Goa & Timor

©Lucio João Mascarenhas, Patriota Goesa e Portuguesa.
The Times of India, Bombay edition, dated 23rd December 2003, featured, on its editorial page, Prabha Chandran's interview of Xanana Gusmão, President of Timor Lorosæ, formerly Portuguese Timor. (See Online Version).

Curiously, the interviewer asks a question for which there does not seem to be any provocation, and which is very relevant to us as Goans. Prabha Chandran, Q. #4: The Portuguese brought Goan priests and professionals to East Timor. But their descendants, despite historic links with India, didn�t support your freedom struggle. Are you disappointed?

Xanana Gusmão: Not anymore disappointed than we were with ASEAN or Australia which supported East Timor�s integration with Indonesia. But that was in the Cold War era and we are thankful the international community came to our aid at the right time and supported our right to independence. Today, we have good relations with all our neighbours.
Strange, very strange. It was meant to underline the glory of the Indian Union; in fact, it compromises the claims and pretensions of the Indian Union, by disproving them, and proving the Goans constant insistence that they never, as a whole, supported the program of the radical fringe of traitors motivated by Marxist and other new erroneous beliefs.

This is another piece of evidence vindicating our stand.

Thank you, Gusmão, Chandran and the Times of India!

The rest of the interview only reinforces what Xanana Gusmao will not himself directly admit: That the people of Timor never had any interest themselves in seceding from the Portuguese Commonwealth, that this idea was forced upon them by miscreants, led principally by the Soviet Union, the Indian Union, the United Nations, etc., which applied hypocritical "principles" — double standards — that applied only to the Portugal, Spain, etc., and not to themselves; and that the resulting tragedies, whether in Portuguese Guinea, Angola, Moçambique, Goa, Timor, etc., the unnecessary loss of lives and properties, terrorism inflicted, rapes, murders, genocide, etc., etc. are the sole responsibilities of the perpetrators of these crimes designed to alienate the affections of the citizens of the Portuguese Empire and to dismember that integral State.

Lucio João Mascarenhas, Patriota Goesa e Portuguesa

Re.: "Timor Titan"
Convoluted & Loaded Question

Letter to the Editor, Times of India, Bombay: <[email protected]>.

Cc.: [email protected], [email protected], [email protected]

For favour of publication.

Sir,

This is with reference to Prabha Chandran's interview with Xanana Gusmão, President of Timor Lorosæ in the Editorial pages, 23rd December.

I do not understand what Chandran is getting to. Her question to Gusmão is convoluted and loaded.

Prabha Chandran, Q. #4: The Portuguese brought Goan priests and professionals to East Timor. But their descendants, despite historic links with India, didn't support your freedom struggle. Are you disappointed?

Xanana Gusmão: Not anymore disappointed than we were with ASEAN or Australia which supported East Timor's integration with Indonesia. But that was in the Cold War era and we are thankful the international community came to our aid at the right time and supported our right to independence. Today, we have good relations with all our neighbours.
It is mischievous and hypocritical to highlight the Goans' refusal to support the attempt to establish a Communist Reich in Timor and therefore their support to Indonesia's invasion and occupation, intended to prevent that eventuality, even while no mention is made at all of India's categorical and "principled" support to Indonesia's occupation of Timor, as a follow-up of the precedent set by India's own act of naked aggression and banditry against Goa!

The Goans in Timor saw that the secession of Timor was artificial, propelled by a radical Communist minority, and therefore supported Indonesia's intervention.

If their support for Indonesia was wrong, then, by the same yardstick, India's invasion and occupation of Goa is wrong.

Up until the time when Indonesia was forced to yield up Timor, Indians supported Indonesia unquestioningly - because they had done the same thing with Goa... Up until then, from the Indian viewpoint, the Goans in Timor were correct, in supporting Indonesia's occupation of Timor!

Now, suddenly, Timor is independent, and India supports Timor! And the Goans were wrong to have not supported independence! Then why the double standards? Why does Chandran not go the whole hog and state up-front that Goa has a right to independence? That India's invasion is as wrong and immoral as Indonesia's invasion of Timor?

What is Chandran trying to do on behalf of India - Have her cake and eat it too?

I do not understand the non sequitur Chandran gratuitously uses to qualify Goans, that she foists on us Goans - "despite historic links with India".

I do not see what the pretended and fabricated connection with India that is imputed to the Goans has had anything to do with them, the Goans, supporting or not supporting either the Indonesians or the Timorese secessionists.

By and large, the Goans in Timor, as elsewhere, have themselves never accepted India's pretensions of a claim upon their affections.

Why is it that, according to Chandran's convoluted thinking, the Goans in Timor were obliged "by their historic links with India" to support secessionism by Timorese Communists, even as they are contradictorily required by the same Indians to tender an unquestioning submission to the Indian occupation of their homeland, and even as the Indians, who pretend that the Goans are a subset of Indians, themselves gladly and resolutely supported the Indonesians?

If the Indian occupation of Goa is legitimate, then Indonesia's of Timor is just as legitimate. And vice versa.

Why is Chandran playing games with Timorese Goans? Why the shameless hypocrisy, attempting to blacken the Goans in Timor and to poison the Timorese against them, when the Indians always and consistently, all this time, strenuously and categorically supported Indonesia in Timor and scorned the secessionists?

Why the hypocrisy? Why the double standards?

Goans have - or do not have - as much, if not far less by degree, a "historic link" with India as the Timorese have with Indonesia.

Goans, unlike the Timorese, largely voluntarily adopted Christianity and Portuguese names and culture.

Goans, largely uniquely in the Portuguese Empire, and unlike the Timorese, voluntarily assimilated to Portuguese culture en masse.

The Timorese began to adopt Christianity in large numbers only recently, as a means of differentiating themselves from the Indonesian invaders.

Timor is a Malay word that means East. A look at the map of Indonesia will reveal many provinces with the epithet "Timor"; even Timor under Indonesian rule was called Timor Timor, while the former Dutch West Timor is called Timor Barat, or West Timor...

Timor, therefore, has far more closer historical links with the Javanese than Goa has with the Indians.

All that does not give, I believe, the Indonesians an automatic right to absorb the Timorese, to levy claims upon the affections and loyalties of the Timorese as against their own lawful government. But if the Timorese have that right not to be encroached upon, so do the Goans.

Chandran's loaded and convoluted question betrays the usual Indian hypocrisy when confronted with the Timor Question because that brings up inevitably the Goa Question.

My message to Chandran: You can lie to yourself and to others only so long. Even you are tiring of your lies about Goa. Quit it. You can carry a charade only so long. You have carried on this charade long enough!

Despite all the desperate efforts to muddy up history and facts, Goa will, sooner than later, break free from India, just as Timor has done, and punish the guilty. It is inevitable; a matter of time, of a historical process of correction of past wrongs that cannot be avoided...

Lucius John Mascarenhas aka "Prakash", Goan Patriot
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