FRETILIN was part of in 1999, which successfully campaigned against the Indonesian pro-autonomy proposal. Yet in the ranks of CNRT’s candidates are several known pro-’autonomy’ activists, and their money is not raised locally. Horta plays a more subtle game, presenting himself as a broker between the FRETILIN leadership and Xanana, but he is actively supporting CNRT from his new position as President. He rarely misses an opportunity to attack FRETILIN ‘radicals’, as he calls them, beating the same anti-communist drum that both the Catholic Church and the Indonesians used against FRETILIN in 1974-5, and Indonesia used all through the occupation. In a brief piece like this, the subtleties and complexities of politics in a post conflict society cannot be detailed. But Timor-Leste bears huge scars, the result of the genocidal war waged against its population by Indonesian dictatorship, supported by Australia, the US and the UK. These scars cut deep into the Resistance itself, and the situation is highly volatile and dangerous. Today, as I write this, things are quiet; but just as they erupted in the first half of last year, they could easily erupt again, engulfing the country in a bloody conflict. The only force with the political maturity, the experience, and above all, the independent progressive social and economic program, to build a stable Timor-Leste is FRETILIN. It is high time the Australian left gave them the solidarity they deserve.