[ There has also been a long Obituary in last Friday's (January 9) The Australian. ]
http://www.smh.com.au/text/articles/2004/01/11/1073769450993.html [ Sydney Morning Herald, 12 January 2004 ] Heroic champion of the persecuted Andrew Ian McNaughtan, Doctor, activist, 1954-2003 Andrew McNaughtan braved death many times, from an early career as a motorcycle racer, to smuggling medicines to East Timor's resistance fighters under the nose of the Indonesian army. He publicly embarrassed the FBI, and brought about a US congressional investigation which damaged the reputation of Janet Reno, the country's former attorney-general. Given the risks he took, and the highly placed noses he put out of joint, it's not unremarkable that Andrew's death, just before Christmas, was from natural causes. Andrew was not much attracted by family commitments, career, or the enveloping shadows of suburbia. Though a great lover of women, he never married or had children. He could have been a highly successful journalist, diplomat or intelligence analyst - but he rarely accepted paid work. Andrew's life took its shape in opposing the oppression of innocents: in Australia's Aboriginal communities, in Central America, and in (of all places) South Florida. But his most sustained contribution was the decade he devoted to East Timor: an Australian citizen trying, bit by bit, to undo the most fatal botch-job in our diplomatic history. I met Andrew in 1995, when we were deported from East Timor. In the five years till we met again, he'd not been idle. He had been jailed by the Indonesian military; had been deported from Timor again; had filmed the aftermath of the Suai massacre; had won the admiration of the most conservative committee chairman in the US Congress; and had broken open one of the greatest political scandals in the history of Florida. In the late 1990s, Andrew helped to educate Australia's Labor opposition on East Timor. Thereafter, the Foreign Minister, Alexander Downer, came under increasingly well-informed attack in Parliament. To take the heat off the Government, the Prime Minister, John Howard, suggested a referendum on East Timorese autonomy to Indonesia's then president, B.J. Habibie. The mercurial Habibie - under international pressure over East Timor - threw in independence as an option, too. The rest is history. In the same period, Andrew formed a committee to examine options for fairly apportioning East Timor's oil and gas revenues. His efforts did not go unnoticed. In March 1998 he received a letter from Jakarta's Cipinang prison: "I hope we can do something to impede the free exploitation of our oil and gas," wrote East Timor's resistance leader, Xanana Gusmao. "I'm waiting for more ideas and news from you." Andrew had ideas aplenty. Five months later, a BHP executive shocked the Australian Government by meeting Gusmao in prison, to discuss exploration rights under a (previously unthinkable) free East Timor. It was a huge symbolic boost to the notion of independence, and confirmed Gusmao's status as president-in-waiting. Andrew had arranged the meeting. It's possible 1998 may have been Andrew's annus mirabilis. In October, he was leaked personnel files from within the Indonesian military showing that Indonesia's vaunted troop withdrawal from East Timor was a fiction and that the province's murderous militias were under the direct command of the Indonesian army. Much credit must go to the courageous East Timorese who leaked the files. But it was Andrew who carried them out of East Timor, analysed them, and took them to the world's media. Clinton Fernandes - then the Australian Intelligence Corps' principal analyst for East Timor - says of Andrew's coup: "The consequence was a dramatic increase in the pressure on Habibie. It was ... an important reason for his subsequent decision to offer a referendum on autonomy or independence." Filmmaker Max Stahl says: "The list of unlikely political triumphs and back-from-the-dead victories which Andrew McNaughtan had a hand in is long and eclectic." Speaking of the "heroes" who had inspired him, the journalist John Pilger said: "Andrew McNaughtan would have been at the top of my list. He was one of the truth-tellers about East Timor. If you wanted a reliable source for what was happening there, you went to Andrew, and you were never let down. "He was an extraordinary witness to events, especially during 1999, when there was a great deal of disinformation about the Australian Government's intervention in East Timor. Andrew was one of those who countered all the propaganda coming out of Canberra about the Government saving East Timor, or General Cosgrove saving East Timor. It didn't happen, of course. It was the Andrew McNaughtans - and especially Andrew McNaughtan himself - who contributed hugely to saving East Timor." Jose Ramos-Horta, now East Timor's Foreign Minister, says: "I first met Dr Andrew McNaughtan some 15 years ago in Darwin. He took enormous risks with his own life, travelling to Timor and delivering cameras to the resistance. "Life is very unfair. I don't want to blame the Creator. But he seems to have the habit of taking away some of the best people I know. [Last year] was a disastrous year. First Sergio Vieira de Mello [the UN's transitional administrator of East Timor, who was killed in Iraq in August] and now Andrew McNaughtan." Lansell Taudevin was head of AusAID's East Timor water supply and sanitation program from 1996 to 1999. In his book East Timor: Too Little Too Late, he writes of Andrew: "I suspect that one reason he was constantly ignored by the establishment was that they knew deep in their hearts that he was correct, and his views challenged their own fragile positions. Certainly, Andrew was not loath to express his opinions often and at length, such was his obsession with the plight of the East Timorese. When the reckoning is finalised, his role and contribution in enlightening the world to the realities of East Timor will be amongst the most significant." In an entirely different sphere, Andrew's analysis of the Gersten case - which embraced all three branches of the US and Australian governments - was so highly regarded that it formed the basis of a report issued in the name of the US Congress. In 1992 the FBI attempted to frame Joe Gersten, a reforming Florida politician, for murder. Driven from office, Gersten moved to Australia in 1993, but was harassed here, too. When he met Andrew in 1996, Gersten felt "relief that a person of such extraordinary advocacy talents had come to my aid - though I didn't yet know quite how brilliant he was". Gersten was soon to find out. "Andy realised the terrible things the Australian Government was doing to me had been ordered by Washington, so that was where they had to be turned off. So he took my case back to the US. Before long I started getting faxes from him. They were copies of subpoenas issued by the Congress - to the director of the FBI, the attorney-general, and the secretary of state - to yield up whatever information they had on my case, and explain themselves. It was phenomenal. "Andy was never afraid to think outside the square. It was unimaginable by almost everyone else that the FBI would direct a political campaign to discredit me on Australian soil. But Andy intuited that it was happening, then went about proving it. How many Australians have written the questions with which a US attorney-general is hauled over the coals by Congress?" At the centre of Andrew's pantheon was the dissident American academic and author Noam Chomsky. After he contacted Chomsky in 2001 (beginning his email with an uncharacteristic "Dear Sir"), Andrew was dismayed to discover that Chomsky had long been an admirer of his. Chomsky told the Herald: "The work Andrew McNaughtan did in East Timor for many years, under extremely difficult circumstances, was truly inspiring. It was a major contribution to the health and spirits of people suffering terribly, and to informing the rest of us on the realities of those awful events ... he was a person of great courage, honour, and dedication." Campaigners against genocide are a phlegmatic lot: starry-eyed idealists don't last long up against real perfidy. Andrew was in that mould. He was driven by a fine sense of moral outrage, which made him fearless. He was a stubborn dismantler of spin, and possessed of biblical patience. He often felt impotent - but in reality his life might serve as a blueprint for what can be achieved by one cranky, obstinate, passionate citizen. When Andrew began an after-dinner monologue, you were in for a long night. Sometimes he was still talking, uninterruptably, at sunrise. But just when you had wilted (grumbling to yourself that he was humourless and insensitive) he'd launch into a delicious impersonation of Habibie, complete with spinning eyes and extravagant gestures; or would sing you, word perfect, the entire lyrics of Astral Weeks. Andrew was warm, but always a little abstracted. He was co-operative and competitive, generous and stingy. He gave thousands of dollars to East Timor's resistance movement, yet stayed, on his travels, in the cheapest humanly habitable accommodation. He negotiated through Washington's power networks while living on the floor of a squat, along with the resident cats. The beautiful Mosman house Andrew inherited from his mother, June, became a meeting place for activists, and a safe house for officials with secrets to leak. It was visited by ASIO more than once. And the house was the repository of Andrew's all-important documents; they filled wardrobes, shrouded the dining room table, lined the hallways, and cluttered the bathroom. When Andrew returned there in March 2000, after six violent and chaotic months in Timor, there were kilograms of unopened mail, and 11,800 emails to read. (Typically, he counted them.) But before he could regain a toehold in normality, the Gersten case enveloped him again. The "X-files" had been leaked - now-infamous documents showing that the US government had instructed the Australian Federal Police to deal destruction on Gersten here. Andrew had the brainpower to dissect the files with forensic precision, and the brio to spirit them off to the US. Shortly afterwards, a testy Justice Whitlam convened an urgent hearing of the Federal Court, to order their return. When he was told Andrew had placed the files on the US Congressional Record, "the blood drained from his honour's face", according to one observer. Andrew described himself as an "activist", but the description is too narrow. He was the most astute analyst and strategist that many of us have known. Fortunately, many who loved him did let him know, in recent times, how impressed we were by his example. (Only to see surprise, then a shy delight, suffuse his face; he tended to doubt his own worth.) Since his sudden death, the things about him which drove us crazy dissolved - their triviality unmasked by his death - and a picture of the larger man has emerged: just as taking a few steps back from a painting might reveal a masterpiece. "It is strange," says Andrew's friend, Dr Vacy Vlazna, "how death clarifies the vastness of his spirit." On December 30 a memorial service for Andrew was held in Dili, beginning at the Santa Cruz Cemetery, and proceeding to the Vila Harmonia - once a centre of the resistance. General Taur Matan Ruak, chief of staff of East Timor's defence force, said to mourners: "No East Timorese leader can deny Andrew's invaluable contribution for the liberation of East Timor. The ones who didn't have the honour of meeting Andrew lost a great opportunity to hear and see one of the finest souls in the history of liberation of this country." On January 2 an Australian memorial service at the Mary MacKillop Chapel in North Sydney was attended by 400 people. Eulogising Andrew were John Pilger, Jose Ramos-Horta (representing President Gusmao), Supreme Court Justice Barry O'Keefe, and Andrew's cousin, Nigel Stewart. Ramos-Horta told the Herald he would ensure the Government of East Timor honoured Andrew with a permanent memorial. May it be something worthy of his Olympian spirit. John Macgregor John Macgregor wrote a series of stories for the Herald about the Gersten case, for which Andrew McNaughtan was his main source. He is now writing a book on the case. A fine sense of moral outrage made him fearless ... Andrew McNaughtan. Photo: Vaughan Williams --> http://www.smh.com.au/text/ffxImage/urlpicture_id_1073769451280_2004/01/11/240andrew_mcnaughtan,0.jpg -- From: Andrew McNaughtan Sent: Monday 5 August 2002 Subject: Submission to JSCT on Timor Gap resources by AETA. SUBMISSION TO THE JOINT STANDING COMMITTEE ON TREATIES - by the Australia East Timor Association, NSW. --> http://www.aph.gov.au/house/committee/jsct/timor/subs/sub41.pdf -- Andrew McNaughtan: a tireless campaigner for East Timor BY Tim Stewart + In memory of Andrew McNaughtan BY Max Lane, Perth --> http://www.GreenLeft.org.au/ -- Visit the proposed Leftlink web site at http://www.leftlink.net/ -- Leftlink - Australia's Broad Left Mailing List mailto:[EMAIL PROTECTED] Archived at http://www.cat.org.au/lists/leftlink/ Sponsored by Melbourne's New International Bookshop Sub: mailto:[EMAIL PROTECTED] Unsub: mailto:[EMAIL PROTECTED]
