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9 June 1966: Consul tells team to quit Timor
Darwin, Wed: A reporter and photographer from WA Newspapers Ltd left Portuguese Timor yesterday on the advice of the Australian consul there after complaints by the :Portuguese authorities.
Tony Thomas 25, of South Perth, and photographer Richie Hann of City Beach, arrived in Darwin this afternoon.
They had completed one week of a planned three week reporting assignment.
The consul, Mr John Colquhoun Denvers, summoned them to his office in Dili, the capital, at 8 o’clock last night after he had a two hour after he had a two-hour audience with the Portuguese governor Col Hose Alberti Correira.
Mr Denvers told them of complaints that Mr Thomas had entered a military barracks in Dili late last week without having obtained permission from military authorities and that he had asked three junior officers for information about Portuguese military strength on the island.
Politics
He said that the Portuguese also considered that Mr Thomas had been objectionable in questioning troops about Portuguese politics.
Timor lies 360 miles north of Western Australia and is divided into a Portuguese eastern half and an Indonesian western half.
Mr Denvers said the Portuguese considered the two men’s safety would be endangered if they remained on the island because the sentry at the barracks had been sentenced to five days solitary confinement for having permitted Mr Thomas to enter, and other Portuguese soldiers might take individual action against them.
He said the two men had not been expelled but it was in their interest to fly to Darwin on the aircraft leaving this morning,
The junior officers had sent written reports on their conversations with Mr Thomas to their commanding officer.
Mr Thomas said in Darwin that he had in gestures asked the sentry at the barracks if he could enter. The sentry had allowed him in.
Football
Troops were playing football in a central square, Mr Thomas said. He looked over one wing in full view of the troops for more than five minutes before a soldier asked him politely to leave.
Tourists Minister Barbosa and the Governor had told him he was free to go where he pleased on the island.
The strength of the military garrison was common knowledge on the island and Mr Barbosa who was president of the Portuguese Union National political party, had given him freely the information about the troops.
The European population of the island consisted largely of soldiers, Mr Thomas said. He had talked to them openly about Portuguese affairs. #
10 June, 1966: Timor: The Portuguese and the Indonesians
From Tony Thomas
For once, Dili’s little-used docks are crammed with people. The men wear glossy dark cock plumes in their hair, spit betel nut, and keep and eye on their whimpering pigs, which lie immobile with legs upturned.
The women have tied their black hair back in a bun, fixed with small silver flowres.
All have come to celebrate the 40th anniversary of military rule in Portugal, rule that brought President Salazar to power and has kept him there for 34 years.
Farther round the bay in the shadow of a monumental church, an old Timorese and his wife squat on the rocks and snatch shrimps from the stones as the waves lap in.
They put them in a salmon tin and in an hour or two they have enough for tea.
For me, the scene tied together the heaviest strands in the intricate cloth of Timor.
The natives dance, the loudspeakers play Teresa Brewer, and when the crops fail there are bananas and tangerines to be eaten off the trees.
The Army
The army, small as it is, floods the gritty streets of the capital with green and khaki and camouflage mottle. And not far round the bay one can find the dry fruit of centuries of Portuguese sovereignty and neglect – a melancholy vista, melancholy as the blue-gfrey clouds sliding over the mountains that stand like castle walls over Dili and its miniature coastal plain. Where Timorse dig their fields with pointed sticks, the passing parade of military trucks and troop-carriers has no attraction.
Portuguese Timor has a budget of $A3m, raised by taxes and charges,and Lisbon has given $A2m for public works.
Development funds will probably increase steadily over the next six years, but not to anything like the level needed to yank the slothful Timorese economy to its feet.
It is not Timor but Angola and Mozambique that are the jewels in Portugal’s crown of overseas possessions. From them pours the fabulous wealth that lets Portugal carry an overseas army of 140,000 men, and simultaneously provides for great economic plans in the homeland.
Timor would like an oil strike of its own. Peasants on the south coast light their huts with the oil that seeps from the marsh, and the Timor Oil Company, an Australian firm, will soon present to the Portuguese governor the top-secret results of its years of drilling.
Not profit but fierce nationalism induces Portugal to cling to its impoverished isolated outpost in a region that has on all sides shed its European overlords.
The 550,000 Timorese are completely and legally citizens of Portugal. The Portuguese see race as no ground for discrimination.When an army wagon passes, a European may be chauffeuring native troops or vice versa.
The Chief of Customs is a full-=blood Timorese, as is a priest who represents the island in the Portuguese National Assembly.
Sitting at dusk on an old waterfront cannon, a young Sergeant told me proudly of his plans to marry a Timorese girl. The typical Portuguese officer crackles through the streets on atiny Japanese motorcycle but a Timorese Sergeant – chief mechanic at the power station- rides a powerful British machine. The examples could continue but they are not the whole story.
On our final climactic day on the island, we drove behind the Consul’s Australian flag to Maubisse across – or rather around – miles of wrinkled corrugated mountains. Women and children frequently scuttled down the ravines and hid as we passed. And men and boys on their indefatigable treks to market, would hastily upend the hundredweight of firewood on their heads to give us the slow Portuguese salute, a mixture of respect, servility and sometimes fear in their eyes.
“I am a black old man,” the burly Indonesian consul, Dr Sorose, told me one night. “But because I have a car they salute me. On our Western side, the people wave and shout, ‘Merdeka!’ which means freedom.” An American hitchhiker confirmed the story and said the Indonesian natives were getting the confidence to run their own affairs. But poor as the Portuguese native is, the Indonesian is acknowledged to be poorer.
My own impression was that time would side with the Indonesians. Lacking the extremes of wealth and poverty to the east, they are already profiting from incorporating into the vast trade complex of the Indonesian archipelago.
Henry Ataupo, native administrator from the capital Kupang, described the town’s university, with several thousand students studying the vital topics of agriculture, veterinary science, economics, public administration and education. But in Dili the Portuguese with misplaced pride tell how they are sending 30 students a year to Lisbon University (not having one of their own).
Perhaps Mr Ataupa’s claim for 500,000 primary students was a little extravagant but even conservative travellers commend the educational progress there. The Portuguese have begun investing in education too, but from a base of only 25,000 primary students. (The Indonesians [on Timor] have about five times the general population).
Meanwhile Portuguese administrators, highly qualified men, have few skilled assistants to do their donkey work and their output is leached away in the transition between planning and implementation. Whether the Indonesians will allow the Portuguese to finish their belated program of development. Is another matter.
Red Bombers
The Indonesian Embassy in Dili, perhaps with grim humor, displays photographs of its four-jet Russian bombers and heavy tanks. The point is not lost on the Portuguese. Asked of their future, they commonly press their fist to their chest and say, “I do not like it here”.
In the 1962 anti-colonial scare they managed to mobilise 20,000 native troops of dubious ability to supplement their front-line force of fewer than 2000 infantrymen. Last August President Sukarno ominously declared support for “the liberation movement” in East Timor. Indonesia’s swing the Right since the attempted coup has given the Portuguese a reprieve.
In future yearse. An excess of Indonesian sympathy for the Portuguese natives {“natives” omitted here, an error due to the Darwin GPO which transmitted the story] might tip the scales. Alternatively dissent among the natives could suffice.
The Portuguese have an unenviable task in developing their lonely island with a gun at their heads. Resourceless, poor in land and skill, and disintegrated by crumpled masses of mountains, the country needs a great deal of capital or a great deal of popular enthusiasm to get anywhere. Both are lacking though Portuguese rule has its admirable aspects.
I heard a story, impossible to confirm, of a tribe’s uprising in the danger year of 1961. It was no coincidence, I was told, that dissenters were eliminated by their traditional enemy tribe soon afterwards, which had obtained Portuguese weapons. Nor was it a coincidence that reinforcements for the Portuguese secret police arrived on the next ship. This apart, the natives seem no more interested in independence, than in the brightly painted ploughs and harrows on display in the festival square. #
JUNE 1966: PROGRESS – AND EXECUTIONS IN INDONESIAN TIMOR
Tourists and business men do not have much trouble getting into Indonesian Timor these days, but Djakarta is sensitive about letting journalists in on the heels of the counter-coup against the Communists.
The Indonesian Consul in Portuguese Timor, Dr Sorosa, said he would send a telegram to Djakarta requesting a visa for us.
Estimates for how long telegrams would have taken ranged from a week to a month, even assuming a favorable reply. On the other hand a young American simply hitch-hiked to the Indonesian border, waited three hours and was then allowed to tour the whole western island.
There is no doubt that the mass executions in Indonesia spread down to Timor. A small girl described to one traveller how she had seen ten Communists led to a hillside and shot.
“Communists are outside the law,” the Consul told me. This was the only point on which he and the head of the Poruguese political wing, Eduardo Barbosa, seemed to agree.
Dr Sorosa said they had moved outside the umbrella of Indonesia’s Pantjasila – the five principles of belief in God, nationalism, social justice, humanitarianism and sovereignty of the people.
“So they cannot live in Indonesia,” he said.
He criticised the heavy Portuguese spending on their army in Timor. (I calculated soldiers’ salaries alone to equal about two-thirds of the civil budget.) He said that because the Indonesia army – if it wanted to – could sweep over Portuguese Timor like an avalanche, the Portuguese were wasting money keeping even a nominal army there. The money should be developing the country, he said.
When I asked him the size of the Indonesian army in western Timor, he side-stepped by saying, “We do not depend on an independent military force. The people as a whole defend their country, not only with guns but also with their heads. We are not afraid of someone else – and the Australians are our friends.”
Agriculture
The latest geographic available on Indonesian Timor was by a Dutchman, Dr F.J. Ormeling, published in 1957. He concluded in a mood of severe pessimism for the island’s agriculture, beset as it was by unchecked population growth.
Over the centuries, he wrote, wars and diseases had kept the population down, but now their burning-off based farming was destroying ground cover and creating fearful erosion. The labor and manure of hordes of introduced cattle went unused and farmers had to spend a quarter of their labour protecting their crops with crude fences.
Only intensive and highly-specialised research could point the way to remedial measures, and he was not optimistic about the defeat of the primary scourges of illiteracy and ignorance.
Whatever the western island lacks today, it is not self-confidence. Talking to Dr Sorosa and three administrators from Kupang, I got the impression that a new national pride was bringing achievements unthinkable when the natives were subjects of Dutch rule.
Take an isolated case, told to me by an Australian business man just returned from Kupang:
The government told the people between Kefamananu and the coast at Wini – 18 mioles – that it needed a truck road to carry exports to ships waiting at the beach.
This was for the good of the nation, the government explained. In two weeks 2000 villagers had built the road of big and little stones.
“The rain will wash it away in the wet,” my informant said. “But never mind, the villagers will build it up again.”
Dr Sorosa knew Dr Ormeling’s thesis but dismissed it with a wave of the hand as out of date.
Education
Education troubles? Mr Ataupa, a senior education administrator told me he was one of the island’s first high school graduates and first teachers. He taught three schools in one building – the first from 7.30am to 1pm; another from 1pm to 5pm and a third till 10pm. This was how they had done the impossible, he said.
But could the island use its thousands of educated people? I asked, an brought an economics lecture down on my head. The more you educated the more needs you created and the more human skills you needed to satisfy them, he said. Social mobility grew, and parents started buying pencils and books as well as essentials., and no-one was content any longer merely to keep himself alive.
The strong central government in Timor could distribute its funds where there was need – in the same way that the administration in Djakarta planned the economics of the whole Indonesian archipelago.
This enabled Timor to specialise in the cattle trade and gain efficiency in land zoning. About 20,000 cattle were exported to Hong Kong each year -the cattle were now developing the country and not destroying it.
With pride, the four men rattled off annual tonnages of exports: garlic 800 tons, apples 60 tons, copra 12,000 tons, coffee 1000 tons, redwood 24,000 cubic metres; sandalwood 500 tons; betel nut 500 tons, spices 5000lb.
Finally I asked them what they were doing about birth control on their over-poulated half island.
“That we do not need,”Dr Sorosa said. “Indonesia has land enough for 250 million people. Look at West Irian – only 1,250,000 people and it is bigger than Java. West Irian is big enough for 60 million.”
In their hail-fellow-well-met fashion, the Indonesians had stopped their Mercedes Benz in a dark street and spent the hour before midnight giving me the interview. The mosquitos finally broke up the party. #
ON PORTUGUESE TIMOR
Tony Thomas describes the way of life
Eduardo Barbosa, chief of public works in Portuguese Timor, switched off the ABCNews on his shortwave transistor.
“They have executed four ex-ministers in the Congo,” he told me. “This is what happens when you give people independence before they are ready for it.”
He screwed a monocle under his left eyebrow and ran a finger round the open neck of his shirt.
“One time our natives would not work,” he said. “All they wanted was to feast. We made them plant rice. They would have starved without a crop.
“The United Nations said, ‘They are slave labour. You must not do that.’ Now if they want to work they can, if they do not our government will not let them starve. They are better off than the peons of Portugal. The peons who do not work, they die.”
Engineer Barbosa warmed to his subject, an ever-present one in an island where a handful of administrators and troops control a native population of more than half a million.
“Last year we went to a village where each house has two acres of gardens. They asked for irrigation. We spent a lot of money and we gave them ten acres each. We thought they would grow plenty of food and we would buy their surplus. But they said, ‘We only want water for vegetables. That is all we need to live.”
The government gave the natives schools, hospitals and roads. They could ride 100km (about 62 miles) in a bus for 10 cents. But they did not want to work, he said.
Employment
I saw swarms of Timorese laboring on new government buildings – mainly army barracks and messes. Across the island, about 15,000 natives are on the government payroll. There are not many other employers in this subsistence-economy country.
One native spent several days outside the governor’s mouldering headquarters, cutting the front lawn with a pocket knife.
Native troops, serving their two years in the army, lounged around the veranda and made gallant but hopeless attempts to get in line and present arms before official visitors passed the entrance.
The people who really want to get ahead are the Chinese, who, despite their small numbers, control everything from coconut factories down to the ice-block trade, in which native children peddle green and red blocks from Japanese vacuum flasks.
Adolfo, our Chinese maitre-d’hotel, is about 25. He speaks three Chinese and three Timorese dialects and fluent Portuguese, and is rapidly mastering English for the benefit of the 500 tourists a year arriving from Darwin. Late this year he hopes to go to Melbourne for a course in hotel administration.
Chinese shops, all looking rather like the Nedlands Post Office but painted pink, green and yellow, open at 7am and shut at 7pm. The Chinese own most of the private vehicles and a good proportion of the motorcycles.
But the Timorise in Dili seem to have but one ambition – their daily bread roll – after which labour loses its point. The inland natives, though they work harder, lack a scale of value. Souvenirs they priced high and refused to haggle. But they would sometimes walk ten miles across the mountains to town to sell horsehair brooms for three cents each.
Driving through blue misty hills to Maubissa, we met a man and his children walking to market leading a grey Timor pony. Through an interpreter the man said, “We are going to market to sell our betelnut leaves. It took us two days to collect them, and we will sell them for 54 escudos ($1.80). We will travel two days.
“We sometimes work on our vegetables but when we are free we take our fruit wine, our rain cover, our blanket, some maize and some wild beans to boil, and go to market in Laitaforu and see our family there.”
In Dili the market is a study in timelessness. Hundreds of native families sit cross-legged in the grit, pathetically small offerings of food arranged on brown paper weighted at each corner with a stone. They preside over peanuts in heaps, tomatos in bark punnets, flour in bamboo canisters, green bottles of drinking water, stacks of golden pumpkin, betelnut, tobacco and turnips. The poorest sell the prolific bananas and oranges.
The health service is excellent for such an island, injections and vaccinations totalling nearly 400,000 a year. The island’s future is likely to be a desperate scramble to cope with the population explosion.
The Portuguese, in this predicament of backwardness,have hopes of a big tourist industry. Even from Perth, the cost of a fortnight’s holiday – air fares and hotel included – need not exceed $400, which is not much more than a similar trip to the Eastern States. When the Portuguese provide a good transport service to the rugged interior, the mountain scenery alone should be a big draw. #
Canberra Times, 16/7/66
Letters
Misconceptions corrected
Sir, — Having lived in Portuguese Timor for several years 1 read with interest the
articles on this country by Tony
Thomas (The Canberra Times,
July 6, 13 and 14), I found them
on the whole superficial and in
accurate, and 1 would like to
make a few comments on some
of the points he raises.
He refers to “military rule” in
Timor, and states that Salazar
has maintained power in Portu
gal through military rule. It
should be pointed out that
Salazar is a civilian, that all
the members of his Cabinet ex
cept those concerned with de
fence are also civilians, and
that Portugal has been under
civilian rule sinc^e 1928.
He refers to Angola and Moz
ambique as the “jewels in Portu
gal’s crown of overseas provin
ces”. from which the “fabulous
wealth” for Portugal’s overseas
army of “140,000” men flows,
and which provides for “great
economic plans in the home
land.”
Mr Thomas clearly has his
facts and his figures wrong, and
his notion of Portuguese
economy is some centuries out
of date, as is his style of writing.
At present Portugal is putting
far more money into the devel
opment of its overseas provin
ces than it is getting back from
them, at considerable sacrifice to
the economic development of
continental Portugal. As to the
140,000 men, according to all
the figures I have seen the
maximum number could not ex
ceed 80.000 at the very most.
Mr Thomas refers to the “dry
fruit of centuries of Portuguese
sovereignty and neglect”. He
apparently forgets that the capi
tal of Dili, as well as most of
the bridges and roads in the
country, were completely de
stroyed by Allied bombing raids
during the Japanese occupation
of Timor for the defence of
Australia. It is said that only
one building was left standing in
Dili. The Portuguese have had
to start their reconstruction and
redevelopment of the island
from scratch.
He refers to the poor economy
of the country, but he does not
mention the development of rice
cultivation at Manatuto; the agri
cultural research station at
Betano, the import of cattle
from Australia for (the experi
mental cattle station at Lospalos,
or the large coffee plantations at
Ermcra and Fatu Bessi.
He states that Timor func
tions as an “open gaol for crimi
nals .” This description is
apparently a rather misleading
reference to a small “prison” in
Taibesse, whose inmates are
mainly from Macau, and who
were free to come and go as
they pleased. These people were
employed in agriculture or in
skilled trades such as carpentry
and basket work, for which they
were paid at the normal rates.
The system seemed to me to
work very well.
Mr Thomas implies that
Timor lives under fear of the
Portuguese secret police. This
is untrue. I heard of no case
of interference from the PIDE
while I was there, and the
Portuguese always spoke quite
freely among themselves. I sus
pect that they would be more
wary of being misreportcd by
foreign journalists than being
overheard by PiDE.
Mr Thomas refers to an un
confirmed report of an uprising
in Timor in 1961. Having trav
elled extensively in Timor at
this time, camping in isolated
areas among the Timorese, I
can assure Mr Thomas that
there was no tribal uprising dur
ing this period.
I hope these commcnts may
remove some of the misconcep
tions about Portuguese Timor
which Mr Thomas’ reporting
may have left with your readers.
CARLOS DE LEMOS
Braddon
Canberra Times, Letters to the editor, 29/7/1966
Portuguese neglect
Sir, — Carlos dc Lemos (The
Canberra Times, July 16) de
scribes my articles on Portuguese
Timor as superficial and factually inaccur
ate. To deal briefly with his
objections to my estimate of the
size of the Portuguese Army and
the importance of Angola and
Mozambique to the Portuguese
economy — my information was
from a Portuguese source in
Timor, in as good a position to
know as Mr de Lemos.
I am aware that the World
War must have set back devel
opment on the island consider
ably. “Centuries” of Portuguese
neglect are apparent in the low
level of literacy among the na
tive population and the lack of
skilled labour, for which the
war cannot be blamed. Even to
day, metropolitan Portugal’s aid
to Timor works out at only S4
per head per year, compared
with about S33 per head Austra
lian aid to New Guinea.
I described the island’s econ
omy as poor because of its com
plete lack of local industry and
agricultural equipment. Isolated
farm projects and even big cof
fee plantations do not alter the
subsistence nature of the econ
omy.
My implication that Timor
lived in fear of the Portuguese
secrct police was backed by evi
dence which I did not publish
for fear of incriminating my
sources. My mention of an un
confirmed native uprising in
1961 likewise came from a good
source.
An extract from The Times,
London.’ in August. 1963, on
metropolitan Portugal might he
relevant to two points at issue:
“The attitude lends to be that
whoever is not a declared Sala
zarist must be a Communist.
Arrests of men and women on
suspicion of subversion continue
at an accelerated pace. Many
professional men and women
whose liberal thinking brings
them under suspicion have been
arrested. This is an uneasy coun
try, where citizens cannot close
their front doors and know they
are safe …
Plans for the economic future
are based entirely on the sup
position that Portugal will re
tain its African territories and
be able to continue to exploit
their riches …”
The forced withdrawal of all
40 Opposition candidates from
the election in November, 1965,
indicates there has been little
change in Salazar’s dictatorial
Government at home and abroad.
TONY THOMAS
Canberra Times – Letters
To The Editor 2/8/1966
Timor by comparison
Sir, — Tony Thomas (The
Canberra Times, July 29) is ap
parently unable to answer the
points which I made, and con
sequently shifts bis argument to
other grounds.
With regard to the size of the
Portuguese Army, the point .at
issue is not the reliability of
Mr Thomas’ source, but the
facts. Official figures prove that
Mr Thomas is incorrect in his
facts.
Mr Thomas makes compari
sons between Portuguese expen
diture in Timor and Australian
aid to New Guinea. It should be
pointed out that the natural re
sources and the political situa
tions in these two countries are
quite different.
If Mr Thomas would like to
make comparisons, however, the
problems of Timor could per
haps be seen in better perspec
tive if they were compared with
those of the Northern Territory
of Australia, which bears a
closer political parallel to the
situation in Timor.
Mr Thomas refers to Portu
guese “neglect” as illustrated by
the illiteracy and lack of skilled
workers in Timor. It could be
pointed out that it was only in
1950 that the Australian Gov
ernment made any provision for
the education of Aborigines in
the Northern Territory. At pre
sent there are no secondary
schools on aboriginal settle
ments or reserves, and few if
any aboriginal children attend
other secondary schools in the
Territory. There are no skilled
aboriginal workers, and no
Aborigines receiving full – time
training in any field. There is
only one Aborigine who could
be said to be employed in a
responsible position in the Ter
ritory.
Hand-outs
In comparison, there are a.
great many Timorese with sec
ondary school education, and
many Timorese hold responsible
positions in all the Government
departments and services in
‘Timor. Special training schemes
in various skilled occupations
have been instituted. Everywhere
in Timor you will meet Timor
ese workers as trained nurses,
clerks, typists, mechanics, bank
assistants, and civil servants. A
Timorese priest was for many
years the Deputy (MP) for
Timor in the National Assembly
in Lisbon.
It is true that the economy of
the Timorese is largely a subsis
tence economy. Jn comparison,
the economy of the Aborigines
is non-existent. They live on
hand-outs of food, clothing and
tobacco from the Government.
Because they are dependent on
these hand-outs, their residence
is restricted to the settlements
and reserves, where their move
ments and mode of life are re
gulated by the Government. The
Timorese, poor as many of them
Are, are not dependent on hand
outs, and are free to live where
Ihey will, and to cultivate their
own land or to seek employ
ment.
I would like to emphasise that
this comparison is not intended
as a criticism of Australia. I
have every sympathy for the
Australian Government in the
tremendous task it faces, and in
the efforts it is making for the
advancement of the Aborigines.
But at the same time I feel that
Australian criticism of Portu
guese Timor should be viewed
with reference to the same sort
of difficulties and the same prob
lems that Australia itself faces
in a similar situation, and the
achievements of the Portuguese
should be evaluated against the
achievements of the Australians.
One could also point out that
Australia is, a much richer
country than Portugal, and its
aboriginal population is far
smaller than the non-European
population of the Portuguese
overseas provinces.
Finally, Mr Thomas’ reference
to The Times article on condi
tions in Portugal suggests that:
he went to Timor not lo observe
the conditions as they were but
to confirm his own preconceived
notions of the conditions he ex
pected lo find. I myself find it
rather difficult to believe that a
non-Portuguese speaking person
could reliably evaluate his
sources of information and the
conditions in Timor in one short
week.
CARLOS DE LEMOS.
Braddon
