AUSTRALIAN NEO-COLONIALISM IN TIMOR-LESTE New revelations of illegal Australian government espionage operations during negotiations for the carve up of the oil- and gas-rich Timor Sea have laid bare the neo-colonial character of Canberra’s relations with East Timor. For decades, successive Labor and Liberal governments have engaged in sordid maneuvers aimed at securing the Timor Sea energy bonanza for Australian corporations. In 1972, Canberra obtained a highly favorable maritime boundary agreement with Indonesia, which in part reflected the military junta’s gratitude for Australian support for its mass murder of around 500,000 workers and peasants in the 1965–66 coups. In 1975, the Labor government of Gough Whitlam encouraged the Suharto regime to invade East Timor, then a Portuguese colony. In 1989, the next Labor government of Bob Hawke finalised the Timor Gap Treaty with Jakarta, illegally dividing up the territory’s oil and gas, at the same time as tens of thousands of East Timorese were being killed by the Indonesian military. Ten years later, in 1999, Prime Minister John Howard militarily intervened in East Timor to oversee the transition to so-called independence in the aftermath of the Suharto regime’s collapse and to secure Australian energy interests.
Posted on: Fri, 07 Jun 2013 09:52:49 +0000
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