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How Indonesia repays Timorese
loyalty
By Richel Langit
JAKARTA - They were loyal to the Indonesian
flag, and were uprooted from their ancestral land in
East Timor because of it. And their love for the Red and
White flag has been rewarded with a squalid life in
makeshift camps in West Timor and elsewhere, stripped of
their rights as Indonesian citizens.
Worse
still, East Timorese languishing in refugee camps in
Atambua and Kupang, both in East Nusa Tenggara province,
have little to eat as Jakarta has halted all
humanitarian assistance to those camps, claiming budget
constraints. The government has also given the refugees
until August 31 to return to East Timor, where they
could be victims of revenge at the hands of the
victorious pro-independence population.
The
Indonesian government, obviously still reeling from its
humiliating defeat in the United Nations-organized
referendum in East Timorese independence on August 30,
1999, has denied East Timorese scattered throughout the
country the right to obtain a new national citizenship
card, an identification card known locally as KTP that
is valid for three to five years.
The official
reason given by government officials has been that the
East Timorese are refugees whose citizenship status has
not yet been resolved. Some local government officials
in West Timor, the home of some 40,000 refugees, had
also said they did not want these East Timorese to
obtain a passport for fear that they would travel to the
newly declared nation of East Timor freely.
Aside from West Timor, East Timorese refugees
are also found on the neighboring island of Flores, in
South Sulawesi province, and in Jakarta.
The
KTP, which in the 1960s and '70s served as an effective
tool to control the movement of suspected leaders or
followers of the now defunct Indonesian Communist Party
(PKI), has become the only ID card valid throughout the
country. One has to have a KTP if he or she wants to
apply for a passport, withdraw money from a bank, or
obtain official documents such as birth certificates
from state institutions. It is issued by the subdistrict
head but must bear the signature of the district head.
People aged between 17 and 60 years are required to have
a valid KTP always, and any negligence could result in
jail or a fine determined by local authorities.
So the effect of the government's policy of not
issuing new KTPs to East Timorese means they are forced
them to stay in their respective camps or homes. They
may move around the country but cannot travel overseas,
unless their passports are still valid.
The
situation is absurd. Long before the referendum in 1999,
in which close to 80 percent of some 450,000 East
Timorese who had voting rights chose to part ways with
Indonesia, these East Timorese were Indonesian citizens
and had valid KTPs and other official documents.
East Timorese refugees, whose number reached
more than 250,000 at the height of the East Timor crisis
in 1999, fled to West Timor and other islands because
they knew they were legally Indonesians with valid
Indonesian KTPs. Some of them, notably those who had
access to power during Indonesia's brutal occupation
from 1975 to 1999, had legitimate and valid Indonesian
passports.
There is no doubt that East Timorese
still living in refugee camps in West Timor campaigned
for the former Portuguese colony's integration into
Indonesia in 1999, knowing very well that they could be
easy targets for revenge by pro-independence people who
dominated the province. They chose to stay in Indonesia
partly because they loved the country.
So,
despite the change in East Timor's political status,
East Timorese refugees are still legitimate Indonesians
and will remain to be so as long as they don't renounce
their Indonesian citizenship. As such, the Indonesian
government has no valid reason to deny East Timorese the
right to obtain a new KTP and other official documents.
That Jakarta suffered a shameful defeat in 1999 does not
justify the revocation of citizenship by the Indonesian
government.
It would seem that the Indonesian
authorities are still unable to come to terms with the
reality that East Timor, which Indonesia annexed in 1976
as its 27th province, had broken away from the country
and become a fully independent state.
This
resentment was obvious when politicians and lawmakers in
the House of Representatives reacted angrily to
President Megawati Sukarnoputri's decision to witness
the official declaration of East Timor's independence
early on May 20. Some legislators even went as far as
submitting a petition to House leaders to have Megawati
explain her visit to East Timor before the legislature.
East Timorese refugees were mostly herded into
makeshift refugee camps in West Timor with the idea that
they would have a better life as Indonesians rather than
as citizens of East Timor, a tiny country with poor
resources. They were also duped into believing that the
Indonesian government would always support them.
Thousands of East Timorese refugees have
picketed the office of the East Nusa Tenggara governor,
demanding that the government resume humanitarian
assistance to numerous refugee camps in Atambua and
Kupang. All of them have been turned away empty-handed
as the central government has run out of money, while
foreign assistance has stopped.
This is of
course not the first time the Indonesian government has
treated East Timorese badly. It is believed that during
its 24 years of East Timor occupation, tens of thousands
of innocent lives were lost, with the Indonesian
military tending to turn the territory into a training
ground rather that an equal part of Indonesia. When it
quit East Timor in 1999, the military backed thousands
of militia members who destroyed up to 80 percent of the
infrastructure in the territory, prompting the United
Nations to send an international combat force, rather
than a peacekeeping force, to East Timor.
It is
no wonder that two of Indonesia's richest provinces -
Papua in the easternmost reaches and Aceh in the
westernmost - observing this ongoing ill treatment of
East Timorese, both during the occupation and now among
the refugees, are fighting for independence. It is
apparent that the Indonesian government has not learned
any lessons from its experience with East Timor.
(©2002 Asia Times Online Co, Ltd. All rights
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