Australian diplomats mocked East Timor rape claims after invasion By Tom Allard Handwritten annotations are on a memo and a press release sent to the Australian embassy in 1976.
Australian diplomats in the Jakarta embassy mocked reports of the rape, torture and execution of the East Timorese after the invasion by Indonesia on official documents held in Canberra archives.
The handwritten annotations are on a memo sent to the embassy in   November 1976, less than a year after Indonesia seized East Timor by force. 
The correspondence - originating from the Australian embassy in the Hague - displays the comments "sounds like fun" and "the population must be in raptures". Also included is a media release from Fretilin, the separatist resistance movement that was fighting the Indonesians. It describes fighting across the territory and artillery bombardments by Indonesian forces on villages. In Quelicai district, Fretilin boasts of success repelling the Indonesians and that the "enemy was impotent".
Fretilin says, "The enemy are daily torturing, raping and executing the captured population" at a detention camp near Bacau.
This phase is underlined by a diplomat, with the comment "sounds like fun". Another handwritten comment observes: "sound like the population must be in raptures."
Another handwritten annotation by a diplomat jokes: "This [Fretilin] report is internally inconsistent.
If 'the enemy was impotent', as stated, how come they are daily raping the captured population?
Or is the former a result of the latter?"
The memo and its annotations were found in the National Archives by two researchers from Monash University, Sara Niner and Kim McGrath. The memo, said Dr Niner, was "vivid evidence of the lack of empathy and concern for human rights abuses in East Timor" in the Department of Foreign Affairs.
She also noted the issue of petroleum in the Timor Sea. The boundary negotiated in the early '70s with Indonesia was highly favourable to Australia but left a gap in the border - the so-called Timor Gap as East Timor was then a Portuguese colony.
Prior to Indonesia's invasion in 1975, Australia's ambassador in Indonesia, Richard Woolcott, cabled Canberra to observe the gap in the sea border "could be much more readily negotiated with Indonesia".
Australia has declined to negotiate a permanent boundary since East Timor's independence, with the fledgling state waiting to hear if Prime Minister Malcolm Turnbull will begin talks.
Fairfax Media contacted a member of the Jakarta embassy staff at the time who received the document: Cavan Hogue, who later rose to become an ambassador in the Soviet Union and Thailand. He said he had just arrived at the embassy and could have penned at least one of the annotations , notably the joke about Fretilin being "internally inconsistent".
"It does look like my handwriting," he said.
"If I made a comment like that, being the cynical bugger that I am, it would certainly have been in the spirit or irony and sarcasm.
"It's about the press release, not the Timorese. ."
Peter Rodgers, whose name is also on the memo, who said he could not say if the annotations were his.
"Those in the embassy in 1976 had no more reason to believe Fretilin propaganda than they did to believe Indonesian, UDT [Fretilin's local conservative rivals], Apodeti [a party favouring Indonesian integration] propaganda over the situation in East Timor," he replied in an email.
"The commentary was blunt but this was on claims made by one of the protagonists in a messy, propaganda-rich conflict."
A United Nations 2500-page report into violence in East Timor during the occupation found thousands of instances of sexual violence, forced starvation, summary executions and torture. "Rape, sexual slavery and sexual violence were tools used as part of the campaign designed to inflict a deep experience of terror, powerlessness and hopelessness upon pro-independence supporters," the report said.
Mr Rodgers - who left the embassy to become a Fairfax correspondent in Jakarta - defied Indonesia's military to publish photos of starving Timorese in the Sydney Morning Herald and The Age.
Mr Rodgers, returned to the diplomatic corp and rose to become ambassador to Israel from 1994-1997.
He is now an author on Middle East affairs and academic at the Australian National University.
Mr Hogue, who has retired, said on Sunday there were "atrocities on all sides" and that people of good will believed it would be better for East Timor's people if they were part of Indonesia and not a "banana republic dependant on foreign aid".