Page 5257 - Week 16 - Thursday, 28 November 1991
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We also have a sense of debt. If you go to every suburb in this town you will see that our built urban environment reflects the great artisan hand of our immigrants. Those immigrants come in large measure from the communities that I am speaking about today - from the Balkans and from other regions of the world.
With respect to Timor, although its people here are not artisans in the same numbers as those from Slovenia, Croatia, Macedonia, Bosnia and Herzegovina, Montenegro, and Serbia - all those regions of Yugoslavia - we have a particular debt to Timor because on 12 December 1941 Australia in fact invaded East Timor. It was a friendly occupation and the neutral Portuguese Government at the time reluctantly agreed, under some pressure, to accept 400 soldiers of Australia's elite Sparrow Force. They landed at Kupang, which at the moment is the capital of West Timor.
That elite group of Australians perished in part. Most of those who perished, ironically, were those detailed in West Timor where, regrettably, they were betrayed in large numbers. On the other hand, the Australian troops in East Timor successfully waged a war there and kept the entire Japanese 48th Division stationed in Timor, which no doubt saved many, many more lives on the main battlefronts. The Timorese throughout that period in East Timor supported Australia.
On 7 December 1975, there was a brutal invasion of East Timor by the Indonesian Government, and this 7 December coming up will certainly be a time of great anguish for the Timorese as they commemorate another year under occupation. How many people in the world are now falling under occupation? The Slovenians, through luck, good management and geographical placement, have escaped the yoke of occupation. The Croatian people have not, and they are, regardless of the issues between the parties, under partial occupation at the moment. No-one in this chamber could have escaped feeling great remorse at seeing the blatant breach of the UNESCO conventions on the protection of cultural properties as last week those rockets went into the historic town of Dubrovnik.
But it is not the purpose of this debate today to take sides on the issue, other than to say that the aggression is clear on both sides. The responses on both sides may become progressively more self-demeaning to everyone involved in the struggle. It is for that reason that we must pursue peace, not revenge, and not make judgments on territorial or border issues in this chamber. That is not the purpose of this motion, and it is not proper in international law for us to involve ourselves in the domestic frontier setting issues that need to be settled by international boundary commissions and the like as soon as peace is achieved.
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