WON BY GOODWILL

Wanganui Chronicle, Volume 87, Issue 1, 2 January 1943, Page 5

WON BY GOODWILL

TIMOR NATIVES PREFER AUSTRALIANS (Recd. 9.30 p.m.) Sydney, Jan. 1. The Japanese have organised the Timor natives to help them fight. Fairly large bands of Timorese have participated in several skirmishes with the Allied forces on the island and suffered heavy casualties. This was revealed by the London News Chronicle war correspondent, Dickson Brown, who spent three weeks with the Australian and Dutch guerrilla troops in their mountain hiding places. “The arming of the natives appears to have a three-fold end,” writes Brown. “The first is to wipe out the Portuguese population, particularly the civil administrators. The second is to dispose of natives who show pro-Australian tendencies. The third is to build a large hostile native populace with which the Japanese hope to meet and beat any Allied invasion.

“The Japanese won many Timorese by subtle pronaganda. They spun the old tale of exploitation of the Asiatics by the white races. They promised to abolish tax payments and they gave the natives gaudy clothes. They told the Timorese it was useless to aid the Australians, as the Japanese had occupied Australia and flattened Sydney, Melbourne and Brisbane.

Brown says that by contrast the Australians have won over the Timorese by sheer goodwill and scrupulously fair treatment. More than pinning clown thousands of Japanese troops, our guerrillas are paving the way among the simple natives for the return of the Allies.

“Wherever they go the Japanese leave a trail of murder, rape and wholesale wilful destruction of food crops, houses and cattle—everything likely to help an Allied invasion. The purely human needs of the natives have been disregarded and whole districts through which the Japanese passed have been denuded of everything necessary to human existence.”