Page 1476 - Week 05 - Wednesday, 10 May 2006
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revere, perhaps wrongly in this case—after the terrible bloodshed that went with the Indonesian takeover of East Timor in 1975.
It is not only Dili which needs our support. Given that East Timor is primarily a rural population and given that it is a small jurisdiction, probably not too much larger than the ACT, I urge the government to do all it can to help people wherever they live in East Timor. It is also worth mentioning at the same time that, although we have our memory and our shame about the way that our governments regarded East Timor, we are very much in danger of doing the same thing with the people of West Papua at the moment.
It is understood, I believe, that education is a primary way by which people are able to lift themselves out of underdevelopment and the kinds of human rights abuses that still, I believe, occur in East Timor today. It is not possible for a country that has never before had the opportunity to learn even how to work in local government to suddenly become an independent and very successful government in two or three years. At the moment, I believe that we should be keeping a very close eye on East Timor and listening to the pleas from that government when it asks for support and asks for the UN forces to stay there at least until after the next election.
We must realise, too, that a lot of the legacies that we are concerned about and that the Chief Minister mentioned today are a result of the brutal occupation by the Indonesian military, which uses starvation as a weapon to exterminate the East Timorese. There is documentation of forced sterilisations, forced abortions, while at the same time East Timorese women were being raped and sexually assaulted during the occupation. As elsewhere, rape was being used by the Indonesian military as a weapon of war. When this is the lesson that people have learned, it is no wonder that violence against women continues to be a major concern in East Timor.
For that reason, I believe that one of the ways that we can assist women and assist the East Timorese people, whose birth rate is currently the highest in the world—a country populating itself into existence, we might say—is to work with the women and work on sexual and reproductive health measures and, perhaps in some gentle way, work against the very strong influence of the Catholic Church there, which has been a force for good. If it does not assist women in looking after their reproductive health, then this is something that should be recognised.
When we talk about education, we too often talk about formal education. We talk about schools and tertiary institutions. These are very, very important. As in South Africa, we are talking about a whole generation of people who missed out on formal education. The Chief Minister mentioned the high rates of illiteracy in East Timor. These tertiary institutions and formal schools are not going to tackle that; nor can East Timor afford to have what we take for granted—the broadband facilities. Most people do not even have computer access. What good is it to people who cannot read and write? Nor is there a TV service that is worthy of the name; nor is radio available to most people. Consequently, to talk about education is really just a speck out of the needs for East Timor.
Consequently, we have to look at innovative ways that are being used in other parts of the region to involve people in education. Education is not just about book learning, getting a degree, learning to read and write even; it is about health issues; it is about nutrition; it is about sexual relationships, sexual behaviour; and it is about teaching
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