Last month, the Australian government released new offshore areas for companies to bid for petroleum exploration permits. This includes territory that is much closer to East Timor's coast than to Australia, which East Timor's government claims as part of our national territory.
Your government wrote that "Australia does not accept the East Timorese claim to the extent that it overlaps areas over which Australia exerts jurisdiction. Australia has exercised exclusive sovereign rights over this area for an extended period of time, and has notified East Timor that it will continue to do so."
We appreciate your honesty in admitting that your current exploitation of contested areas is a direct continuation of Australia's support for and profiting from Indonesia's illegal occupation of our land. But we do not appreciate your brute-power approach.
It is not up to Australia alone to "accept" East Timor's claim — this is a matter to be resolved through negotiations or, if these do not succeed, by an impartial legal process. It is a question of right, not might.
Unlike Australia, we are not a "lucky country". One-third of our people gave their lives for our independence, resisting and eventually overcoming a brutal invasion and occupation by Indonesia. Although your government finally came to our assistance when independence was almost assured in 1999, we remember that between 1975 and 1998 Australia gave diplomatic, military and political support to Indonesia's illegal annexation.
One significant factor in Australia's decision to abandon our people, who had helped you so much during World War II, was that you believed Australia would have easier access to Timor Sea petroleum under an Indonesian-controlled regime. Australia still bears the shame that you were more interested in oil money than human lives.
Although we cannot forget, we are ready to move on. Now that East Timor has achieved independence, we want respectful, friendly and mutually beneficial relations with our neighbours. We expect and hope that Australia and Indonesia have the same wish.
We do not ask for reparations — we accept conciliation in the pursuit of justice for many of the individuals and governments who committed or abetted crimes against our people. But we cannot and will not compromise the sovereignty that so many East Timorese struggled and died for.
Generosity
Australians think of yourselves as generous toward East Timor, and we believe that most Australian people genuinely want to help, and are rightfully proud of the role you played in the International Force for East Timor. It is in your interests, as well as ours, that East Timor succeeds as a democracy, with economic, political and social conditions that will allow our people to enjoy peace, justice, and adequate levels of health and education.
As well as making our lives better, this will prevent the need for refugees to flee to safer lands, or for the international community to mount another crisis response intervention.
But when it comes to the Timor Sea, your generosity rings hollow. Since our liberation in 1999, Australia has been collecting money from the Laminaria-Corallina oil field, far closer to our shores than to yours. Your government has taken in more than US$1 billion in revenues from this area, and we have received nothing.
During the same period, Australian aid programs in East Timor have cost you about $100 million, with some additional expenses for your soldiers here (although you would have paid and fed those soldiers even if they stayed home). During 2003, the Commonwealth collected about US$172 million from Laminaria-Corallina, more than twice our government's entire budget.
In reality, East Timor is the largest international donor to Australia. The relatively small amounts you spend to help us do not compare with what you are stealing from us. We face a $126 million deficit during the next three years because Bayu-Undan revenues will be later than international advisers predicted. But the Laminaria revenues could fill that deficit 10 times over, freeing us from dependence on foreign aid or becoming trapped in a vicious cycle of debt.
Australia is a wealthy country, with a high standard of living and vast amounts of natural resources. East Timor, on the other hand, suffers the legacy of centuries of colonialism and war. The petroleum deposits are our one significant material resource. Our people are dying of malaria and tuberculosis; many of us have not had the chance to learn to read; our roads, housing, water, electricity and other services are far below what any Australian would tolerate. We are just beginning to develop our economy, as we prepare for future generations when our oil and gas has been used up.
Although maternal mortality is 150 times higher in East Timor than it is in Australia, we do not ask for your charity. We only want what is rightfully ours under international law.
Under pressure from your government, oil companies and the United Nations, our post-independence government signed and ratified the Timor Sea Treaty. Many of us believe that this is a bad treaty, not sufficiently protective of East Timor's rights and resources.
We see the Timor Sea Treaty as a direct descendent of the illegal 1989 Timor Gap Treaty, when your government profited from our suffering by conspiring with Indonesia to sell our resources.
The Timor Sea Treaty is now law, and we recognise that East Timor, as a sovereign nation, should follow the law and keep its word. The signers of the Timor Sea Treaty were "convinced" that it would "provide a firm foundation for continuing and strengthening the friendly relations between Australia and East Timor", but this has not been the case.
We are disappointed that Australia has not kept its word to respect our independence and to work in good faith for a permanent maritime boundary.
Negotiation and justice
Thirty years ago, Australia and Indonesia delimited the seabed between your two nations (albeit intruding into our territory as well), after less than three years of discussions.
Delimitation of the East Timor-Australia boundary should not take even this long — it is a much shorter line, and much of the preliminary work has already been done. The only obstacle is Australia's unwillingness to come to the table in good faith, with the desire to reach a fair and just agreement.
Two months before we became independent, your government withdrew from legal processes for resolving maritime boundary disputes. We learned from this action that you expect Australia to profit more from an inherently unbalanced bilateral process than if an impartial arbiter decides on the basis of law. In other words, you want no referee to ensure that the rules are followed and the game is fair.
Australian officials say that you "prefer negotiation to litigation". At first, we understood this to mean that you prefer to use your greater size, wealth, experience and flexibility to bully us, rather than allow East Timor to employ internationally accepted legal principles, administered by a third party.
But we now realise that even this was naive — you do not even want to negotiate. It would be more honest to say that you prefer occupation by force to relating to East Timor as a sovereign nation.
We thought foreign occupation of our territory had ended in 1999. We did not expect to emerge from Indonesia's bloody occupation of our land only to face Australia's greedy occupation of our sea. We believed that Australia, with its democratic traditions and lofty ideals, would be more moral and less ruthless than Suharto's military regime.
We ask Australia
It is not too late for Australia to re-establish a friendly relationship with East Timor. But time, like the Laminaria-Corallina oil reserve, is running out. We request the Australian government to take the following actions:
1. Respect our independent and sovereign state. Our government's legitimacy and authority are equal to yours. We may be small and new, but we are just as much a nation as you are.
2. Negotiate a fair maritime boundary, including seabed and water column economic zones, with East Timor, according to contemporary legal principles as expressed in the United Nations Convention on the Law of the Sea, based on a median line. If both sides approach the process in good faith, it should take no more than three years to reach an agreement.
We ask Australia to meet monthly or as often as East Timor's government requests, since your resources are far greater than ours, and our need for a solution is more pressing than yours.
3. Rejoin the maritime boundary dispute resolution mechanisms of the International Tribunal for the Law of the Sea and the International Court of Justice, so that East Timor and Australia will have boundaries consistent with the law if negotiations do not result in a just and prompt solution.
4. Stop issuing new exploration licenses in seabed territory that is closer to East Timor than to Australia. During each of the last three years, including last month, Australia offered such areas to oil companies, and your government signed one contract as recently as February 23. This is our property, and you have no right to sell it.
5. Deposit all revenues received by the Australian government — including taxes and rents — from Laminaria-Corallina, Buffalo, Greater Sunrise, and other petroleum fields that are closer to East Timor than they are to Australia into an escrow account. When a permanent seabed boundary is established, this account will be divided appropriately between our two nations. Australia has already received more than US$1 billion from Laminaria-Corallina and other fields since 1999, which should also be put into escrow.
[Abridged from a statement released on April 14 by the Movement Against the Occupation of the Timor Sea. For further information email <laohamutuk@easttimor.minihub.org>.]
From Green Left Weekly, April 21, 2004.
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