Victoria’s Yoo-rrook Justice Commission, a truth-telling inquiry that will investigate injustices committed against Aboriginal Victorians since colonisation, rightly looks to similar models in South Africa and Canada. Each of these also had a clear Indigenous focus and addressed the ravaging impact of white settlement on traditional lands, cultures and communities in their respective countries.
Though surprisingly little known in Australia, neighbouring Timor-Leste’s truth and reconciliation commission is also relevant. Known as CAVR after its Portuguese acronym, Timor-Leste’s Commission functioned 2002-2005, immediately after independence. It was the first of its kind in this part of the world. Experts rate it as one of the most impressive of the forty or so commissions to date.
Timor-Leste’s commission involved Australia in a way the other models did not. Australia co-financed the Commission; Australian experts testified to it and a number of Australians worked for it, garnering experience of potential use to Victoria’s new body. Drawing on its experience would be welcomed by Victoria’s government and the local councils, community and educational institutions that actively engage with Timor-Leste.
It was Timorese led and victim-centric. Its fourfold mandate was to impartially establish the truth about human rights violations committed during the Indonesian occupation; to faciliate intra-Timorese reconciliation; to restore the dignity of victims; and to publish its evidence that Timor-Leste had suffered crimes against humanity and to recommend what should be done at home and abroad to prevent a recurrence of such crimes. Regrettably, the report has been largely ignored by Indonesia and the world.
Timor-Leste’s commission addressed issues that, broadly speaking, are also central to the Yoo-rrook inquiry — the violent impact of colonialism and its attendant denial of self-determination. As in Australia, Timor-Leste experienced appropriation, dispossession, massacres, displacement, splitting of families whose children were taken away, and attempts at cultural assimilation. The Commission found that Australia largely connived with Indonesia in these crimes. That is, Australia sided with the coloniser, not the colonised, and, until late in the piece, paid only lip service to Timor-Leste's right to self-determination.
Many factors were at play here, but one wonders if, faced with what it wrongly saw as a policy dilemma, Canberra defaulted to a colonial reflex shaped by two centuries of colonisation at home. It was only thanks to the East Timorese people’s dogged resistance against the odds that Canberra came around, a pattern we are seeing play out in Victoria to the credit of generations of Aboriginal activism and lately the Andrews government.
'The goodwill of Victorians should not be underestimated and a sea-change is well on the way, but engaging the wider community will require non-Indigenous Victorians to step up.'
As Marcia Langton puts it, the Yoo-rrook commission will be ‘a significant step forward in educating the wider community about Indigenous history.’ One hopes getting Victorian non-Indigenous communities to listen closely in the spirit of dadirri, advocated by Senior Australian of the Year Miriam-Rose Ungunmerr, which will be a demanding task in its own right, time-consuming, even inter-generational.
Timor-Leste's experience in this regard is instructive. Survivors were ready to tell their stories and contribute to embedding the values of non-violence, respect and accountability required in their new country. But they also expected bread and butter redress in the form of practical, often financial, assistance and tended to assess CAVR’s effectiveness from that angle. Reparations, however, have been slow in coming in Timor-Leste.
Reaching out to Indonesia is proving challenging. Reminiscent of Australians who were taught nothing about Indigenous history, most Indonesians have been kept ignorant of the country’s failed Timor-Leste chapter by a government and military in denial.
To carry CAVR’s work forward, Timor-Leste has recently established a centre of memory called Centro Nasional Chega! (CNC) Located in a site of conscience in Dili, a former colonial political prison, the centre’s mandate is to facilitate the implementation of many of CAVR’s 204 recommendations, including reaching out to Indonesia. Getting the centre up took a decade of advocacy, further evidence that none of this work is easy. It owes its existence largely to the prime minister of the day, a reminder that champions on all sides are needed to make things happen in this space. The centre is a rare example of the sort of follow-up to a truth commission that a UN study found should be planned for from the beginning as a long-term feature of any commission’s work.
The goodwill of Victorians should not be underestimated and a sea-change is well on the way, but engaging the wider community will require non-Indigenous Victorians to step up. It takes two to tango. As with international support for Timor-Leste’s centre of memory, the Commission deserves a range of non-Indigenous champions in its corner, including across the political divide.
Pat Walsh is the author of The Day Hope and History Rhymed in East Timor and Other East Timor Stories (2019). Pat served as special adviser to East Timor's CAVR commission, and helped design the country's successor body, Centro Nasional Chega!, to which he is an advisor.
Main image: Aboriginal flag waving (Darrian Traynor/Getty Images)