Guns, espionage and oil: the Australian intervention in East Timor 25 years on
September marked the 25th anniversary of Australia’s military intervention in East Timor (Timor-Leste). Official commemorations tell a story of Australian sacrifice in the service of peace and humanitarianism. The grubby details of how Australia deprived one of the world’s poorest countries of billions of dollars in revenue from oil and gas royalties are missing from this narrative.
In 2002, East Timorese Prime Minister Mari Alkatiri sat down with Australian Foreign Minister Alexander Downer to renegotiate revenue-sharing arrangements previously agreed with Indonesia when it occupied East Timor. Keeping those prior agreements in place would leave the world’s newest nation with, as Alkatiri put it, “scrapings off a plate”. Securing a decent new deal was vital to the financial future of the world’s newest nation. However, as reported in the Age, decency was not on Downer’s agenda.
“We are not going to negotiate the Timor Sea Treaty—understand that”, he told Alkatiri. “It doesn’t matter what your Western advisers say ... There will be no new joint development area for [oil and gas field] Greater Sunrise ... We are very tough. We will not care if you give information to the media. Let me give you a tutorial in politics—not a chance.”
Downer’s arrogance and bullying are typical of how Australian imperialism has treated East Timor over many years.
When Indonesia’s General Suharto established his dictatorship in 1965, up to a million Indonesian citizens were murdered due to their actual or alleged involvement in left-wing politics. Suharto also invaded East Timor in 1975, as it was on the brink of gaining independence from Portuguese colonial rule. An estimated 200,000 East Timorese were killed as a result of the invasion, around a third of the population.
In 1998, Suharto was forced from power by a mass democracy movement. In East Timor, the liberation struggle gathered renewed strength, with strikes and demonstrations challenging Indonesian rule. With his government near bankruptcy following the 1997 Asian economic crisis and dependent on international aid, new Indonesian president B.J. Habibie viewed East Timor as a financial and political liability. So he agreed to hold a referendum in August 1999, offering a choice between regional autonomy within Indonesia and complete independence.
The vote was overwhelmingly for independence, despite a campaign of violent intimidation waged by armed militias organised by the Indonesian military. When their defeat was confirmed, the Indonesian forces went on a rampage as they withdrew from the territory. They killed as many as 1,200 East Timorese, looted whatever they could carry away and burned anything they could not. As many as 400,000 civilians, half the population, were displaced. Up to 250,000 were transported into West Timor, most forcibly. It was both brutal retribution and a warning to those favouring independence in other Indonesian provinces, such as Aceh and West Papua.
At this point, the Australian government sent in its military to restore order. This was not due to a deeply held concern for human rights. Despite its genocidal crimes, or rather because of them, the Suharto regime had no better friend internationally than Australia. Successive governments, both Liberal and Labor, had been happy to have the threat of communism or a “South-East Asian Cuba” removed from Australia’s doorstep. But East Timorese independence was now an unavoidable reality. The transition needed to be managed so that it went as smoothly as possible, preventing the “regional instability” that Australian governments have obsessed over for decades.
Naturally, the military intervention was spearheaded by elite soldiers of the Special Air Service (SAS). These units have since gained infamy due to alleged war crimes committed in Afghanistan. But ABC investigative journalist Mark Willacy argues that the pattern of SAS brutality and lawlessness actually began in East Timor.
Reporting for Four Corners in 2022, Willacy uncovered allegations from New Zealand SAS troops that their Australian counterparts had illegally killed members of a pro-Indonesian militia or, at the very least, desecrated the bodies of combatants after they were killed. This occurred after two Australian soldiers were wounded near the town of Suai in October 1999, the SAS reportedly keen on delivering payback.
The SAS is also alleged to have operated a clandestine interrogation facility at Dili’s heliport. Here, detainees were tortured, including by beatings, the use of stress positions and food and water deprivation. Even the military’s own legal advisers were denied access to the facility. In one incident, Australian soldiers thought they had captured an Indonesian special forces operative—because he would not answer questions despite being tortured. In reality, he was an East Timorese civilian who suffered from hearing impairment. No Australian personnel were ever punished over these incidents, despite lengthy investigations by military police.
Beyond the actions of frontline soldiers, Australia’s whole approach was to treat East Timor as primarily a security problem, not a humanitarian crisis. Of the $3.9 billion Australia spent on the East Timor intervention between 1999 and 2004, only $225 million was spent on aid. Most of the remaining funds went towards Australia’s military and police deployment.
Even aid spending was geared towards strengthening the East Timorese state, training for the local army and police force being prioritised above providing health services, clean water or education. East Timorese NGOs that questioned these priorities risked Australia cutting their funding. At least one organisation suffered this fate in 2004 after signing a statement criticising Australia’s stance on border negotiations.
It is, above all, the oil and gas revenues that have fuelled East Timorese anger towards Australia since its independence. In 2016, thousands of East Timorese protested outside the Australian embassy in Dili, chanting: “Long Live East Timor! Down with Australia!” Two years earlier, activists graffitied the embassy walls with an image of a kangaroo and an emu greedily sucking up a pot full of East Timor’s oil. It is a far cry from Australia’s self-image as liberators.
The border issue originated in a 1972 treaty in which Australia secured highly advantageous terms from Indonesia. Rather than drawing the border midway between the two countries’ land masses, it was placed at the edge of Australia’s sea-floor continental shelf, which extends far closer to the Indonesian side of the Timor Sea. This agreement left what was known as the “Timor Gap” along the stretch of coastline then controlled by Portugal.
After Indonesia’s invasion, the substantial oil and gas deposits in the Timor Sea were up for grabs. Australia and Indonesia agreed to divide these spoils without finalising a formal international border. Labor’s Gareth Evans and Indonesian Foreign Minister Ali Alitas famously signed the Timor Gap Treaty in 1989 while sipping champagne on a jet flying over the Timor Sea. Far below, out of sight and out of mind, the East Timorese continued to suffer under occupation.
This was the treaty Alkatiri wanted to renegotiate in 2002, based on the basic principle that the border, and hence division of revenues, should follow the median line between the two countries. This would put most, if not all, of the oil and gas on East Timor’s side of the border. It was a position backed up by international maritime law. So Australia simply withdrew from the international court that arbitrates maritime border disputes.
That left East Timor in a weak negotiating position, given its desperate need for finances to rebuild the country. Its government accepted treaties in 2002 and 2006 that, although granting some concessions, allowed Australia to continue extracting billions of dollars in revenue that rightfully belonged to East Timor. In particular, Australia kept hold of the bulk of future royalties expected from the unexploited Greater Sunrise gas field.
But there was a further twist to come. In 2012, a former Australian spy, known only as “Witness K”, publicly revealed that he had been part of an operation to plant listening devices in offices of the East Timorese government during the negotiations, using the cover of an aid project. He was prompted to speak out when Alexander Downer was appointed to a lucrative position as adviser to Woodside Petroleum, which has a major stake in oil and gas developments in the Timor Sea.
For revealing Australia’s crime, Witness K faced years of legal persecution and eventually pleaded guilty to national security offences. Even his lawyer, former ACT Attorney-General Bernard Collaery, was pursued through the courts for years before charges against him were eventually dropped.
The spy operation gave Australia detailed information about East Timor’s negotiating position on the border dispute. It was clearly illegal and violated East Timor’s sovereignty. Yet Labor’s Julia Gillard, who was prime minister when the spying was revealed, refused to renegotiate the revenue-sharing agreement. When East Timor referred the matter to the Permanent Court of Arbitration, Australia prevented Witness K or Collaery from travelling overseas to give evidence.
The ongoing court cases and international attention were deeply embarrassing for Australia, which likes to lecture other countries about the importance of the “rule of law”, not least in relation to China’s territorial claims in the South China Sea. The legal uncertainties were also delaying the development of the Greater Sunrise field. So eventually, in 2018, a new border was agreed upon, which mostly follows the line of median distance between Australia and East Timor.
The catch? The oil and gas fields were already mostly exhausted. Only Greater Sunrise still contains major unexploited deposits, and Australia will continue to take a sizeable chunk of those royalties. Australia will not repay the billions of dollars in extra revenue that would have gone to East Timor had a fair border been established in 2002. And so the grotesque situation continues of one of the richest countries on earth draining resources from one of the poorest.
The East Timor intervention was Australia’s largest deployment of troops since the Vietnam War, heralding a new era of “regional interventionism”. Over the next decade, Australia sent military, police and government administrators to the Solomon Islands, Papua New Guinea, Vanuatu, Tonga, Nauru and once again East Timor. These neo-colonial adventures were used to justify major increases in Australia’s military budget. But they have done nothing to solve the underlying poverty and underdevelopment in Pacific island nations.
Today, Australia competes intensely with China for influence within the south-west Pacific region. Australian diplomacy makes much of China’s supposed threat to the sovereignty of smaller countries and its desire to exploit the region’s natural resources. Australia, in contrast, boasts of belonging to the “Pacific family” and is motivated only by a desire to help its neighbours. It’s hard to reconcile this rosy self-image with Australia’s history of bullying, espionage and greed in East Timor.
