We live amid relentless attacks, anti-democratic forces in our midst, and the rearing of the ugly and dangerous Hydra of fascism and populism. But the young nation of Timor-Leste has concluded a peaceful democratic transition.
This chapter shares a unique experience of solidarity work from a Global South people’s perspective, in general, and for East Timor, in particular. I start with a little poem I composed in 1996. When I saw this young child, in Timor, who wasn’t speaking but whose eyes were blazing, and telling their story through that gaze. “Breaking the Silence” is a publication that we produced at the time. That told the story of the first Asia-Pacific Conference for East Timor (APCET) and the Asia-Pacific Coalition for East Timor that it birthed. This is the story of APCET the conference, APCET the coalition, and APCET the solidarity movement that was birthed in Manila in 1994. It is discussed in four parts: the conference, the coalition, the solidarity movement, and lastly, lessons and insights.
How did APCET happen? In 1992, there was a meeting of activists and civil society in Bangkok, Thailand, called “the People’s Plan For the 21st Century.” In that huge meeting, there were different workshops. One of those workshops was a people’s tribunal on justice and human rights that dealt with the issue of Timor, Burma and Thailand. And, of course, the Timor speaker at that time, was no other than the fourth president of Timor-Leste, José Ramos-Horta. We realized, and he realized, that even activists in the region were not aware of what the issue of East Timor was all about. So Horta, along with some friends of his in the conference, felt that it was time to bring the issue of East Timor back to where it belonged geographically, in Southeast Asia.
No one was talking about Timor in Southeast Asia, even among activists. It was being talked about in the UN, in the north, in the west, etc., but not in Southeast Asia. Why? Of course, we know why, because of the silence of the Association of Southeast Asian Nations, where the issue of Timor was swept under the rug, as with other human rights issues in the region. So we wanted to break the silence, so to speak. And thus, Horta met with four of us Filipinos, myself, R.C. Constantino, Joel Racamora and Rita Bow, and brainstormed on the possibility of hosting or organizing a conference. We laid the genesis of what was to be APCET.
We felt that between and among the capitals in ASEAN countries, Manila would be the best venue for such a conference, because we have a vibrant civil society, we had very close commonalities with Timor, we were both Catholic nations, and we had in Manila, supposedly, a robust democratic space. Horta was a speaker at that workshop. We had these little meetings, in these little cafes. They say that great things, including revolutions, start in small corners of the coffee shops, and that was maybe what happened.
We first called it “International Conference on East Timor and Indonesia,” so as to not just focus so much on Timor, to shield the issue by bringing in also Indonesia. But after a few months of deliberation, we decided to just focus on the issue of Timor. But since, as I said earlier, no one was really much aware of the Timor issue, we wanted someone or some group, or whoever was more knowledgeable than us, to give us more information. So, we invited Pedro Pinto Leite, of the International Coalition of Jurists for East Timor (IPJET), as a compadre to lead awareness sessions among the local organizers in the Philippines. He came in 1993, and then the government of the Philippines got wind of this plan to do a conference on East Timor in 1994. When Indonesian president Suharto got wind of this, pressure from Indonesia intensified through mid-1994. Philippine president Fidel Ramos also pressured the organizers to stop the conference. So on May 20, 10 days before the conference, invoking national security, the Ramos government ordered a ban on all the foreign participants coming to APCET.
We were now trying to further internationalize East Timor’s struggle for independence, but we were also regionalizing it in Southeast Asia. So the media started to cover this fracas in the Philippines, and we became headlines for the next two to three weeks in Manila and throughout the region. Suharto’s pressure on Ramos to stop the conference came in different forms. There were deprecations of participants, they tried very hard to stop us, but because of the media coverage, we were able to put the Timor issue on the map. One means of pressure was to entice us with a “bribe.” They even talked to the organizer and said, “Why don’t you hold the conference in Hong Kong? All expenses paid and you can talk about human rights in general in the region? And don’t talk about Timor only!” But we didn’t bite, of course. The event now went to court, and the court issued a temporary restraining order for us to stop the conference. We defied the order.
The Philippine-Indonesia Friendship Society, which just sprung out of the blue, suddenly obtained a restraining order against R.C. Constantino, who was chairing the conference, myself as the coordinator, the president of the University of Philippines and the Dean of the College of Law, which was going to be the venue of that conference. Arrests and harassments of APCET participants ensued. Our friend Freddy Gamage from Sri Lanka was thrown out and tried to return again, but was thrown out again.
It behooves us to remember that the road to Timor’s independence, even through this conference, was an uphill feat. Just before the conference, Cardinal Jaime Sin condemned the attempt of the Ramos government to stop the conference. He issued a public apology to Timor’s Bishop Carlos Belo about what his government was doing. As an aside, Cardinal Sin was actually also the Cardinal who called on all the people to protect Ramos, then an opposition leader, during the 1986 “People Power” revolution. Here, Cardinal Sin was calling on the people to condemn what Ramos was now, as President, trying to do.
That also led to a Philippine Supreme Court order overturning the temporary restraining order. So we were allowed to proceed with a conference, but as a concession, perhaps, the Supreme Court also recognized the right of President Ramos to deport and ban foreign delegates. In the meantime, Indonesia canceled peace talks between the government of the Philippines and the Moro National Liberation Fronr, which it was hosting in Jakarta. It also canceled a business conference in Davao where the East ASEAN growth area was happening.
There were pundits who were both pro and con, but there were more pro-APCET voices. One analyst was saying your organizers succeeded in internationalizing East Timor because because they held their ground, because they took the bull by its horns. Barely hours before we started the conference, the Supreme Court ruled that we could proceed.
So APCET I in Manila turned out to be a smashing success. The battle was won for now. Perhaps if Suharto and Ramos had not pressured us, the conference would have just been an academic exercise with maybe an item or two printed on the inside pages of the newspapers. But because of what they did, but also thanks also to us, there was a bonanza of debate about the East Timor issue. It was finally being talked about, not only in the Philippines, but also in the region. Apart from that, the conference also passed resolutions that ranged from the release of Xanana Gusmão, to supporting the peace plan of the National Council of Maubere Resistance (CNRM), to supporting women’s efforts inside Timor. One of the ten resolutions was that APCET recognized Timor as a sovereign people and nation, before many states did so.
The conference, as I said, gave birth to a South-South people’s coalition, which was also called APCET. The “C” was no longer a conference, but a coalition. The coalition committed to three areas of work: awareness raising, lobbying, and capacity building. We resolved in Manila that every two years we would hold an APCET in the different capitals of ASEAN. So in 1996, we held APCET in Kuala Lumpur. The search for peace was the theme. Ironically, APCET II was warned again by the Malaysian government that there would be stiff government action if we proceeded. They didn’t learn from Manila, they still did this. When we persisted, pro-government youth barged into the conference to disrupt it.
The aftermath of APCET II was that all of us were deported: five Australians, four Americans, and others. Some of us were detained a little longer, including some media people. Again, the government denied that they had anything to do with this, but five years later, the Malaysian government, led by the United Malays National Organization (UMNO), apologized. An UMNO youth leader in the mob apologized to us, to the APCET people. Malaysians who were detained were even compensated by the court afterwards.
APCET III was going to be held in Bangkok, Thailand in 1998. By comparison, this was “hassle free.” The Thai government had learned from both Manila and Kuala Lumpur. Still, we were given the runaround. They used a law, supposedly a labor law, to try to stop the conference. Chulalongkorn University, our co-organizer, had to pull out because they were pressured by the government. For us to be allowed to proceed with a conference, laughably, we were not allowed to speak and talk from a stage, we had to all speak and talk on the same floor level.
APCET III was about the right to self-determination of East Timor. After this, our campaigning intensified as events in Timor also intensified. At the close of the conference, we again reiterated our support for the Timorese resistance movement CNRM (National Council of Maubere Resistance). There were advocacy campaigns because of the intensified situation in Timor, and the terror caused by the pro-Indonesia militia, and militia attacks. We called for Indonesia to free imprisoned resistance leader Xanana Gusmão, for emergency resources when refugees had to leave Timor and we had to house them in Malaysia, Indonesia and the Philippines. We even had a big concert for Timor in the Philippines to raise funds and to support the refugees. We also sent medical practitioners, doctors and nurses to Motael Clinic in Dili, and we sent legislators and political activists from the region to Timor prior to the referendum in 1999.
We were planning to hold ACPET IV in Jakarta. It would be important first to get rid of Suharto. Then our Indonesian friends, indeed, got rid of Suharto, because of intense pro-democracy pressure from, especially, the youth and students movements. In light of the nascent democratization in Indonesia, we decided that instead of holding ACPET IV in Jakarta, we would do it directly inside Timor.
Meanwhile, Ramos-Horta and Xanana went to tour around ASEAN countries, when the referendum’s results in favour of independence were already very clear. So APCET IV finally went home to Timor. We held it in Baucau, the bastion of the Timorese resistance. It was symbolic for us to hold APCET IV there. IWe wanted to shift our focus on building an independent East Timor, to empower the grassroots and to consolidate civil society, to focus on partnerships with civil society of East Timor, as many in the Timorese diaspora would now most likely be part of be in government in Timor.
APCET V, our last APCET that closed the curtains, was held in Dili, amidst a continuing quest for justice. Three things came out of APCET V. First, we launched a public indictment of the atrocities of Indonesia and those who worked against Timor. We knew that there was supposed to be a UN tribunal. We were supporting that process. But with or without that process, we called for a people’s tribunal on crimes against humanity. Realpolitik between the Government of Timor and the government of Indonesia derailed that call. We are happy, of course, that the Chega! truth commission process was set up to address at least the issues within East Timor. We also called for setting up a UN tribunal. The third goal was to support the start of a more intense campaign of “closing” the Timor gap by ensuring Timorese access to their own oil in the Timor Sea.
APCET was a gateway to the formation of a new coalition called APSOC, the Asia-Pacific Solidarity Coalition, supporting Aceh, West Papua, Burma, Patani, Bangsamoro and their self-determination campaigns. And still, of course, supporting Timor to succeed. After APCET formed in 1994, there were new regional civil society formations in the region that sprung from this initiative, such as the ASEAN Civil Society Conference, the ASEAN People’s Forum, the Free Burma coalition.
In 2019, we organised an exchange and learning visit from the Philippines’ Bangsamoro region to Timor to learn about their experience. Their experience of becoming “governors” after being warriors and guerillas. The Bangsamoro recently earned their own self-determination through an autonomous region.
Because of our work, APCET was awarded the Order of Timor-Leste in 2015.
We thank Timor for recognizing the little work that we did.
