Death of a Nation
OPP @ Tue Mar 06, 2007 6:31 am
East Timor during the Indonesian occupation.
Death Of A Nation
Horrific acts of genocide, torture and oppression commited by the Indonesian millitary was ignored internationaly and suported by the British, Australian and American governments, funding and providing the Indonesian Government with the millitary equipment needed for the invasion of East Timor and the following genocide of it's people.
Australia was granted the Oil and Gas assets of East Timor and are even to this day in controle of 80% of these assets, ensuring poverty and instability in the country.
Mr_Canada old @ Tue Mar 06, 2007 6:36 am
SgtMills @ Tue Mar 06, 2007 6:46 am
Well that sure sucks! Thats sorta like what Bush is doing in Iraq right now and taking advantage of the poverty of a people just for control of their precious oil eh?
OPP @ Tue Mar 06, 2007 6:51 am
SgtMills SgtMills:
Well that sure sucks! Thats sorta like what Bush is doing in Iraq right now and taking advantage of the poverty of a people just for control of their precious oil eh?
ArmyMan @ Tue Mar 06, 2007 3:16 pm
I thought Bush was after WMD's, not their resources 
EyeBrock @ Tue Mar 06, 2007 3:29 pm
OPP OPP:
East Timor during the Indonesian occupation.
Death Of A Nation
Horrific acts of genocide, torture and oppression commited by the Indonesian millitary was ignored internationaly and suported by the British, Australian and American governments, funding and providing the Indonesian Government with the millitary equipment needed for the invasion of East Timor and the following genocide of it's people.
Australia was granted the Oil and Gas assets of East Timor and are even to this day in controle of 80% of these assets, ensuring poverty and instability in the country.
Death Of A Nation
Horrific acts of genocide, torture and oppression commited by the Indonesian millitary was ignored internationaly and suported by the British, Australian and American governments, funding and providing the Indonesian Government with the millitary equipment needed for the invasion of East Timor and the following genocide of it's people.
Australia was granted the Oil and Gas assets of East Timor and are even to this day in controle of 80% of these assets, ensuring poverty and instability in the country.
What really is your point on this oh brave Viking?
To slag the Aussies off on this one really is going off the wall and exposes your total lack of familiarity with global (that means outside jolly old Sweden) affairs.
East Timor was invaded by the Indonesians in 1975.
The Australian government has continually brought up the plight of the East Timorese in the UN since then.
Post the withdrawal in1999 the Australians have been most pro-active in ensuring East Timor went towards its chosen goal of democracy.
The Australians formed the majority of the UNTAET military stabilising force that administered East Timor and remain in that nation as a force of stability in that new and fragile democracy.
What did Sweden do about the oppressive Indonesians?
BartSimpson @ Tue Mar 06, 2007 3:46 pm
EyeBrock EyeBrock:
What did Sweden do about the oppressive Indonesians?
SIDA (Sweden's foreign aid ministry) punished them by sending more money. That'll show them!
stratos @ Tue Mar 06, 2007 4:29 pm
Well OPP I suppose you will be the first to join your nations Military and go and free the people of East Timor. You know they are being oppressed by a minority group with in their country (in this case the Indonesians). Put up or shut up.
But wait you cant do that can you because OMG Iraq was being ruled by a minority group prior to the US invasion, this minority ruling class committed acts of torture, genocide and other horrors. What did your oh so great country of Sweeden do... thats right they bought oil from that country and its minority ruling elite and then cried when they were cast down.
Wow what a hypocrite you've show your self to be.
OPP @ Tue Mar 06, 2007 5:36 pm
EyeBrock EyeBrock:
OPP OPP:
East Timor during the Indonesian occupation.
Death Of A Nation
Horrific acts of genocide, torture and oppression commited by the Indonesian millitary was ignored internationaly and suported by the British, Australian and American governments, funding and providing the Indonesian Government with the millitary equipment needed for the invasion of East Timor and the following genocide of it's people.
Australia was granted the Oil and Gas assets of East Timor and are even to this day in controle of 80% of these assets, ensuring poverty and instability in the country.
Death Of A Nation
Horrific acts of genocide, torture and oppression commited by the Indonesian millitary was ignored internationaly and suported by the British, Australian and American governments, funding and providing the Indonesian Government with the millitary equipment needed for the invasion of East Timor and the following genocide of it's people.
Australia was granted the Oil and Gas assets of East Timor and are even to this day in controle of 80% of these assets, ensuring poverty and instability in the country.
What really is your point on this oh brave Viking?
To slag the Aussies off on this one really is going off the wall and exposes your total lack of familiarity with global (that means outside jolly old Sweden) affairs.
East Timor was invaded by the Indonesians in 1975.
The Australian government has continually brought up the plight of the East Timorese in the UN since then.
Post the withdrawal in1999 the Australians have been most pro-active in ensuring East Timor went towards its chosen goal of democracy.
The Australians formed the majority of the UNTAET military stabilising force that administered East Timor and remain in that nation as a force of stability in that new and fragile democracy.
What did Sweden do about the oppressive Indonesians?
$1:
In a little reported ceremony, UN and Australian government representatives signed a new Timor Gap Treaty in Dili last Thursday, securing control over the substantial oil and natural gas reserves under the Timor Sea. The UN Transitional Administration in East Timor (UNTAET) has now officially replaced Indonesia as Australia's partner in exploiting these reserves, valued at between $11 billion and $19 billion.
The UN's East Timor administrator Sergio Vierra de Miello initialled the treaty representing the people of East Timor. Australia's resident consul in Dili, James Batley signed on behalf of the Howard government. Briefing reporters, Batley noted that the terms of the 1989 Timor Gap Treaty, signed by Indonesia and Australia, would continue to apply. Effectively, UNTAET and the Australian government will share control over mining in the Timor Sea, with the lucrative royalties split between them.
Another UNTAET spokesman, Manuel de Almeida told reporters that the UN's share of the royalties would be backdated to October 25, 1999, when Indonesia formally relinquished its claim to East Timor, but the use of the money had not been determined. UNTAET's royalties would go into a trust fund for the duration of its administration, with no decision made yet on whether to use them to defray the costs of running the administration.
Council for East Timorese Resistance (CNRT) leaders and UN officials are still negotiating the dispersion of the hundreds of millions of dollars in revenue expected over the next three years.
There was virtually no coverage of the signing ceremony in the Australian media, yet the fate of the 1989 treaty has been central to the Australian intervention in East Timor. Media attention has been focused on the Australian-led INTERFET military occupation—presenting it as an entirely humanitarian operation. Behind the scenes, however, the Howard government has been pushing on with the treaty negotiations.
The first public announcement that a new treaty was about to be signed came at an international workshop held in Dili from January 15 to 18 to discuss the exploitation of the seabed between Timor and Australia. About 50 geologists, lawyers, engineers, economists, oil executives and officials from Australia, the UN, Portugal, Mozambique and East Timor gathered in a UN-leased hotel. CNRT leaders were also on hand, including vice president Jose Ramos-Horta, Timor Gap spokesman Mari Alkateri and members of the UN administration's appointed National Consultative Council.
Company representatives declined to give the workshop detailed estimates of the oil and gas reserves at stake. But one told Lusa, a Portuguese news agency, that East Timor would be “one of the great exploration zones in the world”. The CNRT's Alkateri declared that East Timor and Australia stood to share $800 million in royalties over the next 20 years.
At a January 19 press briefing, UNTAET's principal legal advisor Hansjoerg Strohmeyer gave some indication of the intensive diplomacy behind the new treaty. He said the Dili workshop was the final point in a series of four meetings initiated by Australia and the CNRT leaders. He emphasised that the treaty was a fresh legal instrument between UNTAET and Australia. The practical arrangements would remain the same—with UNTAET replacing Indonesia as a party—but it was not a revised version of the 1989 treaty. This was necessary, he declared, to avoid giving any retrospective legitimacy to the 1989 document.
The manoeuvres and negotiations over the new treaty began well before Australian troops moved into Timor last September. In August 1998, CNRT president Xanana Gusmao, then still jailed in Jakarta, held secret discussions in his prison cell with Peter Cockroft, an executive of BHP, an Australian mining company with significant holdings in the Timor Sea. Gusmao reportedly assured BHP that an East Timorese government would protect Australian and other international investments in the Timor Sea.
The talks followed a July 1998 CNRT statement pledging that a Timorese administration would provide international oil companies with “a more secure and productive environment”. Just days after the Gusmao-Cockroft meeting, Australian Foreign Minister Alexander Downer called on Indonesia to release Gusmao. It was the first shift in Canberra's 25-year policy of supporting the Suharto regime's annexation of the former Portuguese colony in 1975.
Timor's potential oil wealth has been a crucial consideration in Australian policy since the early 1970s, when exploration began to show promising results. In one revealing diplomatic cable, the Australian ambassador to Indonesia, Richard Woolcott advised the Whitlam Labor government that a Timor Gap Treaty “could be much more readily negotiated with Indonesia than with Portugal or independent Portuguese Timor”.
In two summit meetings in September 1974 and April 1975, Whitlam made it clear to General Suharto that Australia would offer no more than a ritual protest if Indonesia invaded East Timor. In January 1978 Whitlam's successor as Prime Minister, Malcolm Fraser, gave legal recognition to East Timor's incorporation as the 27th Indonesian province in order to meet Indonesian pre-conditions for negotiations on the Timor Gap.
After protracted negotiations, the Timor Gap Treaty was ultimately signed in December 1989 by the foreign ministers of Australia and Indonesia, in a champagne glass-clinking ceremony on board a Royal Australian Air Force VIP plane flying over the Timor Sea.
One of the major problems facing Canberra with regard to the treaty, however, was its illegality in international law. Australia was the only Western country to formally recognise the Indonesian takeover. Portugal had acquiesced in the Indonesian invasion but kept its colonial interests alive by sponsoring various UN resolutions that recognised East Timor as a “non-self-governing territory,” with Portugal designated the “administrative power”.
In 1991, following new major discoveries in the Timor Sea, Portugal revived its formal claim to sovereignty. It launched proceedings against Australia in the World Court, charging that the Timor Gap Treaty was illegal, damaged the material interests of both Portugal and the people of East Timor, and abrogated the right of the East Timorese people to self-determination.
In June 1995, the World Court ruled that it could not make a decision on the legality of the Indonesian annexation because Indonesia did not recognise the court's authority. However, in its judgement the court found that Portugal's claims were “irreproachable”. While the Australian government claimed to have survived the court challenge, it had legal opinion that, in the event of East Timor becoming independent, the treaty would have to be renegotiated.
By controlling the military situation in East Timor from last September, the Howard government sought to strengthen its argument that the arrangements made under the 1989 treaty should be maintained and not reopened for the benefit of Portugal. For now at least, the Australian position appears to have prevailed within the UN.
In a joint statement, Downer and Industry, Science and Resources Minister Nick Minchin placed on record the Howard government's appreciation for the “constructive approach” taken by Indonesia during talks in Jakarta the previous week. Before the treaty could be signed, Indonesian representatives had to agree that the area covered by the Treaty was outside Indonesian jurisdiction. According to some earlier reports, however, Indonesia's oil company Pertamina may still argue that some of the oil and gas reserves fall within the territorial waters of West Timor, which remains part of Indonesia.
The Portuguese government has yet to issue a statement but is unlikely to be pleased. Only months ago, the CNRT's Alkateri was in Lisbon for talks on the Timor Gap. Portugal has recently expressed disappointment with the conduct of the UN administration. Last week its Defence Minister Julio Castro Caldos also accused unnamed Western intelligence services of causing repeated delays in the departure of Portuguese troops to join the UN force in East Timor.
As for the CNRT leaders, UN officials said they had been consulted, and appreciated the requirements of foreign investors. Strohmeyer said the extension of the old arrangements reflected “the declared opinion of the CNRT to give the investors the planning security that they need”. In Australia, Downer told reporters: “These arrangements are important to politically convince investors already making investments in the context of the Timor Gap Cooperation Zone.”
The CNRT leaders have sought to justify their stance by declaring that the income generated would assist the Timorese people. In a radio interview after the Dili workshop, Alkateri said royalties could provide “substantial economic and social benefits” to East Timor. Experience from elsewhere, including other oil-rich parts of the Indonesian archipelago such as Sumatra, demonstrates that the revenues will flow into the pockets of the transnationals and their local partners, not to the oppressed masses.
Major oil companies from the US, Australia, Japan, Britain and the Netherlands have much at stake in the Timor Sea. Last year Robert Mollah, the Australian executive director of the Australia-Indonesia joint authority for the Timor Gap, said 27 companies had spent more than half a billion dollars on exploration and development in the zone.
Revenues are currently small by world standards, but are expected to rise dramatically in 2004, when the large Bayu-Undan oil field comes on stream. Last October, following written assurances of support from Gusmao and Ramos-Horta, Phillips Petroleum, the sixth-largest US oil company, announced that it would proceed with the $1.4 billion project.
Phillips has a 50.3 percent stake in the Bayu-Undan project. Santos, an Australian oil and gas producer, holds 11.8 percent, as does Japan's Inpex. Kerr-McGee Corp of the US has 11.2 percent, followed by Australia's Petroz (8.3) and British Borneo Oil & Gas (6.7). Phillips also operates the smaller Eland and Kakatua fields in the Timor Gap, having bought Australian company BHP's 42 percent stake last April.
Another Australian oil and gas company, Woodside Petroleum, underscored the potential value of the Timor Sea when, on January 20, it announced higher-than-expected oil production from its new half-owned Laminaria/Corallina oil project, which lies in Australian-claimed waters just outside the Timor Gap Treaty's Zone of Cooperation. Royal Dutch/Shell owns 34 percent of Woodside, and has its own 25 percent share in the Laminaria/Corallina project, as does BHP.
In recent months rising world oil prices have increased the potential profits from the Timor Gap. Phillips, for example, announced last month that higher crude oil prices boosted its global revenue in the final quarter of 1999 by about 60 percent to $4.3 billion. The known reserves in the Timor Gap are in the treaty area's Zone A, which is now jointly operated by Australia and UNTAET. Higher prices will encourage test drilling in two zones that have not been extensively explored—Area B, controlled exclusively by Canberra, and Area C, now under UNTAET jurisdiction.
The UN's East Timor administrator Sergio Vierra de Miello initialled the treaty representing the people of East Timor. Australia's resident consul in Dili, James Batley signed on behalf of the Howard government. Briefing reporters, Batley noted that the terms of the 1989 Timor Gap Treaty, signed by Indonesia and Australia, would continue to apply. Effectively, UNTAET and the Australian government will share control over mining in the Timor Sea, with the lucrative royalties split between them.
Another UNTAET spokesman, Manuel de Almeida told reporters that the UN's share of the royalties would be backdated to October 25, 1999, when Indonesia formally relinquished its claim to East Timor, but the use of the money had not been determined. UNTAET's royalties would go into a trust fund for the duration of its administration, with no decision made yet on whether to use them to defray the costs of running the administration.
Council for East Timorese Resistance (CNRT) leaders and UN officials are still negotiating the dispersion of the hundreds of millions of dollars in revenue expected over the next three years.
There was virtually no coverage of the signing ceremony in the Australian media, yet the fate of the 1989 treaty has been central to the Australian intervention in East Timor. Media attention has been focused on the Australian-led INTERFET military occupation—presenting it as an entirely humanitarian operation. Behind the scenes, however, the Howard government has been pushing on with the treaty negotiations.
The first public announcement that a new treaty was about to be signed came at an international workshop held in Dili from January 15 to 18 to discuss the exploitation of the seabed between Timor and Australia. About 50 geologists, lawyers, engineers, economists, oil executives and officials from Australia, the UN, Portugal, Mozambique and East Timor gathered in a UN-leased hotel. CNRT leaders were also on hand, including vice president Jose Ramos-Horta, Timor Gap spokesman Mari Alkateri and members of the UN administration's appointed National Consultative Council.
Company representatives declined to give the workshop detailed estimates of the oil and gas reserves at stake. But one told Lusa, a Portuguese news agency, that East Timor would be “one of the great exploration zones in the world”. The CNRT's Alkateri declared that East Timor and Australia stood to share $800 million in royalties over the next 20 years.
At a January 19 press briefing, UNTAET's principal legal advisor Hansjoerg Strohmeyer gave some indication of the intensive diplomacy behind the new treaty. He said the Dili workshop was the final point in a series of four meetings initiated by Australia and the CNRT leaders. He emphasised that the treaty was a fresh legal instrument between UNTAET and Australia. The practical arrangements would remain the same—with UNTAET replacing Indonesia as a party—but it was not a revised version of the 1989 treaty. This was necessary, he declared, to avoid giving any retrospective legitimacy to the 1989 document.
The manoeuvres and negotiations over the new treaty began well before Australian troops moved into Timor last September. In August 1998, CNRT president Xanana Gusmao, then still jailed in Jakarta, held secret discussions in his prison cell with Peter Cockroft, an executive of BHP, an Australian mining company with significant holdings in the Timor Sea. Gusmao reportedly assured BHP that an East Timorese government would protect Australian and other international investments in the Timor Sea.
The talks followed a July 1998 CNRT statement pledging that a Timorese administration would provide international oil companies with “a more secure and productive environment”. Just days after the Gusmao-Cockroft meeting, Australian Foreign Minister Alexander Downer called on Indonesia to release Gusmao. It was the first shift in Canberra's 25-year policy of supporting the Suharto regime's annexation of the former Portuguese colony in 1975.
Timor's potential oil wealth has been a crucial consideration in Australian policy since the early 1970s, when exploration began to show promising results. In one revealing diplomatic cable, the Australian ambassador to Indonesia, Richard Woolcott advised the Whitlam Labor government that a Timor Gap Treaty “could be much more readily negotiated with Indonesia than with Portugal or independent Portuguese Timor”.
In two summit meetings in September 1974 and April 1975, Whitlam made it clear to General Suharto that Australia would offer no more than a ritual protest if Indonesia invaded East Timor. In January 1978 Whitlam's successor as Prime Minister, Malcolm Fraser, gave legal recognition to East Timor's incorporation as the 27th Indonesian province in order to meet Indonesian pre-conditions for negotiations on the Timor Gap.
After protracted negotiations, the Timor Gap Treaty was ultimately signed in December 1989 by the foreign ministers of Australia and Indonesia, in a champagne glass-clinking ceremony on board a Royal Australian Air Force VIP plane flying over the Timor Sea.
One of the major problems facing Canberra with regard to the treaty, however, was its illegality in international law. Australia was the only Western country to formally recognise the Indonesian takeover. Portugal had acquiesced in the Indonesian invasion but kept its colonial interests alive by sponsoring various UN resolutions that recognised East Timor as a “non-self-governing territory,” with Portugal designated the “administrative power”.
In 1991, following new major discoveries in the Timor Sea, Portugal revived its formal claim to sovereignty. It launched proceedings against Australia in the World Court, charging that the Timor Gap Treaty was illegal, damaged the material interests of both Portugal and the people of East Timor, and abrogated the right of the East Timorese people to self-determination.
In June 1995, the World Court ruled that it could not make a decision on the legality of the Indonesian annexation because Indonesia did not recognise the court's authority. However, in its judgement the court found that Portugal's claims were “irreproachable”. While the Australian government claimed to have survived the court challenge, it had legal opinion that, in the event of East Timor becoming independent, the treaty would have to be renegotiated.
By controlling the military situation in East Timor from last September, the Howard government sought to strengthen its argument that the arrangements made under the 1989 treaty should be maintained and not reopened for the benefit of Portugal. For now at least, the Australian position appears to have prevailed within the UN.
In a joint statement, Downer and Industry, Science and Resources Minister Nick Minchin placed on record the Howard government's appreciation for the “constructive approach” taken by Indonesia during talks in Jakarta the previous week. Before the treaty could be signed, Indonesian representatives had to agree that the area covered by the Treaty was outside Indonesian jurisdiction. According to some earlier reports, however, Indonesia's oil company Pertamina may still argue that some of the oil and gas reserves fall within the territorial waters of West Timor, which remains part of Indonesia.
The Portuguese government has yet to issue a statement but is unlikely to be pleased. Only months ago, the CNRT's Alkateri was in Lisbon for talks on the Timor Gap. Portugal has recently expressed disappointment with the conduct of the UN administration. Last week its Defence Minister Julio Castro Caldos also accused unnamed Western intelligence services of causing repeated delays in the departure of Portuguese troops to join the UN force in East Timor.
As for the CNRT leaders, UN officials said they had been consulted, and appreciated the requirements of foreign investors. Strohmeyer said the extension of the old arrangements reflected “the declared opinion of the CNRT to give the investors the planning security that they need”. In Australia, Downer told reporters: “These arrangements are important to politically convince investors already making investments in the context of the Timor Gap Cooperation Zone.”
The CNRT leaders have sought to justify their stance by declaring that the income generated would assist the Timorese people. In a radio interview after the Dili workshop, Alkateri said royalties could provide “substantial economic and social benefits” to East Timor. Experience from elsewhere, including other oil-rich parts of the Indonesian archipelago such as Sumatra, demonstrates that the revenues will flow into the pockets of the transnationals and their local partners, not to the oppressed masses.
Major oil companies from the US, Australia, Japan, Britain and the Netherlands have much at stake in the Timor Sea. Last year Robert Mollah, the Australian executive director of the Australia-Indonesia joint authority for the Timor Gap, said 27 companies had spent more than half a billion dollars on exploration and development in the zone.
Revenues are currently small by world standards, but are expected to rise dramatically in 2004, when the large Bayu-Undan oil field comes on stream. Last October, following written assurances of support from Gusmao and Ramos-Horta, Phillips Petroleum, the sixth-largest US oil company, announced that it would proceed with the $1.4 billion project.
Phillips has a 50.3 percent stake in the Bayu-Undan project. Santos, an Australian oil and gas producer, holds 11.8 percent, as does Japan's Inpex. Kerr-McGee Corp of the US has 11.2 percent, followed by Australia's Petroz (8.3) and British Borneo Oil & Gas (6.7). Phillips also operates the smaller Eland and Kakatua fields in the Timor Gap, having bought Australian company BHP's 42 percent stake last April.
Another Australian oil and gas company, Woodside Petroleum, underscored the potential value of the Timor Sea when, on January 20, it announced higher-than-expected oil production from its new half-owned Laminaria/Corallina oil project, which lies in Australian-claimed waters just outside the Timor Gap Treaty's Zone of Cooperation. Royal Dutch/Shell owns 34 percent of Woodside, and has its own 25 percent share in the Laminaria/Corallina project, as does BHP.
In recent months rising world oil prices have increased the potential profits from the Timor Gap. Phillips, for example, announced last month that higher crude oil prices boosted its global revenue in the final quarter of 1999 by about 60 percent to $4.3 billion. The known reserves in the Timor Gap are in the treaty area's Zone A, which is now jointly operated by Australia and UNTAET. Higher prices will encourage test drilling in two zones that have not been extensively explored—Area B, controlled exclusively by Canberra, and Area C, now under UNTAET jurisdiction.
wsws
Yep.. damn fine peace effort them Ausies are doing in Timor... yep.. all in the name of peace and stability.. no doubt..
OPP @ Tue Mar 06, 2007 5:38 pm
East Timor calls on Australia to stop exploiting disputed oil field
By John Roberts
13 February 2004
Long-running disagreements between Australia and East Timor over their maritime border and therefore control of Timor Sea oil and gas erupted again late last year, focusing on revenues from the Laminaria-Corallina fields. East Timor’s Prime Minister Mari Alkatiri and Foreign Minister Jose Ramos Horta both accused Canberra of taking royalties that rightly belonged to Dili.
After talks between the two countries over the border last November, Alkatiri declared that Canberra was violating international law by unilaterally exploiting oil fields in a disputed maritime area. The prime minister claimed that Australia had gained $US1.2 billion in royalties while East Timor had received nothing. He called for a halt in production in the fields until the maritime boundary had been settled and indicated that East Timor may seek repayment of the royalties.
The Laminaria-Corallina oil fields are operated by the Woodside, BHP Billiton and Shell corporations and began production in November 1999. Until recently, Laminaria-Corallina was Australia’s largest oil field. At startup, output averaged 142,500 barrels a day, peaking at up to 180,000 barrels a day, before declining to just 50,000 barrels a day. Logistical support for the operation is based in Darwin in northern Australia.
Laminaria-Corallina was just one of several lucrative oil and gas fields that came under effective Australian control as a result of the Timor Gap Treaty signed with the Suharto dictatorship in Indonesia in 1989. Under the terms of the treaty, Jakarta allocated Canberra much of the seabed wealth in return for formal recognition of Indonesia’s military takeover of East Timor in 1975.
East Timor’s leaders, however, refuse to recognise the 1989 treaty and insist instead that the border should be based on the UN Convention on the Law of the Sea (UNCLOS). For the tiny, impoverished state, which was granted formal independence in May 2002, oil and gas royalties offer one of the few possible sources of revenue and jobs. Well aware that East Timor desperately requires the income, the Howard government in Canberra has used delaying tactics to bully it into unfavourable agreements.
An initial treaty concerning the Bayu-Undan gas field was agreed at the time of East Timor’s independence. Amid considerable publicity, the Howard government announced that it would cede 90 percent of the revenue to East Timor. The terms of the deal, however, maintained the joint development zone established by Indonesia and Australia and held out the prospect that Australia would retain control of the more lucrative Greater Sunrise field. Canberra deliberately delayed ratifying the agreement—a move that threatened the development of the Bayu-Undan field—to force East Timor to accept Australian demands for 80 percent of the Greater Sunrise field.
The fact that tensions have reemerged over the Laminaria-Corallina field is a measure of Dili’s desperation to resolve the border dispute and ensure the flow of oil and gas revenues. If Dili were to receive part of the royalties from Laminaria-Corallina, it would provide immediate financial relief. Income from the Bayu-Undan development will not materialise until 2006 when gas deliveries to Japanese customers are due to begin.
East Timorese leaders are urging Canberra to speed up the negotiations over a final boundary settlement, hoping to secure a larger share of the seabed resources. For its part, the Howard government has arrogantly dismissed calls for a halt in Laminaria-Corallina production and is dragging out talks over the boundary, knowing full well that time will allow Australia to exploit existing fields.
East Timor’s Foreign Minister Horta attempted to speed up negotiations during a visit to Canberra last December. He told the media that if the “middle-line approach” specified by UNCLOS were adopted, East Timor would control the entire Greater Sunrise field, potentially worth billions of dollars in royalties, as well as Laminaria-Corallina.
Horta explained that East Timor had been pressing for monthly meetings and a time limit of three to five years to resolve the border dispute. But Australia had rejected the proposal, agreeing only to meet twice a year—a recipe for dragging negotiations out indefinitely. The next round is not due until April. The Howard government has unilaterally ruled out any arbitration through the International Court of Justice or the International Tribunal on the Law of the Sea.
Following talks last year, Australian Foreign Minister Alexander Downer made clear that Canberra was in no hurry to settle the boundary issue. “Although negotiations on a permanent maritime (boundary) may take some time, legal arrangements are already in place to ensure that benefits from the development of Timor Sea petroleum resources will flow to both countries,” he said.
Limited independence
Australia’s ongoing bullying of East Timor highlights once again that its military intervention into the half island in 1999 under the auspices of the UN had nothing to do with concern for the plight of the East Timorese. Rather throughout all the twists and turns of Australian policy toward East Timor—beginning with Canberra’s tacit green light for the Indonesian invasion in 1975—a major goal has been to secure control of the Timor Sea oil and gas.
The ruling elite in Dili—having welcomed the Australian-led intervention as a means of gaining power—is in no position to strenuously resist. The so-called independent state of just 800,000 people is entirely dependent on the major powers, economically and militarily.
At the same time, the East Timor government is in desperate need of funds. The government budget was only $77 million for 2002. Its total revenue, excluding foreign aid, is about $75 million and the 2003-2004 budget will be $60 million in deficit. While Dili wants access to oil and gas revenues, it wants to avoid alienating Canberra, which currently provides $40 million annually to assist in policing and security.
The UN mandate for East Timor is due to expire on May 20 next year. Dili has already appealed to Canberra to maintain police and troops in the country, both to deal with any external threat and as a guarantee against internal opposition. High levels of poverty and unemployment have generated sharp social tensions and protests by workers, farmers and young people. Officially, 40 percent of the population lives below the poverty line of 50 cents per day.
In its contemptuous dismissal of East Timor’s latest criticisms over the border dispute, the Howard government is well aware that the tiny nation is heavily reliant on Australian assistance. There is little doubt that in the discussions over the form and size of a continued Australian military and police presence, the issue of oil and gas will also be on the agenda.http://www.wsws.org/articles/2004/feb2004/timo-f13.shtml
OPP @ Tue Mar 06, 2007 5:42 pm
Two East Timorese protestors killed by Australian troops
By Patrick O’Connor, SEP candidate for Marrickville in the NSW election
2 March 2007
The killing of two East Timorese men by the Australian military on February 23 at a refugee camp near the Dili airport points to the real motivation behind the Howard government’s East Timor intervention.
Australian troops shot and killed Jacinto Soares, 32, on the spot. Atoy Dasy, 36, died in hospital the next day. A third man, 40-year-old Geraldo Martins, remains in a critical condition in hospital. The director of Dili Guido Valadares hospital, Antonio Caleres, told the news agency Adnkronos International (AKI) that Jacinto was shot in the head and Atoy in the chest. Shots to the head and chest are intended to kill.
The three men were among a crowd of protestors throwing rocks and other objects at Australian troops and UN police outside the Internally Displaced People (IDP) camp adjacent to the airport. The East Timorese government and international security forces have been trying to evict the 8,000 terrified and defiant residents, who have nowhere else to live.
Jeff Kingston, a visiting academic, described the tense situation prior to the clash to the Japan Times: “Despair peered at me through the chain-link fence separating the airport from a refugee camp of nearly 8,000 internally displaced people (IDP). And from behind this forlorn façade of despair, angrier IDPs threw rocks at security personnel and their vehicles guarding the air terminal.”
The very fact that tens of thousands of refugees in Dili are still living in these squalid conditions makes a mockery of the Howard government’s claim that it sent troops to East Timor to help the people. The real purpose of last year’s military intervention was to secure the interests of Australian imperialism for resources and regional influence, against its rivals, especially Portugal and China, and to suppress all local opposition to its agenda. The killings underscore the increasingly brutal character of this operation.
A refugee spokesman told Reuters that clashes broke out when Australian soldiers tried to arrest some of the residents protecting the camp: “They resisted by throwing rocks at the Australian soldiers, who responded with shots and came inside the camp using an armoured vehicle. They dragged out those who were wounded and dead.”
On Monday, an angry funeral procession for the two dead men walked and drove through the streets of Dili. Fifty heavily armed UN police prevented the mourners from walking with the men’s bodies to the Australian embassy building. According to media reports, anywhere from 500 to 3,000 people participated, including the men’s families. Reflecting the hostility and bitterness toward the Australian forces, trucks accompanying the funeral procession bore slogans such as “Australian army get out of East Timor”. A letter protesting the killings was later delivered to the embassy.
East Timorese authorities have rushed to assure local residents that the deaths will be properly probed, while the United Nations Integrated Mission in East Timor (UNMIT) has said that UN Police (UNPOL) are already investigating. No confidence can be placed in such inquiries, however, which will almost certainly exonerate the Australian troops.
Brigadier Mal Rerden, the Australian Commander of the International Security Forces (ISG) in East Timor, has already publicly cleared the soldiers involved and announced that they have returned to duty. Even before any official investigation, Australian Foreign Affairs Minister Alexander Downer claimed that the soldier who killed Soares acted in “self-defence” after steel arrows were fired at him.
An opposition member of the Timorese parliament, Antonio Ximenes, who is the brother-in-law of Atay Dasy, has told the media that people at the camp disputed the Australian claims. “The people say soldiers fired tear gas at them and then fired shots,” he said. Ximenes, the leader of the Christian Democratic Party, has called for an inquiry into “a crime against the rights of the East Timorese people”.
In the wake of the shootings, Downer callously declared that the incident “doesn’t come as a great surprise” given the instability in Dili in the past week. His remark simply highlights the extent to which the 930 ISG troops—800 Australian and 130 New Zealand—and the 1,000 UN police, mostly Portuguese, are there to suppress mounting social discontent and prop up the government.
In the two days before the shooting, Australian and other international security forces in Dili arrested 117 people in clashes with camp residents who resisted eviction and hungry people attempting to take rice from government warehouses. Several UN police have been injured and some 50 UN vehicles damaged by rocks thrown at them. In one incident, 700 bags of rice were taken from a Dili warehouse.
On February 22, the day before the fatal clash, a crowd of people burnt cars and attacked buildings belonging to the government and the UN. A UN police commander in Dili, Leitao da Silva, said 17 government cars and three UN vehicles were torched, “as well as about 20 houses”. UNPOL forces were deployed to guard two main rice warehouses, where people had stoned police while trying to break in.
Australian troops were dispatched to East Timor last May, not to ease the plight of ordinary working people, but to oust Prime Minister Mari Alkatiri, whom Canberra viewed as an obstacle to its economic and strategic interests. The Alkatiri government only reluctantly agreed, after years of bullying, to allow Australia to retain control over the lion’s share of the oil and gas reserves beneath the Timor Sea. Moreover, Alkatiri was looking to other quarters, notably Portugal, the former colonial power, and China to participate in drilling and refining East Timor’s undersea fields.
The full story of the Australian government’s role in provoking the political turmoil that became the pretext for its military intervention has not yet been fully told. When Alkatiri refused to resign, charges were fabricated by his opponents and aired by the Australian Broadcasting Corporation that he had recruited a “death squad” to assassinate his political rivals. Alkatiri was pressured to step aside and was replaced by Jose Ramos-Horta, who immediately expressed his loyalty to Canberra.
Nine months on, the fabricated charges against Alkatiri have been quietly dropped. At the same time, 100,000 of the 150,000 people displaced during last year’s political crisis are living in appalling conditions in flood-prone IDP camps. Most cannot leave because their homes have been destroyed or occupied and their extended families are too poor to provide for them. Drought has caused food shortages and high levels of malnutrition across the half-island of about a million people. An estimated 40 percent of the population was already living below the official poverty line of 55 US cents a day.
Yet, the UN and Horta’s government, with Canberra’s backing, are trying to close the refugee camps and threatening to end official food relief, in order to save money and force the displaced people to fend for themselves. According to a report in the Japan Times on February 22, the authorities are “worried that having settled in, the IDPs were becoming far too comfortable with running water and regular meals”.
The entire political and media establishment is complicit in the Howard government’s neo-colonial operation in East Timor, and the latest killings have, predictably, produced not a word of protest. While posturing as opponents of Australia’s participation in the occupation of Iraq, the Labor Party and the Greens back every military intervention in the Pacific to the hilt—from East Timor in 1999, to the Solomons in 2003 and 2006, and the Timor operation last year.
The Australian working class has a responsibility to oppose the Howard government’s neo-colonial agenda and the daily injustices it is carrying out against the peoples of the Pacific. We urge all working people and youth to support the Socialist Equality Party’s campaign for the New South Wales state elections, and our demand for the immediate and unconditional withdrawal of all Australian troops and officials from East Timor and the South Pacific as a whole.
http://www.wsws.org/articles/2007/mar2007/etim-m02.shtml
OPP @ Tue Mar 06, 2007 5:50 pm
BartSimpson BartSimpson:
EyeBrock EyeBrock:
What did Sweden do about the oppressive Indonesians?
SIDA (Sweden's foreign aid ministry) punished them by sending more money. That'll show them!
You don't even recognise the direct involvment of the American Government... and then you attempt to prove Swedens guilt in all of this.
I think you need some perspective Bart. I really do.
OPP @ Tue Mar 06, 2007 5:54 pm
stratos stratos:
Well OPP I suppose you will be the first to join your nations Military and go and free the people of East Timor. You know they are being oppressed by a minority group with in their country (in this case the Indonesians). Put up or shut up.
But wait you cant do that can you because OMG Iraq was being ruled by a minority group prior to the US invasion, this minority ruling class committed acts of torture, genocide and other horrors. What did your oh so great country of Sweeden do... thats right they bought oil from that country and its minority ruling elite and then cried when they were cast down.
Wow what a hypocrite you've show your self to be.
But wait you cant do that can you because OMG Iraq was being ruled by a minority group prior to the US invasion, this minority ruling class committed acts of torture, genocide and other horrors. What did your oh so great country of Sweeden do... thats right they bought oil from that country and its minority ruling elite and then cried when they were cast down.
Wow what a hypocrite you've show your self to be.
Well.. Indonesian millitary is no longer occupying East Timor... so, I guess me joining our millitary in that purpose would be kinda pointless, from that perspective atleast.
and... How am I a hypocrite?
stratos @ Tue Mar 06, 2007 7:52 pm
OPP OPP:
stratos stratos:
Well OPP I suppose you will be the first to join your nations Military and go and free the people of East Timor. You know they are being oppressed by a minority group with in their country (in this case the Indonesians). Put up or shut up.
But wait you cant do that can you because OMG Iraq was being ruled by a minority group prior to the US invasion, this minority ruling class committed acts of torture, genocide and other horrors. What did your oh so great country of Sweeden do... thats right they bought oil from that country and its minority ruling elite and then cried when they were cast down.
Wow what a hypocrite you've show your self to be.
But wait you cant do that can you because OMG Iraq was being ruled by a minority group prior to the US invasion, this minority ruling class committed acts of torture, genocide and other horrors. What did your oh so great country of Sweeden do... thats right they bought oil from that country and its minority ruling elite and then cried when they were cast down.
Wow what a hypocrite you've show your self to be.
Well.. Indonesian millitary is no longer occupying East Timor... so, I guess me joining our millitary in that purpose would be kinda pointless, from that perspective atleast.
and... How am I a hypocrite?
You whine and cry about how some groups are oppressed and tortured ect.. yet when its taken care of in other regions you blame the ones who went in. I'm positive if the US had gone into East Timor you would have yelled about the US involvement. How much did Sweeden do to end this you clearly state that the outside world did not get involved that means Sweeden did not also. What have you said or done to change your countries complicity in all of this?
Thus your attempt to call out other nations and not your own is HYPOCRITICAL
![[moon]](./images/smilies/action-smiley-081.gif "Moon")
icekarma2752 @ Tue Mar 06, 2007 8:59 pm
ArmyMan ArmyMan:
I thought Bush was after WMD's, not their resources
well china has WMDs...why doesnt bush invade them...because china would kick the crap out of them