Timor is first mentioned in a Moslem book from 1350 about a kingdom said to be the start of Indonesia.
When the silk road trade was stopped by the mongolians the trade went to sea. Timor became involved because of the Sandal tree, but no foreigners settled until 1440. The trade was mainly chinese, but then the chinese fleet withdraw and the Portuguese came in, approximately 1515.
1642 the kingdom of Timor was defeated by a Portuguese dependent force.
1769 the administration moved to the Dili area.
In 1581 the Dutch started to take over the Portuguese maritime network.
During WW II all of Timor was occupied by Japan.
Indonesia became independent 1949. Australia did not want Portugal to come back to East Timor.
1959 there was an uprise against Portugal resulting in new oppression but also for the first time Timorese were admitted to schools in Portugal. These students met african students, got support from China and became Maoist.
Timor was "forgotten" in the decolonization process starting 1974 after the revolution in Portugal. But political parties were formed and now the maoist students from Portugal started to return to Timor.
During the short civil war in 1975 Suharto travelled the world and checked the attitudes towards a future Indonesian invasion. Nobody protested, so an Indonesian build up started. Two days after a meeting between Suharto, Bush and Kissinger Indonesia staged a full scale invasion of East Timor.
My perspective for this talk is going to be the issue of East Timor in the light of recent political developments in Indonesia. I have to admit that my knowledge of East Timorese history is limited, and I'm hoping that I can be helped in this area by your knowledge. As an Australian, of course, East Timor is quite a big issue, and I have been involved in many demonstrations and actions around the issue, but my area of study actually lies with Indonesian history.
I first went to Indonesia as an exchange student in 1985. I stayed for a year, and although I wasn't a particularly person at the time, two memories stick out amongst others.
Firstly, when I told people I was Australian, often their reaction was to ask me what Australians have against Indonesia, after all they write all those lies in their newspapers about East Timor. I didn't know all the facts about the situation in East Timor, so all I could use in reply was my own experiences growing up in Darwin in the mid-1970s. I told them how thousands of East Timorese had fled to the Northern Territory in tiny fishing boats, and how we had heard about thousands more dying after the invasion.
Normally they nodded politely, but I don't think they believed me. The vast majority of people, if they thought at all about East Timor, seemed to believe the government's line, even those whom I had considered more liberal thinkers. This, I think, reflected a relatively strong level of support for the government's views on most things, which is illustrated by my second main political experience for the year.
In early 1986, the Australian journalist David Jenkins published an article in the Sydney Morning Herald openly discussing the Suharto families fortune and how it cam into that wealth. Of course, since then it has grown even further, but in the mid-1980s it was already enormous. He was expelled from Indonesia immediately, and a big diplomatic hooha followed.
For me, this led to another round of attacks from friends and acquaintances. "Why do Australian journalists lie so much about our country?", they'd ask. The only person who gave me any indication that she might not agree with the official version of events was my host mother, who approached me one day and quietly said, "It's probably true, isn't it?".
In the last year or so, the situation couldn't be more different. Almost everyone from the boardroom to the street seems critical of the Suharto regime, seems to be frustrated and fed up in one way or another. On several occasions since the middle of last year this has exploded into substantial social disturbances, such as the demonstrations and riots of July last year and the massive demonstrations and riots of the election campaign.
Nowadays strangers on buses are perfectly prepared to tell you in no uncertain terms how much they think Indonesians politics stink, or how much they would like to see someone blow up Suharto. Taxi drivers can tell you exactly which Suharto family member owns what, and everyone is only too well aware of the corruption and nepotism that rules in the governing and business elites.
Partially this all is an almost automatic product of precisely the sort of economic development of which President Suharto feels so proud. Since the early 1980s, as many of you will know, Indonesia's economy has grown at quite an astounding rate, by modern standards. GDP has maintained a growth of around 7-8% per year.
This has caused changes which aren't merely statistical. Indonesian society now is quite different to the society I came to know in the mid-1980s. A large urban working and middle class has developed. This has cut down on people's isolation and has made it easier to see behind the regime's facade - both in the cities and in the countryside.
Alongside this, and as part of this development, a loose and broad movement of greater or lesser opposition to the regime has arisen. It has included free trade unions, student groups, religious groups, new illegal parties, non government organizations, and a myriad of less formal groupings.
In the course of its development, particularly in the 1990s, and particularly amongst students, this has led people into contact with East Timorese activists. This has been facilitated by the general questioning of almost all of the regime's ideology, although it has to be emphasized that old prejudices die hard.
Journalists, who are in general really quite oppositional, have begun publishing much more material on East Timor. Although this reporting is twisted by the general repressive situation in Indonesia, the point is that it is now much more similar to the reporting of political opposition than it ever was before. People have a real sense that something is going on in East Timor, and it is not happening the way that the regime says it is.
Left-wing and liberal Indonesian activists, such as those of the Legal Aid Institute or the People's Democratic Party, have for a number of years worked co-operatively with East Timorese groups within Indonesia, and some have even visited East Timor.
This has helped to build a general consensus on the left of the opposition movement supporting the right of East Timorese to self-determination. But it has also helped all sorts of weird and wonderful right-wing views to spring up, which are also dissenting from the government's line. For instance, Islamic figures such as Amien Rais and Nurcholis Madjid seem to favour a referendum on the basis of a mixture of anti-Catholic sectarianism and economic pragmatism.
Well, I guess that's a potted history, but what's happening now? Since about the middle of last year things have moved up another gear. Frustration with the regime seems to have reached near saturation point. People at the bottom seem a lot wiser to the way the system works, and people at the top have begun to think that the regime is no longer as beneficial as it once was. I'm thinking here in particular of foreign capital, but also some domestic business. In this context it has to be remembered that the military regime has never been exactly a puppet of the West. In the late 1950s the army actually opposed the heavily Western backed rebellions, and to a certain extent the regime forced corruption and nepotism on Western capital after it took power. Nevertheless, this arrangement, whereby the regime provides low labour costs in return for bribes and perks has made enormous profits for foreign investors as well as the mainly Chinese Indonesian domestic business class.
But it seems that low wage, low technology high export development can only take the Indonesian economy so far. So, foreign investors have been amongst those pushing for reform, including political reform. I think this has been what has been behind the US government's more critical attitude to the regime in recent times.
My opinion is that the Indonesian economy has been carrying basic weaknesses for a couple of years now, and I don't believe any of the talk that despite the currency crisis, Indonesia's economy is "fundamentally sound". I think the economies of Southeast Asia and South Korea are in real trouble, and that their problems are most certainly not going to disappear overnight.
Steve Miller can be reached on email as bonnotgan@hotmail.com.