|
|
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. |
|
|