A new 976-page official military history of Australia’s involvement in the 1999 Timor-Leste crisis may not sound like a particularly controversial book.
But that’s exactly what this book has become — largely because of what’s not been said about it.
The Australian government, which funded the work, and the Australian War Memorial, which co-published it, have so far been muted about its publication. Unlike similar official histories, there’s been no launch or fanfare.
It comes after a three-year approval process by the Department of Foreign Affairs and Trade (DFAT), with some claiming the department tried to censor the work.
Critics say the controversy stems from how the book frames Australia’s past relationship and intervention in Timor-Leste (also known as East Timor) as not as noble as some would like to think.
‘The national record’ of a conflict
Craig Stockings is a professor of history at UNSW Canberra. But his other, much grander title is “official historian of Australian operations in Iraq, Afghanistan and East Timor”, working out of the Australian War Memorial.
Professor Stockings and his team are funded by, but independent from, the Australian government — a unique arrangement.
“Certainly, it’s rare in the Anglosphere,” Professor Stockings told ABC RN’s Late Night Live.
“We have a tradition going back to World War I, more than 100 years, where the government commissions [official histories] and gives the job to an independent group of people.”
As material from the Australian War Memorial explains, official histories are “the national record of Australia’s involvement in particular conflicts”.
Critically, the official historian is granted “unrestricted access to closed period and security classified government records” and their final product does not have to “follow any official or government line”.
Over more than a century, different Australian governments commissioned five official war histories.
Then in 2015, it commissioned a sixth.
Three years to get government approval
In 2015, Tony Abbott’s government announced almost $13 million in funding to produce the “Official History of Australian Operations in Iraq and Afghanistan, and Australian Peacekeeping Operations in East Timor”, which would be released in several volumes.
In 2016, it was announced that Professor Stockings was appointed official historian, with the whole project (covering the three conflicts) expected to take “some seven years”.
Come last December, the first book in the six-book series was finally released. It’s the first of two books on Timor-Leste, this one titled Born of Fire and Ash: Australian operations in response to the East Timor crisis 1999-2000.
The book covers a critical time. In 1999, Timor-Leste voted to become independent from Indonesia, sparking violence from the pro-Indonesia side there. So an international force led by Australia was sent in to restore order, called INTERFET (International Force East Timor).
It’s a time Professor Stockings knows well — he served as a junior officer during the INTERFET deployment.
But while it took two years to write the book, it then took a drawn-out three years for DFAT to “clear” it, leading to claims of attempted censorship along the way.
Back in 2019, three previous official historians wrote a Guardian op-ed warning of the “perception that [Australia’s] official histories may be censored by departmental officials”. Another report at the time said Professor Stockings had threatened to resign.
Professor Stockings was careful around this topic, saying “we are working in a classified environment” so there is “a role for stakeholders [like DFAT] to play in determining that what we’ve written is indeed unclassified – and there’s no threat to the nation”.
But he adds, “I think the ambiguity is … what is actually of risk to the nation and what is perhaps something that a stakeholder might not want to read, or might not want in the public domain”.
“That’s not a security classification issue. That’s a reputation management issue.”
He made the observation that if he was prepared to “compromise” with DFAT, the approval process may have been much quicker, perhaps weeks not years.
“[But] we can’t compromise historical integrity for convenience’s sake.”
ABC RN asked DFAT why this process took so long and about the censorship claims.
“Under the Archives Act 1983, the government is afforded the right to consider whether the public release of any classified information might cause damage to Australia’s international relations, defence or national security interests,” a DFAT spokesperson said.
Where the controversy lies
The book, Born of Fire and Ash: Australian operations in response to the East Timor crisis 1999-2000 unpacks the South East Asian country’s road to independence in granular detail.
It already has supporters, including Clinton Fernandes, a professor of international and political studies at UNSW Canberra and a former Australian Army intelligence officer.
So what’s so controversial about the text?
Professor Fernandes said it lies in how the book frames Australia’s role in the lead-up to the 1999 Timor-Leste crisis and how this has been portrayed since then.
Rather than presenting Australia as an earnest saviour of Timor-Leste, the book shows an Australia that had a “determination to avoid an independent East Timor” for decades. This was so it could keep its powerful ally Indonesia on side.
“Stockings has unmasked the deep roots of Australian foreign policy, showing how DFAT protected Indonesia’s genocidal actions for more than two decades,” Professor Fernandes said.
“Prime Minister John Howard and Foreign Minister Alexander Downer were forced to support something they had long tried to prevent – an independent East Timor. Like their predecessors, they refused to contemplate independence for that territory because Australia’s diplomats had put 30 years of work into getting control of its oil.”
A spokesperson for DFAT said the department “rejects” these claims.
Professor Fernandes said this stance changed dramatically in late 1999, but not necessarily as the result of goodwill within the government.
“A tsunami of public outrage – international and domestic – had been building up for months and it finally came crashing down on the government in September 1999. The government was overwhelmed and forced to backflip and reverse its stance, and the Australian Defence Force had to respond at the midnight hour without adequate resources.”
Despite this, “to its great credit, the ADF performed brilliantly under difficult circumstances”, Professor Fernandes said.
“The problem is that for years, John Howard maintained that the ‘liberation’ of East Timor was one of his proudest achievements as prime minister … His deputy PM, Tim Fischer, even described Howard’s diplomacy as akin to the Balfour Declaration,” he said.
“When an honest account based on the primary archival record emerges, it exposes these distortions. It is therefore unwelcome to people who prefer the public be told military myths rather than military history.”
Again, Professor Stockings was more diplomatic. But he said: “I think it would be a little bit cynical to describe the whole process as [the Australian government’s] desperation to assist the Timorese”.
An ‘unusual’ silence
Despite years of work, December’s release of the book saw surprisingly little fanfare from either the federal government or the Australian War Memorial.
There has not been an official launch which Professor Stockings says is “certainly an unusual thing”.
And there’s been little, if any, government promotion, despite their millions in funding for the project.
A spokesperson for the Australian War Memorial acknowledged there had been “a protracted government clearance process” that has delayed proceedings.
“The official launch is currently postponed. The chosen date was not suitable for a number of key stakeholders and the decision was taken by the Memorial to postpone,” the spokesperson said.
For now, Professor Stockings is thinking about next steps.
“The second Timor volume, the one dealing with the peacekeeping period out to 2012, is currently being examined by stakeholder agencies. I hope it’s finished soon,” he said.
“Then we’ll get into the Middle East.”
Seven years into the process, with only one volume of one conflict published, it looks like there’s a lot of work and difficult discussions with the government ahead.
Source : ABC News
