Newsgroups: soc.rights.human
Subject: Human Rights, Senator Evans...
Date: 16 Aug 92  12:19:44 EST




/* Written  6:23 pm  Aug 11, 1992 by peg:greenleft in cdp:greenleft.news */
Human rights, Senator Evans and Timor

By Val Plumwood

The ANU provided a pleasantly legitimating academic atmosphere 
for the Centre for International and Public Law's conference from 
July 15 to 17 entitled ``Australia and Human Rights: Where to 
from Here?''.

The conference showcased bureaucratic efforts to conform to 
international human rights principles and legislation, and failed 
dismally to address the main human rights issues in Australia. It 
ignored activist groups, and largely ignored the key issues of 
police racism and violence to Aboriginal people, and of the 
absence of adequate checks on police powers, as well as growing 
human rights abuses involving homeless, unemployed and young 
people.

It also ignored two crucial areas in which Australia is currently 
a defendant before the International Court of Justice: the 
Aboriginal claim to sovereignty and Australia's de jure 
recognition of Indonesian sovereignty in East Timor.

The keynote speaker on the third day was foreign minister Gareth 
Evans, who often adopts the stance of a human rights advocate. 
Evans lifted the government's record of hypocrisy on human rights 
to a new level by speaking of the need of countries to be self-
critical and to be consistent in condemning human rights abuses.

He did not explain how he reconciled that with the blatant 
inconsistency between Australian support for Indonesia in the 
East Timor case and the principle invoked to justify involvement 
in the Gulf War, that small nations should be protected from 
invasion by larger and more powerful neighbours. Nor did he 
explain how Australia's continued recognition of Indonesian 
sovereignty
could be reconciled with the 1970 Australian-
sponsored UN resolution that territory obtained by aggression 
should not be recognised.

At the conference, Evans amplified his previous record of 
apologising for the Indonesian role in East Timor and minimising 
the effects of the terror there. Evans has referred since 
December 1991 to the Dili massacre as an ``episode'' and an 
``aberration''. He still maintained on July 17 that the Dili 
massacre was an action in which the army was ``out of control'', 
and not an act of policy of the Indonesian state, which, 
according to Evans, is distinct from the military.

Evans claimed that it was important to distinguish between cases, 
such as in China and Tibet, where human rights abuses were state 
policy and cases where they were not. This distinction provides 
the basis on which Evans regularly condemns the Chinese role in 
Cambodia, while discounting the similarity of Australia's role of 
support for an equally genocidal regime on its own borders in 
East Timor.

How can repressive policies which have been in place since 1975 
and have wiped out one-third of the Timorese population be 
referred to as an ``aberration''? How can the 25-year military 
rule of the Indonesian state be overlooked? How can Evans 
overlook the official announcements that the policies of 
repression will continue and intensify, and the replacement of 
the commander whose troops carried out the massacre by another 
one (General Syafei) who has promised even tougher action against 
dissidents, and said that ``the army is determined to wipe out 
anyone who disrupts stability''?

Evans prefers to place weight on President Suharto's official 
``distancing'' from the Dili massacre, and to draw a sharp moral 
distinction between states (such as China and Burma), which admit 
their human rights abuses as policy, and others. But this 
distinction may simply
accept and reward hypocrisy and concealment of abuses.

According to Senator Evans, there is nothing Australia can do 
except try to influence Indonesia. The Australian government has 
adopted the right course in expressing its views on the massacre 
to the proper (Indonesian) authorities, who promised to conduct 
an investigation and bring those responsible to justice.

But the results of the ``investigation'' are now known and make 
nonsense of the Australian claim to influence. The captured 
Timorese who organised a peaceful demonstration have been 
savagely punished; the soldiers who shot them down received minor 
punishments or none at all. Evans described this as an ``unhappy 
disparity'' (thus accepting a peaceful demonstration by the 
Timorese as a crime and one of comparable severity to that of the 
massacring soldiers). Evans repeated the Indonesian 
``explanation'' that this disparity was due to  ``the fragility 
of the state and the fact that there were two different systems 
of law under which the two groups were tried'' without critical 
comment on the way this reflects a colonial system.

Evans conceded that the Indonesian response was ``not perfect'', 
and spoke of his ``heavy heart''. But these alleged qualms did 
nothing to stop him announcing at the same time new levels of 
cooperation and a ``joint defence'' pact with the Indonesian 
military.

Defence ties too were presented as ``a good way to influence and 
moderate behaviour''. But presumably they are only so if 
Australia has the courage and principle to withdraw from them 
when it is clear that no moderation has occurred.

People with experience of East Timor who have recently returned 
report that the repression is worse now than ever before (Sydney 
Morning
Herald Letters, July 30). Continued Australian silence and 
announcements of increased military cooperation must be 
interpreted as further acceptance of and complicity in the terror 
in East Timor.

 * Origin: Gated from uucp to Fidonet by FredGate (1:112/28.0)