The Australian Senate ratified the Timor Sea Treaty March 6. The treaty provides for 90 percent of revenue from the Bayu-Undan gas field to go to East Timor and 10 percent to Australia. Ratification occurred only after the East Timorese government of Prime Minister Mari Alkatiri signed a separate agreement. That accord gave Canberra rights to the lion’s share of revenue from two other fields that are claimed by East Timor as part of its territorial waters.

Canberra will take 82 percent of the Greater Sunrise gas field revenues and 100 percent from the Laminara Corallina oilfield when they eventually come on line. Together they are twice the size of Bayu-Undan. All of Bayu-Undan lies inside an agreed joint production area but only 20 percent of Greater Sunrise does.

ConocoPhillips, claiming pressure from its intended customers, had threatened to pull out of its promised investments unless the treaty was signed by March 11. The company was committed to build a pipeline from Bayu-Undan to Darwin, Australia, the capital of the Northern Territory, and to process the liquefied natural gas for export to Japan.

"The Australians are trying to force us to give up on our claims on Sunrise," Alkatiri told the Sydney Morning Herald February 27. "Their tactics are very clear. Australia knows that these revenues are vital for us. I am very surprised by their attitude. I never thought a democratic country like Australia would play this kind of role with a poor neighbour."

A senior Timorese official described a March 5 phone call from Australia’s prime minister, John Howard, to Alkatiri as "an ultimatum."

"Howard said that unless we agreed to sign the new deal immediately, he would stop the Senate approving the treaty," the official noted. "They were treating him as if he was a child and he is offended. The Australians have shown great disrespect to the institutions of another sovereign nation," a Timorese official told the Sydney Morning Herald. "This sort of thing goes down like a lead balloon in Dili. The Timorese were pushed around for too long by the Indonesians. We don’t want another big neighbour telling us what to do."  
 
‘A tutorial’ in imperialist politics
Howard’s demand was a continuation of Canberra’s imperial arrogance throughout negotiations between the two governments. It built on the fact that Australian armed forces were the bulk of UN-sanctioned troops sent to East Timor as "peacekeepers" to supposedly safeguard the country’s independence in 1999.

A leaked transcript of a Nov. 27, 2002, negotiating session in Dili records the East Timorese prime minister complaining to Australia’s foreign minister, Alexander Downer, that the Australia government was insisting on boundaries it had negotiated years ago with Indonesia, and offering his country "scrapings off a plate." Downer vehemently replied: "We are not going to [re]negotiate the Timor Sea Treaty--understand that. It doesn’t matter what your Western advisers say.... There will be no new joint development area for Greater Sunrise.... We are very tough. We will not care if you give information to the media. Let me give you a tutorial in politics--not a chance."

The East Timor government claims its maritime boundary as the middle of the Timor Sea, while Canberra claims three-quarters of the area between the two countries. As part of its course of action, Canberra withdrew from the jurisdiction of the International Court of Justice and the International Tribunal for the Law of the Sea in 2002.

Downer and other cabinet ministers, in Dili for the March 6 signing of the separate Greater Sunrise and Laminara Corallina agreement, claimed the package would promote the long-term stability and prosperity of East Timor. Their statement also noted, "These projects will be of great benefit to Australia, in particular through downstream investment and employment in the Northern Territory."

Sen. Robert Brown, the leader of the Greens in Australia’s parliament, was ejected from the Senate for the rest of the day on March 6 after refusing to retract or reword the term "blackmail" to describe the pressures brought to bear on the East Timor government.

In related developments, as part of Canberra’s ongoing assault on immigrant rights, 1,600 East Timorese refugees, some of whom have lived in Australia for a decade or were born here, face deportation now that Indonesian rule has ended. To date nearly 1,100 applications for permanent residence have been rejected. None has been approved.

Doug Cooper is a member of the Maritime Union of Australia.  
 
 
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