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Representing Timor: Histories, geo-bodies, and belonging, 1860s–2018

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  20 September 2019

Kisho Tsuchiya
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Abstract

This article provides an outline of the historical construction of Timorese (East Timorese and Indonesian West Timorese) geo-bodies and communal identities from the mid-nineteenth century to the present time, thereby reconstructing the origins of many national imaginings amongst the Timorese people. Since the controversial annexation of Portuguese Timor by Indonesia in 1976, (East) Timor has been constructed as a place of two territorial identities: Timor as a part of Indonesia and East Timor as a homogeneous nation distinct from Indonesia. However, representations of Timor had been much more fluid and inconsistent in preceding ages. This article studies various communities’ representations of Timor to reveal dialectic relations between diverse colonial and post-colonial representations of the Timorese spaces and their senses of belonging. Thereby, it problematises the political role of global and regional place-making in a contested Southeast Asian locale.

Type
Research Article
Information
Journal of Southeast Asian Studies , Volume 50 , Issue 3 , September 2019 , pp. 365 - 386
Copyright
Copyright © The National University of Singapore 2019 

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Footnotes

Kisho Tsuchiya is a postdoctoral fellow at the Department of History, Faculty of Arts and Social Sciences, National University of Singapore. He is currently working for the university's research project entitled ‘Reconceptualizing the Cold War: On-the-ground Experiences in Asia’. Correspondence in connection with this article may be addressed to: [email protected]. This article is a revised version of the paper that won the Indonesia-Timor-Leste Studies Committee's Best Student Paper Prize at the annual conference of the Association for Asian Studies, 22–25 Mar. 2018, Washington D.C. The archival and field work for this article was conducted during May 2015 to July 2017 in Timor-Leste, Indonesia, Portugal and Japan. My interpretation is also based on my experiences in Timor-Leste as a staff member of the United Nations Electoral Support Team in 2009–10. I would like to thank the departments of History and Southeast Asian Studies at NUS, and the Timor-Leste Studies Initiative and Indonesia and Timorese Studies Committee of the AAS. I would also like to thank Ronald Lukens-Bull, Shane Barter, Richard Fox, and Maitrii Aung-Thwin for reading drafts and providing suggestions for improvement. If not otherwise indicated, all translations from Japanese, Tetun, Portuguese and Indonesian sources are mine. I am grateful to the International Boundaries Research Unit (IBRU), Department of Geography, University of Durham, for permission to reproduce fig. 1 here.

References

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2 A good recent study of East Timorese nationalism is Leach, Michael, Nation-building and national identity in Timor-Leste (London: Routledge, 2017)Google Scholar.

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7 Throughout this article, I intend to use ‘place’ as a meaningful and concrete space for humankind and the phrase ‘place-making’ as the construction of meanings about space. ‘Space’, on the other hand, is used as a broader concept and refers to material features of a location or where people meet, as in ‘cyberspace’.

8 Examples of this school of writing include Jolliffe, Jill, East Timor: Nationalism and colonialism (St. Lucia: University of Queensland Press, 1978)Google Scholar; Gunn, Geoffrey, A critical view of Western journalism and scholarship on East Timor (Manila: Journal of Contemporary Asia, 1994)Google Scholar; Cox, Steve and Carey, Peter B.R., Generations of resistance: East Timor (London: Cassell, 1995)Google Scholar; Hill, Helen M., Stirrings of nationalism in East Timor: FRETILIN 1974–1978: The origins, ideologies and strategies of a nationalist movement (Otford: Otford Press, 2002)Google Scholar; Dunn, James, East Timor: A rough passage to independence (Double Bay: Longueville Books, 2003)Google Scholar; Durand, Frederic B., History of Timor-Leste (Chiang Mai: Silkworm, 2016)Google Scholar.

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29 Hägerdal, ‘Servião and Belu’.

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35 Ibid., pp. 443–4; Yanagi, Isamu, ‘Hoheidaiyonjyuunanarentai Chimoru-sakusenki’ (Tokyo: Boueikenshuujo Archives, n.d.), pp. 1925Google Scholar. These two sources refer to a large operation of the Japanese and the Colunas Negras in October to November 1942. The Japanese estimates state that 8,000 inhabitants from the Aileu region and another 4,000 from the border area either participated in or collaborated with the operation.

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39 Prominent Timorese expressions of Portuguese nationalism include Sylvan, Fernando, Comunidade pluri-racial: Bases para uma filosofia da Portugalidade, um comportamento social e uma orientação política (Lisboa: Guilmarães Editors, 1962)Google Scholar; Sylvan, Fernando, Filosofia e politica no destino de Portugal (Lisboa: Gráfica Santelmo, Lda, 1963)Google Scholar; Duarte, Jorge Barros, Timor jeremíada (Odivelas: Pentaedro, 1988)Google Scholar.

40 Permesta was a rebel movement which began in Manado in March 1957; the Permesta capital was captured by the central government in June 1958. The last remnants of the movement surrendered in 1961.

41 The 1959 Viqueque Rebellion was a planned attack against Portuguese authority in Timor. The rebels were quickly defeated. Individuals arrested for this attempt included Viqueque district villagers, some national civil servants and workers in Dili, and Indonesian asylum seekers. See Gunter, Janet, ‘Communal conflict in Viqueque and the “charged” history of 59’, Asia Pacific Journal of Anthropology 8, 1 (2007): 27–41CrossRefGoogle Scholar; Chamberlain, Ernest and Chamberlain, Christine, Rebellion, defeat and exile: The 1959 uprising in East Timor, rev. 2nd ed. (Point Lonsdale: Ernest Chamberlain, 2009)Google Scholar.

42 Dom Joaquim Jr of Ossu officially visited West Timor, and apparently married into the family of Atambuanese nobility under Japanese patronage. His father, Dom Joaquim da Costa was an indigenous authority of Viqueque who died on the prison island of Atauro while serving a sentence for collaborating with the Japanese.

43 Cited in Taylor, John G., Indonesia's forgotten war (London: Zed, 1991), pp. 21Google Scholar.

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45 Compare Tsuchiya's ‘Indigenisation of the Pacific War’ and Chamberlain, Ernest, Faltering steps: Independence movements in East Timor — 1940s to the early 1970s (Point Lonsdale: Ernest Chamberlain, 2010)Google Scholar.

46 Polícia Internacional e de Defesa do Estado (PIDE), ‘Informação N° 827/61-GU’, in Situação interna de Timor, PT/TTAOS/D-N/1/5/11, Arquivo Nacional do Torre do Tombo.

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49 Anderson, Imagined communities.

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52 See Akihisa Matsuno, ‘The Balibo Declaration’, prepared for the Closing Sessions of the 2nd Course on Indonesia and East Timor. Lisbon, Mar. 1995, pp. 1–9. Matsuno, without obtaining the Portuguese version, affirmed that the declaration was fabricated by Indonesian officials. Knowing the Portuguese version, I am inclined to believe that the Portuguese version was written and signed by the Timorese party leaders, but the translation into English and Indonesian was terribly done by someone else.

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54 Tsuchiya, ‘Awkwardly included’, p. 93.

55 FRETILIN, , FRETILIN manual e programa políticos (Lisboa, 1974)Google Scholar. Also refer to the lyrics of Pátria-Pátria, the national anthem of Timor-Leste in Portuguese, written by Francisco Borja da Costa.

56 FRETILIN, FRETILIN manual e programa políticos. Also refer to the lyrics of Foho Ramelau, the FRETILIN party anthem in Tetun, written by Francisco Borja da Costa.

57 For comparable Filipino cases of language and translation as technics of nation-building, see Ileto, Reynaldo, Pasyon and revolution: Popular movements in the Philippines, 1840–1910 (Quezon City: Ateneo de Manila Press, 1979)Google Scholar; Rafael, Vicente, The promise of the foreign: Nationalism and the technics of translation in the Spanish Philippines (Durham: Duke University Press, 2005)CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

58 Some experiences of East Timorese migrants in West Timor in the post-1976 period are mentioned in Damaledo, ‘To separate is to sustain’, pp. 19–34.

59 Department of Information, Republic of Indonesia, Decolonization in East Timor, p. 12.

60 Alarico Fernandes and José Ramos-Horta, ‘Relatorio da visita a Jakarta (Indonesia) do secretário geral do comité geral, Alarico Fernandes, e J.M. Ramos Horta, encarregado das relações externas’, 1 May 1975, pp. 1–2. Reproduced on http://amrtimor.org/ (accessed 1 Aug. 2016).

61 Jolliffe, Nationalism and colonialism, p. 19.

62 Ibid.

63 See for example, Taylor, Indonesia's forgotten war; Gunn, A critical view; Cox and Carey, Generations of resistance.

64 Cox and Carey, Generations of resistance, pp. 9–14.

65 Such a view was based on Nevil Shute's preface to Callinan, Bernard, Independent company: The Australian army in Portuguese Timor, 1941–1943 (Richmond: William Heinemann Australia, 1953)Google Scholar. More recent scholarship pointed out that this was Shute's unhistorical misinterpretation which was later conceived as ‘truthful’ as a result of repeated citations among Anglophone authors. See Tsuchiya, ‘Indigenization of the Pacific War’; and Farram, Steven, A political history of West Timor 1901–1967 (Cologne: LAP Lambert Academic Publishing, 2009)Google Scholar.

66 Cox and Carey, Generations of resistance, pp. 13–14.

67 The Governments of Indonesia and Portugal and the Secretary-General of the United Nations, Agreement Regarding the Modalities for the Popular Consultation of the East Timorese through a Direct Ballot (5 May 1999); http://etan.org/etun/modaliti.htm. (accessed 17 Oct. 2016).

68 Isezaki, Kenji, Higashi-chimoru kenchiji nikki [The diary of a district administrator in East Timor] (Tokyo: Fujiwara Shoten, 2001)Google Scholar.

69 Ibid., pp. 49–52.

70 Ibid., p. 231.

71 Ibid., pp. 169–77.

72 Sandeep Ray, A road through Fatulotou, 20 mins. (produced by the Conflict and Development Program of the World Bank in Indonesia, 2011). Available at: https://vimeo.com/80240452.

73 Isezaki, Diary, p. 158.

74 Szonyi, Michael, Cold War island: Quemoy on the front line (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2008), pp. 251–2Google Scholar.

75 Hayon, Edi, ‘VIDEO: Beginilah aksi demo warga eks Timtim di kantor gubernur NTT’, Pos Kupang, 25 Sept. 2017Google Scholar.