Tim Stewart
Family, friends and East Timor solidarity activists were shocked to hear of the sudden death of Andrew McNaughtan, at the age of 49, on December 22.
A tireless campaigner for human rights and justice in East Timor, the scope of Andrew's work is only now being revealed through the number of tributes flowing in from around the world.
At a special memorial hosted by the Mary Mackillop Institute in Sydney on January 2, 500 people remembered Andrew's contribution to the struggle for East Timorese independence. Figures who attended the service and spoke on Andrew's life and political work included radical author John Pilger, East Timorese foreign minister Jose Ramos Horta and East Timor's new consul-general to Australia, Abel Guterres.
Andrew's contribution to the struggle for a free East Timor between 1993 and 1999 was immense. Arriving in the Northern Territory as a doctor at the Katherine Hospital, he soon moved to Darwin and immersed himself in the many aspects of the campaign to end Indonesian occupation of East Timor.
In support of the clandestine struggle, he smuggled video cameras into East Timor in order for the truth of Indonesian military atrocities to be broadcast to the world.
Andrew understood that a struggle for national liberation needed more than guerrilla resistance on the ground — international public opinion and solidarity needed to be mobilised against the brutal Indonesian occupation.
In 1994, at a time when there was a virtual media blackout of the East Timorese struggle, he managed to record a brief interview with the outspoken bishop, Carlos Belo, in a church that was soon stormed by Indonesian soldiers who shot people Belo had been in the company of only minutes before.
Andrew later provided footage for opinion-shaping stories screened on SBS's Dateline and ABC's Four Corners programs in later years.
He was a financial sponsor of the solidarity movement at many critical junctures — from buying a house in Darwin to be used as a de facto headquarters for local activists, to funding photo exhibitions and speakers to international gatherings including the 1996 Australia-Pacific Coalition for East Timor conference in Kuala Lumpur which was stormed by hired thugs and the Malaysian police.
Seeing too many important opportunities to advance the solidarity struggle for East Timor, he gave up his career as doctor in order to dedicate himself wholly to the cause. In this, he was truly rewarded with the momentous mobilisation of 30,000 people on the streets of Sydney on September 11, 1999, which successfully pressured the Australian government to send troops to Dili and immediately halt the barbaric actions of the Indonesian military organised militia gangs after the vote for independence.
Soon after, Andrew volunteered his medical services through Timor Aid. In October 1999, he ventured into mountainous villages to offer his services.
Despite suffering pain from an arthritic hip which gave him a limp from his early days as a motorcycle racer, he had the energy to engage in hands-on help for the local Timorese precisely when foreign governments saw the struggle as resolved.
Andrew's early exposure to political solidarity ranged from his involvement in Campaign against Repression in the Pacific, to Committees in Solidarity with Latin America and the Caribbean. He learnt Spanish and participated in a brigade to Nicaragua in the early 1980s.
In the local left activist scene in Darwin, he attended most political functions and rallies and was a regular at Green Left Weekly fundraisers. This continued in Sydney where he was involved in work for asylum seekers and the West Papuan and Acehnese freedom struggles.
Andrew was last seen publicly at the opening of the East Timor consulate on International Human Rights Day on December 10. In typical style, he drove a car-load of Sydney people to the occasion and at a National Press Club lunch the same day, he cornered a journalist from Radio Australia to explain in detail the campaign to reclaim East Timor's oil riches during the negotiations with Australia on the country's permanent seabed boundaries.
Andrew's dogged efforts will be sorely missed and his legacy remains in the successful history of the East Timor solidarity movement.
[Thanks to Rob Wesley-Smith from Australians for a Free East Timor in Darwin for background material.]
From Green Left Weekly, January 14, 2004.
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