IN A WEEK that saw Tim Severin off on a remote Indonesian odyssey there is food for modern day geo political reflection.
He is following the route of a 19th century botanist, Alfred Russel Wallace, whose discoveries and theory of evolution identified at least two worlds within what's now one country, Indonesia.
Wallace was the first to say "the survival of the fittest". Beached with a bout of malaria he wrote from the South Seas to tell Charles Darwin, who gave him credit for coming to the same conclusion the master had independently drawn.
"The Wallace Line" bisects present day Indonesia, the then Dutch East Indies, north to south. On either side he discovered completely different animal species.
East Timor is part of one of a chain of southern islands in that 3,000 mile wide archipelago. I'm led, Perhaps misled, to stretch Wallace point to the modern day world of human political species and their habits.
UN sponsored talks they can't be called negotiations were held this week in Austria about Portugal's former colony of East Timor.
Indonesia insists it is a country. It acknowledges vast differences within its east west chain of about 14,000 islands and hundreds of tongues. Its founding fathers even invented a state system to contain religious difference Islam, Hinduism, Buddhism, Christianity, though not the animism of Wallace's eastern extreme, approximately Melanesia.
Indonesia has played a central role in the Non Aligned Movement and is working its way to an important regional status, trading friend of the west, and a model of development.
But in its 51st year of independence another image persists of just another imitative empire, driven cruelly from its political centre, Java, the world's most densely populated island containing 60 per cent of Indonesia's almost 200 million souls.
There has been rebellious, violent, protest this week in Irian Jaya, a Melanesian/Austronesian territory Indonesia "integrated" in the 1960s. An ongoing separatist movement in the western (Malay) side of the archipelago also questions Indonesia's official account of itself.
This week also saw an announcement that the leader of Indonesia's illegal trade Linion, SBSI, Muchtar Pakpahan, is to be tried again, in spite of being freed last December after an appeal to the Supreme Court. More will be heard of this case when the genera secretary of the Indonesian Centre for Labour Struggles addresses a meeting in TCD this morning.
This week Indonesia banned, of all things, the Readers Digest apparently because it carried an outspoken article on East Timor's apostolic bishop Dr Carlos Ximenes Belo.
The bishop of Dili has been a consistent critic of the Indonesian occupation of East Timor since 1975 and its appalling record of human rights abuse there, which the UN's Commissioner for Human Rights, Mr Jose Avala Lasso, only yesterday called attention to.
Dr Belo was a key figure at last year's session of the All Inclusive Inter Timorese Dialogue, resumed this week in Stadtschlaining, Austria. The bishop excused himself from this week's session on the grounds that he was preparing for his "Easter obligations".
Clearly he has thought it diplomatic not to place himself in the midst of conflict at Stadtschlaining instead sending a representative.
When he visited Ireland last year I spent several hours with him. At the time there was a push from Indonesia's mostly Javanese Catholic bishops and the Jakarta government to divide his diocese in two and appoint a pro government Javanese bishop to Dili.
Because of the delicacy of this negotiation his minder refused to allow our conversation to be published, for fear of offending the Indonesians.
Dirty tricks seem to be part of an overall Indonesian package. These include a current military push to finally trash the remaining guerrilla resistance in the East Timor highlands. At the same time Jakarta is going through the motions of dialogue.
Turning these talks and more substantive parallel bilateral ministerial ones between Jakarta and Lisbon into real negotiations is remote indeed. The Timorese peace process seems to be even more stationary than our own.
The two dioceses plan seems to have been fended off for the moment, partly due to Dr Belo's presence in Rome for several weeks last year. But Rome has been perceived as wavering in its solidarity. A change of heart, however, was signalled during a visit to East Timor last month by Cardinal Roger Etchegaray, head of the Pontifical Council for Justice and Peace.
He spoke of the need to respect human rights, of dialogue as "the most effective way for producing solutions which satisfy all concerned".
But Rome's representative did not mention a Timorese "right to self determination".
The Portuguese Prime Minister, Mr Antonio Gutteres, has offered Indonesia partial diplomatic relations if the jailed rebel Falantil leader Xanana Gusmao, is freed. The 30 or so participants in Austria heard President Suharto's answer to that from his Timorese "ambassador at large", Mr Lopez da Cruz (a supporter in the 1970s of a plan for eventual Timorese independence). The president said "sure" if the highland rebels surrender.
The Austrian talks agreed on a communique tamer than one they came up with last year, which included mention of a 1982 UN General Assembly resolution calling for an internationally acceptable solution diplomatese for "the right to self determination.
The Indonesians regard the mere mention of that as so much Timorese temerity. Croppy lie down.
This week's communique confined itself to talk of the need.to promote peace, stability, justice and social harmony. But the real news may lie in an agreed call for this dialogue between old enemies to become a permanent feature. Jakarta is afraid of that. Already several of Indonesia's Timoiese puppet delegates have demonstrated an unfortunate tendency to think beyond their strings.
Dr Belo refuses to be cast in the role of an independence champion. But he has spoken of the death as a people of the East Timorese and last year he remarked to me. "If it were happening to the Polish people would the Pope be more outspoken?" He said: "The Pope tells me that he prays every day for East Timor.... But the position is nearer to the realpolitik. I don't understand it myself."