Cablegram to Lisbon and Jakarta

Canberra, 31 August 1975

O.CH261153 CONFIDENTIAL IMMEDIATE

Portuguese Timor-Humanitarian Concerns

Ref O.GE13766 1

Acting Minister today 31 August expressed wish that RAAF meet requests from Red Cross stemming from what Pasquier describes as urgent need in Dili for medical supplies and personnel.

1. Red Cross is flying supplies and personnel to Darwin tonight and, provided necessary approvals are obtained, it is quite likely that in the next few days the RAAF will make a number of flights from Darwin to various destinations in Timor on the Red Cross’s behalf.
2. We have also been asked by the Red Cross to make available an RAAF plane for use under Red Cross operational control.
3. We are therefore finding ourselves more and more involved in Timor, for proper humanitarian reasons and in response to Portuguese requests to us and the ICRC. At the same time, however, Indonesia, to whom an identical appeal was addressed by Portugal, has had its offers of and attempt at assistance rejected by Portuguese authorities (and has publicly expressed its unhappiness at this).
4. Please say to the Portuguese that, for the reasons set out in paragraph 8 of our O.CH261072,2 and bearing our own increasing and largely involuntary involvement in mind, we think that the Indonesians must be allowed promptly to play an appropriate part in the necessary humanitarian activities now going on.

For Jakarta

1. Please advise the Indonesian authorities.

[NAA: A1838, 696/5, iv]

• 1 29 August. It reported the Geneva post’s informal advice to ICRC that it would be unwise to jeopardise Indonesian co-operation in Timor by rejecting assistance offered, and that Australia was unwilling to exclude Indonesia. The ICRC nevertheless planned to rely on assistance from the Australian Red Cross during the ‘emergency phase’, for logistical reasons. It saw itself as responding to a Portuguese request, and saw the offer of Australian Red Cross as ‘the most realistic in the present circumstances’. The point was also made, in confidence, that Indonesian involvement under ICRC aegis might prove embarrassing ‘should the Indonesians use that involvement for other than purely humanitarian purposes’. Pasquier had reported only minor food shortages. It was hoped he would play a mediating role, or at least gain Fretilin permission for Red Cross teams to staff the hospital in Dili.
• 2 29 August. Paragraph 8 reported a request to the Australian Red Cross to advise Pasquier that ‘in terms of our very important continuing relationship with Indonesia it would be unfortunate if we were to be asked for assistance in creating … circumstances in which Indonesia was excluded from playing a humanitarian part in a situation which is in the long term of more concern to it than any country or group of people other than the Timorese’.