John Roughan: Blinded by propaganda

Fretilin were so romantic, real freedom fighters in a frightening country not so far from here. We imagined them roving the hills of East Timor in bandannas and cartridge belts, which only made them more glamorous when their representative Ramos Horta came calling and he was gentle and reasonable.

It was hard to imagine this neat man with his Latin charm and a scholarly scarf around his neck returning to a guerrilla war. Printed interviews always used a picture of the other one, Xanana Gusmao. He at least looked tough enough to be taking on the Army of Suharto's Indonesia.

In New Zealand and Australia, this was an independence struggle with unusual piquancy for us because our governments were, as Maire Leadbeater always said, complicit.

In the mid-1970s, when Portugal abandoned its colony, its accession to Indonesia seemed entirely natural and sensible. The forsaken place was half an island plumb in the middle of the archipelago. It had been left impoverished and largely undeveloped after centuries of extractive colonial rule. It did not look like a viable state and nearby governments saw no reason to oppose Indonesia's claim.

They were not inclined to change their view while the Cold War continued. Suharto was a friend of the West and Fretilin was Marxist, or so the Economist said. The material written by supporters of East Timor's secession did not say much about the movement's political character and reporters who went there were more interested in exposing Indonesia's heavy-handed suppression of the popular will.

If I sound angry, I am. The steady drip of propaganda for East Timor's independence had us believing the place was a cohesive, capable political community. When the Cold War ended and democracy flowered in previous dictatorships of the left and right, East Timor voted overwhelmingly for self-government. The result sent Indonesian loyalists into a terrible sulk. Marauding militias set about murderous reprisals and destruction of infrastructure that Indonesian investment had brought to the place.

We all cheered when Bill Clinton came to Auckland for Apec and blessed an intervention by Australia, New Zealand and others in the region to scare off the recalcitrants and ensure Timor Leste became the first new state of the 21st century.

Nobody imagined then that within seven years the state would fail. There is no other word for what has happened there. The Government lost its authority last week, factions of the Army began shooting at each other, the police force has evaporated, frightened people have fled from their homes, others have taken to the streets looting and fighting with machetes.

President Gusmao seems to have had less interest in self-government once he got it. He didn't try to take control from Fretilin's prickly Prime Minister, Mari Alkitiri, until foreign forces were in position this week.

Behind all the trouble, reportedly, there are ethnic and other resentments that we never heard about through the decades that East Timor's liberation was commended to us.

Those who gave us the impression it was a united incipient nation deserving our support have been unusually quiet this week. It took a few days for someone to work out how the failure could be our fault.

Murray Boardman of the aid agency World Vision wrote in the Herald on Thursday that Australia, New Zealand and other countries that rallied around East Timor to help bring it to independence should not have left after its first free election.

Aid agencies warned them at the time of the pull-out, he said, that the place would need continuing external support to maintain law and internal stability. "A functioning and stable democracy does not happen in five years."

Now that our soldiers are patrolling Dili again Helen Clark thinks they will be there for a year or more. Mr Boardman would consider that optimistic. He is an aid programme officer of East Africa where it must take eternal patience to believe external effort can produce any sort of development.

In this part of the world we are just beginning to march regularly into other people's arguments. Solomons one month, East Timor the next. We go with confidence that our cheerful good will is conspicuous and contagious.

Sooner or later one of our soldiers is going to get killed and we will begin to look critically at the cause they could die in.

No new state could have a better start, you might think, than one that has come through a long struggle for self-government. Its economy may be weak and its infrastructure wrecked by the convulsions of its birth, but its people would have a shared experience of oppression and triumph that ought to overcome any differences and commit them to the law and peace of the state they have established.

When too many of its people lack that commitment, as they clearly did in Dili this week, it was reasonable to wonder whether the hunger for independence was ever as deep as it was painted. And if it was that deep, we must doubt that a state that falls apart despite the advantage of its founding struggle, is going to be viable in the long run.

East Timor today does not look any better from this distance than it did within Indonesia, worse in fact for the infrastructure it lost in the transition. Unless Australia gives up its claim to the undersea gas in the Timor gap, the economy is likely to remain a basket case, and maybe even then. Plenty of mineral rich countries continue to be impoverished by poor government.

It's time that liberal sentiment ceased to side with every distant minority desiring its own two-bit state and recognised the virtue of multinational federations like Indonesia. They can be rugged but at least they work.