Ten years since East Timor’s independence vote

Yesterday marked the tenth anniversary of the referendum that saw nearly 80 percent of the East Timorese people vote to secede from Indonesia and become a separate nation-state.

A decade later, independence for the tiny island state has proven to be a fraud. The enclave is entirely dependent on and subservient to the imperialist powers; Dili is a nest of intrigue, with officials and corporate executives from Australia, the US, Portugal, China, and other countries manoeuvring for access to the Timor Sea’s vast oil and gas reserves. At the same time, Timor’s 1.1 million people remain among the most impoverished in the world, and subject to an increasingly repressive Western-backed government. Several key social indicators have actually worsened during the past 10 years.

The record stands as a tragic confirmation of the bankruptcy of nationalism and the associated myths of “self-determination” and “national independence” in the 21st century...

By 2006, the first Timorese post-independence administration of Fretilin’s Mari Alkatiri was regarded as insufficiently compliant with Australian dictates and oriented too much towards Portugal and China. As a result, the Australian government launched a provocative regime change operation, dispatching another military intervention force.

That the tenth anniversary celebrations of the 1999 referendum were being held yesterday while around 800 Australian and New Zealand soldiers remain stationed in East Timor—together with more than 1,000 mostly Portuguese and Malaysian UN police—underscores the reality of the country’s so-called independence...

Post-independence Timorese governments have heeded World Bank and International Monetary Fund dictates and locked away oil and gas royalty revenues in a US treasuries-based Petroleum Fund that is now worth $US5 billion. Meanwhile, almost half the population lives below the official poverty line of less than 55 US cents a day, and the unemployment rate is estimated at about 50 percent — up from about one-third of the population in 1999. Basic health, education, and other social services remain widely unavailable — and, as a result, infant mortality is nearly 10 percent at 88 deaths per 1000 live births, average life expectancy just 60 years, and about 30 percent of the adult population is illiterate. The majority live in rural areas, dependent on subsistence farming and typically without running water and/or electricity...

The East Timor tragedy is among the sharpest expressions of the historic failure of bourgeois nationalism. In the late 18th and early 19th centuries, the formation of the modern European nation-state was a progressive development, bound up with the abolition of outmoded feudal barriers that were constraining the development of society’s productive forces. In the current epoch of global capitalism, however, national bourgeois elites are incapable of delivering even the most basic requirements of the masses--including decent living standards and fundamental democratic rights. National “independence” means nothing but the creation of new enclaves, where tiny elites appeal for foreign investment and imperialist patronage by ruthlessly exploiting the local population.

http://www.wsws.org/articles/2009/aug2009/pers-a31.shtml