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- Indonesia, East Timor and The
Western Powers
- A Case Study of The Role of Western Foreign Policy in Conflict Creation and Peace Sabotage
- by Nafeez Mosaddeq Ahmed
-
- I.I
Sweeping Indonesia Clean
- I.II
The Installation of Suharto
-
II.I The Balibo Declaration and
Other Political Frauds
-
II.II Explicit
Western Approval of Indonesia’s Invasion
-
II.III Impact of the
Invasion and the Ensuing Conflict
-
II.IV The Arms Ban
and the Escalation of Genocide
-
II.V Diplomatic and Financial Perpetuation of
the Conflict
- III.I The Referendum
- III.II
The Escalation of Atrocities With
Western Support
- III.III Belated UN Intervention
- III.IV
Western Interests In Indonesia and East Timor
- III.V
The Real Agenda for Intervention
Introduction
In the wake of the 11th September
2001 attacks on the United States, the formation of an international
coalition against terrorism under American leadership has been based
on the conventional premise that Western civilisation has some sort
of superior moral status within world order which permits it to be
the principal initiator of a war on terror. The idea that the
Western powers may have a systematic role in perpetrating terror,
undermining democracy and promoting human rights abuses around the
world to secure their strategic and economic interests poses a
severe challenge to the notion that the West can play a meaningful
role in combating terror. Indeed, if established, it demonstrates
that the same powers who have no qualms about perpetrating terror
and repression in the name of their interests, are hardly going to
be key opponents of terrorism. This paper analyses the developments
of Western foreign policy towards Indonesia and East Timor in the
post-World War II period with the aim of examining the degree to
which Western foreign policy is genuinely formulated with the intent
to promote human rights, conflict resolution and world peace, and
thus put an end to terrorism. Indeed, Indonesia and East Timor are
prime examples of how Western foreign policy actually systematically
results in the violation of human rights, the support of terror, the
creation of conflict and the sabotage of peace. Policy, it seems, is
formulated primarily on the basis of achieving regional strategic
and economic interests, with humanitarian principles being
systematically sidelined. In this context, we must view Western
claims to be harbingers of humanitarianism, leading a genuine war
against terrorism, with much skepticism.
I. The Crusade in Indonesia
Indonesia had a central role in United States global
planning. According to then head of the U.S. State Department Policy
Planning Staff, George Kennan, Indonesia was “Japan’s empire to the South”.[1]
At that time, Indonesia was a genuine multi-party democracy. One of the most
popular parties which had a good chance of winning elections was the
Communist Party of Indonesia (PKI), that was accordingly considered a key
threat to U.S. interests in the South Asian region. Kennan argued that: “A
political victory for the PKI [in Indonesia] would be an infection that
could sweep all South Asia”.[2] While conventional opinion asserts that
the U.S. feared the rise and spread of Soviet-directed dictatorial Communism
in South Asia, beginning from Indonesia through a PKI win, the facts on
record indicate that the PKI was considered a threat due to its popularity
and intent to implement egalitarian socio-economic reforms. Australian
Indonesia specialist Harold Crouch confirms that “the PKI had won widespread
support, not as a revolutionary party, but as an organisation defending the
interests of the poor within the existing system,” developing a “mass base
among the peasantry” through its “vigor in defending the interests of the…
poor.”[3]
The U.S. could not tolerate a government in Indonesia that was democratic
enough to allow a political victory which would mobilise domestic resources
for the benefit of the indigenous population, and serve as a potential
example for other nations in the region to follow. A PKI victory was thus
considered a serious threat to U.S. interests, because it threatened U.S.
access and control over regional resources, which had to be maintained at
any cost. Accordingly, by the early 1960s, U.S. experts were ordering their
contacts with the Indonesian military to “strike and sweep the house clean”.[4]
I.I Sweeping
Indonesia Clean
The massacre that occurred in
the attempt to overthrow Indonesia’s democratically elected government under
the Presidency of Sukarno has been described by U.S. historian Gabriel Kolko
as “a war crime of the same type as those the Nazis perpetrated…
“No single
American action in the period after 1945 was as bloodthirsty as its role in
Indonesia, for it tried to initiate the massacre, and it did everything in
its power to encourage Suharto, including equipping his killers, to see that
the physical liquidation of the PKI was carried through to its culmination.”[5]
Summarising
the brutal and bloody nature of the U.S.-backed coup, Director of Research
of the California-based Institute for Economic Democracy, Dr. J. W. Smith,
records that:
“It took two
tries for the CIA to overthrow Sukarno of Indonesia. The reason: Indonesia
had massive resources, including oil, and they were going to set up an
honest democracy. Twenty-five percent of the nation were following the
Communist party so they were going to be allowed 25 percent representation
in the government. By the lowest estimate, 500,000 were slaughtered, by the
highest, 1,000,000, and by the CIA’s own estimate it was 800,000. Not
because they were going to overthrow anybody, as we are always told, but
because they were going to vote for candidates the West would not accept.
Quite simply, democracy will only be tolerated if people acceptable to the
West are elected (pure Machiavelli).”[6]
The main
victims of this genocide were hundreds and thousands of landless peasants.
An authoritative account of the U.S.-backed coup and accompanying massacre
has been provided by the 13-year veteran U.S. Central Intelligence Agency
(CIA) official John Stockwell in his study The Praetorian Guard: The U.S.
in the New International Security State.[7]
Stockwell affirms that the Indonesian coup in 1965 was organised by
the CIA to discredit the PKI and thereby prevent it from coming to power in
democratic elections. The CIA strategy involved fabricating evidence that
would implicate the PKI in planning a violent coup to gain control over
Indonesia. In actuality, the PKI was becoming increasingly popular and was a
likely candidate to win coming elections. Indeed, this is exactly what
rendered the party so threatening to the United States. In Stockwell’s
words, the U.S. “simply could not have an example of legitimate and
successful participation by the Communists in the democratic process.” In
order to discredit the PKI, the movement was framed. The CIA planted caches
of arms along with various forged documents appearing to indicate Communist
plans for a violent uprising, that were then conveniently ‘discovered’ by
Indonesian police under the media’s observation. Propaganda agents planted
stories in the media, designed to provoke public mistrust of the party. “The
situation heated up until some generals in the Indonesian army were killed,
and the boil of tension burst…
“The Indonesian
army went after the Communists and the people they felt traditionally
supported the Communists. The result was a bloodbath that the New York
Times described in terms of half a million to a million and a half dead.
The Australian secret service, closer to Indonesia, put the figure at closer
to two million - the rivers were clogged with the bodies of the dead.”
The CIA
subsequently published a cover story through the Library of Congress, in
which it was alleged that the PKI had supported an insurrection that had
been put down by the Indonesian army. However, Stockwell notes that in its
own internal reports, the CIA referred to the operation as a classic success
in which the U.S. had “targeted the world’s third largest Communist Party and aided the Indonesian army
by providing thousands of names of suspected individuals and completely
eliminated from the face of the earth not only the party, but the ethnic
Chinese in Indonesia who tended to support the Communists. Simply put, this
is a classic case of genocide that was engineered by the CIA and cited as a
model to be copied elsewhere”. It was only much
later - in the summer of 1990 - that the U.S. State Department acknowledged
its crucial role in engineering the coup, admitting, as Stockwell relates,
that it had even “delivered lists of names, of
people who were subsequently killed, to the Indonesian government.”[8]
Former
State Department official and CIA specialist William Blum reports that early
on in the preparations to engineer a coup, “tens
of thousands of rebels were armed, equipped and trained by the U.S. Army…
“U.S. Navy submarines, patrolling off the coast of Sumatra, the
main island, put over-the-beach parties ashore along with supplies and
communications equipment. The U.S. Air Force set up a considerable Air
Transport force which air-dropped many thousands of weapons deep into
Indonesian territory. And a fleet of 15 B-26 bombers was made available for
the conflict after being ‘sanitized’ to ensure that they were ‘non-attributable’ and that all airborne equipment was ‘deniable’.”[9]
Declassified UK Foreign Office
documents have revealed that Britain too was deeply involved in aiding the
blood-bath. Then British Ambassador in Indonesia Sir Andrew Gilchrist had
observed as follows in 1965: “I have never concealed from you my belief that
a little shooting in Indonesia would be an essential preliminary to
effective change.” Hence was justified the series of covert British
operations directed from Singapore in support of what Stockwell terms “a
classic case of genocide” masterminded by the CIA, and which in the eyes of
the British elite amounted only to “a little shooting”.[10]
I.II
The Installation of Suharto
The
fundamental reason for the genocidal coup is clear. Sukarno had to be
eliminated because under his government, Indonesia was set to become an
independent, egalitarian democracy, which implied resistance to U.S.-led
Western domination. This could not be tolerated when, as Richard Nixon wrote
in 1967: “With its one hundred million people and
its three-thousand-mile arc of islands containing the region’s richest hoard of natural resources, Indonesia constitutes the
greatest prize in the Southeast Asian area.”[11] Therefore, the
Indonesian generals, under U.S. instigation, overturned democracy via a
massacre which annihilated a political party whose popularity was due to its
commitment to defending the interests of the poor. Military leader General
Suharto was violently installed to establish an army-run regime that was
favourable to Western interests. As then U.S. Secretary of Defense
Robert McNamara informed President Lyndon Johnson, U.S. military assistance
“encouraged [the army] to move against the PKI when the opportunity was
presented.” Contacts with Indonesian army and university officers were “very
significant factors in determining the favorable orientation of the new
Indonesian political elite.”[12]
The Suharto
regime that represented the “new political elite”, whose orientation was so favourable to the United States,
proceeded to amass an atrocious record of human rights abuses and domestic
terror. Its elections were controlled, free unions were not permitted, and
numerous prisoners from the time of the coup of 1965-66 remained
incarcerated.[13] According to Amnesty International, the
Suharto regime displayed an “increasing contempt” for the civil and political rights of the Indonesian people.[14]
Describing the Indonesian army which dominated the government, Amnesty added
that it is “organised to deal with domestic rather
than international threats…
“Troops are deployed throughout the country, down to village
level. At each level, the military has wide-ranging authority over
political, social and economic matters. [These] are complemented by a range
of elite units… All are responsible for grave
human rights violations. The most powerful are Kopassus units which have
been responsible for grave human rights violations.”[15]
However,
since the dictatorship was suitably subservient to the traditional Western
demands - allowing Western access to its oil, timber, and other resources -
it was consistently supported by the United States and its European
subordinates.[16] Indonesia specialist Carmel Budiardjo
noted:
“The destruction of the world’s
largest communist party outside the Soviet bloc and the removal of Indonesia’s maverick president, Sukarno, opened up Southeast Asia’s richest country in natural resources to plunder by capitalist
forces in the West. Neither the massacre of up to a million communist
suspects in 1965/1966, the killing of hundreds of Muslims in Jakarta’s Tanjung Priok in September 1984, the killing of thousands of
alleged criminals by army and police death squads at Suharto’s behest, nor murders galore in the most westerly province of
Aceh throughout the eighties and nineties could upset the West’s cosy relationship with the Suharto dictatorship.”[17]
General Suharto - who was
responsible for orchestrating the repression of innocent civilians both
within Indonesia and its various provinces, and in Indonesia’s illegal
invasion and occupation of East Timor in the late 1970s - became the West’s
beloved bastion in the region. Motivated by strategic and financial
interests, the West not only lent the Indonesian military regime huge sums
of money, but has provided it with arms that were critical in its
subjugation of surrounding territories.[18]
II. Annexing East Timor
In 1975, Suharto commandeered the
Indonesian invasion and occupation of the island of East Timor. The
Indonesian army has ever since been responsible for committing vast
atrocities in the former Portugese colony, to the complicity of Western
governments and media. The Indonesian Christians of the Centre for Strategic
and International Studies in Jakarta were General Suharto’s principal advisers for
the annexation.[19] Professor Antonia Barbedo de Magalhaes,
Coordinator of the Symposia on Timor at Oporto University in Portugal,
observes the reasons behind this:
“Representing the
Catholics only 3% of the population of that country with 87% of Muslims (6%
are Protestants and 4% have other religions), the annexation of one island
with a high percentage of Catholics could mean a reinforcement of the
Christian minority. Besides contributing to the expansion of Indonesia, the
Christian minority would prove their nationalist commitment and justify the
social preponderance that it held in the Suharto regime. This position of
the prominent Indonesian Catholics - among which was General Benny Murdani -
was shared by a great number of Bishops and by the Apostolic Nuncio in
Indonesia, to whom the continuity and reinforcement of the small catholic
minority in the biggest Muslim nation of the World, was of crucial
importance.”[20]
The entire operation was approved of by
the Western powers. General Suharto only began publicly affirming that the
independence of East Timor would not be accepted after visiting the main
foreign investors in Indonesia - the United States, Canada, Japan - and
confirming their support of the invasion. Once this was achieved, in July
1975, Suharto commanded his Generals to bring to fruition their plans to
create instability within East Timor, to prepare for an invasion whose
pretext would be to “restore calm”.[21]
We may thus note that the brief civil war within East Timor that was
exploited by Indonesia to justify a purported peacekeeping operation there,
was actually provoked by the clandestine policy of the Indonesian army to
manufacture a pretext to establish a presence there. The leading
Australian/British war correspondent John Pilger observes:
“In 1974, ‘Operation Komodo’ was hatched to
crush growing Timorese independence groups calling for democracy. This was
spearheaded by the Indonesian General Murdani. Meanwhile in East Timor,
Fretilin and the UDC - two pro-democracy parties - formed a coalition.
However, Operation Komodo successfully infiltrated this coalition and
undermined it.”[22]
In connection with this coalition, G. V.
C. Naidu, a Research Fellow at the prestigious Institute for Defence Studies
& Analysis (ISDA) in New Delhi, records that: “In the local elections that were held in early
1975, the Revolutionary Front for Independent East Timor (FRETILIN) won 55
per cent of the vote and the UDT came a close second. Nearly 90 per cent of
the people supported these two parties.” However, as noted above, Operation Komodo
masterminded by General Benny Murdani led to the infiltration of UDC by
Indonesia and thereby the undermining of the coalition. Thus, as Naidu
notes:
“While the battle for
political supremacy was beginning to rage between FRETILIN and the UDT, the
Indonesian military was quietly supporting and encouraging the UDT, leading
to the UDT staging a coup in August 1975. This was challenged by FRETILIN
through an armed struggle, leading to the establishment of its supremacy.”
One of the reasons Fretilin won was
“because of
its larger following”, observes Naidu. With instability having thus been manufactured
according to plans, “the Indonesian generals were plotting to intervene militarily.”[23] They thus began carrying out a variety of
covert military operations to exacerbate these conditions.
In this context it is possible to
understand how the Western-backed Indonesian authorities were responsible
for provoking the brief civil conflict in East Timor, to the knowledge of
Western intelligence. On 17th September 1975, the CIA reported
that: “Jakarta is now sending guerrilla units into the Portuguese half of
the island in order to provoke incidents that would provide the Indonesians
with an excuse to invade.”[24] Not long later in 14th October, the CIA informed the
principal U.S. officers that: “Indonesian Units are to attack the town of
Maliana. The troops participating in the operation will wear uniforms
without insignia and are to carry older, soviet-made weapons so as not to be
identified as Indonesian regulars.”[25] ISDA Research Fellow G. Naidu records the reaction of the East
Timorese government and the ensuing events:
“Sensing that the
Indonesian intervention was imminent, FRETILIN declared independence on
November 28, 1975, as a pre-emptive move. Taking advantage of the
politically unstable conditions and chaos (in part created by Indonesia
itself), Indonesia created a pretext in the form of the Balibo Declaration
(named after a small town in West Timor on East Timor’s border but signed in
Bali) purported to have been issued by those opposed to FRETILIN, which
asked the Indonesian government’s assistance in
East Timor, to embark on an invasion on December 7, 1975.”[26]
II.I The Balibo Declaration and Other Political
Frauds
The Balibo Declaration of 30th
November 1975, which was initiated in September, constituted an integral
part of the Indonesian authorities’ operation to create a justification to invade.
Indonesia has often pointed to the Balibo Declaration as an adequate pretext
for integrating East Timor into Indonesia. The declaration was in fact
signed by one representative from each of the four smallest parties in East
Timor - UDT, Apodeti, Kota, and Partido Trabalhista. However, the signing
occurred without the knowledge or consultation of the East Timorese people.
The Declaration was actually signed by only four individuals in Bali
(Indonesia) not in Balibo. Furthermore, these individuals were members of
the minor parties in East Timor. The declaration was not signed by the fifth
and largest party, Fretilin, which actually constituted the democratically
elected de facto government of East Timor. As noted by the independent
Australian human rights group, the East Timor International Support Center (ETISC),
Fretilin more fully represented the wishes of the people of East Timor than
UDT, Apodeti, Kota, and Partido Trabalhista, who in fact did not have any
popular support. This is indicated clearly by several facts.
As observed by the American anthropologist
Professor Robert Lawless of the University of Florida,
“Fretilin had
support from East Timor’s youths (such as junior civil servants,
teachers, urban workers, and students)” while “UDT and Apodeti gained support from East Timor’s old generation (such
as, the higher civil servants, the native chiefs, and some Chinese
businessmen)”.[27]
It was also Fretilin which had won the local elections in February and March
1975, as already noted above. On the other hand Apodeti, for instance, which
was in receipt of substantial financial aid from Indonesia, only scored a
tiny number of votes. Kota and Partido Trabalhista did not then exist.
Moreover, Fretilin had won the ‘civil war’, most significantly
“because of its
larger following” as Naidu reports, and were thus the de facto government at the
time of the Balibo Declaration. As the ETISC observes, it was the Fretilin
military that “held the powerful Indonesian army at bay for 3 years (1975-1978),
suggesting that the East Timorese people supported Fretilin, rather than
supporting UDT, Apodeti, Kota and Partido Trabalhista who were collaborating
with the Indonesian authorities.”[28] The former Australian Consul in Dili, James Dunn, describes the
reaction of the East Timorese to the establishment of Fretilin’s de facto government:
“This administrative
structure had obvious shortcomings, but it clearly enjoyed widespread
support or cooperation from the population, including many former UDT
supporters... Indeed, the leaders of the victorious party were welcomed
warmly and spontaneously in all main centers by crowds of Timorese. In my
long association with the territory, I had never before witnessed such
demonstrations of spontaneous warmth and support from the ordinary people.”[29]
UN-accredited observer Matthew Jardine
elaborates on the reasons for this widespread support:
“FRETILIN (the
Revolutionary Front for an Independent East Timor)… demanded immediate independence from Portugal. FRETILIN
volunteers began to move out from Dili into the rural areas, teaching
villagers to read and write Tetum, establishing agricultural cooperatives,
helping organize labor unions and other groups, and promoting local culture
by encouraging the creation of nationalist poems, songs and dances. Thanks
to these activities, FRETILIN became, by early 1975, the most popular of the
three parties.”[30]
In conclusion of the above facts, those who
signed the declaration were never authoritative representatives of the East
Timorese population. Indonesian scholar Waruno Mahdi of the Fritz Haber
Institute, currently a doctoral student at the University of Hamburg
specialising in Indonesian affairs, writes:
“The Bali Beach Hotel
declaration of September 7, 1975, (also refered to as the Balibo
Declaration) requesting inclusion of the territory into Indonesia, served as
sole legal basis for the annexation. But the East Timorese signers of the
declaration had never been legitimized as representatives of the East
Timorese population. They had no mandate to offer their country for
annexation. They were at that time furthermore completely dependent on the
apparatus of the regime for their safety and freedom. At least some of them
have meanwhile distanced themselves from the declaration.”[31]
In fact, not only was the declaration not
initiated or written by these East Timorese individuals, but it was only
signed by them under severe coercion and threat of death, as was later
revealed. East Timor specialist Professor Antonio Barbedo de Magalhaes of
Oporto University notes that: “The Timorese leaders who sought protection from
the Indonesian side of the frontier, after the short civil war won by
FRETILIN, were, on the other hand, forced to sign a request for
integration.” Afterwards, the request was “reformulated and given the name
of ‘Balibo
Declaration’ and signed in Bali (not in East Timor), under threats of death
made by Indonesian militaries, as some of the subscribers would denounce
later in the United Nations.”[32]
On this issue, the ETISC similarly observes
that:
“[O]n 29 November 1975,
the Balibo Declaration, a document which had been written by the Indonesian
intelligence, was presented to the leaders of the UDT and Apodeti parties,
who were coerced into signing it under threat of being repatriated into the
hands of their former adversaries, Fretilin. It was signed in Bali
(Indonesia) but given the name of ‘Balibo
Declaration’, Balibo being an East Timorese border
town, to give the impression that it came from inside East Timor. It asked
for the assistance of the Indonesians in East Timor. It was an Indonesian
strategy to use the disgraced UDT and Apodeti leaders as a means of replying
to Fretilin’s declaration of independence and of
preparing the world for the planned all-out invasion of East Timor. The
Indonesian generals needed an excuse to invade.”[33]
As the ETISC notes elsewhere in regard to
the Babilo Declaration and the equally fraudulent Act of Integration:
“The
signatories to both these documents signed them under the threat of death or
other unspecified punishments. Evidence to this effect has been given by
Guilherme Maria Gonçalves (Apodeti) in the case of the Balibo Declaration,
and by Antonio Sarmento in the case of the Act of Integration.”[34] In this regard we should note that although
after the invasion in 1976, Indonesia’s highest legislative body (the People’s Consultative Assembly)
formally declared East Timor to be a province of Indonesia, the island of
Timor has never been a part of Indonesia, even before the arrival of Dutch
colonialists in the region. As the Indonesian scholar Wurano Mahdi points
out, “there
are no real either legal or traditional grounds whatsoever for considering
the territory a part of the geopolitical entity known as Indonesia, except
that decision of the Peoples Consultative Assembly of 1976 based on false
assumptions of a request of the territory for inclusion.”[35]
II.III Explicit Western Approval of
Indonesia’s Invasion
In accord with the grim reality behind ‘decolonisation’,
it was covertly decided by Western governments that the right of the East
Timorese people to self-determination would be ignored and suppressed for
the sake of various political and economic designs. That Fretilin intended
to pursue a variety of egalitarian social programmes to utilise domestic
resources for the benefit of the indigenous people clearly had a role in
motivating this policy, in accordance with the ‘domino’ theory. The United
States had thus given the Indonesian regime its secret approval of the
invasion, with President Ford and Secretary of State Kissinger having
visited the Indonesian capital, Jakarta, only hours before the invasion
commenced. Former CIA operations officer Phillip Liechty affirms:
“Suharto was given the
green light [by the U.S.] to do what he did. There was discussion in the
Embassy and in traffic with the State Department about the problems that
would be created for us if the public and Congress became aware of the level
and type of military assistance that was going to Indonesia at that time
[approximately 90 per cent of its arms]. It was covered under the
justification that it was ‘for training purposes’.”[36]
The British ambassador in Jakarta had
informed the Foreign Office well before the Indonesian invasion on 7th
December 1975 that “the people of Portugese Timor are in no condition to exercise the
right to self-determination”, and that “the arguments in favour of its integration into
Indonesia are all the stronger”. These “arguments” were by no means humanitarian, considering that
the “integration” of the sovereign state
of East Timor “into Indonesia” actually entailed the genocide and ethnic
cleansing of the East Timorese people as shall be discussed. Rather, the
“arguments” were as follows:
“Certainly, as seen
from here, it is in Britain’s interests that
Indonesia should absorb the territory as soon and as unobtrusively as
possible, and that if it should come to the crunch and there is a row in the
United Nations, we should keep our heads down and avoid taking sides against
the Indonesian government.”[37]
As we have already seen, the United States
had similar feelings. In September 1975 a U.S. State Department official
stated, “we are more or less condoning the incursion into East Timor” since
“we regard Indonesia
as a friendly, non-aligned state - a nation we do a lot of business with.”[38] The recent release of other formerly classified
official documents has provided further proof of U.S. complicity. Reporting
on the obtainment of the documents by the George Washington University’s
National Security Archive, the Australian daily The Age reported
that:
“The United States offered full and direct
approval to Indonesia’s 1975 invasion of East Timor, a move by
then-president Suharto that consigned the territory to 25 years of
oppression. Official documents released yesterday prove conclusively for the
first time that the United States gave a ‘green light’ to the invasion that
killed up to 200,000 East Timorese. General Suharto briefed U.S. President
Gerald Ford and his Secretary of State, Henry Kissinger, on his plans for
the former Portuguese colony hours before the invasion, according to the
documents collected by George Washington University’s National Security
Archive… It appears that Dr Kissinger was more concerned over the
interpretation of the legislation, not the use of the weapons. ‘It depends
on how we construe it, whether it is in self-defence or is a foreign
operation,’ he is quoted as saying. The eastern part of the island of Timor
was invaded by Jakarta in 1975 and annexed the following year… President
Suharto… enjoyed a close relationship with the U.S.”[39]
Then Australian Ambassador to Jakarta,
Richard Wilcott, who was also notified by Indonesia of the oncoming
invasion, similarly advised in a secret cable to the Australian Department
of Foreign Affairs on 17th August 1975, to
“leave events to
take their course… and act in a way which would be designed to minimise the public
impact in Australia and show private understanding to Indonesia of their
problems.” He admitted that this was a “pragmatic rather than a principled stand”. Elaborating, he mused:
“I wonder whether the
[Australian] government is aware of the interest of the Ministry of Minerals
and Energy in the Timor situation. It would seem to me that the Department
might well have an interest in closing the present gap in the agreed sea
border and this could be much more readily negotiated with Indonesia… than with Portugal or independent East Timor.”[40]
Clearly, hegemonic economic interests in both
Indonesia and Timor were crucial in the formulation of Western policies.
II.IV Impact of the Invasion and the Ensuing
Conflict
It is important that one understands
exactly what was implied by Indonesia’s “incursion into” East Timor which the Western powers were
condoning. Two years after the invasion, an East Timorese Catholic priest
described the Indonesian imposition as “a barbarous genocide of innocent people”, where the population
was being “wiped out by an invasion, a brutal conquest that produces heaps of
dead, maimed and orphaned.”[41] One East Timorese named Eloise who lived in Dili related:
“On 7 December we woke
and heard this big noise of planes and saw parachutes and planes covering
the light - it became dark because of them, so many. Then there were shots
and we went inside and kept listening to more and more shooting. In the
afternoon some Timorese came and told us everyone must come to surrender at
headquarters... Once we got there they divided us: the women and children
and old men to one side, and on the other young boys [and men]... Then an
Indonesian screams an order and we hear machine guns running through the
men. We see the boys and men dying right there. Some see their husbands die.
We look at each other stunned. We think they are going to kill us next. All
of us just turn and pick up the children and babies and run screaming, wild,
everywhere... [Later] my sister went to look for her husband and son. On her
way she met a friend crying who told her, ‘Don’t bother going there. I have just seen my cousin being eaten by
a dog. They are all dead. Only the dogs are alive there’.”[42]
A Chinese Timorese, Mr. Siong, narrated a
similarly horrific experience:
“At midday [on December
7] they take six of us to work at the harbour... [where] we have to pick
up... dead bodies... There were a lot of iron pipes on the wharf and we must
tie the dead bodies on to them with parachute rope and throw them into the
sea.... [Chinese Timorese from a Dili suburb] came in groups of two or three
or four, stood on the wharf and were shot. One group after the other coming
and coming, killed and thrown in the sea. Two were couples, one with young
children who went with relatives. The other couple were elderly, and the
rest were men.... Next they bring the ten [men who had been working with
us].... The Indonesians tell them to stand in line and face the sea and then
they are shot with a machine gun. Four people in that first sixteen of us...
were father and son, but the Indonesians didn’t
know this. There on the wharf they kill the father, and the son must tie and
throw his father into the sea. Then they kill the other son and his father
is one of the six of us who must tie and throw his body.”[43]
Such massacres of East Timorese civilians
continued systematically throughout the occupation. For instance, another
East Timorese citizen named Vigilio, in a personal letter to a former
soldier of the Australia Army who had been a close friend of his father’s, wrote to him of how
Indonesian forces had entered their village of Kraras in August 1983. They
had “looted,
burned and devastated everything and massacred over 200 people inside their
huts, including old people, the sick and babies… four battalions encircled Bibileo and fighter
aircraft bombed the area intensively during the following weeks.” The Indonesian army, he
wrote, had “captured about 800 people” who were “massacred by machine-gun fire…
“… on 27/9/83 they
called my father and my wife, and not far from the camp, they told my father
to dig his own grave and when they saw it was deep enough to receive him,
they machine-gunned him into the grave. They next told my pregnant wife to
dig her own grave, but she insisted that she preferred to share my father’s grave. They then pushed her into the grave
and killed her in the same manner as my father.”
Soon after writing that letter, Vigilio and his
brother, who had managed to escape, going on to join the Fretilin
resistance, were captured and killed.[44]
Indonesia’s invasion, in addition to the
slaughter of whole villages, involved aerial bombing (which included the use
of the chemical weapon napalm) and starvation campaigns. According to
Amnesty International, by 1985 up to half a million people had been killed
or displaced.[45] The ETISC describes the invasion in
graphic terms:
“The Indonesian
invasion began with massive human rights violations from the outset.
Looting, rape and killing of civilians was a feature of the invasion with
dozens dragged to the dock and executed on the first days. This pattern of
contempt for basic human rights continued throughout the occupation and
continues to this day. The Indonesian forces used conventional and napalm
bombing to destroy the bases of the population and their ability to grow
food... Torture of civilians and resistance fighters by the Indonesian
military has been widespread. Imprisonment in East Timor will normally lead
to physical abuse. Types of torture that have been frequently reported
include rape, electric shocks, burning with cigarettes, removal of nails,
soldiers bouncing on chairs positioned on people’s
bare toes, beating with fists, rifle butts or clubs, immersion in water to
the point of suffocation and threatened or real execution. Prisoners may be
executed or ‘disappeared’...”[46]
In May 1982, the Pulitzer Prize winning
journalist Rod Nordland was given permission by the Indonesian authorities
to stay in East Timor for 11 days. Summarising his observations during his
fact-finding mission, he subsequently reported that:
“East Timor, the former
Portuguese Colony which had been annexed to Indonesia by force in 1976, is a
land where sub-nutrition and hunger became general... There are thousands of
political prisoners... Even if many of the Timorese interviewed showed a
clear fright to talk, some of them did yet talk, there was namely one who
stated: ‘Please, tell the world to help the
Timorese people’. We were later informed that at
least six of the interviewed, were conducted afterwards to the general
headquarters of the Secret Military Services and questioned for hours on
what they had said during our inquiry... Virtually, there are no civil
rights in East Timor. The Indonesians tell the farmers to whom they must
sell their coffee and at what price. No one can leave their villages or the
place of their residence without permission. Telephone calls or telegrams
out of Timor are forbidden. No one can leave the province without a special
permission, which is rarely granted.”[47]
It is certain that more than 200,000 East
Timorese were killed in the years since the invasion.[48]
An authoritative report by the Foreign Affairs Committee of the Australian
Parliament for instance recorded that “at least 200,000” East Timorese had been killed.[49]
It should be stressed however that this oft-cited figure is actually very
conservative. According to specialist Gabriel Defert based on statistical
data available from the Portuguese and Indonesian authorities, and from the
Catholic Church, between December 1975 and December 1981, an average of
308,000 Timorese lost their lives; this constituted about 44 per cent of the
population before the invasion.[50]
Similarly Indonesian Professor George Aditjondro, formerly of Salatiga
University in Java, concluded from his study of Indonesian Army data that in
fact 300,000 Timorese had been killed in the first years that followed the
invasion.[51]
II.V The Arms Ban and the Escalation of Genocide
The Western powers thoroughly supported this reign of terror
and genocide, even when they appeared not to. For instance, in reaction to
the illegal invasion and occupation, the United States imposed a secret arms
embargo on Indonesia from December 1975 to June 1976. Unfortunately, the
embargo was so ‘secret’ that Indonesia was unaware of it and the U.S. failed
to adhere to it. Professor Benedict Anderson of Cornell University later
exposed this deliberate fraud in his testimony before Congress in February
1978, citing a report that had been “confirmed from the Department of
Defense printout” showing that there never was an arms embargo. During the
period in which the arms ban was supposed to be effective, the U.S. in fact
initiated new offers of weapons to the Indonesian military regime. Anderson
pointed out that: “In flat contradiction to express statements by General
Fish, Mr. Oakley and Assistant Secretary of State for East Asian and Pacific
Affairs Richard Holbrooke, at least four separate offers of military
equipment were made to the Indonesian government during the January-June
1976 ‘administrative suspension’.” This included “supplies and parts for
OV-10 Broncos, Vietnam era planes designed for counterinsurgency operations
against adversaries without effective anti-aircraft weapons, and wholly
useless for defending Indonesia from a foreign enemy.”[52]
Indeed, the U.S. increased arms sales to Indonesia after the invasion,
supplying counterinsurgency aircraft that “changed the entire nature of the
war”, according to retired U.S. Admiral Gene La Roque. Transport aircraft,
armoured cars, rifles, mortars, machine guns and communications equipment
were supplied by the U.S., all of which “contributed significantly to the
military successes of the Indonesian Armed Forces in their 1977-79
offensive”.[53]
Broad Western military support of the brutal occupation continued throughout
the 1980s and 90s. The United Kingdom has also been highly complicit. In
April 1978, British aerospace ordered eight Hawk jet trainer aircraft,
Rolls-Royce engines, spares and training of pilots and engineers, for export
to Indonesia.[54] Contracts were signed worth over £200
million for the Rapier air defence system, along with further Hawk sales in
each year from 1984-86. The 1984 Rapier deal had involved “various
agreements on training and transfer of technology”. It was established that
“many Indonesian military officials will be going for training in Britain
while Bae personnel will be closely involved in back-up and other services
in Indonesia”.[55]
British historian Mark Curtis, a former Research Fellow at the Royal
Institute of International Affairs in London, records that these crucial
arms deals were signed in correspondence to the intensification of
slaughter. As the contracts for the Rapier air defence system were being
signed in 1983-85, 3,500-4,500 people were massacred by army death squads in
Indonesia. In 1991, on the same day that a co-production agreement between
British Aerospace and Indonesia for the Hawk fighter-trainer and a light
attack fighter was reported, the American press noted that “foreign human
rights investigators and Western diplomats in Jakarta now estimate that up
to 5,000 people have been killed or have ‘disappeared’” in Indonesia’s Aceh
province in recent months. “Although there has been killing on both sides,
human rights activists say most of it appears to originate with the
Indonesian army.”[56] According to Amnesty International,
between 1989 and July 1993, approximately 2,000 people had been killed, with
“most of the victims” having been “ordinary villagers living in areas of
suspected rebel activity”.[57]
Importantly, Curtis notes the contrast with simultaneous Western policy
toward Bosnia-Herzegovina. During the Bosnian war, the international
community imposed a full blockade on the Bosnian Muslims despite the
invasion of the Serb Army, denying them arms and ammunition. The same
powers, however, imposed no such blockade on the Indonesian Army as it
invaded and occupied East Timor. On the contrary, as award-winning British
journalist John Pilger has reported, both Britain and the U.S. were
converting Indonesia into a veritable war machine.[58]
It is worth pondering the implications of this vast inconsistency;
especially considering that, as Pilger reports on the basis of credible
eyewitness testimony, arms supplied by the U.S. and Britain, among others,
were the primary source of Indonesian firepower, systematically employed to
implement a genocide which its suppliers knew all too well was occurring.
Arms sales to Indonesia continued with impunity throughout
the 1990s. The British government’s annual report on arms exports for 1997
discloses that from May to December 1997, 34 licenses were issued for
Indonesia. The report mentions licenses for arms ranging from machine gun
spares to communications equipment and military simulators, though it fails
to make clear the exact nature, amount and value of the equipment covered by
each license. Actual deliveries in the same year included 23 armoured combat
vehicles and 4 Hawk aircraft valued at £112.49 million, which were allowed
to go ahead even though the government retained the power to revoke these
licenses. This is in contrast to the fact that five licenses for war-torn
Sierra Leone were revoked in 1997.[59]
The effects of such input can be gauged from a single notorious incident in
August 1998, reported by Pilger, when Indonesia masqueraded for the
international mass media, professing to have withdrawn 1,000 troops from
East Timor. Upon the departure of the international media at night,
Indonesia replaced the withdrawn troops with new ones, armed with
Western-supplied weapons. As a consequence, the number of Indonesian army
troops and Indonesian-trained militias totalled at 21,620.[60]
Nevertheless, British complicity in the Timor crisis persisted unabated.
TAPOL and Campaign Against Arms Trade (CAAT) jointly refer to parliamentary
written answers that “show that the number of licenses” granted by the
British Government “for Indonesia had increased to 92 by the end of 1998”
with only “seven licenses” being refused. Paul Berber of TAPOL observed in
March 1999:
“The Indonesian armed forces are even now
implementing a ‘shoot-on-sight’ policy to curb unrest and are supplying arms
to militias intent on undermining the peace process in East Timor. British
equipment has been used before to repress the people of Indonesia and East
Timor and there is a grave danger that it will be used again… Indonesian
armed forces have admitted to using British equipment in East Timor”.[61]
Robin Cook MP, who was soon to be British Foreign Secretary
in Tony Blair‘s Labour government, had slammed the Tories in 1994 for arming
Indonesia, noting in Parliament that Hawk fighters had been “observed on
bombing runs in East Timor in most years since 1984”.[62]
Yet, it is clear from the above that Cook’s own promise of a new “ethical
foreign policy” while a member of the Cabinet - in which “Labour will not
permit the sale of arms to regimes that might use them for internal
repression or international aggression” - was for the purpose of public
deception only. Despite the dozens of reports from aid agencies, journalists
and independent observers that British weapons were used routinely against
civilians in East Timor and Indonesia, the British government had continued
to supply arms to the Indonesian military regime. Since April 1999, nine of
the 16 Hawk jets the Tories had previously licensed for export to Indonesia
were delivered. The government underwrote the sale with £250 million of
public money under the Export Credit Guarantee system, which means that
British taxpayers would have had to foot the bill if Indonesia was unable to
pay. A leaked report in March 1999 revealed that sales to Indonesia of
small arms - the kind that Indonesia had armed its militias with in East
Timor - had doubled under the new government, compared with the last Tory
government (whose own record was horrifying enough). Thus, arms sales
endured despite the fact that Parliament had been barraged by solid evidence
of the employment of British weapons by Indonesia for both internal
repression and international aggression.[63]
These arms sales constituted direct support of Indonesia’s military
occupation of East Timor. For example, on 17th April 1999 one
thousand pro-Indonesian paramilitary members took control of the streets of
East Timor’s capital Dili to begin marauding through the city, attacking
civilians, shooting into buildings, and ransacking and burning homes.[64]
Internal Indonesian army documents confirm that these pro-integration
militias were armed and co-ordinated by the Indonesian army.[65]
As the U.S.-based East Timor Action Network (ETAN) reported:
“… the [internal Indonesian] documents
contradict the claim by Indonesia that paramilitary groups are not under
ABRI’s [the Indonesian military’s] control. An analysis of the documents by
the East Timor International Support Center... says that ‘these forces are
perceived by ABRI administration to be part of their operational
structure’...”[66]
Award-winning American journalist Allan Nairn similarly
reported: “It is by now clear... that the militias are a wing of TNI/ABRI,
the Indonesian armed forces”. Nairn also brought to light ongoing American
complicity in the catastrophe: “Although the U.S. government has publicly
reprimanded the Indonesian Army for the militias, the U.S. military has,
behind the scenes and contrary to Congressional intent, been backing the TNI”,
and condoning violent militia operations against East Timorese civilians.
Allan Nairn had previously exposed U.S. military training of Indonesian
troops implicated in the torture and killing of civilians in early 1998.[67]
U.S. support of Indonesia escalated in correlation to the increase in
violence. “[T]he Indonesian military continues to arm and train paramilitary
units now attacking civilians in East Timor”, reported ETAN. “Support for a
peaceful transition to self-determination is urgently needed as ABRI and
paramilitary violence continues to escalate in the occupied territory. In
the past two months [before April 1999] dozens of East Timorese have been
murdered and more than 10,000 forced to flee their villages”. In spite of
“the intent of the ban on military assistance to Indonesia passed after the
1991 Santa Cruz massacre” it was revealed “last spring” by “ETAN, members of
Congress, and journalist Allan Nairn” that “U.S. forces continued to train
some of Indonesia’s most notorious military units.”[68]
In
fact, from 1991 to 1997 the U.S. State Department had licensed more than 250
military sales to Indonesia, with items ranging from machine guns and M-16s
to electronic components, from communications gear to spare parts for attack
planes, along with the sale of IMET and JCET military training. Even while
bills were passed in the U.S. effectively banning the sale of particular
military training programmes to Indonesia, ETAN reported in a June 1999
press release entitled ‘Campaign of Terror Threatens to Derail August East
Timor Vote’:
“The State Department and Pentagon report $106 million in
projected arms sales to the Indonesian military for 1999, along with plans
to train the Indonesian police. The Pentagon is also working to restore
training programs for the Indonesian military which the U.S. Congress has
passed legislation to end. Among the troops the U.S. has trained for years
is the notorious Kopassus elite forces, which have in turn trained death
squads in East Timor and are implicated in recent massacres there… [T]he
Department of Defense is doing its best to circumvent congressional intent
by pressing for new military training programs and weapons shipments to the
Indonesian military.”
All this was in spite of the fact that in the months leading
up to June, more than 40,000 people had been driven from their homes by
death squads backed by the Indonesian military.[69]
II.VI Diplomatic and Financial Perpetuation of the Conflict
The Indonesian invasion was also accompanied by significant Western
political support. For example, the American United Nations Ambassador
Daniel Patrick Moynihan was assigned the task of blocking any possible UN
action. A secret cable on 23rd January 1976 from Moynihan to the
U.S. Secretary of State at the time, Henry Kissinger, disclosed Moynihan’s
considerable success in this task. In his memoirs, Moynihan makes clear why
the UN failed to undertake meaningful action to save the lives of East
Timorese:
“The United States wished things to turn out as they did and
worked to bring this about. The Department of State desired that the United
Nations prove utterly ineffective in whatever measures it undertook. This
task was given to me, and I carried it forward with no inconsiderable
success.”[70]
Moynihan was certainly aware of the ramifications of the invasion, as well
as what his task was supposed to achieve. He refers to a February 1976
estimate by an Indonesian client in East Timor “that some sixty thousand
persons had been killed” by August - “10 per cent of the population, almost
the proportion of casualties experienced by the Soviet Union [due to
Hitler’s forces] during the Second World War.”[71]
Echoing this stark absence of Western diplomatic benevolence, in April 1993
then British Foreign Secretary Douglas Hurd visited Indonesia and signed an
agreement for a £65 million British loan to the country. While he was there,
Hurd dismissed the relevance of the terror, torture and massacres occurring
at the hands of the Indonesian regime at the time:
“Referring to human rights issues, Hurd
said that Western countries cannot export Western values to developing
nations without making adjustments to local economies and cultures.
Differences in cultural life and economic level are decisive factors for the
adoption of Western values by developing countries, he said.”[72]
The nature of the interests behind this indifference to humanitarian crisis
could be discerned shortly after the massacre in Dili in November 1991,
where at least 400 East Timorese were killed (according to ETAN there were
at least 271 people killed, 278 wounded, 103 hospitalized, and 270
‘disappeared’). Amnesty International affirmed that the myriad of witnesses
to the incident were “credible”, and their “allegations that civilians were
deliberately killed or ‘disappeared’ after the massacre have been
corroborated by other reliable sources”. AI further condemned those “who
have effectively turned their backs on the reality of the systematic human
rights violations in East Timor [and] have accepted uncritically Indonesian
government promises of commitment to human rights [which] are empty… The
lack of concerned pressure from the international community [has]
contributed to the perpetuation of systematic human rights abuses in East
Timor.”[73]
A United Nations Rapporteur sent to East Timor by the UN Commission on Human
Rights to investigate the Dili massacre concluded that it was “a planned
military operation” by the Indonesian authorities, adding that those
responsible “continue to enjoy virtual immunity”.[74]
President Clinton had demonstrated his government’s concern for this
humanitarian catastrophe by announcing at a U.S. banking conference, not his
condemnation of the atrocities, but the more important fact that “we have a
lot of opportunities in the country... I would like to talk to [Suharto]
about our willingness to become a partner of Indonesia”.[75]
This statement was in conformity to the traditional American position, as
highlighted in a statement by Richard Holbrooke, where he described
Indonesia as “moderate”, “an important oil producer”, occupying “a strategic
position astride the sea lanes between the Pacific and Indian Oceans”, and
being “important to key U.S. allies in the region, especially Japan and
Australia”. Holbrooke concluded: “We highly value our cooperative
relationship with Indonesia.”[76]
Similarly, when Suharto visited Washington in 1995, despite the necessary
rhetorical public remarks about America’s deep human rights concerns, the
visit remained entirely cordial. In fact, a senior Clinton official
revealingly declared that Suharto was “our kind of guy”, exposing what the
U.S. expects of its regional Third World clients.[77]
These sentiments were echoed unanimously by other Western governments.
Events a year after the invasion of East
Timor provide ample explanation for this admiration for the Indonesian
military regime and its policies of genocide and ethnic cleansing.
Negotiations began between an Australian company and Indonesia on extracting
the vast oil resources on both the island itself and in the Timor Gap, the
seabed between Timor and Australia which is just of the coast of East Timor.
By December 1989, the negotiations were finally settled with a joint
agreement to exploit the Timor Sea, the Timor Gap Treaty, involving
Australian, British and U.S. companies, among others. A month after the Dili
massacre, the Australian government alone approved with Indonesia eleven oil
production contracts for exploitation of a jointly controlled area of the
sea. As Australian Foreign Minister Gareth Evans put it, the gains to be
made from East Timor under the Timor Gap Treaty in terms of oil amounted to
“zillions
of dollars”.[78]
Due to such business opportunities, the Clinton administration played its
humanitarian role by blocking an amendment to the Foreign Appropriations
Bill voted for by the Senate Foreign Affairs Committee, which asked the
President to consult with Congress to determine whether improvements in the
human rights situation have occurred before approving arms-sales.[79]
We may remind ourselves that the demarcation of the territorial waters in
the economic interests of the most powerful Western nations had already been
discussed with the Portuguese government before the invasion; the results
had not been in conformity with the wishes of the major powers. Accordingly,
the Australian Ambassador in Jakarta reminded his government on 17th
August 1975:
“I wonder whether the
(Australian) government is aware of the interest of the Ministry of Minerals
and Energy in the Timor situation. It seems to me that this department might
well have an interest in filling the gap in the agreement on maritime
borders, and this would be more easily negotiable with Indonesia by closing
the present gap than with Portugal or independent East Timor”.[80]
As Timor specialist Professor Barbedo de
Magalhaes records in conclusion about this array of military and economic
policies:
“Taking into account
the political and diplomatic support that the mentioned States gave to the
Indonesian Government and the supply of planes and other war equipment used
to fight the Timorese Resistance and the covering up that they did of the
crimes committed against the People of East Timor, we can say that it were
the United States, Australia, the United Kingdom, Vatican, Japan and other
powers who invaded and occupied the territory through the Indonesian
intermediary. The soldiers were Indonesian but the interests and the support
were mainly those of the Western powers. Only the fact of being ‘their own war’ can explain so much
support, so much connivance, so much silence and so many lies, from the
representatives of the Western governments (and also the relative silence of
the Soviet Union and its satellites)”.[81]
III. Western Humanitarian Intervention
The activism of a handful of
dedicated individuals and organisations eventually resulted in the widening
publicity of the responsibility of the Western powers for the Timor crisis,
which soon led to public outrage, and consequently pressure for the Western
powers to transform their policies. Eventually it was decided that a
referendum supervised by the United Nations would be held in order to allow
the East Timorese to cast their vote either for full independence, or for
autonomy within integration into Indonesia.
III.I The Referendum
The UN-supervised elections
were eventually held on 30th August 1999 after continual delays
for many months due to pro-Jakarta paramilitary violence. In an intense
climate of fear and terror, the East Timorese people emerged courageously to
cast their votes. Seventy eight per cent of registered voters chose
independence, despite violent Indonesian army efforts to terrorise the
population into accepting Indonesian hegemony.[82]
This result had always been predictable. U.S. Senator Claiborne Pell for
example, on the final international trip of his Senate career, wrote in his
report to Chairman Helms having visited East Timor in May 1996 his findings
of:
“... widespread
reports of abuse continue, including arbitrary arrest, torture,
disappearances and killings. I heard several credible reports of these types
of abuses while I was there... Simply put, the people of E |