The blueprint for Palestine

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Hey, Jules and Jazz here.

Join us as we unpack the news of the week on Not Stupid.

You would just see these people who were radically in the minority, year after year, standing out with their little hand-drawn signs because they believe in something.

And it's funny, isn't it?

Because we have leaned on these people historically to achieve the rights and equalities we now enjoy and take for granted.

That's right.

You can find Not Stupid on the ABC Listen app.

And now watch us on ABC Ivy.

This podcast is recorded on the lands of the Awabakal, Durug and Eora people.

The Australian capital of Canberra is unusual in a lot of ways.

One being that the embassies in Canberra are all unique.

Many of the embassies look as if they're just about to go to a costume ball.

Dotted along the suburban streets of Canberra, these embassies are extraordinary.

The Chinese embassy looks like the Forbidden City in Beijing.

The US Embassy is a brick replica of the White House.

The entrance to the Mexican Embassy is protected by stone jaguar statues.

The Pakistani Embassy looks like a Mughal temple.

The Greek Embassy has marble columns.

Most of the fanciest embassies are in the suburbs of Deakin and Yarra Lumla.

In the nearby suburb of O'Malley, countries like Cuba, Georgia, Kosovo, Zimbabwe, and Bulgaria basically just have generic suburban McMansions.

It's a little bit disappointing, to be honest with you.

But then, tucked away in a little subdivided plot on a cul-de-sac, there is this four-bedroom detached house with a Palestinian flag out front.

It is the home of the general delegation of Palestine to Australia, New Zealand and the Pacific.

According to the Australian government, it's not an embassy because Australia doesn't recognise the state of Palestine yet.

Similarly, in the city of Ramallah in the West Bank, Australia has a representative office, not an embassy.

But apparently that'll all change in September when Australia recognises a state of Palestine at the UN.

The question that's on everyone's lips is, will that be all that changes?

Well, the Australian government says no.

This is not the end.

It is just the beginning.

There is much more work to do in building a Palestinian state.

We will help build the capacity of the Palestinian Authority.

Experts say that Australia will work with its allies to try and build a functioning Palestinian state.

Australia will be trying to ensure that there are free and fair elections and good outcomes that Australia and its like-minded partners are happy with.

Can that actually work though?

Well, a few minutes drive from the future Embassy of Palestine is an example of how it sometimes can.

The Embassy of Timor-Leste is quite a fabulous building with a fascinating roof design built to resemble a traditional East Timorese tase cloth.

Timor-Leste is not a wealthy country, but it is a functioning democracy with vibrant public debate and free and fair elections.

And the story of Timor-Leste's fight for statehood is staggeringly similar to the story of Palestine.

Looking at how Timor-Leste was recognised as a state tells us a lot about what might happen if Australia and its allies really put their money where their mouth is when it comes to recognising and supporting a Palestinian state.

I'm Matt Bevan, and this is If You're Listening.

Something happened here last night that moved us very deeply.

It was so far outside our experience as Australians and so inextricably interwoven with the atmosphere of this place that we'll find it very difficult to convey to you in a central Australian living room, but we'll try.

This is Greg Shackleton, a journalist for Channel 7 News in Australia, and he's reporting from a village on the edge of the Portuguese colony of East Timor.

It's October 1975.

Throughout this story, you're going to hear the area referred to as both East Timor and Timor-Leste, which just means East Timor in Portuguese.

In this clip, Greg Shackleton is telling the story of a meeting that he had with local members of a resistance group called Fretalin, which had been set up to seek independence from Portugal.

of questioning from men who know they may die tomorrow and cannot understand why the rest of the world does not care.

Before we go into the story of these men who could die imminently, we need to do a little bit of a geography lesson.

Greg Shackleton is on the island of Timor, 500 kilometres north of Australia.

At the time, it was split in half.

The western half of the island was part of Indonesia and the people were predominantly predominantly Protestant Christians.

The eastern half was a Portuguese colony that was almost entirely Catholic.

500 years ago, the Dominican friars came to Timor seeking souls.

Then came the soldiers to convert to the sword carriers and found an outpost to guard Portugal's trade empire.

But then that trade empire suddenly collapsed.

In April 1974, a revolution in Portugal brought the end of Portuguese colonialism.

After 500 years, Portugal left very little in Timor.

So, who would control East Timor?

Well, most of the half a million people living there were keen that their new leader not be the brutal dictator of neighboring Indonesia.

Surhato ruthlessly crushed his opponents and reduced those who served him to unquestioning instruments of his will.

They didn't want to be crushed or become instruments of Sakhato's will.

Most Timorese wanted independence but hoped the Portuguese would stay to assist in the transition.

They didn't and a bloody civil war developed between moderate and left-wing political factions.

After a year of fighting the left-wing resistance group Fretalin came out on top and declared independence.

The Fretalin planned to turn East Timor into a socialist-style republic.

That was fine with Portugal, but not with the Indonesian dictator Sakhato.

He loved nothing more than crushing left-wing groups.

The killing was done in the name of an anti-communist purge, but many with no political ties also perished.

But this was the height of the Cold War, and Western powers, including Australia, turned a blind eye.

Throughout the 1960s, Suharto's regime killed hundreds of thousands of alleged leftists in Indonesia.

Fearful of Indonesia becoming another Cold War battleground, the US and their allies left them to it.

Suharto's staunch anti-communism and his willingness to listen to prudent economic advice made him a favourite of the West.

And now he had his sight set on East Timor and the Fretalin.

Even though the Fretalin's leader Jose Ramos Horta said that the group didn't identify as communist at all.

They always call us as communists, but they never call us as freedom fighters, as nationalists, as Timorist patriots that want to liberate our people from colonialism, from oppression and exploitation.

We are nationalists, that's all.

The Indonesians didn't listen.

Concerned at the prospect of a little Cuba on their back doorstep, the Indonesians decided to act.

So this is why Greg Shackleton and four other journalists from Australian news outlets were on the border between East Timor and Indonesia, reporting on the escalating situation.

Why they ask?

Are the Indonesians invading us?

Why they ask if the Indonesians believe that Fretlin is communist, do they not send a delegation to Dili to find out?

Why, they ask, are the Australians not helping us?

Why weren't the Australians helping?

Well, they too were afraid of the threat of communism.

So they, like the Americans, were giving Indonesia's invasion the green light.

In a series of meetings in 1974 and 1975, Gough Whitlam made it clear to President Suhato that in his view, the best solution for East Timor was integration with Indonesia.

Greg Shackleton and a small cohort of journalists were in East Timor covering this situation.

Shackleton said that the local people just wanted the international community to pay attention to what was happening to them.

That's all they want, for the United Nations to care about what is happening here.

The emotion here last night was so strong that we, all three of us, felt we should be able to reach out into the warm night air and touch it.

Greg Shackleton at an unnamed village which we'll remember forever in Portuguese Timor.

At night, the journalists slept in a house in the town of Balibo.

We've daubed our house with the word Australia in red and the Australian flag in the house where we spent the night.

We're hoping it will afford us some protection.

But on the night of the 15th of October, things changed.

The Indonesian Navy began firing artillery shells into the town.

Within hours, 300 Indonesian soldiers had taken control of the town with basically no resistance from the Fretalin.

The reporters came out of the house to identify themselves as members of the foreign press.

They came outside and put a hand up.

We are Australian journalists.

We don't have our guns, all this stuff.

They said, the captain said, no, go inside.

Eyewitnesses told the ABC they saw an Indonesian special forces soldier who went by Chris go into the house with a gun.

He says he looked in the window and saw that Mr.

Chris had entered the house and shot the three journalists sitting in the chairs and the one leaning against the wall.

The fifth journalist was stabbed in the bathroom.

Several eyewitnesses have described what happened next.

When we arrived there, he said, we were told that the Indonesians had killed five Australian military men.

He says he actually saw the corpses.

Three were leaning over machine guns and two others were nearby.

They were dressed in Portuguese military uniforms.

The subsequent coroner's report found that the journalists had been in civilian clothes when they were killed.

But in an attempt to cover up the fact that they had killed foreign journalists, the Indonesians dressed the bodies in Portuguese military uniforms and planted weapons next to them.

The Indonesians took some pictures of the corpses, he said.

The corpses were thrown in a pile, then they placed an incendiary bomb and everything was burned.

All the corpses of the five Australians and those of the Timorese who died during the night.

Now, how would the Australian government react to this?

The illegal execution of five unarmed journalists who had surrendered themselves to the Indonesians?

Well, it wasn't really a great time for the Australian government to react to anything at all, really.

Why?

Well, it was in the process of collapsing.

Parliamentary democracy is a complex and fragile thing.

The night the journalists were killed, Prime Minister Gough Whitlam was trying to hold hold on to his job as the opposition tried to force his resignation.

I make it clear that the government will not yield to pressure.

We will not yield to blackmail.

We will not be panicked.

A three-week constitutional crisis followed, culminating in Whitlam's sacking and the most famous quote in the history of Australian politics.

Well, may we say, God save the Queen.

God save the Queen,

because nothing

By the way, buckle up, the 50th anniversary is on the way, and you're going to be hearing that quote quite a lot.

As Australian journalists were being executed during an invasion 500 kilometres off the coast of Darwin, everyone in Canberra was too busy coup d'état to notice.

And once they did start paying attention, the debate wasn't over how to sanction Indonesia for these war crimes, but rather about whether the Australian government had warned the journalists of the danger they were in.

Whitlam said he had told them himself.

I, in fact, had told Greg Shackleton

my fears.

One week and after I heard the Red Cross, I told him a second time.

Despite this, the Indonesian and Australian governments both said that the journalists had been tragically and accidentally killed in crossfire during the capture of Balibo.

And that's largely because Australia's bipartisan East Timor policy was to support Indonesia as they defeated the Fretalin and put the entire island under occupation.

With the Indonesians in control, East Timor was sealed off.

Once East Timor was annexed, things started to move very quickly.

In 1976, the Australian government shut down the last phone line connecting Australia and East Timor.

In 1978, they officially recognised Indonesian sovereignty over East Timor, and Australia was the only country to do that.

And while there were some who protested this move, voicing opposition to this policy was enough to get you branded a bleeding heart lefty looney.

In 1981, the Australian Prime Minister Doug Anthony said during a visit to Indonesia that it was time people just got over the whole five executed journalists thing.

It is causing a problem and it is causing political and economic difficulties between our two countries.

By this point, a lot of Australians weren't buying the story that the men had been caught in crossfire, which remained the official position of the Indonesian and Australian governments.

And Doug Anthony.

He said that six years after the event, Australians should ask themselves if it would not be better to put the incident behind them.

Mr Anthony quoted Mr Whitlam as saying it was difficult to have an informed discussion on East Timor because Australian journalists were embittered by the deaths of their colleagues.

I should hope that if I am executed on the job, my colleagues would also be just a little embittered on my behalf.

But Doug Anthony said he raised the topic so that...

People in the media who still feel fairly savage about it might let the issue pass by.

So I think that journalists in Australia ought to take a lower profile on the Bally Bay issue.

So why should journalists shut up about it?

Well, there was money to be made, of course.

Relations between Australia and Indonesia have steadily improved over recent years, culminating in the signing of the Timor Gap Oil Treaty.

The Timor Gap Oil Treaty carved up the bountiful oil reserves of the Timor Sea between Australia and Indonesia.

The status quo had the potential to be very profitable indeed.

Since the takeover, there have been numerous reports of mass killings, death and famine.

Of course, That was never acknowledged, but the Indonesians were happy to let the ABC see the prison island where they were housing somewhere between 4 and 60,000 people thought to be family members of the Fretalin.

Brought here as part of the Indonesian policy to cut the Fretalin off from family support.

Exiled Fretalin members said Australia was complicit in what was happening.

We feel that

Australian government has effectively become an ally to the crimes and the illegal occupation of East Timor.

What we have heard on the part of Australia, on the part of Foreign Minister Gareth Evans, that the Timorese people should simply surrender and then the conflict would end.

So I must say to Gareth Evans, he can swallow his advice and he can go to hell.

Fratalim leader José Ramos Horta does not mince words.

But throughout the 70s and 80s there were only stories about the brutality.

There were no pictures.

But that changed in 1991.

Those fleeing the gunfire of Indonesia's soldiers were mainly youths and clearly defenseless.

In a chilling irony, it was a graveyard and its headstones which offered the best protection against the bullets.

Massacres like this had become almost routine in East Timor.

There are apparently 80 or so, maybe 100 people taken out in trucks.

and

executed by a firing squad, shot dead and buried in a mass grave.

The only difference between the massacre at the Santa Cruz Cemetery in 1991 and several other massacres across the island since occupation was this.

Yorkshire Television's Max Stahl was in the cemetery when the shooting began.

Max Stahl was one of a small cohort of international journalists who had been on the ground in Santa Cruz to cover a visit by a UN delegation.

Activists for East Timorese's independence had thought that the Indonesian military wouldn't dare shoot them for demonstrating while the world's media was around.

They were wrong.

Which said that up to 270 people had been killed or disappeared either on the 12th of November or in the subsequent smaller massacres that followed.

Gradually, more and more information came out about what had happened in the years since Indonesia annexed East Timor.

And it wasn't good news.

East Timor has seen a deliberate, vicious and systematic campaign of gross violations of human rights.

The UN eventually found that at least 102,800 people died due to conflicts during the Indonesian occupation.

18,000 killed deliberately and 84,000 killed by hunger and disease caused by the conflict.

This is in a region of less than a million people.

Some estimates say that up to a third of the population died due to the conflict.

It It took until 1998 and the resignation of President Suhato before Australia finally acted.

Prime Minister John Howard sent a letter to the new Indonesian president, BJ Habibi.

In this letter he suggests that I have to solve Istimur.

That means prepare them for 10 years or whatever.

and then after that give them their independence

give them their independence.

John Howard had given the Indonesian government 10 years to come up with a plan for an East Timorese state.

In the unfolding story of Israel and Palestine, we've reached the same point Australia was at in 1998 when Prime Minister John Howard sent that letter to BJ Habibi.

Anthony Albanese is feeling pressure from Australians to recognise a Palestinian state.

Let me walk through some of the parallels between East Timor and what's happening right now in the occupied Palestinian territories.

Long-term Western bipartisan support for an occupying force?

Czech.

Dead journalists?

Czech.

Mass starvation?

Czech.

An almost incomprehensible death toll?

Czech.

Enormous numbers of refugees?

Czech.

East Timor is even broken up into multiple sections, just like the Palestinian territories.

It has a little exclave like Gaza.

So what happens after the recognition of statehood?

Well, back in 1998, the recognition of East Timor felt like a positive step but the reality on the ground was very different.

The streets in Dili have become a battleground.

The Indonesian president didn't want to spend 10 years figuring out how to build an East Timorese state so instead he called a snap independence referendum.

And when it passed, he dipped out, just like the Portuguese in 1975.

There's absolutely no security in Timor.

And they left a few parting gifts for pro-Indonesian militias.

Indonesia's military has admitted supplying weapons.

The civilian militias, made up of young and poorly trained recruits, accused of carrying out a campaign of terror on village people.

Yesterday, the militias went on a rampage, shooting and burning, taking control of the streets.

Things got so bad that Australia had to step in.

In a massive show of force, Australian troops swept the centre of the capital.

So, that's 1999.

Let's jump forward a little bit to May 2002.

On a hot and sticky night in Dili, the world watched the creation of the Democratic Republic of Timor-Leste.

Our time has come,

and the most momentous occasion in the history of Istimur

is almost upon us.

Former Fretilin leader José Ramos Horta was about to become the new nation's first foreign minister.

I feel the hearts of all Timorese brothers and sisters around the world singing and our spirits soar beyond dreams.

Shortly after midnight, the flag of the former resistance Fretalin was raised as the new flag of East Timor.

The future was looking bright.

In a few years, oil and gas revenues from the Timor Sea will start to kick in.

That will be a giant boost to East Timor.

They're even talking about East Timor being a country as rich as Brunei.

Now, just checking the data and...

No, they didn't become as rich as Brunei.

On a GDP per capita basis, Brunei is currently 25 times richer than Timor-Leste.

So what happened to the Timor-Sea oil and gas revenue?

Well, just to go back to their Independence Day celebrations for a moment.

Today, East Timor's government will begin its official duties by signing a raft of international treaties, including the Timor-Sea Agreement with Australia.

In practice, that agreement has led to most of the profits from Timor-Sea oil flowing into Australia.

Timor-Leste has accused Australia of stealing its hopes of a prosperous future.

East Timor has a right to stand on its own two feet, and what the Australian government is doing is robbing East Timor of this opportunity by robbing East Timor of its oil.

That's probably a story for another day, to be honest with you.

The point is: independence and global recognition of statehood isn't a shortcut to prosperity.

You can be exploited even if you are a sovereign state.

As UN boss Kofi Annan said that night in Timor-Leste: Independence is not an end.

It is the beginning of self-rule, which requires compromise, discipline, unity, and resolve.

Statehood has not made them rich, but it has made them free.

They have one of Asia's strongest democracies.

They have freedom of speech, freedom of religion, and the freedom to elect their leaders.

Their current president is José Ramos Horta.

So what does all that tell us about what might happen to the Palestinians?

To build an independent functioning state like Timor-Leste, you need a functioning government and a functioning security force.

It took three years of intervention by the Australian-led, US-backed, multinational peacekeeping force in East Timor to set up their government.

That peacekeeping force was only able to operate because Indonesia let them.

Right now, Israel is not giving any indication that they will allow an international peacekeeping force to enter the West Bank or Gaza.

In fact, they have revoked the visas of Australia's representatives to the Palestinian Authority.

We can't even send diplomats in at the moment.

The Timor-Leste government was also only able to be set up because they controlled the entire territory that they were claiming as their own.

Currently, the Palestinian Authority only controls about 9% of the territory it claims.

Israel controls most of the West Bank, and what's left of Hamas controls what's left of the Gaza Strip.

Neither Israel nor Hamas have shown any indication that they're willing to hand over control of that territory to the Palestinian Authority, and Australia, France, the UK, and Canada can't really make them.

Only the US can do that.

Their recognition and goodwill is better than nothing, but without the United States, its effectiveness may be limited.

Sure, they'll be able to call that building in Canberra an embassy, but as we saw with Timor-Leste, it's going to take decades to build up even a remotely functioning state.

And right now, the Israelis and Palestinians don't even have a ceasefire, let alone a peace agreement.

Right now, the person leading these ceasefire negotiations on behalf of President Trump is a guy named Steve Witkoff.

But who is this dude?

What's his deal?

And what does he think that he can achieve?

That story's next on If You're Listening.

If You're Listening is written by me, Matt Bevan.

Supervising producer is Cara Jensen-McKinnon.

Audio production is by Tegan Nichols.

We're bringing the If You're Listening live show to the Brisbane Writers Festival on the 10th of October.

There is a link to buy tickets in our show notes.

It's likely to sell out though, so definitely get in quick.

I'll catch you next week.