Cablegram to Canberra

Canberra, 30 June 1976

O.JA 7484 UNCLASSIFIED PRIORITY

East Timor

The press this morning reported that President Soeharto approved the integration of East Timor with Indonesia at a Cabinet meeting yesterday.

1. Soeharto reportedly concluded that: 1. The Government of Indonesia respond positively to and approve the East Timorese petition for integration, 2. Integration will be arranged through constitutional procedures, 3. The Government of Indonesia will submit a draft bill on integration to the House of Representatives (DPR). The bill will be passed into a law legalising integration, and 4. All Indonesian government agencies are instructed to help development in East Timor.
2. Information Minister Mashuri is quoted as saying he hoped the process of finalising integration would not repeat not take long.
3. e understand the President is to discuss the integration bill with DPR leaders today.1

[NAA: Al838, 801/13/10/1, v]

• 1 The bill was submitted to the Indonesian Parliament on 5 July. The preamble of the bill stated that the PGET and the people of East Timor had submitted to the Indonesian Government and Parliament a petition seeking the integration of East Timor into the unitary State of the Republic of Indonesia; that a delegation of the Indonesian Government had obtained convincing proof that the people of East Timor in fact possessed a ‘strong and free’ desire to integrate the territory into Indonesia; and that a law was needed to ratify the incorporation of East Timor into Indonesia. Article 1 ratified the integration of East Timor into the unitary State of the Republic of Indonesia. Article 2 formed the ‘level one area province of East Timor whose territory covered the former territory of Portuguese Timor’. Article 3 stated that ‘Matters in connection with the implementation of the determination referred to in article 2 are to be arranged in more detail by individual regulations, with regard to the situation and development in the territory of East Timor’. Article 4 stated that the law would take etl’ect from a date to be proclaimed.