=Subject: WP: Editorial - East Timor's Due
Date: Sat, 08 May 1999 09:37:07 -0400
From: "John M. Miller" <fbp@igc.apc.org>Received from Joyo Indonesian
News:
Washington Post Saturday, May 8, 1999
Editorial
East Timor's Due
AGREEMENT HAS been reached and celebrated at the United Nations to offer autonomy under
Indonesian sovereignty to East Timor, the territory that Indonesia grabbed from Portugal
just as Portugal was giving up its three-century colony in 1975. But if the 800,000
Timorese reject the autonomy offer in a U.N.-sponsored vote scheduled for August, then
Indonesia has pledged to release the territory instead to independence. It sounds as if
East Timor, which has suffered greatly under Indonesian rule, is finally to get the
self-determination it deserves.
But wait. Indonesia's newly found formal solicitude for the will of the people of East
Timor may not be all that it is cracked up to be. The Indonesian military establishment
says it supports the new agreement, but it also seems to maintain continuing links with
local paramilitaries that favor not independence from Jakarta but permanent integration
with it. The Indonesian government, even as it cites its own readiness to let East Timor
go, insists that a "silent majority" of its population prefers staying a part of
Indonesia. The intimidation being widely practiced in the island is conducted mostly, it
says, by the pro-independence camp.
Reports from different sources over a period of time do not confirm the official
Indonesian view; they rebut it, in fact. Nonetheless, there is no reason why anyone has to
rely exclusively on what one side or the other has to say about this question. The coming
vote, or "consultation," is the right process by which the people's choice will
become incontestably known. It will, that is, as long as the voting is conducted fairly
and transparently and in the presence of qualified international observers with the reach
to see what is going on.
There is some anxiety, in official Indonesian circles and elsewhere, that the release
of once-Portuguese East Timor to independence will encourage secession movements in
restive parts of the otherwise formerly Dutch Indonesian archipelago. Indonesia does face
deep problems of governance, not to speak of economics. But they do not justify the denial
of self-determination to a much-abused territory.
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