East Timorese youth ambassador project, 1992-93

CROSSING CULTURES: INTERVENING IN EAST TIMOR'S FUTURES

East Timorese youth ambassadors, Elizabeth Exposto (centre) and Danilo Henriques (front right), in a very traditional pose with Elizabeth's mother, Eugenia Exposto (far right) and her aunt, Margarida Pires.
Photo by John Banagan, 1992.

Article first published as 'Crossing Cultures' in The Tabloid, ITF, Winter 1993.

It's the year 2020. The ecoversity is playing host to the president of one of Australia's nearest neighbours, some of her cabinet ministers and a leading activist in the indigenous non-governmental sector.

The country these distinguished guests are from is East Timor - an imaginary future East Timor. An East Timor in which, as 'President' Elizabeth Exposto explains to her ecoversity audience, people can at last work together to repair the damage of the past and build a strong indigenous society that is peaceful, just, democratic, economically viable and ecologically sustainable.

The eighteen year old 'president' from Broadmeadows in Western Melbourne, and her young colleagues, Danilo Henriques and Luis Santos from Endeavour Hills, Liliane Alexandrino from Craigieburn, John Babo and Norma Babo from Wantirna South, and Victor Guterres from Mill Park were speaking at the last of a series of twelve weekly seminars called East Timor: towards peace, prosperity and self-determination held at the Ecoversity from October 1992.

This multilingual series was organised as part of Imagine The Future's cross-cultural program in collaboration with Melbourne's East Timorese community, Australian Council for Overseas Aid's Human Rights Office, Australian Conservation Foundation, East Timor Talks Campaign and the Timorese UN Project. More than 40 scholars, commentators, activists, community leaders, including Jose Ramos Horta, East Timorese elders and Indonesians now living in Australia participated as guest speakers.

Says Emilia Pires, chairperson of the Timorese Association in Victoria: "The speakers seemed to cover everything -- history, indigenous culture, ecology, global politics, trade, development, international law, the United Nations, appropriate technology, social justice, human rights, health care, women's issues -- all these things. It was the first time that we as a community have been able to look at East Timor from all these different perspectives. In a sense, the seminars were liberating for us, especially for the younger ones, because they began to see how they could work for the future of East Timor in all these different ways. They also learned to value what the older people could tell them about the culture.

"We've needed something like this for years in our community because we were running the risk of losing our most talented young people completely.”

YOUTH AMBASSADORS

Elizabeth, Danilo, Luis, Liliane, John, Norma and Victor participated in the Imagine The Future series through the East Timorese community's youth ambassador program. This program was developed by Emilia Pires, Abel Guterres and Imagine The Future's Merrill Findlay to nurture a new generation of East Timorese intellectuals in the diaspora, to give them the confidence and support they needed to speak on behalf of their community.

In April 1993, two of the Melbourne youth ambassadors, Elizabeth and Danilo, toured North America as part of an international delegation initiated through the Timorese Association and facilitated by Imagine The Future with the support of the East Timor Talks Campaign. The tour was hosted in North America by the East Timor Action Network (USA) and the East Timor Alert Network (Canada).

Says Elizabeth Exposto: "We went to North America because we knew many of the decisions that would affect the future of our people in East Timor would be made in Washington and New York, and we wanted to make sure the decision makers there knew what was really happening in our country. That it was young people like us who were disappearing or being imprisoned and tortured and killed for daring to believe in freedom and democracy. That it was young people, some as young as eight years old, who were massacred while they were peacefully demonstrating at the Santa Cruz cemetery in November 1991."

LET THEM SPEAK

Funds for the tour were raised at an astonishingly eclectic event called Let them speak at the CUB Malthouse theatre on Australia Day 1992. The concert was conceived and produced by Jeannie Marsh, Jenny Worthington, Meredith King, Louise Byrne, Douglas Horton of Chamber Made Opera, and Stephen Armstrong, with the support of many other members of Melbourne's arts community. Performers included Jane Clifton as compere, Macchina, Tom the World Poet, Geminiani Quartet, New Music Liberation Front, Great Big Opera Company, Judith Lucy, comics Magda Szubanski and Found Objects, singers Jeannie Marsh and Helen Noonan, Tony Gould Jazz Trio, the East Timorese Cultural Group, and guests from Phantom of the Opera. Guest speakers included executive director of ACFOA, Russell Rollason; chairperson of the East Timorese Association, Emilia Pires; and MP Garrie Gibson.

After the concert, Christies of London auctioneered work by Michael Leunig, Caz Cooke, Les Tanner, Peter Nicholson, Deborah Halpern and others. Theatre bar staff also contributed to the evening by designing a suite of commemorative cocktails - including one called the Timor Gap (bacardi, amaretto, blue curacai, fresh lime juice, pineapple juice and ice).

A special double screening of Manufacturing consent: Noam Chomsky and the media by Canadians Mark Achbar and Peter Wintonick, plus Buried Alive by Australian film makers Gil Scrine, Rod Hibberd and Fabio Cavadini at the Carlton Movie House raised further funds for the tour of North America.

TO THE UNITED STATES

Youth ambassadors Elizabeth Exposto and Danilo Henriques left Melbourne on March 26, 1993, after an exhausting round of media interviews \and a public farewell produced by the Let them speak team at the CUB Malthouse theatre. They were accompanied by Maria Braz, an East Timorese youth ambassador resident in Portugal, and by Merrill Findlay, from Imagine The Future Inc, as the Australian co-ordinator/speech writer. In New York they were joined by the other members of their diplomatic missions: Constancio Pinto, secretary of the National Council of Maubere Resistance within East Timor, and Abe Barreto, an East Timorese student who defected to Canada after the Santa Cruz massacre.

Billed as 'a new generation', the youthful ambassadors met with around 30 Members of Congress and their aides in Washington and representatives of approximately 18 national missions to the United Nations in New York, as well as representatives of several UN committees and many non-governmental agencies, including Asia Watch, Cultural Survival and Amnesty International. They also spoke at major universities including Yale, Princeton, Brown, Harvard, Cornell, Rutgers, Massachusetts Institute of Technology, and the University of California in Berkeley and Los Angeles.

Says Danilo Henriques: "The tour was really exhausting, but I think it was very successful. People we spoke to were genuinely moved by what we said and very supportive, especially the students at the campuses we visited. Now that they've heard about East Timor they will be able to pressure their representatives in Congress to support our cause.

"For us East Timorese, the tour was also about self- empowerment. We learned an enormous amount about international diplomacy and global politics, and we really had to think through how we could achieve our hopes for East Timor. How we, as a community, could translate our ideals into actions."

DREAM YET UNFULFILLED

By the year 2020, Elizabeth, Danilo, Norma, Liliane, John and Luis will be mature and greying adults. What will East Timor be like by then? Will those who are young today have built the peaceful, just, democratic, economically viable and ecologically sustainable society that 'president' Elizabeth Exposto spoke about at the Ecoversity? What will these young people have done with their lives by then to help turn their dream into reality?

What will we all have done?

Will we remember that one evening at the ecoversity a group of young refugees dared to imagine ...

Page revised April 2004.