Ragged chorus flies Timor's tattered flag
THE kumbaya crowd which pressed for East Timor's independence must shoulder much of the blame for the failure of its dysfunctional Government.
But while the collective of liberation theologists and civil rights lawyers cheered Fretilin's Portugese-educated Marxist guerrilla leaders, the same candle-wavers protested against the toppling of the mass murdering Iraqi dictator, Saddam Hussein.
Yet East Timor, with a population estimated at about one million, whose independence was internationally recognised on May 20, 2002, is now arguably in proportionately worse shape than Iraq, population 26 million, where the first election under its new constitution took place just last December.
The Daily Telegraph's Canberra correspondent Malcolm Farr noted yesterday the turmoil in East Timor should ensure a vote against ill-considered support for independence for West Papua, a reality that will be ignored by the Australian-based, self-promoting, self-righteous refugee advocates who incite foment in that province.
Not surprisingly, the usual media suspects, led by bantam-weight Glen Milne, have demonstrated their ignorance and abject hypocrisy by attempting to blame Prime Minister John Howard, whose sole role in East Timor was to accede to Indonesia's request that Australia assist in the transition of power from the Indonesian military to a UN-led administration, for East Timor's current problems.
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The fact Prime Minister Mari Alkatiri, who cosied up to the clapped-out communist Frelimo revolutionaries (who brought Mozambique to its knees) and is deeply unpopular with much of East Timor's population, is largely overlooked by his left-wing sympathisers.
Some still laud the absurd and threatening demands Alkatiri made during the drawn-out negotiations with Australia over Timor Sea oil rights.
Nor is it apparent that any of those who clamoured for East Timor's independence lodged objections to the appointment of Interior Minister Rogerio Labato, with responsibility for the novice nation's police, though he was trained by Cambodia's notorious Khmer Rouge regime which was responsible for the murders of approximately 1.7 million.
Those same useful idiots were out in force last week cheering the deluded Cindy Sheehan, the unfortunate American woman who has been ostracised by her family for her praise of the insurgents responsible for killing her volunteer soldier son as "freedom fighters", and making absurd claims that the leaders of the US-led Coalition of the Willing lied to justify a war that was, in her conspiratorial thinking, all about oil and Israel.
Apparently forgotten by Sheehan and the kumbaya claque (including NSW Attorney-General Bob Debus who welcomed her to Sydney) were the hundreds of thousands of Iraqis Saddam slaughtered to maintain his stranglehold on the nation, the war he waged against Iran until his forces were reduced to a shredded remnant, his invasion of Kuwait, and his use of mustard gas and nerve gas against his own people.
In consigning the Sheehanesque theories on the Middle East to the rubbish tip of history, its worth remembering that most of the intelligence relied upon by the US and the other liberating nations came from Germany and Russia.
It's also worth recalling the views of some of the more strident opponents to the Coalition, such as former US presidential candidate John Kerry, who said: "I believe a deadly arsenal of weapons of mass destruction in his hands is a threat, and a grave threat, to our security."
Other Democrats who took the same view included the bloated Senator Ted Kennedy, who noted: "We have known for many years that Saddam Hussein is seeking and developing weapons of mass destruction" and the Democrats' presidential hope, Senator Hillary Clinton, who said in 2002: "In the four years since the inspectors, intelligence reports show Saddam Hussein has worked to rebuild his chemical and biological weapons stock, his missile delivery capability and his nuclear program."
Their thinking was in line with that of numerous weapons inspectors, including Australia's own Richard Butler, and later supported by David Kay, the head of the Iraq Survey Group (ISG), who testified: "I actually think this may be one of those cases where [Iraq under Saddam] was even more dangerous than we thought."
Contrary to the no-WMD mantra, Kay found: "Saddam, at least as judged by those scientists and other insiders who worked in his military-industrial programs, had not given up aspirations and intentions to continue to acquire weapons of mass destruction."
His successor, Charles Duelfer, reported in 2004 that Saddam was aggressively rorting the UN's Oil for Food Program and intended to resume his WMD efforts once the UN sanctions were eliminated.
The newly emboldened Iraqis have since participated in three elections at enormous personal risk and are pressing ahead, despite warnings from the world's doomsaying fraternity.
East Timor, conceived and largely shaped by the same people who would so stridently deny the Iraqis their opportunity to become the most liberal Arab democracy, is foundering and by most definitions is already a failed state.
Born out of the goodwill of the churches, with the good wishes of possibly every country except Indonesia, it has been magnificently stuffed up by the nominally East Timorese Portugese-speaking elite.
And just to show how little our own literati have learnt from the luvvies' disastrous foray into international relations, two East Timorese guests of the Sydney Writers Festival last Friday condemned Australia's life-saving mercy mission to their country as an "intervention" driven more by oil than concerns for the East Timorese.
Unfortunately there was no mention of whether this gratuitous insult to those engaged in Australia's peacekeeping force was greeted by yet another empty chorus of kumbaya.
akermanp@dailytelegraph.com.au
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