Ian & Stuart's Australian Mac: Not for Sale/Another.not.for.sale (Australia).iso/no need to argue/Imagining East Timor

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Arena Magazine No.4 April - May 1993

FEATURES

IMAGINING EAST TIMOR

Benedict Anderson


Why has Indonesia's attempt to absorb East Timor failed? And
how does one explain the very rapid development of Timorese
nationalism since 1975? Benedict Anderson, author of
Imagined Communities, argues that Indonesia cannot imagine
the East Timorese as Indonesians. Their relations with them
are those of colonizer and colonized, producing East Timorese
nationalism as Dutch colonialism once produced Indonesian
nationalism.

I want to ask two quite concrete questions which nevertheless
involve a certain common theoretical problematic. The first
question is: Why has Indonesia's attempt to absorb East Timor
failed? Was the failure inevitable or did something happen
between 1975 and 1990 which could have been avoided? What is
the nature of the mistakes that were made, if there were
indeed mistakes made? The second question is in some ways
the reverse: How does one explain the very rapid spread and
development of Timorese nationalism? For me this second
question is very serious. My theoretical writings on
nationalism have focused on the importance of the spread of
print and its relationship to capitalism, yet in East Timor
there has been very little capitalism, and illiteracy was
widespread. Moreover, East Timor is ethnically very
complicated, with many different language groups. What was
it then that made it possible to 'think East Timor'?

The first question came to me while I was in Portugal in May
1992. Among my Portuguese colleagues a discussion was going
on about the memoir of General Costa Gomez. He was one of
the key players in the Portuguese governments of 1974-76, at
the time of the collapse of the Portugese empire, and one of
those most responsible for decision making with regard to
East Timor. In his memoir, he said that he and his friends
thought East Timor would be like Goa - that it would be
peacefully and easily absorbed into big Indonesia, just as
little Goa was absorbed into big India. He argued that if
only Jakarta hadn't been so brutal, if the Indonesian Army
hadn't been so oppressive and exploitative, there would be no
East Timor problem today. Hence, the tragedy of East Timor
was neither his fault nor that of the Portuguese Government.
East Timor could easily have been a happy, vibrant,
participating part of Indonesia. Yet Costa Gomez's account
in the end doesn't help us very much, since it does not
explain the brutality and the exploitativeness of the
Indonesian occupation.

Here we are faced with a question which relates not only to
Indonesia, but engages the whole problematic of how nations
imagine themselves in the late twentieth century and what the
real possibilities are for nations growing in size rather
than breaking up into smaller pieces. We have been seeing a
lot of the latter in Eastern Europe and I suspect that more
is going to occur in the future in other regions, in a kind
of general scaling back of the national imagination - an
inability to move towards inclusiveness and genuine
incorporation. In the specific case of Indonesia, one needs
to ask how the military leadership in Jakarta thinks about
territory and peoples which they have determined to be
'Indonesian'. Clearly, the great difficulty has been to
persuade themselves that the East Timorese 'really' are
Indonesians. If they were, there would be only the simple
task of scraping away a kind of superficial strangeness
attributable to Portuguese colonization, revealing a 'natural
Indonesianness' underneath.

Indonesian nationalism self-consciously sees itself as
incorporating or covering many different ethnic-linguistic
groups and many different religious cultures, precisely those
agglomerated over centuries into the Netherlands East Indies.
The commonality of 'Indonesia' is fundamentally one of
historical experience and mythology. On the one hand, there
is the conception of centuries of struggle against Dutch
colonialism. On the other, there is the myth, powerful but
also potentially divisive, of grand pre-colonial states, most
notably that of Majapatit in the fourteenth and fifteenth
centuries. The Majapatit 'empire' has the advantage that its
ill-defined extent can be read to include the whole of Timor,
as well as regions today solidly part of Malaysia and
Singapore. Yet it has the great disadvantage that it is
closely identified with just one of Indonesia's ethnic
groups, the Javanese. Hence state leaders have been very
cautious about using it as a prime basis for the historical
identity of modern Indonesia.

For jakarta, therefore, the question is how to recompose the
national people narrative so as to incorporate the East
Timorese. It cannot be done in terms of resistance to Dutch
imperialism. Nor can it be done in terms of the solid
historical connections and contacts with the rest of the
archipelago, for one of the peculiar characteristics of
Portuguese colonialism was that it kept East Timor extremely
isolated, except for links between Portugal, Macau,
Mozambique, Angola and Goa. The obvious alternative to a
historicized nationalism is of course, a biological-ethnic
essentialism. In principle Jakarta could say: 'After all, we
have the same physical features, our languages are connected,
our original cultures were identical'. But this line of
argument is tricky, for it leads to claims, unacceptable
today, to the Philippines and Malaysia.

I think the result has been a deep inability to imagine East
Timor as Indonesian. And if you can't imagine the East
Timorese as really and truly 'brothers', what then? I was
talking recently with a very intelligent East Timorese about
his conversations with East Timorese students in Indonesian
universities. There are at least a couple of thousand such
students. Many of them drop out, partly as a result of
language problems, but mainly because of what they experience
as an intolerable social climate. He told me that what
really enrages East Timorese students is that they are always
being told how ungrateful they are. 'Look at all we have
done for you! Where is your gratitude?' is what they hear
day in day out from deans, professors, fellow students, and
so forth. Is it likely that in the heyday of Indonesian
nationalism people ran around the country telling fellow
Indonesians whom they were enlisting to the nationalist cause
that they should be 'grateful'. Even in the 1950s when
Indonesia was shaken by many regionalist revolts, the
accusation of ingratitude never emerged. The accusation then
on all sides was typically that of 'betrayal' of a common
historical project. By contrast, 'ingratitude' was a typical
accusation by Dutch colonial officials against 'native'
nationalism: 'Look at all we have done for you, down there,
in terms of security, education, economic development,
civilization'. The language is that of the superior and
civilized towards the inferior and barbarous. It is not very
far from racism, and reveals a profound incapacity to
'incorporate' the East Timorese, an unacknowledged feeling
that they are really, basically, foreign.

One could argue this stance is evidenced by the extremist
methods of rule that were used in East Timor after the
invasion of 1975. The vast scale of the violence deployed,
the use of aerial bombardments, the napalming of villages,
the systematic herding of people into resettlement centres
leading to the terrible starvation famines of 1977-80, have
no real counterparts in Indonesian government policy towards,
as it were, 'real Indonesians'. They seem more like policies
for enemies than for national siblings. It is true that
there was massive violence in the anti-Communist campaign of
1965-66. Yet the bulk of that violence was local in
character, fuelled by the panic of millions of people about
what was going to happen to themselves, their families, and
so forth, 'if Communism prevailed'. It had its cold, planned
elements certainly, but nothing comparable to the coldness
and the plannedness of the ravaging of East Timor, which
reminds me very much of the horrific depredation of Leopold's
'spectral agents' in Conrad's Heart of Darkness. Conrad made
the point that for these agents all civilized rules were
abandoned in 'Africa'. There atrocities they would never get
away with back home in Belgium were permissable.

It is true, of course, that East Timor posed very special
problems for Jakarta. A substantial part of the population
had long been Catholicized. Furthermore, because of
Portugal's membership of NATO, the East Timorese resistance
had better weapons and military training, at the start, than
any previous local opposition to Jakarta. It put up a very
stiff fight, and many thousands of Indonesian troops were
wounded or killed in the struggle, stimulating a strong
battle-zone atmosphere in the territory. On the other hand,
the war has gone on now for seventeen years - longer than any
war Jakarta has conducted. This has meant that East Timor
has been crucial in the careers of Indonesian military
officers in a unique way. Most of the most successful and
ambitious officers have fought in East Timor, and their
promotions have depended in part on their success in
conducting merciless repression and control.

The Indonesian Government has been unable to incorporate East
Timor imaginatively, in the broader, popular sense. I have
been very struck over the years by the extraordinary degree
to which East Timor has been shut off, not merely from the
outside world, but also from the rest of Indonesia. Until
fairly recently, ordinary Indonesians could not go to this
official part of their own country without special
permission. Newspaper coverage of East Timor was
exceptionally meagre, and even less truthful than the media
coverage of other parts of Indonesia. It was thus possible
for many Indonesians not to think about East Timor very much
at all, let alone know about it. Hence it has never been
successfully attached to popular nationalist feeling. This
'void' is very striking if you compare it to the troubled
province of Irian, where Jakarta has for years been battling
quasi-nationalist resistance. I now have staying with me the
son of a friend of mine, a nineteen-year-old boy, who has
just finished high school in West Java. He can barely recall
the name of a single East Timorese, but he knows those of
Irianese football players and journalists, and is a great fan
of Ade, the popular transvestite Irianese TV comedian. Irian
has an imaginative presence in Indonesia. No matter how
badly treated Irianese may actually be in Irian itself, for
Indonesians as a whole they are part of 'us'.

One last question to raise before turning to East Timorese
nationalism itself again relates to the problem of
imagination. Did the Indonesian military leaders ever
consider the possibility that they were replaying, in
reverse, the final trajectory of the colonial relationship
between themselves and the Dutch? The Dutch have been in the
archipelago since the start of the seventeenth century, but a
recognizable nationalist movement did not appear until the
very end of the nineteenth century or the beginning of the
twentieth. Its rise was clearly tied to the decisions of the
Dutch colonialists to start educating people, particularly in
Dutch, to the spread of the modern mass media, to massive
'development' projects, and to the growth of a
professionalized secret police and intelligence apparatus.
For the first time, after 1900, natives were aware of
themselves. People were targets of a systematic and
centralized security apparatus. They were now conscious of
being subjected to a single developmental project, and of
having in common, in the minds of their rulers, their
ineradicable 'nativeness'. They came to understand, through
the Dutch language imposed on them in new schools, the very
idea of colonialism as a system, and the modern means to
emancipate themselves from it. Why did the Indonesian
Government not see that Education-Repression-Development in
East Timor followed exactly the logic of earlier Dutch
policies, and that their failure was 'foretold' by
Indonesia's own modern birth?

I now want to turn to the question of why East Timor has
become so nationalist so quickly. The answers here are much
less clear. Begin with the name itself: 'East Timor'. It is
an expression which comes from the Mercatorian map, on which
a pencilled administrative line divides Timor in half. How
did this 'aerial' demarcation become so real a reality that
it is possible for young people in Dili to think it is
perfectly normal to call themselves 'East Timorese', as if
these two words were one, no longer immediately pointing to
'West Timor'. In the video of the Dili massacre the kids'
placards show slogans like 'Viva Timorleste' - all one word.
The origins of this new consciousness certainly derive in
part from a bureaucratic imagining which long pre-dates the
invention of nationalism. It parallels the way in which (as
I have argued in chapter nine of the new edition of my
Imagined Communities) the Irianese were imagined or came into
being, only perhaps in the last thirty years. Yet 'mapped
imagination' is not a sufficient explanation.

What about social formation? If one looks at the situation
up to 1974-75, one finds a typically Iberian colonial social
order. Underneath the Portuguese ruling stratum were, by
rank, wealthy, apolitical Chinese, the then niestizos of
mixed African, Arab, Portuguese and local ancestries, and a
plethora of 'native' ethnolinguist communities. One might
expect to emerge from such a social order something like what
one finds in the Philippines: leaders with an ambiguous
political consciousness, very much aware of their mixed
ancestries and external ties. Indeed, among the older East
Timorese leaders of the 1970s one did find, quite often, a
kind of unsureness of identity, and a resentful attachment to
things Portuguese. East Timor was as real a place, but was
there then a real 'East Timorese' community for which they
were the natural leaders? My sense is that in 1974-75 true
East Timor nationalism was still quite thin on the ground;
perhaps only a small percentage of the population could then
really imagine the future nation-state of East Timor.

Since 1975 this situation has changed dramatically. The
question is why, given the virtual absence of print-
capitalism, and the still substantial illiteracy? In a
recent interview with Editor, a major Jakarta magazine,
General Sjafei, the East Timor military commander, said
something very revealing. Describing the intensive measures
that were taken to head off the Dusitania, the ship that
tried to go to Dili from Darwin with a group of students and
reporters aboard, he noted that the ship itself was not
dangerous, but said that if it managed to anchor in Dili
harbour, 'it could be that I would be facing 120,000
inhabitants of the city of Dili', and 'under the
circumstances I could not guarantee that there would not be
an explosion of the masses'. This language is completely
new. Never before has the Army talked about 'explosions of
the masses' in East Timor or that it faced '120,000 people in
Dili'. For years it has claimed that only a few dozen
diehard opponents existed deep in the mountainous interior.
Sjafei's statement is precisely that of a colonial power
suddenly aware of its impending demise. It is just like the
Dutch recognition in 1946 that Indonesia had changed
completely since 1940 when their power had seemed
impregnable.

We here return to the ironical logic of colonialism. If you
look at the official speeches about East Timor, you will
never find Suharto or the generals talking about its people
as anything but 'East Timorese', even though there are at
least thirty ethnic or tribal groups in the region. In the
same way, the Jakarta regime never talks about Asmat or
Dhani, but always about Irianese. This exactly parallels the
late colonial Netherlands East Indies, where the colonized
knew they were all 'natives' together in their rulers' eyes,
no matter what island, ethnicity or religion they belonged
to. A profound sense of commonality emerged from the gaze
of the colonial state. Indonesian power is infinitely more
penetrating, infinitely more widespread, than Portuguese
colonial power ever was. It is there in the smallest
villages, and is represented by hundreds of military posts
and a huge intelligence apparatus. Thus the consciousness of
being East Timorese has spread rapidly since 1975 precisely
because of the state's expansion, new schools and development
projects also being part of this.

One of the main projects of the Suharto state has been to
'develop' Indonesia. This necessarily involves a certain
kind of definition of what it means to be a real Indonesian.
Part of this definition has emerged from the anti-Communist
massacres of 1965-66, which were understood in part as a
fight against atheism. Hence today every Indonesian has to
have a proper book-religion. Here the Indonesian state finds
itself caught in a strange bind. In 1975, a majority of East
Timorese were still animists. Making them 'Indonesian' meant
'raising' them from animism to having a proper religion,
which given existing realities meant Catholicism. At the
same time the state was perfectly aware of the dangers of the
spread of Catholicism, particularly since Rome insisted on
dealing directly with East Timor, bypassing the conformist
Indonesian Catholic hierarchy. So the Indonesian regime
found itself both wanting and distrusting Catholicism's
spread. In the last seventeen years, the Catholic population
of the territory has more than doubled in size. In East
Timor, everyone is aware that if you are a member of the
Catholic Church, you enjoy protection according to the
state's own logic; at the same time a popular Catholicism has
emerged as an expression of a common suffering, just as it
did in nineteenth-century Ireland. This Catholic commonality
in some sense substitutes for the kind of nationalism I have
talked about elsewhere, which comes from print-capitalism.
Moreover, the decision of the Catholic hierarchy in East
Timor to use Tetun, not Indonesian, as the language of the
Church, has had profoundly nationalizing effects. It has
raised Tetun from being a local language or lingua franca in
parts of East Timor to becoming, for the first time, the
language of 'East Timorese' religion and identity.

But there is a further colonial irony at work. For young
Indonesian intellectuals at the turn of the century, the
language of the colonizer, Dutch, was the language through
which it became possible to communicate across the colony,
and to understand the real condition of the country. It was
also the language of access to modernity and the world beyond
the colony. For one generation at least, Dutch performed the
absolutely essential function of getting natives out of the
prisons of local ethnic languages. In the same way, the
spread of Indonesian in the Jakarta-sponsored school system
has created a new generation of young Timorese who are quite
fluent in Indonesian, and who, through Indonesian, have found
access to the world beyond Indonesia. Indonesian is not the
language of internal solidarity among the East Timorese young
but it is one of the important languages of access to modern
life. Indonesian/Tetun corresponds in 1990 to
Dutch/Indonesian in 1920.

Thinking about nationalism at the end of this century, we may
have to think more about situations like East Timor, where
nationalist projects can turn into 'colonial' projects,
thereby contributing to the fragmentation of the post Second
World War new states that were inherited from European
dominion in the late nineteenth and early twentieth
centuries.

Benedict Anderson teaches Indonesian politics at Cornell
University. He is author of Imagined Communities:
Reflections on the Origins of Nationalism. This article is
based on a lecture at Monash University in 1992.

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