East Timor News Digest 7 – July 1-31, 2015
- Labor backs talks on new maritime boundary with East Timor - Melbourne Age. July 26, 2015
- Timor's former president Ramos Horta says West Papua 'part of Indonesia' - ABC Radio Australia. July 23, 2015
- Clinics in East Timor lacking sufficient support, says long-serving - ABC News. July 23, 2015
- Premier of Timor Leste extols Cuban medical collaboration - Prensa Latina. July 22, 2015
- As East Timor moves forward, Navy takes an interest in partnership - Stars & Stripes. July 27, 2015
- Indonesia to push Timor membership in ASEAN at ministerial meeting in KL - Bernama. July 30, 2015
- Timor-Leste seeks tourism investments - Bernama. July 24, 2015
Labor backs talks on new maritime boundary with East Timor
Melbourne Age - July 26, 2015
Tom Allard – A Labor government will enter into maritime boundary negotiations with East Timor, a move that would likely give the tiny half- island state a far greater share of royalties and tax receipts from the $40 billion Greater Sunrise oil and gas project.
A motion to begin formal talks on a new boundary was passed on Sunday morning at the ALP conference after being moved by Janelle Saffin, a former federal Labor parliamentarian. It was seconded by the shadow attorney- general Mark Dreyfus.
While there is no formal boundary between the two nations, Australia currently shares in resources that lie in an area much closer to East Timor than Australia under a treaty carving out a joint petroleum development area.
East Timor believes the boundary should be equidistant between the two nations, bringing far more of the oil and gas reserves in the Timor Sea within its borders.
Under current arrangements, East Timor will share 50 per cent of upstream revenues from the Greater Sunrise project, which is led by Australian energy giant Woodside and has yet to be developed due to the disagreement about the maritime boundary.
Existing productive oil and gas fields in the Timor Sea are approaching the end of their lifespan, leaving East Timor vulnerable to a calamitous economic decline. It relies on oil and gas income for about 90 per cent of its budget revenues and needs.
Ms Saffin, who has acted as an adviser for East Timor, said the current maritime boundary was undermining the economic security of East Timor and was a major irritant in relations between the two countries. "We are a country of the fair go and we should demonstrate that with the Timor Sea," she said.
As well as committing a Labor government to "enter into structured engagement" with East Timor to negotiate a settlement on the boundary, the motion also says Labor will review Australia's controversial position to exempt itself from key parts of the United Nations Convention on the Law of the Sea (UNCLOS).
The so-called "reservations" about UNCLOS were made by Australia shortly before East Timor, formally known as TImor-Leste, assumed nationhood in 2002 after 25 years of occupation by Jakarta.
The reservations mean that Australia does not recognise the International Court of Justice or the UN's International Tribunal for the Law of the Sea as arbiters of maritime boundary disputes.
East Timor's efforts to convince the Abbott government to enter negotiations to redraw the boundary have been unsuccessful.
Instead, East Timor has gone to international arbitration to try to get a treaty governing the distribution of oil and gas revenues declared void after revelations Australian spies bugged its government offices during negotiations.
East Timor ambassador to Australia Abel Guterres welcomed the resolution, noting favourably the decision to reconsider the UNCLOS reservations that "deny Timor-Leste access to a third party independent umpire on the boundary issue".
Timor's former president Ramos Horta says West Papua 'part of Indonesia'
ABC Radio Australia - July 23, 2015
East Timor's former president, Jose Ramos Horta, says that he does not think an independence campaign for the Indonesian province of West Papua will be successful.
"I don't believe in that," the now United Nations special representative told the ABC. "Well everything is possible in the world," he added, "but I wouldn't advocate that. It is very much a part of the Republic of Indonesia".
"Solutions for the betterment of the people of West Papua, ending any human rights abuses, economic, social exclusion of West Papuans have to be realised in the context of Indonesian sovereignty."
Mr Ramos Horta's comments go against the calls of West Papua's pro- independence supporters who seek to separate the region from Indonesia. East Timor struggled for decades for its own independence which it achieved in 2002.
"I believe that if anyone can help redressing the challenges and problems in West Papua would be [Indonesia's] president Widodo," Mr Ramos Horta said.
"I would urge West Papuan elites to seize on the opportunity with a new president to find the best possible arrangement between Jakarta and West Papua."
Meanwhile, Mr Ramos-Horta said he believed the relationship between Australia and East Timor was good but stressed there were differences when it came to the neighbouring countries' borders.
"Canberra, in a very simple manner, would like to see Timor Leste forgetting about wanting to have a maritime boundary," he said.
"Any international attempt at litigation, at arbitration could end today if Canberra were to signal to Timor Leste that let's sit and settle the maritime boundary, let's draw a median line."
Clinics in East Timor lacking sufficient support, says long-serving
ABC News - July 23, 2015
Mark Colvin: One of our nearest neighbours, East Timor, is still so poor that many people lack even the most basic access to health care.
One of the country's largely unsung heroes is an American doctor who's been running a clinic there since 1998.
You might have seen Doctor Dan Murphy and his Bairo Pite clinic on the ABC Foreign Correspondent program last year. He saves lives daily under extremely difficult conditions, but a lot of what's needed is very expensive and requires patients flying to Melbourne for treatment.
Dr Murphy gets financial support from Macquarie Telecom, but he says his patients need a lot more.
Dan Murphy: As you know, East Timor is maybe one of the poorest countries in South-East Asia and health-wise, just starting with things like nutrition, we're number three in the world in malnutrition, tuberculosis – our clinic, to me, is the busiest one I've ever heard of in South-East Asia for treating tuberculosis.
Many other problems – women are the number one in South-East Asia in maternal mortality. Everything must be addressed, and you're talking about a country that has never had a chance to do anything to develop.
They've always been under the control of somebody else that had other interests. Now, finally independent since 1999, and it's time for them to build and become the country that we all dreamed about.
Mark Colvin: Is none of the natural resources money flowing through to the health sector?
Dan Murphy: Some has, but you've got to remember this is a country with absolutely no infrastructure, it's all mountainous terrain, very difficult, and even to get communication – we're so happy now because with a cell phone we can talk to almost any village.
There are still a few isolated ones that we can't get to. Before, we had to go up there somehow and communicate with people.
Roads are still a huge problem, and during the rainy season it's impossible to go many places, so there's still a long way to go just for infrastructure.
Then once you get that done, we need the capacity to do something meaningful when we get a hold of people and they come in.
We don't have any of the things needed and we don't have personnel that are trained to run a good program or to operate in the way western countries are accustomed to.
Mark Colvin: Are you worried about the fall in the oil price, are you worried about what the resources crash will do to East Timor's economy more broadly and flow-on to your health sector?
Dan Murphy: Yes, of course that's a tremendous worry. I mean, we're very limited by a single source for 90 per cent of the income for the country.
And yet recently somebody asked Doctor Rui, who's the new Prime Minister, "what are you doing to develop an economy because we know the price of oil's dropped and it's going to run out, then what?", and he said "well, we have a lot of ideas but we haven't really started that yet", so we don't know. There are individuals and there are NGOs doing some things, but it's on a small scale, and here we have a country that's growing, that is going to have tremendous needs and I'm afraid there's going to be a lot more suffering in the future.
Mark Colvin: And the things that you've talked about, like lack of infrastructure, lack of roads, all of that sort of thing, also I imagine, militate against, say, growing a tourism industry? I know a lot of the southern Indonesian islands are starting to do quite well there.
Dan Murphy: Well, unless you want to do eco-tourism and you want to go hiking or go on these Tour de Timor bike rides that go through the mountain trails and up river beds – that we can do, but as far as a nice sweet drive up to a beautiful resort high in the mountains, it's not going to happen.
Mark Colvin: So tell us about the patients that you're advocating for, tell us about these children who come to Melbourne, give us a couple of case studies.
Dan Murphy: Okay, just last week we had a young man come back from Melbourne from surgery and he had a hole in his heart. He's from a village, he would never have any special attention from government, he's not from a high family or anything, anybody important.
But we had discovered him, and they, Doctor Noel Bayley from Melbourne came over – he's a cardiologist, he brought his sophisticated equipment along to do an echocardiogram and discovered this hole in the heart, and we were lucky enough – he went over to Melbourne thinking that we was going to have open-heart surgery, but they were able to do the whole thing through a catheter.
See, technology's really advancing and so they closed this hole just through inserting a catheter through the groin and getting it up into the heart and doing that. They had problems, they had trouble pushing their way through the right part of the heart but they got it, they took care of it all and he's fine now.
Mark Colvin: But that stuff of course needs real-time imaging, it needs big machines so that the surgeon can see what he or she is doing at the time, and there's nothing like that...
Dan Murphy: Oh, not only that but you have to be ready for every disaster, anything that could potentially happen.
Mark Colvin: But there's nothing like that in Timor.
Dan Murphy: Nothing. You have to realise we are totally under-developed. We do not even have good laboratory or any kind of pathology. No heart surgery whatsoever, half the time the x-ray machine doesn't really even work, so we're pretty primitive.
Mark Colvin: What would you like listeners to do about this?
Dan Murphy: Read about our website, which is Bairo Pite Clinic (https://bairopiteclinic.org), and we're on Facebook, we are also on the internet, and we actually have been there since 1998, we know what we're doing, we have experience. Any resource we get we can put to good use.
Mark Colvin: And can Australian government aid help?
Dan Murphy: Well, the trouble is most time Australian aid is government to government. We have had some help from Australia, it's not nearly enough and now it's harder than ever to get.
We mostly depend on individuals as donors and I've found Australians to be very generous. We get money from people and even if it comes in small amounts it builds up and we're able to do a lot with it because we don't have any overhead – all we do is work.
Mark Colvin: Doctor Dan Murphy from the Bairo Pite Clinic in East Timor.
Source: http://www.abc.net.au/pm/content/2015/s4279743.htm
Premier of Timor Leste extols Cuban medical collaboration
Prensa Latina - July 22, 2015
Dili – Prime Minister Rui Maria de Araujo thanked the Cuban government and health collaborators for the support offered for over a decade.
In the opening ceremony of a program to extend primary health care to all the people and promote dispensarization countrywide, Cuban Ambassador Luis Laffitte Rodriguez gave De Araujo a frameworked picture of him greeting the historical leader of the Cuban Revoluton Fidel Castro on a visit to Cuba, in 2005.
The health program, scheduled to conclude in November, 2016, was designed following the Cuban health model, recalled De Araujo.
The Cuban ambassador highlighted Fidel Castro's controbution to the health of the Cuban people and of other countries around the world by turning Cuba into a health power and sending doctors and other health experts to over 82 countries.
The ceremony was attended by representatives of the World Health Organization, the UN Food and Agricuture Organization, Cuban collaborators and the staff of the Cuban Embassy in Timor Leste.
Source: http://www.plenglish.com//index.php?option=com_content&task=view&id=4011151&Itemid=1
As East Timor moves forward, Navy takes an interest in partnership
Stars & Stripes - July 27, 2015
Erik Slavin, Tokyo – About 150 US sailors have arrived in East Timor, a country that international observers say is on its way toward stability but still has a long way to go in its development.
The exercises planned for the world's second-newest nation are somewhat unusual for their small scale, when compared with the combat training at other stops in the Navy's nine-nation Cooperation Afloat Readiness and Training, or CARAT.
Some of the sailors flying into the Timorese capital of Dili will instruct East Timor's servicemembers on basic seamanship, while Seabees will work on community service projects. The country also is known as Timor-Leste.
The Navy is arriving at East Timor's request, said Rear Adm. Charlie Williams, commander of the US 7th Fleet's Task Force 73. "With a country like Timor-Leste, you have to start sometime in building capacity and partnerships," Williams said Saturday in Singapore during a phone interview.
East Timor won its independence in 2002 from Indonesia after decades of fighting. Estimates swing widely between 100,000 and 250,000 killed since 1975, when Portugal's colonial rule over the eastern half of Timor ended. East Timor declared independence that year, but Indonesia invaded nine days afterward.
In 1999, large-scale violence erupted between nationalist and pro- Indonesian forces after East Timor voted overwhelmingly for independence in a United Nations-backed referendum. By 2002, 70 percent of the nation's infrastructure had been destroyed and 75 percent of its people had been displaced, according to World Bank figures.
After internal strife in 2006 led Australian and UN forces back into the country, East Timor began recovering. By 2012, the nation held orderly, democratic elections, according to analysts.
"There have been notable reductions in various forms of violence in Timor- Leste, particularly political violence," according to a 2015 report by the Development Progress project, which is operated by the Overseas Development Institute, a British think tank.
"While security has undoubtedly improved, this may be negated by socioeconomic inequalities and questions around how the gains made to date may be sustained," the report added.
Poverty is now East Timor's biggest security threat, Domingos Sarmento Alves, the country's ambassador to the United States, said in a March interview with The Diplomat, a news site.
Unemployment among the population of 1.2 million – half of which is under age 19 – could lead to internal conflict, as well as make East Timor vulnerable to drug and human trafficking, Alves said. However, Alves remained optimistic about the nation's moves to diversify its economy beyond oil and gas revenues.
"We, the Timorese people, have proved ourselves as tenacious and resilient people in pursuing the attainment of our goals," Alves said.
East Timor is also aiming for a voice in affairs outside its borders. It has applied to join the Association of Southeast Asian Nations; acceptance would give it input on regional issues of concern to the US, such as freedom of navigation.
The nation must meet certain standards first. Stability will require continuing professionalization of its security forces. Other nations have willingly assisted, most recently including the US, when Marines rotating in from Australia conducted urban operations training with East Timor's Defense Force in June.
The US Navy's job is simpler by comparison. East Timor's naval force consisted of seven patrol boats in 2013, according to The Military Balance, an annual book detailing the world's forces.
On Monday, a coastal riverine team and others will assist with security and boat maintenance, in additional to the general seamanship and Seabee projects. Meanwhile, officers will talk with the nation's military leadership about long-term goals that include a navy capable of a more complex partnership.
"It's something they hope to work to, and when they do, we'll be there to support," Williams said.
Indonesia to push Timor membership in ASEAN at ministerial meeting in KL
Bernama - July 30, 2015
Jakarta – The Indonesian delegates would raise the issue of membership of Timor Leste in ASEAN during the 48th ASEAN Foreign Ministers' Meeting in Kuala Lumpur early next month, an Indonesian official said here on Thursday.
The Indonesian government would persistently attempt to include the new nation into the ASEAN membership, China's Xinhua news agency reported M.I. Derry Aman, director at the Indonesian foreign ministry, as saying.
"Indonesia will raise the issue of Timor Leste membership in ASEAN (at the meeting). It is time for the ASEAN member countries to consider the membership of Timor Leste," he said at his office.
Indonesia is the first country giving support to the membership as the new nation is located in the Southeast Asia region, according to Aman. "Indonesia's commitment is clear that Timor Leste will be an ASEAN member country in the future," he revealed.
A study on the readiness of Timor Leste on the membership has been carrying out which will determine whether the new nation will be accepted into the ASEAN membership, according to him.
Source: http://www.bernama.com/bernama/v8/wn/newsworld.php?id=1157052
Timor-Leste seeks tourism investments
Bernama - July 24, 2015
Dili – Timor-Leste Prime Minister Rui Maria de Araujo is calling for foreign investment in tourism to boost its contributions to the economy alongside agriculture and oil and gas industries, reports Vietnam News Agency (VNA).
Developing tourism is vital to helping the country diversify its economy and reduce the dependence on oil-related revenue, he said.
As a young nation that gained independence in 2002, Timor-Leste has poor infrastructure and over 30 per cent of its population living in poverty. The country's economy depends heavily on oil exports which bring home about US$7 billion per year.
Though the island nation boasts unspoiled natural beauty, local facilities are only capable of accommodating a few thousand travellers every year, regarded as one of the country's biggest challenges to boosting the tourism sector, the Prime Minister conceded.
Timor-Leste is seeking investment with the focus on community tourism, eco-tourism and cultural tourism. It has been working to train human resources in the field and complete legal frameworks and incentive policies to welcome more investors.
In addition, the nation is also focused on developing clean agriculture with coffee remaining as a key product.
Source: http://www.bernama.com/bernama/v8/wn/newsworld.php?id=1155138