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Sunanda K. Datta-Ray

IF ITALY was a geographical expression, as the Austrian statesman Metternich said, East Timor, which achieved independence on Sunday, is a state of mind that reflects the high idealism of the Timorese under their widely acclaimed leader, President Jose Alexandre `Xanana' Gusmao, on the one hand, and Western power politics on the other.

Indonesia's former military dictator, Gen Suharto, exploited the latter to stamp down on the former. It is tempting to look on East Timor's emancipation as a defining point in the struggles of small and vulnerable peoples. If this tiny half of an island can become independent after 400 years of Portuguese rule and 24 years of Indonesian military occupation, people might argue, so can Kosovo, Chechnya or Kashmir. This, in fact, explained India's refusal to join the peacekeeping exercise. But New Delhi need not fear any precedent. With all respect for the heroic sacrifices of the East Timorese, last Sunday's celebrations in Dili, the capital, really proved the triumph of realpolitik.

Now, East Timor's huge offshore oil and gas reserves, the world's seventh largest and valued at more than $40 billion, are up for grabs. Australia, which has seized a chunk of East Timor's territorial waters and fudged the maritime boundary between the two countries in the Timor Gap, is trying to force Dili to accept a deal that it struck with Indonesia in 1989. An American consortium goes back even further to a concession that Portugal is said to have granted in 1974. The fuel is worth `zillions' of dollars, to quote Mr Gareth Evans, a former Australian Foreign Minister. East Timor's tragic drama exposes the self-serving stratagems of the US, Britain and Australia. Now regarded as defenders of human rights and stout champions of Mr Gusmao, these three countries had no compunction in 1975, when Portugal's colonial administration crumbled in the wake of the anti-Salazar revolution, about selling the 850,000 East Timorese into Indonesian slavery.

A letter the Australian Ambassador in Jakarta, Mr Richard Woolcott, wrote to Canberra three months before the Indonesian invasion said it all. He advised Canberra's Department of Minerals and Energy that a treaty to grab East Timor's undersea wealth "could be much more readily negotiated with Indonesia than with or with independent Portuguese Timor." In other words, it would suit Australia if Indonesia swallowed up East Timor. Then came the ambassador's clincher. "I know I am recommending a pragmatic rather than a principled stand, but that is what national interest and foreign policy is all about." And so, Mr Gough Whitlam, who then headed Australia's Labour Party government, looked the other way as Indonesian troops marched in and ruthlessly suppressed protests. About 200,000 East Timorese are believed to have been killed.

The Britain and US had somewhat different reasons for supporting Jakarta's military takeover. Oil mattered to them too, but security was of even greater concern. Seeing Reds under every bed and deeply engaged in Vietnam, the Americans regarded Mr Gusmao's resistance movement as Leftist.

The US had helped Gen Suharto overthrow President Sukarno who was thought to be too pro-China and too non-aligned to suit Western strategic interests. With Britain following in its wake, the US, therefore, gave the Suharto regime every help and encouragement it needed to annex East Timor. American money and weapons poured into Indonesia under a project codenamed Iron Balance and the more staid Joint Combined Education and Training programme. Australia trained the dreaded Indonesian elite corps, Kopassus, commanded by Suharto's son-in-law, Gen Prabowo Subianto. Britain trained a selection of the Indonesian army's seniormost officers (some under supposedly independent schemes organised by universities and other institutions) while British Aerospace sold the machine guns used to shoot down East Timorese protesters.

At one time, Indonesia had 40,000 troops in East Timor. When 78.5 per cent of the voters opted for independence in a 1999 referendum under UN auspices, Kopassus spawned the militias called Red and White Iron and Thorn to murder people and terrorise and destroy villages. No one knows how many men, women and children were butchered and their bodies dumped into the sea. Three-quarters of the population were displaced, 70 per cent of East Timor's buildings were reduced to ruins, and about 300,000 refugees fled to West Timor. Wisely, Mr Gusmao, who has suffered much with his people, says that the point of independence is not his presidentship or the new flag that was hoisted after Sunday's Roman Catholic mass, but improving the lot of the impoverished East Timorese.

The world's newest republic will need a great deal of reconstruction aid since it does not have the resources to exploit natural resources. Australia does, and Mr John Howard's conservative government has promised aid. But it is driving a hard bargain. It wants the lion's share of the harvest from the Timor Gap.

It is trying every legal stratagem to deny Dili its maritime rights. Australia's Resources Minister, Mr Nick Minchin, once hinted that aid might be cut off if Dili did not play ball. East Timor exchanged Portuguese for Indonesian shackles when the West needed to placate a client regime in Jakarta. It was able to throw off the yoke only when Indonesia ceased to be a major counter in Western calculations. How fuel-rich East Timor survives will now depend largely on the terms of its relations with the US which will, in turn, shape its ties with the region and beyond.

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