Passionate Histories: When Scholars Become Activists*

* this was written for a history course, summer 2009, as a sort of histioriography


In this essay I look at three scholars – John G. Taylor, Benedict Anderson and Peter Carey – who went beyond writing histories and began to write passionately for a cause – the occupied yet ignored country of East Timor.

When I go to read a history of one place or another, I expect certain things. I expect the essay or book will be free of bias, or at least the bias will be hidden. I expect it to be a bit boring, perhaps. And by boring I mean lacking emotion. But I have found a few cases where scholars have smashed those expectations.

John G. Taylor, director of the Centre for Chinese Studies and Principle Lecturer in Social Sciences at the University of the South Bank, London, has written three books about East Timor. In reading his second, Indonesia’s Forgotten War: The Hidden History of East Timor [1], published in 1991, it seems Taylor is passionately rooting for the Timorese while acting hostile to its invaders.

“It is nothing less than an act of genocide committed by the Indonesian military,” he writes in the introduction. “A country which could have developed as a viable and successful nation-state is being moulded brutally in the Indonesian image, at a terrible cost to its population (ix).” He adds, “The history of East Timor needs to be recounted because of its concealment, but just as importantly because it is one of the most impressive and striking attempts ever by the people of a small nation to resist incorporation by the government of a large, powerful, aggressive military state, with all the necessary resources at its disposal (xiii).”

It becomes clear that this is more than a mere history book. Taylor has been moved, apparently, to do more than that, to put down his scholar’s hat and pick up the hat of the activist. A 1993 review praises the book, saying it “restores the significance of a war that was not so much obliterated from memory, as never really known.” [2] And wasn’t that what Taylor wanted? Yet this passion comes with a cost, as I will explore later.

Cornell University Professor of Indonesian Politics, Benedict Anderson, best known for his book Imagined Communities about the causes of nationalism, wrote an essay in the same year as the review above entitled “Imagining East Timor” [3] in which he argues that the Timorese reacted to the Indonesians as the Indonesians did to the invading Dutch. The essay has none of the passion of Taylor’s book but reads like the objective essay one would expect from a scholar. So Anderson presents a different kind of writer. He is drawing attention to the issue, but unlike Taylor he is not shouting it from the rooftops. But that will change.

Anderson and Taylor both contributed to the edited collection East Timor at the Crossroads: The Forging of a Nation, published in 1995. This is a collection of writings from not only scholars but also politicians, activists and refugees. The book is another passionate response to the issue. Though Anderson’s essay is more tempered than the others, it gets caught up in the flurry. So by association he is now passionate.

A review in The Journal of Asian Studies admires the contributors:

In a period when many scholars are uncritically attracted to the spectacular
growth of Southeast Asian capitalism, or are immersed in the depoliticizing
world of postmodernism, or have simply remained quiet because they fear the loss
of research access, it is encouraging to see scholars who openly support the
East Timorese's struggle for self-determination and straightforwardly criticize
one of Southeast Asia's remaining despotic regimes. [4]

This is the risk I mentioned above. The authors in this book risk never returning to East Timor or Indonesia. Some are Timorese and risk punishment but others, like Taylor and Anderson, because they are scholars and will be blacklisted. They knew this going in. The scholars jeopardized their careers in the name of justice. I find that fascinating, particularly because these scholars are Western scholars who do not have strong connections to the people of East Timor outside of research related areas, as far as I can tell.

But there is another risk this passionate history brings. In another review of the collection a strange trend is found. The author notes in the Timorese resistance leader Paulino Gama’s contribution that he alone looks at the brief civil war between the emerging political parties of East Timor in 1975. The review also notes that the chronology, put together by Taylor, leaves out the civil war. “This omission points to a deeper reluctance of many observers of East Timor openly to come to terms with the divisiveness generated by this short-lived but deeply felt conflict, which to this day haunts East Timorese politics, particularly in exile,” the author writes. [5]

I’ve noticed this, that the scholars are quite biased to Timor, refusing to dwell on anything that may put the Timorese in a bad light. In fact the Timorese appear to be innocent on all counts. Does this make the collection a flawed history? Of course the Timorese were victims, and the evidence of the Indonesian military’s brutality is disturbing, but the lack of two-sidedness makes these more rhetoric than historical.

But the people of Timor needed help immediately. There was no time to spare. The atrocities were going on then and would continue until something was done. These writers became the voice of Timor. They were respected Westerners. Timorese refugees had been calling for help from the beginning but were ignored – by most. It was this group of scholars who used the refugees’ testimonies to support their argument to the world.

Now to that last of the three scholars who has become an activist, Peter Carey, a Fellow and Tutor at Trinity College, Oxford and an Indonesianist. He is also one of the editors of East Timor at the Crossroads. In the preface to the collection he reveals how he became passionate about the Timor issue, writing that in 1983 he was asked to review politician James Dunn’s Timor: A People Betrayed. He said he was shocked by what he read.

“What could I do?” he wrote. “I could not pretend that I had not read the book. But, if I published a long review article, surely that would mean the end of my career as an Indonesianist, certainly the end of my access to the Indonesian archives?” He would write the review under a pseudonym but would be discovered anyway. He then began publishing essays about Timor under his real name and in 1990 even wrote a preface to John Taylor’s first book, The Indonesian Occupation of East Timor, 1974-1989: A Chronology. Carey also reveals in the preface that he is married to an Indonesian and that while in Indonesia he was rebuked and told he had shamed his family for what he had written.

While Taylor has written books and Anderson essays, Carey puts his passion in his book reviews. And boy does he put in his passion. In a review of the edited collection Bitter Flowers, Sweet Flowers, published in 2001, he writes of the contributors, “Unlike so many Western-based Indonesianists, particularly in the elite groves of Canberra academe, they have not left their consciences at the door.” [6] And so we see another aspect of this passionate scholarship – trash talking. I mean, that seemed like a real low blow. Is he calling his peers chickens?

It is almost as if there is some sort of pro-Timor, anti-Indonesia fraternity at work here. In it are Taylor, Anderson and Carey and the journalists and activists. Out are the Indonesianists who, according to Carey, refrain from writing about it. To support the fraternity theory look at how, later in the review, Carey seems to welcome Sarah Niner to the fold for contributing something new while he slights Geoffrey Gunn for getting some of his facts wrong.

In a review of both Bitter Flowers and another edited volume, The East Timor Question, [7] published in 2000, the author writes, “Many of the voices of Indonesia's Western adversaries are again raised in the two edited volumes .” He saw what I see, calling my “fraternity” the “voices of Indonesia's Western adversaries.” He adds that The East Timor Question “in particular articulates the outrage that informs so much of the Western discourse on the politics of East Timor.” [8]

I realize that I did not come up with any good answers, for example I do not offer a reason why the scholars do this other than that they were appalled by what they saw, but I hope I pose some good questions. It is not hard to imagine why journalists would want to report on the invasion, but to see scholars like Taylor, Anderson and Carey turn their attention to something that can jeopardize their careers and to then write about it passionately is worth a closer look. Why did these three, and there may be others I haven’t found, do what others did not? And perhaps more importantly, did their decisions to speak up have the desired effect? That would require much more study, but I think I can safely say their work kept the issue alive.

Notes
[1] In this book he receives praise from none other than Ben Anderson and Peter Carey, the other subjects of this essay. I will write more about this “fraternity” below.
[2] Volkman, Toby Alice. The Journal of Asian Studies, Vol. 52, No. 4 (Nov., 1993), pp. 1093-1094. Volkman is with the Social Science Research Council.
[3] Published in Arena Magazine No.4 April - May 1993. This article is based on a lecture at Monash University in 1992. Volkman mentions the essay in his review of Indonesia’s Forgotten War.
[4] Abinales, Patricio N. The Journal of Asian Studies, Vol. 55, No. 3 (Aug., 1996), pp. 774-776.[5] Ryter, Loren. Indonesia, Vol. 61, Pramoedya Ananta Toer and His Work (Apr., 1996), pp. 179-185. Published by Southeast Asia Program Publications at Cornell University.
[6] Indonesia, Vol. 73 (Apr., 2002), pp. 171-176. Published by Southeast Asia Program Publications at Cornell University.
[7] Carey contributed the essay “A Personal Journey Through East Timor.”
[8] University of South Carolina Southeast Asia scholar Donald Weatherbee reviews both for Pacific Affairs, Vol. 75, No. 2 (Summer, 2002), pp. 333-335.