A GOD-FORSAKEN PLACE

I have just been to East Timor. We have stuffed it up. Not consciously. Not even obviously.

We were the world leaders to go in there in 1999 and help them form an independent country. To help them get rid of the oppressive yoke of Indonesia which had kept a boot on their necks for nearly thirty years. After decades of Portuguese colonialism.

A yoke which, inexplicably, Labor and Liberal Governments in this country had enthusiastically embraced.

(We even had Prime Minister Keating secretly signing a groveling agreement with Jakarta about some so-called Indo-Aussie mutual peace agreement).

I say Australia and the world have betrayed this country yet again because we have put barriers up that a new country cannot climb over. Some of it is their fault. Much of it is ours.

I went to East Timor with the thought in my head that Xanana Gusmao was a sort of Pacific Nelson Mandela. Now I am not so sure. He was a brave man. Spent hard times in the jungle during what the East Timorese euphemistically now call “the troubles” and spent years in Indonesian jails for his cause and country.

But then, with independence, they played politics. The most obvious problem is the language. The main language is Portuguese. Yeah, right. I saw little kids in poor villages in East Timor being taught Portuguese. It was like seeing a child taught Latin in 2004.

It is true that East Timor is a former Portuguese colony. But they have gone. They ran away. People speak Portuguese in Portugal and Mozambique (I think) and Goa and Brazil and East Timor.

What does that do in the real world for this new poor country? They should be speaking Indonesian and English. As I said to a nun in a struggling school on the island’s northern tip: how many computer training books do you get here in Portuguese?

What it does do is keep the poorer people down. It’s a bit like the Brahmins in India. If you don’t speak Portuguese you can’t get a job with the public service. Get out of Dili and most people speak the local Tetum and Indonesian and English.

Keep in mind that 60 per cent of people in this country of only 800,000 people are under the age of twenty. Their parents were slaughtered by the drug-fuelled militia. Backed by Indonesian soldiers.

Last week I met a brave nun who hid more than twenty young girls in one room at a convent when crazed militia were trying to break down the front door. She eventually got them out and, in the dark, spirited them away to the hillside forests where they slept under logs. And avoided being raped.

In orphanages you see the fresh faces of kids who also have the dead fish eyes of children who have seen horror. Fourteen year olds who have been brutalised. Sixteen-year-olds whose parents have been killed.

On a five-hour winding drive from Dili through Bacau to a Catholic order monastery (the Salesians) at Don Bosco at Fuiloro, we saw the results of the hatred and the punishment.

Again and again and again there were burnt out houses. Sombre, blackened, concrete shells with roofs and windows gone. And you think: How could people be this harsh, this vindictive, to their own people?

As an atheist I went to a Catholic Mass. All these cute kids singing in their Sunday best. After the service we asked the village chief what he needed most. His village had not had water for nearly three months. They lived on the pure, but limited, water they got from green coconuts. Like most villages they had not had electricity for a year.

I bought the village a pump. It cost a thousand dollars. It helped change the quality of life for three hundred people. And it made me feel good and made me feel bad.

And it made me feel angry. We sent troops into this island to make them free. Why are governments so blinkered, so wrapped in red tape that we can’t do more? Why can’t we “hit the ground running”? Give them the tangible things they really need. Now.

Give me the brief – and a couple of million dollars -- and I will have a roof on every gutted building in East Timor in six months. I sat with a woman in a northern village in East Timor the other day. She was disabled. Her “home” was the size of a matchbox and her chook occupied more of it than she did. And I had hungry kids swarming over me.

We owe this country. We dudded them in World War Two, when we abandoned them to the Japanese, and I believe we betrayed them in 1975. It is true Australia, more than any country, came back to help them after the Independence vote was spat on by the Indonesians.

Bur right now, I believe we are screwing these people over oil royalties. I fear I am going to be ashamed by the final deal that talks about the “Continental Shelf” and self-serving, selfish, claimed boundaries.

I think we are legally and morally wrong. Just give it to them. Give them a chance. It is the only resource they have. Tourists are hardly flocking there.

Recently a woman sent me an e-mail after an Air-North trip from Darwin to Dili. She claimed that she had heard a couple of Australian negotiators in front of her boasting that their job was to “string out” the East Timorese as long as we could. And eventually screw them.

We can. We shouldn’t. And let’s get teaching Portuguese off the agenda as well.

Sunday, June 20, 2004

©Copyright Derryn Hinch 2004