Timor Sea oil slick may now be lapping Indonesian shores

The West Timor Care Foundation has sent the Australian Greens a video claiming the 10-week Montara oil spill is now lapping the south shores of the island of Timor. The five minute video shows some oil slicks and dead fish in local fishing grounds (though when I entered the location coordinates shown in the video it oddly came up in Philippine waters). The government also doubts the slick has approached the Indonesian coastline and has announced no compensation measures as yet.

But while there is doubt over this video, there is little doubt that that Montara spill is a major catastrophic event happening most out of reach of Australian news cameras. From 21 August to 3 November a possible 140,000 barrels of light crude oil, gas and condensate leaked into the sea. Well owners PTTEP claimed the well leaked 400 barrels of oil a day but could never back up this estimate. The Australian government said the maximum flow could be as much as 2,000 barrels a day. After four unsuccessful attempts to fix it, it was eventually plugged when heavy mud was successfully injected into the underground leaking well. The spill was complicated by a major fire on the rig which was put out two days earlier.

But the vast amount of oil leaked into the sea continues to cause havoc. Both West and East Timor authorities have asked Australia to take urgent actions to stop the impact on their island. The governor of East Nusa Tenggara (Indonesian West Timor) said Australia must take “immediate measures” to halt the spill. Meanwhile East Timorese President Jose Ramos Horta says the slick is impacting local fishermen’s livelihood and has requested compensation from Australia.

The Montara wellhead on the West Atlas rig is in Australian waters 250km northwest of the Truscott air base in Western Australia's Kimberley region and another 250km from the south Timor coastline. The rig is owned by Thai based oil company PTT Exploration and Production Public Company (commonly known as PTTEP) and run by its Australian subsidiary PTTEP Australasia Company Limited (PTTEP AA).

The problem started when a concrete plug 2.6km below the ocean floor cracked open leaking sweet crude oil, gas and condensate into the Timor Sea. The cause is not yet been announced. However an unnamed industry insider told WAtoday.com PTTEP knows what caused the problem. The source was working for PTTEP near the West Atlas rig on the day the leak occurred. He said one of six wells they were drilling began to leak because the company took corners by not plugging the well securely because they did not expect oil flow.

The company then went into panic mode as their increasingly desperate efforts failed to plug the leak. After three failed attempts, they invited Texan well control company Boots & Coots to review their operation. Other local industry companies Woodside, Inpex, Vermillion, AGR Petroleum Services and Apache also became involved on a “without prejudice” basis (to avoid liability) as the reputation of the Australian oil drilling industry plummeted. The rig then caught fire on the fourth attempt and took three days to put out. The leak was eventually plugging by steering a drill through rock 2.6km below the seabed to a 25cm diameter pipe.

After the problem was fixed, Resource Minister Martin Ferguson announced an inquiry into the matter to be headed by former senior public servant David Borthwick. The terms of reference are to report on the causes, the adequacy of the regulatory regime in response, the performance of those carrying out the response, environmental impacts and PTTEP’s role. Borthwick will have six months to carry out his investigation. The Australian Marine Conservation Society said the oil slick will leave a legacy for decades and called on the government to impose heavy sanctions and penalties on those responsible.

Greens Senator Rachel Siewert is also concerned the consequential impacts to Indonesia and East Timor may be outside Borthwick’s terms of reference. Minister Ferguson claims the spill is over 200kms from the Indonesian coastline. But Siewart called on the government to investigate the Timorese reports of oil contamination to see if they are linked to the Montara rig. "Australians expect that we will do the right thing by our near neighbours,” she said. “The Prime Minister needs to promise that he will ensure the company takes responsibility for impacts outside of Australian waters.”

Balibo at Brisbane International Film Festival

At the end of August East Timor celebrates the tenth anniversary of the remarkable referendum that would lead to its independence a year later. It was a stunning achievement for a country that had been forcibly occupied by Indonesia for 24 years after being abandoned by former colonial masters Portugal. The story of the fall of East Timor in 1975 is also one of Australia’s most shameful moments in foreign affairs and one that does no credit to either the Labor or Liberal governments that straddled the invasion period.

Tonight I went to the closing night of the Brisbane International Film Festival to see an important film about the period. Balibo (which today won two of BIFF's five jury prizes) tells the story of the five Australian and New Zealand television journalists who were killed at the border town for which the film is named. Balibo also tells the story of freelance reporter Roger East who was killed in Dili when he tried to find out the fate of the original five. All six were executed by Indonesian invaders a fact not admitted by Jakarta to this day. The official line is that the Balibo five were killed in “crossfire” while there has never been a satisfactory explanation for East’s death. Movie director Robert Connolly spoke to the audience of his desire for justice for these men before the start of the film and reiterated the point that this was an unashamedly political picture.

The lead character in Balibo is the sixth man, Roger East, played by Anthony LaPaglia who also produced the film. East was a Darwin based journalist in his early 50s who had served in the navy in World War II and covered many conflicts across the world as a journalist. As the Indonesian military build-up grew in late 1975, East was paying growing attention to what was going on across the Timor Sea. In October he was contacted by Jose Ramos Horta (played with great flair by American actor Oscar Isaac) who wanted him to set up a news agency in Timor to counteract Indonesian propaganda. East was reluctant but took the job when he heard that five journalists working for Channels Seven and Nine had gone missing in Balibo.

East arrived in Dili early the following month and on 10 November he scooped AAP and Reuters when he published eyewitness accounts of the death of the five journalists. The story of the five is interspersed with East's story in grainy flashbacks. According to the film East and Ramos Horta went to Balibo together but there is no evidence this actually happened. East did intend to travel to the front line but in the end the front line came to him. He stayed at the waterfront Hotel Turismo and refused Fretelin pleas to move to the rear of the town where he could escape to the mountains. The hotel was too handy to the telephones out of the country. So East was caught out when the invasion happened.

On 6 December, US President Gerald Ford and his Secretary of State Henry Kissinger visited Jakarta where they gave Indonesia the green light for the overthrow of the “Communist” Fretelin government. The general invasion of East Timor "Operation Komodo" began a day later with parachute drops of Indonesian troops into Dili. At 7am, East left the hotel and went to the nearby Marconi communication centre. He contacted Darwin to say that troops were in the city and the airport had been taken. East also said he expected the communication centre to fall soon. As Desmond Ball and Hamish McDonald’s book “Death in Balibo, Lies in Canberra” says, this communication probably cost East his life. A Timorese misson sent to rescue him failed when it encountered heavy Indonesian resistance.

In the film Balibo, East was captured in the communication centre, but this is contradicted by Ball and McDonald’s account. They say he hid out in Dili for most of that day and night. However he was eventionally arrested either during the night or early the next morning and taken to the port. At 8am, eye-witnesses saw him with his hand tied behind his back with wire at the side of the pier. He was executed by rifle fire. His body floated in the water alongside dozens of others who were either associated with Fretelin or picked out because they were Chinese.

The newly installed Fraser Government followed the lead of Whitlam and did their bit to help Indonesia by confiscating pro-Fretelin transmitter equipment near Darwin. Over 130,000 people would die in the 24 bitter years of fighting that followed. But the Timorese never accepted their status as Indonesians and eventually wore the invaders down. Australia would eventually restore some of its reputation in Timor with its lead role in restoring peace under the UNMISET mission.

But Connolly and LaPaglia’s film is determined to get justice for the six Australians who died in the invasion. On the weekend LaPaglia said the filmmakers felt a responsibility to the families of the dead journalists. "For us to make a crap movie about their loved ones would have just been rubbing salt into the wound, so we took a great deal of care - assembling the script and cross-checking all the facts,” he said. “That's why it took seven years.” Despite it not quite being the "true story" it promises to be, the end product is well worth the wait.

East Timor presses charges against Jose Belo

East Timorese journalist Jose Antonio Belo has returned home from Australia where he was seeking support against an upcoming prosecution over his attempts to expose official corruption. Belo is the editor and founder of popular Timorese weekly newspaper Tempo Semanal. He is facing a six year jail sentence after being charged with criminal defamation. Last year Belo wrote an article that suggested Justice Minister Lucia Lobato had improperly awarded government contracts to friends and business contacts. The article was based on text messages the newspaper had received which suggested corrupt dealings by the government minister.

While the trial date has not been set, the East Timor and Indonesia Action Network (ETAN) called on East Timor’s prosecutor-general to drop the criminal defamation charges against the paper and its editor. On 26 January, John M. Miller, ETAN’s National Coordinator said neither should have to face charges under an “obsolete and repressive law”. Timor’s repressive defamation laws were inherited from its old Indonesian masters. ETAN says the Timorese government had proposed decriminalising defamation under a new penal code. However the new code has not yet been enacted, although drafted several years ago. He now urges the state to drop the charges. “Rather than attack the messenger,” he said, “Timor-Leste's leadership should support freedom of expression and encourage a dynamic, investigative media”.

Tempo Semanal published the offending article entitled “SMS texts evidence: Minister for Justice Gives Herself And Friends Projects” on 12 October 2008. In it, Tempo claimed they had received SMS texts which were exchanged by the Minister for Justice Lucia Lobato and Timorese and international businessmen. The text messages were discussions for a tender to construct a new fence for the Becora prison, the acquisition of uniforms for prison officers, and the design, issuance and management of national identity documentation. The issue was that the million dollar discussions took place before these projects were sent out for public tender.

The minister argued Belo violated her privacy and journalists’ ethical code by publishing the text messages. The government served notice to Belo in December he was facing defamation charges. However the Office of the Prosecutor-General refused to give Tempo Semanal a copy of the charges claiming the relevant documents were confidential. On 19 January, the prosecutor’s office questioned him for three hours. Belo said he does not any money or any resources to fight the charges. “So we can't fight a person who has influence [and] who has money,” he said. “I presume it is very, very difficult to win this case in the court."

This is not the first time Belo has faced imprisonment. He was a member of the clandestine resistance movement against Indonesian rule and was arrested in 1995, aged 23, after being involved in a peaceful demonstration calling for the release of independence leader Xanana Gusmao. Belo spent the next 18 months in jail. Afterwards he fled to the mountains to join the guerrilla fighters. He was captured in 1997 and spent more time in jail. He was released before the 1999 referendum that voted for independence and he went on to report the subsequent Indonesian massacres.

Since then he has worked as a freelance correspondent and cameraman with Associated Press, the ABC, SBS and Channel Seven. In 2006, he founded Tempo Semanal with $500 of his own money, a $1000 donation and one computer. For the first six months, his staff worked without pay. But its circulation grew rapidly and he now employs 20 staff. Belo accuses the government of not genuinely wanting freedom of speech in East Timor. “They don't want the journalists to do some hard stories, that's why they go after me.” he told ABC’s PM this evening. “And if they get me then other journalists are not going to be brave to do the hard stories.”

The betrayal of the Balibo Five

The Melbourne International Film Festival has announced that Robert Connolly’s new film “Balibo” will be premiered at their 2008 event in July-August. Connolly is the director of “The Bank” and “Three Dollars” and his third film is currently filming in Darwin. Connolly may struggle to meet the festival date as he is finding it difficult to get accommodation for his cast and crew in Darwin’s tourist high season.

The film stars Anthony LaPaglia as Australian journalist Roger East who investigated the murder of five fellow journalists at the border town of Balibo during the Indonesian invasion of Portuguese Timor in 1975. East himself died in Dili at the hands of the Indonesian Army but it is the fate of the Balibo Five he investigated that has had the bigger profile as facts emerged after the event that cast shame on two Australian Governments of the era: Whitlam’s and Fraser’s.

Despite the fact there have been multiple official enquiries about the incident, the most forensic analysis of what actually happened in Timor appears in the book “Death in Balibo: Lies in Canberra” by Desmond Ball and Hamish McDonald. Ball is an intelligence expert with telling insights into the activities of the shadowy Defence Signals Directorate, the Australian government body charged with listening in on Indonesian operations. McDonald meanwhile was at the scene of the crime near the time. His fortune was that he was a Jakarta-based reporter (for the Sydney Morning Herald and the now defunct National Times, among others) so he saw the scene from the winning side.

This was not the case for five men who tried to report the war for Australian TV from the Timorese side. While it may amaze those that watch the rubbish served up by Channels Seven and Nine in the name of news these days, it was reporters from these stations that died while trying to tell the story. Their crews deliberately rushed to the border to report the unfolding story of Indonesia's invasion of East Timor.

It was a complicated story. Timor was a historical curiosity and a hangover from the earliest times of European navigation when Portugal was a major power. Their fall from power can be traced to the independence of Brazil in 1822, but they continued to maintain a scattered empire in the 20th century in places such as Angola, Mozambique, Goa, Macao and Timor. India liberated Goa in 1961 and the rest of the empire fell apart when the long-standing Portuguese dictatorship was overthrown in 1974.

Timorese nationalists felt the winds of change and several liberation groups began to agitate for a role in their own destiny. The largest of these, Fretelin, took their stamp from Mozambique and were steeped in 1970s socialist liberation ideas. Its leaders included the journalist Jose Ramos-Horta and army lieutenant Roque Rodrigues. They sought the earliest possible independence from Portugal.

The second was the Timorese Democratic Union, the UDT, which was favoured by the 25,000 Portuguese-speaking middle class of the island. They were more favourable to Lisbon but also wanted eventually independence with a more cautious timetable of a decade or more. The least influential group of Timorese were the Association for the Integration of Timor with Indonesia which became known as Apodeti. Not only unpopular within Timor, they were mostly ignored by their larger neighbour until about 1974.

While Jakarta adopted a position of a Pan-Indonesian nation when it gained independence after World War II, it was content to set its borders as the old Dutch East Indies colony to begin with. This included West Papua which it annexed in 1961. But it left the Portuguese colony alone until its interest was pique by the fall of the Portuguese dictatorship in the 1974 carnation revolution.

In September that year Indonesian President Suharto’s plans for Timor were boosted by a visit of Australian Prime Minister Gough Whitlam. According to the official Australian record of that trip, Whitlam explicitly stated Portuguese Timor should become part of Indonesia but only with the “properly expressed wishes” of the people of Portuguese Timor. Indonesia knew it could never influence the Marxist-leaning Fretelin, but with the support of Apodesi it could possibly buy off the middle-class UDT.

Meanwhile the Australian government began to assist Indonesia in its ambitions by denying Fretelin all official succour. They refused hospitality to Ramos-Horta in the Dili consulate and would not meet him in Canberra. Portugal was no help either as it dealt with its own internal problems. Throughout the rest of 1974 and into 1975 Jakarta began to launch a military build-up around East Timor. Radio stations blasted pro-Indonesian propaganda across the border claiming that Communist Fretelin were victimising the pro-Indonesian “majority”.

Australia was well aware of the build-up. The Indonesians went as far as briefing the Australian embassy of their plans, cleverly counting on the fact that if the Aussies didn’t complain to begin with, they were complicit in the eventual invasion. But if the Australian Government was compliant, the country’s media was not and was increasingly asking Canberra questions about the fate of Timor.

The trigger for action was the UDT coup of August 1975. In an effort to counter the growing strength of Fretelin, UDT took control of the Timorese capital Dili and sent the small Portuguese force packing. But this backfired when Fretelin overwhelmed them four days later. By September Fretelin had de facto control over East Timor.
The coup sent Australian newspapers and broadcasters scrambling to get people on the ground to report the quickly changing situation. Against a Government ban, then Channel Nine news director Gerald Stone and his boss Kerry Packer hired a fishing trawler to cross to Dili. Stone said Packer took his own arsenal along to enjoy target practise from the back of the boat. Fretelin encouraged journalists to come. Ramos-Horta said later: “it was the only weapon we had in this fighting for influencing, [and] for winning sympathy around the world”.

Channel Seven sent a three man crew to investigate the war. The crew’s reporter was 29 year old Greg Shackleton. Shackleton was keen for a challenge, bored as he was with his Melbourne round of stories on domestic politics, car sales and industrial disputes. With him went 27 year old New Zealand cameraman Gary Cunningham and 21 year old sound recorder Tony Stewart. Shackleton’s boss told him to be careful and avoid “foolhardiness”.

Fresh from the success of their trawler raid into Dili, Nine’s Stone wanted to launch a second expedition to obtain proof of Indonesian incursion into Timor. He sent in a two man team: 28 year old Scottish born reporter Malcolm Rennie and British cameraman Brian Peters who had accompanied Stone and Packer to Dili on the trawler. Stone also warned them against adventurism and told them the object of the trip was to get the story out.

Both crews were on the ground in Dili and working by 10 October 1975. All five men had just four days to live. The Seven crew drove to the Indonesian border accompanied by a Fretelin driver. On the 12th, Melbourne’s Seven news carried Shackleton’s earlier report from Dili of the Indonesian capture of a border village. A day later the two Nine men arrived in Balibo where they met the Seven crew. Balibo was the most forward position held by Falintil, Fretelin’s armed wing. An Indonesian frigate lay close to shore off the Indonesian border town of Motaain. Rennie interviewed Ramos-Horta near the border. Ramos-Horta predicted a “massive attack” and took both crew’s footage back with him to Dili. The Australians settled in an abandoned house they dubbed “the embassy” or occasionally the “Commonwealth Secretariat” to take into account the Brits and Kiwis in their ranks.

The last footage of the men alive was taken by Portuguese TV which was in Balibo on the 15th. Their film showed four of the men drinking beer in the square with their shirts off. It also showed their house with a sign and flag painted “Australia”. Next to it was a slogan “Falintil esta sempre com o povo Maubere” (Falintil is always with the Maubere people). Maubere was the Fretelin word for the East Timorese common man. Before the Portuguese left, the Australians asked them had they any beer or wine as they expected to stay in Balibo a few days.

Both Indonesian and Australian authorities were aware of their presence there. Indonesia was about to get into serious phase of “Operation Flamboyant” – their covert war in Timor. They were not about to let five nosy journalists get in the way of their ambitions and made plans to execute them as a matter of priority once they took Balibo. Their plans to do so were intercepted by the blandly named Defence Signals Directorate (DSD), Australia’s most secret intelligence organisation. The DSD grew out of Australia’s wartime collaboration with British and American forces to intercept radio transmissions and break ciphers.

By the 1970s, the key countries that the DSD were monitoring were Indonesia and China. DSD knew exactly what Operation Flamboyant was all about and also knew that five journalists were in the danger area. They intercepted one message about them that said “we can’t have any witnesses”. Whitlam’s Government knew this too. But with Opposition leader Malcolm Fraser about to instigate the dismissal by pulling the pin on supply, Whitlam’s own tenure was too insecure to worry about five journalists in Timor.


The invasion began at midnight 15 October with sustained mortar attacks on the border towns. By the following mid morning, armed attackers appeared in Balibo. There is conflicting testimony to what exactly happened to the five journalists. However the broad consensus is that Indonesian soldiers fired into the “embassy” before one of the journalists emerged. He was motioned to a back wall where he was killed with a knife in the back.

Another Timorese witness saw three more bodies inside the house slumped in chairs at the table while a fourth body lay against a wall. Others heard orders to “shoot them all”. Later, the Apodesi commander of the raid Tomas Goncalves boasted of having killed two himself with a knife. The Indonesians then burned all five bodies. The DSD intercepted a signal about the journalists which said “we already have them under control”.

Fretelin reported the five men as missing on the 17th. Later that day, Canberra and the embassy in Jakarta were alerted to the DSD intercepted signal. Their reaction was to pass blame to the TV networks for sending their men into a danger area. But to protect the DSD, they could not publicly acknowledge the men were dead. Jakarta wanted to conceal its involvement in what it pretended was a “civil war” while a complicit Canberra didn’t want their knowledge of it exposed.

On 20 October, the Jakarta daily Kompas reported an interview with the UDT leader who said the bodies of “four men” were found in a house in Balibo. This was corroborated by more evidence later in the week that Westerners had died but the numbers were always fuzzy. For three weeks, the Government pleaded ignorance until Whitlam wrote to Suharto asking for confirmation. Suharto never responded and Whitlam was sacked four days later.

A month after their deaths, Indonesian secret police handed Australian ambassador Richard Woolcott a box containing charred human remains, camera gear, notepapers and papers belonging four of the men. The next of kin of the men did not find out until 5 December, the day the remains of the journalists were buried in a Jakarta cemetery. The mourners were embassy staff and spouses, resident Australian journalists and one Indonesian journalist.

By then Indonesian forces had invaded Dili. Roger East was there to see them land. He reported most of the town’s citizens had fled to the hills. He refused pleas by Fretelin to retreat to the back of town. Instead he went to the communication centre where he said Indonesians were in the city, had taken the airport and would be at his building at any moment. This transmission cost him his life. But while the death of six Australian journalists in defence of freedom is a tragedy, it is far less than the one of a million Timorese that gave their life to their country over the next 25 years. The lesson of Balibo is that Canberra’s appeasement of Indonesia was not only cowardly – it was proved wrong by time. Suharto was overthrown in 1997 and Timor Leste became independent three years later. The 1975 graffiti held good: Falintil was always with the Maubere people.

Kirsty Sword Gusmao tells of Timor attack

The Australian wife of East Timor Prime Minister Xanana Gusmao has spoken yesterday about how their home was surrounded by armed rebels minutes before her husband was attacked. Kirsty Sword Gusmao said armed men had surrounded their home on Monday morning while Xanana was out. She made her three children lie under the bed while the house was defended by a small local security contingent. As Sword Gusmao then tried to ring her husband, his own convoy came under attack. "I attempted to call Xanana at that point and got through to his driver, but it was right at the time his vehicle was being ambushed,” she said. “So I was hardly able to get the message through that we were in peril.”

While none of them were injured in the ambush, Timorese President Jose Ramos-Horta remains in a critical condition in a Darwin hospital after a simultaneous attack. Rebel leader Alfredo Reinhado was killed in the attack on Ramos-Horta. A Timorese friendship group in Sword Gusmao’s native Bendigo in Victoria spoke of their shock of the attack. The Maubisse Friendship Community Committee raises money for the Maubisse community in East Timor’s central highlands, approximately 70km from Dili. Bendigo councillor and Maubisse committee member Wayne Gregson said “We’d had some contact with a senior bureaucrat from East Timor as recently as last week in Bendigo and he said he thought the situation was improving.” Sword Gusmao was due to visit Bendigo in April but that is now thought to be unlikely.

Born in Melbourne in 1966, Kirsty grew up in Bendigo in central Victoria. As a young girl, she seriously considered a ballet career. She abandoned this idea and studied languages (majoring in Indonesian and Italian) at Monash University in Melbourne. In 1985, while Kirsty Sword was at university, she started to mix with members of the Timorese resistance, even translating some of Xanana's letters. Her primary school headmaster father Brian taught Kirsty her first words of Indonesian when she was just four. Her family took great interest in Asia and politics and her mother Rosalie, also a teacher, marched against the Vietnam War. The family went on holidays to Bali and Jakarta. She told the Saturday Telegraph in 2003: “as a teenager I fell in love with Indonesia and was always saving up to go back,” she said.

Sword met Timorese student Joao at Monash. She said Joao "brought East Timor's sad story to life for me". Sword travelled to East Timor in 1990 on a mission to deliver materials to supporters of independence. On graduation, Kirsty and Joao migrated to England to work on the Refugee Studies Program at Oxford University. Sword landed a job at Yorkshire Television as a researcher on a documentary about the Timorese struggle for Independence. As it happens, the documentary makers were in Timor at a decisive moment and captured the massacre at Santa Cruz cemetery in the documentary they eventually called “Cold Blood”. Sword had returned to England before the massacre but had met many of those killed. The incident left a profound impression on the young woman.

In May 1992, she went to Jakarta to closer to the struggle. She supported herself in the Indonesian capital by teaching English. Five months later, she learned of the Dili arrest of the leader of the Timorese resistance Xanana Gusmao. Gusmao had led Falintil, "the national liberation army" in the mountains of East Timor since the Indonesian invasion in 1975. Imprisoned in Jakarta’s Cipinang jail, Gusmao had heard of Sword’s presence in Indonesia and asked for her help with the organisation.

The couple first met in 1994. Xanana was serving a twenty year sentence for subversion while Kirsty worked for the clandestine East Timorese independence movement in Jakarta. The pair started a romance using letters smuggled through prison bars. “There were many times when I questioned if I was being realistic,” Kirsty said of this time, 'as we could not put the relationship to the test.” But after she met him for the first time, they began to discuss marriage. They would have to be patient while Gusmao remained incarcerated.

While her fiancé languished in a Jakarta cell, Sword redoubled her efforts on behalf of Timorese independence. Her official role was development worker for an Australian aid agency, and an English teacher. However she led a double life on behalf of the clandestine independence movement. For her spywork, Sword adopted the pseudonym of Ruby Blade because, she said, “it sounded kind of Agatha Christie”.

Gusmao was released in 1999 after his nation voted for independence in a referendum. Xanana and Kirsty finally married in 2000 in a traditional Timorese wedding. Gusmao became the newly independent country’s first president two years later Kirsty Sword Gusmao became the country’s First Lady. She wrote her autobiography A Woman of Independence in 2003. "I had put my life on a parallel course with his and indeed that of East Timor" she wrote then. That parallel course could easily have run to a parallel end this week.

Timor reels after assassination attempts on Ramos-Horta and Gusmao

East Timor president Jose Ramos-Horta is now recovering in Royal Darwin hospital after surviving an assassination attempt at his home in the capital Dili this morning. The Nobel Peace laureate Ramos-Horta survived gunshots in the arm and stomach. The predawn raid was carried out by fugitive rebel leader Alfredo Reinhado who was shot dead by Timorese loyalists in the attack. Ramos Horta underwent emergency surgery in Dili before being flown to Australia. Prime Minister Xanana Gusmao was also attacked in his car but was unhurt in what appears to be a co-ordinated coup attempt against the East Timorese leadership.

The incidents which began the drama occurred just after dawn this morning. Dili-based Diligence blog reported a friend who lived within 5km of Ramos-Horta’s presidential residence hearing gunfire around 6:30am which lasted for 15 minutes. Diligence reported that the gunfire started while Ramos-Horta was taking his morning walk. Ramos-Horta then managed to get home which about 500m to 1km away where he was attacked in a second flurry of gunfire a few minutes later. He was immediately taken to the Australian military hospital at Dili heliport.

According to government spokesman Major Domingos da Camara, two cars carrying rebels soldiers passed Ramos-Horta's house on the outskirts of the capital, Dili, at around 7 a.m. local time and began shooting, da Camara said. The guards returned fire, he said. The rebels were led by Alfredo Reinhado, an army major who has been on the run since March 2006. Government sources have confirmed Reinhado was killed in the attack on Ramos-Horta’s residence.

Alfredo Reinhado was from the west of the country where as most of the new country’s rulers are from the east. Easterners were seen as patriots while westerners were viewed with suspicion due to their closer relations with the former Indonesian occupiers. Violence between the two groups erupted in Dili in 2006. The violence started after then-PM Mari Alkatiri sacked 595 soldiers over minor grievances. The sacked army men were mostly westerners and Reinhado protected them when they went on strike.

Reinhado deserted and he and the rebel soldiers headed for the hills outside Dili. Reinhado was later arrested but escaped custody. He remained in hiding until he agreed to meet Ramos-Horta in August 2007. His troops were active again in the last few days. According to Timorese blogger Catholicgauze, Reinhado "got greedy" and attempted to seize the presidency and launch a coup. Catholicgauze hopes that with Reinhado’s death “perhaps easterners and westerners will have the chance to start again”.

The country could certainly do with a break or two. Over half a million people died during the 25 year Indonesian occupation. The country has struggled since independence to thread its way to economic prosperity. The 2006 Human Development Report (pdf) for Timor Leste from the UN Development Program showed that the poorest country in a poor region was becoming even poorer with almost every indicator of health and collective wellbeing in decline. Yet Timor showed an optimistic face when 1996 Nobel Peace laureate Jose Ramos-Horta won an overwhelming victory in the 2007 presidential elections in May 2007 with a massive 73 per cent of the vote.

In December 2007, the UN pledged to reform East Timor’s police and military after the gun battles that tore the country apart in 2006. The news came just a month after Reinhado threatened to turn to violence again if the demands of his 600 renegade soldiers were not addressed. Now Reinhado is no longer around to make threats. Hopefully Ramos-Horta will make a full recovery. His troubled country needs him at the peak of his powers.

UN offers hope to Timor-Leste

The UN has pledged to reform East Timor’s police and military after the gun battles that tore at the heart of the new country last year. General-Secretary Ban Ki-Moon made the pledge after meeting Timorese president Jose Ramos Horta in the capital Dili on Friday. Timor-Leste has made perilous progress to democracy since its separation from Indonesia in 1999 and last year saw several weeks of anarchy and gang warfare that was only ended by a strengthening of the UN force. Now Ban promised that the UN and the international community “will fully support reform of the security force and judiciary.”

This is good news designed to protect East Timor’s fragile democracy and its hard won independence from Indonesia. The Democratic Republic of Timor-Leste founded in 2002 was the world’s first 21st century sovereign state and one of the poorest. In 1975 it declared its independence from a Portugal, which was convulsed in its own struggle for democracy. But after a few short weeks of civil war between feuding parties East Timor was annexed by Indonesia.

For the next 27 years its official UN status would remain that of "self-governing territory under Portuguese administration”. This was a crucial distinction: While it was a de facto Indonesian province with the explicit and implicit approval of successive American and Australian governments, it remained on the UN agenda. But the cold war imperatives that caused the US to overlook Suharto’s excesses no longer existed in the 1990s. With the world seeing film footage of Indonesian atrocities, the tide turned and by 1999 with Suharto gone, Indonesia offered a surprise independence referendum. 78.5 percent of East Timorese voted in favour of independence.

The story of the former Portuguese colony’s long road to freedom is achingly told in David Scott’s Last Flight Out of Dili. David Scott has devoted much of his life to the cause of Timor-Leste. He was one of the last Australians to set foot in the colony before Indonesia’s illegal invasion in 1975. He was there on behalf of the Australian Council for Overseas Aid charged with the mission of finding out the consequences of Fretelin’s unilateral declaration of independence from Portugal. As the Indonesian forces closed in, he stayed on to help at Dili hospital. He was eventually evacuated with the last flight out of the country avoiding the inevitable execution that awaited those few foreigners that remained.

That fate had befallen five journalists for Britain, Australia and NZ two months earlier on the border between West and East Timor. They became known by the border town in which they were slain: the Balibo Five. They were executed under the orders of Indonesian commanding officer Yosfiah Younus who would become Minister of Information in the 1998-99 government of BJ Habibie.

After the Indonesian invasion, responsibility for resistance fell to the 35,000 strong Falintil (Armed Forces for the Liberation of Timor) who fought from the mountains for next 24 years. Thousands of civilians gave clandestine support and sent reports to the outside world in the face of a media blackout. They faced a 30,000 strong Indonesian army equipped with the latest in American and British equipment. Casualties were roughly even on both sides, about 13,000 to 15,000 died on each side.

Scott accused Australia of four major betrayals in the long independence struggle. The first was in World War II. He quotes Swiss historian Henry Frei who says Japan had no intention of invading neutral Portuguese Timor. Portugal was determined to remain neutral to be a negotiating channel. However a force of 400 Australian troops landed in the province giving Japan the excuse to invade. 40,000 Timorese died in the subsequent occupation.

Scott cites the second betrayal as Gough Whitlam’s support for Timorese integration with Indonesia in 1975 before President Suharto himself was totally convinced by his generals. Throughout his political career Whitlam remained a staunch supporter of Indonesia’s right to the province. Whitlam was aware about the Balibo attack and told the Indonesians his government would not stand in the way of an invasion. His legacy was upheld by the Fraser government that replaced him after the December 1975 dismissal. Australia refused Jose Ramos Horta entry for 8 years and closed down a Darwin radio station that was the only link to Timor from the outside world. The Hawke, Keating and Howard governments that followed Fraser all supported the ‘de jure’ status of Indonesia’s occupation.

The third betrayal occurred in 1999 after the UN Security Council guaranteed the East Timorese the right to campaign and vote in the referendum without fear. This was subverted by Indonesian army elements that conducted a campaign of terror, organised militias, and tried to intimidate people into not voting for independence. Then after the vote, the embittered Indonesians unleashed a scorched earth policy of revenge that levelled East Timor's towns and villages and left hundreds dead. Not until Dili was destroyed did Australia offer troops to lead a UN intervention force.

Scott says that there was a fourth betrayal that occurred around the same time. Australia had intelligence intercepts of Indonesian army plans to terrorise the population ahead of the referendum and also knew about its plan to destroy the new nation if the referendum succeeded. But John Howard’s government refused to divulge this information to either Indonesia or the UN.

It wasn’t until Australian NGOs and unions took action, did the Government move. The level of public anger about the rape of East Timor took many by surprise and it was grassroots action that had the most effect. The Maritime Union of Australia (MUA) banned the movement of all Indonesian freight. Churches and community organisations protested about the tragedy that was apparently happening “next door”. Finally an 8,000 strong multi-national InterFET (International Force for East Timor) contingent led by Australian Major-General Peter Cosgrove arrived in the country. They showed great skill negotiating Indonesian acceptance of the mission and the Indonesian withdrawal.

On 29 December 1999, the Indonesian flag was lowered for the last time in Dili. The UN became the transitional authority with a two year timetable for rebuilding and preparing East Timor for self-government. Portugal finally recognised its old colony’s independence in May 2002 as did Indonesia and Timor-Leste took its seat in the UN three months later. But the transition has been painful.

Fierce fighting between former allies broke out in May 2006 and there were renewed clashes in the run-up to the 2007 presidential election. That election was won by 1996 Nobel Peace Prize winner Jose Ramos Horta. He now says he wants Australian-led international troops to stay at least until the end of 2008 and the U.N. mission until 2011. "We will review it along the way together with the United Nations," Ramos-Horta told reporters after meeting Kevin Rudd today. "We should not repeat the mistakes of the past, a hasty withdrawal of the UN and our friends."

Jose Ramos-Horta wins East Timor's first presidential election

Jose Ramos-Horta has claimed an overwhelming victory after Wednesday’s presidential run-off election in East Timor. Ramos-Horta ended up with 70 per cent of the vote to claim a clear mandate to rule. "I'm happy with the result," Ramos-Horta told Australia's ABC Radio in the capital Dili, "I will carry out my duties according to the constitution and listen to advice from everybody so I can take Timor Leste to a better future."

Ramos-Horta is the first directly elected president. He replaces Xanana Gusmao, the former resistance leader, who has led the country since independence in 2002. Ramos-Horta’s defeated opponent, the parliamentary speaker, Francisco "Lu-Olo" Guterres conceded defeat this afternoon. The Fretelin backed candidate is now turning his attentions to parliamentary elections next month. “What is important now is to prepare ourselves to face the upcoming election," he said. "We will also observe how they (Ramos-Horta’s administration) will manage the country."

The election result now needs to be rubber-stamped by the court of appeal. The mood in the capital Dili was calm with no sign of celebration parades or protests. The country’s security forces had been on high alert after trouble marred the first round of elections last month. The EU has 40 monitors in Timor to monitor the two presidential elections and the parliamentary election. EU head of mission Jose Pomes Ruiz said the run-off was more peaceful than last month's poll, but he also criticised both candidates for “unnecessary aggression”.

Jose Ramos-Horta is a former Nobel Peace Prize winner who spearheaded the overseas end of the campaign for East Timor's independence. Born in Dili in 1949 to a Timorese mother and Portuguese father, he was educated in a Catholic mission and became involved in the struggle for independence from Portugal. He was exiled for two years before returning to take a role in the short-lived East Timor republic of 1975. Aged 25, he was appointed foreign minister. He left the country to appeal to the UN three days before Indonesia invaded. It would the start of a long exile from his homeland.

As well as promoting the cause of a free East Timor, he had an illustrious academic record. He studied Public International Law at The Hague Academy of International Law, gained an MA from Antioch University in the US and did post-graduate at Columbia University, Strasbourg and Oxford. He is fluent in five languages: Tetun (native language), Portuguese (official), French, English, and Spanish.

In 1988, he left Fretelin, the dominant East Timor party he helped found. He would henceforth be an independent voice for freedom. In 1996, the Norwegian Nobel Committee honoured the East Timor struggle by awarding the Peace Prize jointly to Ramos-Horta and fellow countryman, Bishop Carlos Filipe Ximenes Belo. The committee consider Ramos-Horta the “leading international spokesman for East Timor's cause since 1975” . They cited the two men’s “sustained and self-sacrificing contributions for a small but oppressed people” and hoped the award would spur efforts to find a diplomatic solution to the Timor conflict “based on the people's right to self-determination”.

When East Timor finally did regain its right to self-determination, Ramos-Horta was the obvious choice for the nascent country’s Foreign Minister. He resigned this role in 2006 after a military crisis that embroiled the country. Ramos-Horta relieved the aggrieved soldiers of duty who marched through Dili demanding to be re-instated. The protests that followed saw police shoot against soldiers, killing five and causing 20,000 people to flee the city in terror. Ramos-Horta assumed Defence Ministry responsibilities during the crisis. Weeks of anarchy followed with the rebels backed by Prime Minister Mari Alkatiri. Ramos-Horta resigned from the government in protest. With pressure growing internationally, Alkatiri resigned and Ramos-Horta was installed as interim Prime Minister.

Ramos-Horta is widely viewed as more friendly to the West than the Fretelin Party he has defeated. He wants to see more foreign investment in what is Asia’s poorest country. The country still relies on foreign aid but its best economic prospects lie in tourism, fisheries, coffee and gas. Ramos-Horta told a 2006 interview he wants Australia to give it a “50/50 per cent share of the resources in the Greater Sunrise area. Greater Sunrise is one of the richest gas fields in the entire Asia Pacific region”. With Australian foreign minister Alexander Downer leading the plaudits for the new president, now might be a good time for Ramos-Horta to press home his country’s claims.

Timor in crisis

Timor Leste is the official Portuguese name of the country most English speaking people know as East Timor. Timor Leste became independent in 2002 after a long history of colonisation by the Portuguese and Indonesia. Like many newly post-colonial independent nations, it is now struggling to come to terms with its own identity and is in the middle of a political and humanitarian crisis. It is a crisis whose roots are steeped in the history of the country and is in many ways an inevitable consequence of that history.

Timor-Leste is one half of the island of Timor. Timor is a variant of the Malay word ‘Timur’ which means east and gets its name from the fact it is the most easterly of a chain of islands such as Bali, Lombok and Flores collectively called the Lesser Sunda islands. All these islands and the western half of Timor itself are part of Indonesia.

The earliest people to inhabit the island were Australoid people who fanned out through the islands over 40,000 years ago on their new way to New Guinea and Australia. A second wave of Melanesians arrived 3,000 years ago on their way out to conquer the Pacific. Proto-Malays also arrived and between them a fairly advanced system of government emerged under local chieftains speaking a language called ‘tetum’. Modern Tetum (also called ‘Tetun’) was greatly influenced by Portuguese and is still the language of 85% of Timor’s modern inhabitants.

The Portuguese first arrived on the island in the 16th century and commenced trading the precious sandalwood with the local tribes. Timor had the highest quality white sandalwood in the Indies. The Dutch East India Company founded in 1602 was also heavily involved in the area. The Dutch government had given the company the right to run the business of exporting spices to Europe as an effective state from their capital Batavia (Jakarta). The Dutch took slaves from Timor to work the nutmeg and mace plantations in Banda. Portugal fought running battles with the Dutch throughout the 17th century as they sought dominance of the lucrative trade routes. After 50 years of destructive struggle they signed a treaty in The Hague to formalise the territories they both occupied. The Portuguese were forced back to Timor and took formal possession of the island with the arrival of the first governor in 1702. Portugal largely neglected the colony which allowed the Dutch to colonise the western part of Timor. A second treaty was required in 1859 to fix the new border on the divided island.

Portugal was neutral in World War II but Australian and Dutch troops invaded East Timor in December 1941 in anticipation of a Japanese landing. After protest from the Portuguese governor, the Dutch force returned across their border. The small Australian force was overwhelmed by the Japanese who landed in the capital Dili in early 1942. They retreated into the mountains and fought a guerrilla campaign known as the Battle of Timor. The Australians, aided by locals, held out for two years before being evacuated. Some 40,000 to 70,000 Timorese civilians were killed in this campaign.

After the war, the Dutch East Indies, including West Timor, won its independence from the Netherlands as Indonesia. East Timor remained Portuguese until 1975. Portugal was ruled by the fascist dictator Antonio Salazar from 1932 until 1968. He kept his country neutral in the war so that he could retain Portugal’s colonies. In the sixties, his African colonies of Angola, Mozambique and others rebelled and East Timor became forgotten about once more. After Salazar died, the regime quickly collapsed and his successor Caetano was overthrown in the bloodless ‘Carnation revolution’ of 1974. Portugal had its first free elections one year later – the same year in which most of its colonies, including East Timor, proclaimed their independence.

The party of independence was FRETELIN an acronym for Frente Revolucionária de Timor-Leste Independente (Revolutionary Front for an Independent East Timor). Fretelin incurred the wrath of neighbouring Indonesia due to its supposed links to Communist China. Indonesia had long coveted East Timor, just as they coveted West Papua which the Dutch relinquished in 1962. With Jakarta raising the spectre of communism, the US and Australia turned a blind eye while the Indonesia military prepared to invade. In February 1975 Indonesia staged a mock invasion of East Timor in South Sumatra. In October special forces began to infiltrate secretly into East Timor to provoke clashes to provide the pretext for a full-scale invasion. These cross-border incursions included the murder of five TV journalists despite the Australian Whitlam government having advanced knowledge of the attack.

The full invasion was launched in October after Indonesia president Suharto received assurances from the White House that the US would not intervene. The territory was declared the 27th province of Indonesia in July 1976 as Timor Timur. Portugal (and the UN) never formally recognised this. The Timorese took their resistance into the hills and fought a guerrilla campaign for the next 25 years. They inflicted severe casualties on the Indonesia military who took revenge on the civilian population.

Two of the worst massacres were the 1991 Dili massacre where almost 300 people were killed when the military opened indiscriminate fire at a student funeral and the 1999 Liquica Church massacre when soldiers opened fire in a Catholic church killing 200 people who were seeking refuge. Estimates vary but somewhere between 100,000 to 250,000 people were killed out of an initial population of about 600,000 Timorese since 1975. The Dili Massacre did start to turn world opinion as the Communist ogre was now past and journalists had smuggled footage of the killing to show the world.

In 1999, the UN sponsored an agreement between Indonesia and Portugal which allowed for a referendum on independence. But before the referendum took place, pro-Indonesian militias commenced a large-scale campaign of retribution, killing, looting and destroying the countries fragile infrastructure. Australia led a UN peace keeping force INTERFET to end the violence. The referendum was passed and on 20 May 2002, East Timor, soon renamed as Timor-Leste, was internationally recognized as an independent state.

The honeymoon of nationhood is now over. Unrest started in the country in April 2006 following the riots in Dili associated with protests over the dismissal of around 600 army soldiers for desertion. The riots exposed a political divide. Factions gathered around Catholic president Gusmao and his Muslim prime minister Mari Alkatiri. The UN estimated that 75% of the capital's population fled the violence and sought refuge in surrounding mountains. The sacked soldiers who ignited the protests were predominantly from the western part of the country, and they had regularly complained about discriminatory practices in the allegedly eastern-dominated national army. The police force is similarly split. There are also tensions over the fact that Portuguese, the language of the elite, is the official language ahead of Tetum. And now the foreign armies are back to bring order to the streets of Dili.

As former government adviser, Lora Horta, says “The early days of nationhood are never easy”.