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02 March 2003: "A perspective from Dili"

The Australian newspaper The Age ran an article recently by the foreign minister of East Timor (or Timor Lorosae, if you prefer), Jose Ramos Horta, titled "Why freedom's cost may be war"

Damn fine reading. I particularly appreciated Ramos' point that, while various Western nations must bear some responsibility for the suffering of the Timorese people, those nations redeemed themselves when Indonesian rule over East Timor was ended. This point forms the counter to the accusations that the US is being hypocritical by pushing for Iraqi disarmament when it was responsible for arming Iraq in the first place (of course, the French and the Russians each sold over twenty times more dollars' worth of weapons to Iraq than the US ever did, but why get worked up over that, or indeed, link it to the current Franco-Russian position as regards military action?).

It has to be said that I frequently wonder whether the decolonisation of Western Papua and East Timor (by, respectively, the Netherlands and Portugal) was the best idea as it was realised, considering the fact that in both cases Indonesia—a former Dutch colony itself—immediately moved in and occupied the nascent countries in question, subjecting them to a higher level of brutality than the colonial powers ever had. Almost certainly, a better model would have been that of Bélize, which was granted independence in 1981 without the British armed forces actually withdrawing; surely, the latter part was the only that Bélize is not currently part of Guatemala. Given the nature of Guatemala's régime during the 1980s—i.e. a genocidally inclined junta—this is most definitely a Good Thing.

Then again, perhaps the British and the Belizeans had learnt this lesson from the fates of Western Papua and East Timor. And of course, the Netherlands and Portugal never set up a system like the Commonwealth.

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