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Australians in East Timor, Australia in the Pacific generally

 
 
All Acting Regiment
12:18 / 21.08.07
So, another occupation I don't know nearly enough about. Here's a blog post:

The leader of East Timor's largest political party has denounced the Australian troops occupying his country, saying 'they had better go home because they are not neutral'.

Mari Alkatiri, the Secretary-General of the Fretilin party, made his call after Australian troops waded into an anti-government protest held in a village near the East Timorese capital Dili yesterday. The Aussies provoked fury by ripping down two Fretilin flags and wiping their backsides with them. Fretilin led the fight against both the Portugese and the Indonesian occupations of East Timor, and its flag is seen by many Timorese as a symbol of national independence. Fretilin vice-President Arsenio Bano backed up Alatiri's statement, saying that the actions of the troops reflected the 'cultural insensitivity and arrogance [that] typifies Australian military operations in the Pacific region'.


So, what's going on here? What other operations is Australia involved in?
 
 
Disco is My Class War
00:59 / 22.08.07
The Australian Government has basically appointed itself the unofficial policeman of the Western Pacific. At the moment there are troops in Papua New Guinea, the Solomon Islands and sometimes Fiji, as well as the official peace-keeping force in East Timor. Many of these missions are ostensibly aimed at 'peace-keeping' and 'restoring democracy', but I think a lot of them have to do with advocating neo-liberal economics and policing flows of migration/labour in the region.

East Timor is a pretty big/complex issue on its own, but you're right to call it an occupation. Basically, the Aust. government 'supported' East Timor's independence from Indonesia, but in 1999 it let Indonesia go ahead with a pretty huge massacre around the time of the first election. Troops were finally sent in after everything had already happened. This was a completely insufficient response (and it brought on weird crisis in the left -- no-one supported the army going in, but everyone wanted the bloodshed to stop.) Australia's interest in East Timor is all about oil: there are huge oil stocks in the Timor Sea, and previous to independence, Australia had a treaty with Indonesia to let it take out the oil. East Timor did become independent, but unemployment and poverty is high, and there are huge political conflicts between those who support trade liberalization (and particularly the continuation of the Timor Gap Treaty) and the marxist members of the ex-resistance movement (Fretilin) who don't support trade liberalization and its effects on the population, and who additionally refused to sell the Timor Gap oil at the insanely low price Australia was offering to buy it.

Basically, at the moment, Australian troops are suppressing internal resistance to the ruling pro-development political faction. It's made more complicated by the fact that this faction is led by the ex-leader of Fretilin, Xanana Gusmao, who was a pretty big left hero during the years of Indonesian occupation. Alkatiri is the ex-Prime Minister, who has basically been deposed because he didn't support trade liberalization. It's really murky. The Solomons, Fiji and PNG are similarly murky...

This is all off the top of my head, and it's an extremely 'marginal' view... Everything that we see in the newspapers about East Timor is about the Australian troops protection of people in refugee camps who have been displaced by 'thugs'. I'm sure some of this is true, but it's not the whole story.
 
 
Disco is My Class War
11:01 / 31.08.07
Bumping this to add some links...

Uriohau is a blog dedicated to 'Revolutionary Anti-Colonialism and Anti-Capitalism in the Pacific'. It's got a lot of resources on Australia's role in the Asia Pacific in the sidebar.

And some articles:

"Australian Neo-Colonialism in the Pacific: Human Rights Implications."

"Howard's Pacific colonalism: who benefits?"
 
  
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