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. The Crusade in Indonesia

      I.I    Sweeping Indonesia Clean

      I.II   The Installation of Suharto

II. Annexing East Timor

      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. Western Humanitarian Intervention

      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

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 17^th 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 14^th 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 30^th 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 7^th 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 17^th 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 17^th 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 23^rd 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 17^th 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 30^th 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 East Timor feel they are subjugated by a foreign army of occupation... When asked how a plebiscite on the issue of independence versus integration would turn out, I was told that over 90% of the people would choose independence and that number would include some who formerly supported integration.”^[83]

The policy of the Western powers behind the front of United Nations is, however, disconcerting and revealing. In response to public outrage at Indonesia’s occupation of East Timor, the Western powers under U.S. leadership insisted on holding elections in a repressive, militarised environment which had been perpetuated by intensive Western military aid to Indonesia. Throughout the period leading up to the elections, the East Timorese people were living in constant terror due to ABRI/TNI-backed death squads. Pro-integration paramilitaries armed and trained by Indonesia were threatening and slaughtering pro-independence civilians and activists with escalating impunity.

The tactic bears an uncanny resemblance to U.S. tactics in Guatemala, El Salavador and Nicaragua. Elections can only be meaningful if certain significant conditions are met ensuring that the people are able to make an independent choice free from external pressure. In a militarised environment characterised by coercion, terror and repression of those who are supportive of the independence movement, the relevance of elections becomes negligible. Given that the Western powers had made no significant efforts toward demilitarising the region and halting the ongoing repression of the East Timorese by Indonesian forces, their covert aim is clear.

As the London Guardian commented on Indonesia’s paramilitary atrocities: “What we are witnessing is a campaign aimed at terrorising east Timorese people into voting for autonomy within Indonesia. Alternatively the aim may be to create conditions in which there can be no vote in the promised July referendum and then to aim at a partition of the territory.”^[84] The Observer similarly reported that the Western-backed Indonesian army “is both running a campaign to persuade people not to vote for independence and funding paramilitary groups that are bringing a reign of terror to the territory... Jakarta promised UN Secretary-General Kofi Annan a free and fair ballot. But the documents detailing the covert operations, dated after the [UN-sponsored voting] agreement, prove Indonesia is doing the exact opposite.”^[85] East Timor specialist John M. Miller further noted that the Indonesian military was simply “afraid that in a free and fair vote the East Timorese will reject continued Indonesian rule paving the way for East Timor’s independence... The tragedy is that a fair vote is impossible in this atmosphere of terror and intimidation” - an atmosphere perpetuated by Western financial and military support for the perpetrators of this atmosphere.^[86] That the Western powers were supporting Indonesia throughout this period illustrates their complicity in Indonesia’s objective - to maintain East Timor’s integration into Indonesia in accordance with Western interests.

III.II The Escalation of Atrocities With Western Support

Thus, in light of the previous policies of violence, repression and deception pursued by the Indonesian authorities, it came as no great surprise when death squads allied with the Indonesian military, horrifyingly renewed and escalated the traditional policies of slaughter and ethnic cleansing. The escalation of the ongoing campaign to subjugate East Timor occurred in the aftermath of the UN-supervised elections when it was found that the indigenous population voted against the interests of the Indonesian army and its Western supporters. Pro-Indonesian head-hunters rampaged through East Timor as vain appeals were made to the international community to “prevent the genocide”. By 6^th September 1999, more than 200 East Timorese were reported dead overnight and over 150,000 fleeing. Witnesses reported seeing “at least 100 heads on stakes”, lining the road from Dili to Atambua. Other reports stated that Indonesian troops were ‘cleansing’ town after town, “herding refugees on to the roads or into trucks and buses, and dumping them across the border in West Timor”, and that there were “increasing fears that authorities may be forced to abandon the ballot, making it impossible to either verify it or check on claimed irregularities.”^[87]

Indonesia’s objectives included “shipping the whole population of Dili and other major towns to West Timor and replacing them with West Timorese who are against independence.” Already credible sources within East Timor reported that 3-5,000 Timorese had been slaughtered prior to the August elections, which was almost twice the number of people killed in Kosovo before NATO’s intervention.^[88] The international community had been entirely aware of the genocidal nature of the outcome. Authoritative reports show that despite anticipating Indonesia’s violent offensive against the East Timorese people to effectively annul the significance of the August referendum, the West continued to supply critical military aid to Indonesia in support of the impending onslaught. Referring to diplomatic, church and militia sources, Australian journalists reported in July “that hundreds of assault rifles, grenades and mortars are being stockpiled, ready for use if the autonomy [within Indonesia] option is rejected at the ballot box.” They predicted that the Indonesian army-run militias would implement a violent takeover of much of East Timor if, in spite of Indonesian terror tactics, the Timorese people voted for independence.^[89] Similarly, the London Observer reported that as far as “the leaders of Indonesia’s military machine” were concerned, “rule from Jakarta was anything but finished”, and that plans were made for “the total eradication of the pro-independence East Timorese population”, in the event of undesirable election results.

“Documentary evidence, clandestine intercepts and eyewitness accounts show that the atrocities in East Timor have been carefully conceived over nearly a year by the Indonesian army. The aim, quite simply, is to destroy a nation… The army’s preparations to launch a campaign of terror in East Timor were spotted as early as July 1998 when it was reported that the Indonesian army was starting to establish civilian armed militias in East Timor.”

The Western powers, including the United Nations, although professing ignorance, were in fact fully informed of Indonesia‘s plans and tactics.

“Western intelligence services were also aware of the army’s plans, and warned the UN many months ago… On 4 March, representatives of Australia’s Defence Intelligence Organisation in Jakarta cabled their headquarters that the Indonesian military was ‘clearly protecting and in some cases operating with’ militias. Basing their reports on intercepted satellite telephone conversations between senior officers in Dilli and Jakarta, they said that the militias would implement a ‘scorched earth policy’ if the vote went against them.”

This information was passed by the Australian government to the UN, which had “also received documents from resistance sources revealing the Indonesian plans. Even their own security briefing for the third week of August noted ‘continued Indonesian army involvement’ in the militias and preparations for a ‘full scale offensive after the [referendum]’.” One Indonesian military document, leaked to the East Timor resistance in June, revealed that “the province had been split into four ‘killing zones’... The Indonesian army has also provided the militias with helicopters, communications equipment, cars and computers.” Additionally, “tens of thousands of pounds of Indonesian government development grants were channelled into the militia forces.” Further orders were given in early May in another army document urging that: “Massacres should be carried out from village to village after the announcement of the ballot if the pro-independence supporters win.” The East Timorese independence movement “should be eliminated from its leadership down to its roots.” Another document, sent from the Interior Ministry to the government’s Minister in charge of politics and security, affirmed the plans to violently ‘cleanse’ East Timor of its primarily pro-independence population: “West Timor must be made ready to receive huge numbers of refugees and their security forces. The evacuation routes must be planned and secured.”^[90]

The Indonesian National Commission for Human Rights has documented the consequent genocidal atrocities of the militias, concluding from its inquiry that they were directed, controlled and funded by the Indonesian army. Max Lane reported for the Australia-based Action in Solidarity with Indonesia and East Timor (ASIET):

“For the first time since 1974, a public split has emerged within the Indonesian army’s top generals over how best to preserve the political authority of the Indonesian armed forces (TNI). The split has been provoked by the inquiry, launched by the Indonesian National Commission for Human Rights into the events in East Timor that followed the August 30 referendum. The commission’s inquiry is headed by the outspoken human rights lawyer Munir, who led the campaign which exposed the military’s role in the kidnapping and disappearance of student activists in 1998 and 1999. The inquiry has revealed the extent to which the TNI organised the militia that terrorised East Timor before and after August 30. To date, it has confirmed that militia gangs, such as Aitarak (headed by the murderous Eurico Guterres), Besi Merah Putih and others were installed as the official civil militia in East Timor and, as such, were organised, funded and directed by the Indonesian government. The inquiry also stated its opinion that the ‘Ganardi document’, which set out a scorched earth plan should Jakarta lose the August 30 referendum, was a genuine document… The commission believed that charges against the officers should be seriously considered. However, the commission cannot itself prosecute Wiranto or any other generals; only the Wahid government can make such a decision. The uncompromising nature of the questioning from Munir and other commission lawyers has provoked a publicly hostile response from military spokespeople. In November, General Sudrajat, spokesperson for Armed Forces Headquarters, stated that the TNI’s soldiers ‘would be angry if their generals were treated roughly’.”^[91]

Most revealing of all of course is the fact noted above that: “Western intelligence services were also aware of the army’s plans, and warned the UN many months ago.”^[92] Knowledge of the impending tide of genocide about to unfold at the hands of Indonesian army-backed militias, however, did not suffice to end the “longstanding ties between the Pentagon and the Indonesian military”, referred to by the New York Times, which have already been discussed.^[93] These ties were also reported and clarified by the British press in 1999:

“Indonesian military forces linked to the carnage in East Timor were trained in the United States under a covert programme sponsored by the Clinton Administration which continued until last year. The Observer can also disclose that the [British] Government has spent about £1 million in training more than 50 members of the Indonesian military in Britain since it came to power.”^[94]

The report, in concordance with the confirmations of numerous human rights organisations, further noted that the U.S. training programme which continued into 1998 had been in violation of Congressional bans. The training had also accrued to the Kopassus units, notorious for carrying out mass atrocities, and who were responsible for orchestrating and participating in the latest militia-driven ‘scorched earth policy’ - as the West knew all too well. While the beneficiaries of Western arms and military training were rampaging through East Timor, looting and burning down homes, forcefully expelling families, murdering and raping civilians, in accordance with extensive plans of which Western intelligence was fully informed, the Pentagon declared that: “A U.S.-Indonesian training exercise focused on humanitarian and disaster relief activities concluded August 25” - i.e., five days before the UN-supervised elections which accompanied the massive escalation of violence.^[95]

It is thus quite apparent that the Western powers and the United Nations were fully aware of Indonesia’s long-standing plans to brutally enforce its occupation of East Timor if the Timorese voted for independence. While being aware of the plans of the Indonesian military, the West nevertheless continued to supply arms to the regime up to the election period in accordance with its own “long-standing ties” to the army, anticipating exactly what these arms were going to be used for in the event of an electoral victory for the pro-independence movement. This policy clearly demonstrates the West’s unequivocal support of the anticipated Indonesian violence designed to sabotage the elections. In this light, the UN-supervised elections take on an entirely different appearance. It seems that the very powers who organised the referendum did not wish it to be free and fair, and wished to suppress an indigenous vote for independence. While the ETISC reported that “these [paramilitary] forces are perceived by ABRI administration to be part of their operational structure”,^[96] and while a high-ranking Western official in the UN compound at Dilli confirmed that “this is being directed from Jakarta. This is not a situation where a few gangs of rag-tag militia are out of control. As everybody here knows, it has been a military operation from start to finish”,^[97] the West knowingly pandered to Indonesia’s duplicity, preferring, as Noam Chomsky observes, “to delay, hesitate, and keep to evasive and ambiguous reactions that the Indonesian Generals could easily interpret as a ‘green light’ to carry out their grim work.”^[98]

The international community’s “green light” to the slaughter was harshly criticised by a doctor from Cedar Rapids, Iowa, who had spent nine months working in a clinic in East Timor, before being deported not long before September 1999. Dr. Dan Murphy stated in the first week of September, as the atrocities were escalating: “The U.S. government could stop military aid, stop joint military exercises, deny World Bank funding, recall our ambassador... The administration’s current actions reflect complicity, and tacitly give a green light to the terror.” The award-winning Pacifica radio journalist Amy Goodman reported on the mounting U.S.-sponsored death-toll: “The Indonesian armed forces are ethnically cleansing the East Timorese; they are burning homes, forcing people out by the thousands at gun-point if not killing them outright. If the U.S. would say to Indonesia, no more arms, no more international aid or loans, the violence would stop today.”^[99] But the U.S. did not say no. On the contrary, by maintaining the traditional input of arms and loans the U.S. and its Western allies articulated their enthusiastic consent to the campaign of terror.

Despite having been long aware that the militias were sponsored and directed by the Indonesian army, the Western powers pretended otherwise by publicly accepting Indonesian claims that the militias were independent of the military, simultaneously supplying crucial military aid. They also continued to interact with Indonesia with disregard for its complicity in the massive post-election scorched earth operation in East Timor, stating instead that internal security in East Timor “is the responsibility of the Government of Indonesia, and we don’t want to take that responsibility away from them”.^[100] By providing Indonesia with critical arms and training, and by undertaking this in the awareness of Indonesia’s ultimate plans to brutally annex East Timor, the Western powers had manufactured and supported the humanitarian catastrophe that erupted in the former Portugese enclave after the elections. Moreover, by denying knowledge of Indonesia’s plans and by providing military support to Indonesia’s direct orchestration of the resulting violence while publicly turning a blind eye, the West allowed and indeed supported Indonesia’s terror campaign until almost one-third of the population was ethnically cleansed. As noted by Co-chairperson of the Cambridge Campaign for Peace, John Hipkin, on Britain’s hypocritical role: “In the case of Kosovo, Western leaders argued that such repression was intolerable and inflicted dreadful punishment upon those in whose name it had been committed. In the case of East Timor, Robin Cook piously condemns recent atrocities but Britain continues to sell arms to the regime which condones and... encourage[s] them.”^[101] Britain was, of course, following in the footsteps of its American instructor, as was evident on the eve of the Asia Pacific Economic Conference (APEC) on 9^th September 1999, when U.S. President Clinton declared the termination of military ties with Indonesia, although he curiously failed to cut off arms sales. Instead, he announced that East Timor was “still a part of Indonesia”.^[102] Senior Fellow at the World Policy Institute, William Hartung, debunked the U.S. position: “The Clinton administration’s suggestion that it has limited leverage over the Indonesian military is absurd. The U.S. has been a principal source of arms, aid and investment to the Jakarta regime for three decades.” Indeed, the real reasons for the APEC summit were described by UN-accredited observer Matthew Jardin: “The APEC summit in New Zealand embodies the very logic by which the U.S. government has sacrificed the East Timorese people for profits in resource-rich Indonesia over the last 24 years.”^[103]

III.III Belated UN Intervention

Under massive pressure from numerous public bodies, the West belatedly ended significant military ties and halted loans, assenting to the intervention of a UN peacekeeping force in East Timor with the permission of the Indonesian government. That the intervention only occurred with the permission of the same military regime that had orchestrated the violence, of course, signified that the international community only continued to overlook Indonesia’s complicity in the massive post-election brutalisation of East Timor. Just as the UN-sponsored elections were fraudulent from the beginning, the terror campaign to sabotage the vote having been jointly orchestrated under Western connivance with Indonesia, the proposed UN intervention via the establishment of a peacekeeping force only extended this pretence. UN intervention was in fact designed to impress and deceive the public at home while the Western powers and their Indonesian client regime could continue to mutually secure their strategic and economic interests.^[104] Several days after the UN mission was announced, The Observer noted that:

“Gloom has returned to Jakarta after the glimmer of hope at the weekend when President BJ Habibie invited a UN peacekeeping force to enter East Timor, and then agreed to an emergency programme of humanitarian aid. In spite of bland assurances, the situation throughout the island of Timor has got worse, not better, since he spoke.”

The reality of the matter was that, rather unsurprisingly in light of the previous revelations, “nothing is actually happening to help the hundreds of thousands of refugees... to survive, or to protect them from the murderous militia and army.” Instead, “guarantees at the highest level are not bringing action on the ground.” The continued calculated, evasive and ambiguous reactions of the West meant that, despite the declaration of a UN peacekeeping mission, “UN officials do not know when or how they can continue their mandate of supervising the transition to independence.” Similarly, while U.S. envoy to the UN Richard Holbrooke spoke of a “robust mandate” for the UN force, in fact the Security Council resolution to be passed on this issue was “expected to be loosely worded and contain loopholes.” And in a further insult to the East Timorese people: “Britain’s UN envoy, Jeremy Greenstock, a member of UN chief Kofi Annan’s crisis mission to Indonesia, said he believed the head of the Indonesian armed forces, General Wiranto, would hand the negotiations to his best people. But he said such decisions were up to the General.”^[105]

The UN thus rewarded the complicity of the Indonesian military by granting responsibility for the main decisions on negotiations about the UN mission, to the very head of the Indonesian armed forces who had been covertly directing the brutalisation of East Timor himself - to the awareness of Western intelligence services, who had also previously informed the UN. General Wiranto’s responsibility for the Indonesian operation in East Timor, including the direction of both military and paramilitary death squads, was well understood by the West.^[106] In regard to Jeremy Greenstock’s affirmation that “negotiations” would by handled by General Wiranto, and that “decisions were up to the General”, the British press reported that: “Observers in Jakarta fear that this is only too true. The future of East Timor, and of the hundreds of thousands of displaced Timorese, is still in the hands of General Wiranto and his army”.^[107]

Reports in late October 1999 further indicate that the UN mission had only been able to account for about 150,000 people out of approximately 850,000. While 260,000 were “languishing in squalid refugee camps in West Timor under the effective control of the militias after either fleeing or being forcibly removed from their homes”, an estimated 100,000 had been relocated to other parts of Indonesia, with the rest presumed to be hiding in the mountains. Over 200,000 East Timorese remained in Indonesia against their will. Terrorised refugees were lacking food and medical supplies while unexplained ‘disappearances’ constituted a daily occurrence. While Indonesia continued to publicly profess its renunciation of East Timor, militia backed by the Indonesian army continued to threaten East Timorese inside and outside the territory. Indonesia’s National Commission on Human Rights reported that militia groups in West Timor were committing “systematic and organized human rights violations”, while Indonesian security forces “let these things continue”. Indonesia also refused to cooperate with the UN’s investigations of human rights. As the catastrophe therefore endured under UN auspices, the mass media blacked out the ongoing disaster.^[108]

Indeed, with public outrage subdued as a result of the widely trumpeted self-congratulatory observations on the humanitarian benevolence behind the UN mission, ETAN reported in March 2000 that:

“[The] Clinton adminstration is considering restoring ties between the U.S. and Indonesian militaries despite continued Indonesian military (TNI) and militia activity on the East-West Timor border and in East Timor’s enclave of Oecussi… Military violence continues against civilians in Indonesia.”

Meanwhile, “Pentagon and State Department officials are planning high-level contacts and so-called humanitarian operations”, although current law “prohibits weapons transfers and military training.” Such rekindled U.S. military support would only exacerbate the “situation for refugees in West Timor and other parts of Indonesia” which “remains dire”, with refugees in camps facing “ongoing threats and intimidation by TNI-supported militias, little to no medical care and high levels of malnutrition.” East Timor itself is “not yet secured against militia and Indonesian military (TNI) threats”, with Oecussi having also “come under regular militia attack, with the support of the TNI.” Even “international peacekeepers” have come under TNI fire. “The Indonesian military remains massed on the border, where it conducts exercises”, while thousands of militias are similarly “still active along the West Timor border”.^[109] In May 2000, an independent delegation of congressional staffers, human rights advocates, journalists, and a noted filmmaker travelled into Jakarta and Dili on a week long fact-finding mission, meeting with Indonesian NGOs, church leaders, government and military officials, as well as East Timorese NGO leaders and international aid workers. They confirmed the above, finding that:

“East Timorese refugees remain under threat from militia leaders and members of the Indonesian armed forces (TNI), who are preventing the refugees from returning to East Timor… Continued discovery of modern weapons in the camps points to direct TNI collusion with militia leaders. Several separate reports of a low-level training plan, based on the continuous drilling of fifteen militia members by the TNI with five men rotated in and out at a time, further connect TNI to militia repression.”

Over 200 refugee sites inhabited by evicted East Timorese are scattered throughout West Timor. More than 100,000 total refugees are in the province, with another 11,000 to 30,000 still elsewhere in Indonesia.^[110] Having returned from an investigative visit to the island, Dinny Hawes of the Catholic Institute for International Relations has summarised the overall impact of Indonesia’s scorched earth policy, supported by the Western powers:

“… shells of buildings stood blackened and roofless, one after the other, with hardly a house intact. The departing Indonesian army and their local militias ensured that the new country really is starting from scratch. This small country has lost its infrastructure - almost all of it in the capital Dili and the other main towns - its structure of governance, and its health and education systems. Some 75 per cent of its population was displaced in one month after 25 years of occupation that saw a third of the population murdered by the Indonesian occupiers or die from disease or starvation - a genocide proportionately greater than either Pol Pot’s mass murders in Cambodia or the Rwandan massacres of 1997.”^[111]

III.IV Western Interests in Indonesia and East Timor

The interests motivating the Western powers’ policies in the region clearly have been systematically opposed to elementary humanitarian principles, focused rather on strategic and economic concerns. In September 1999, a Western diplomat in Jakarta affirmed that: “The dilemma is that Indonesia matters and East Timor doesn’t.”^[112] In clarification of this position, New York Times Asia specialists Elizabeth Becker and Philip Shenon observed that the U.S. Administration: “… has made the calculation that the United States must put its relationship with Indonesia, a mineral-rich nation of more than 200 million people, ahead of its concern over the political fate of East Timor, a tiny impoverished territory of 800,000 people that is still seeking independence”^[113] President of the Asia Pacific Policy Center Douglas Paal was even more explicit: “Timor is a speed bump on the road to dealing with Jakarta, and we’ve got to get over it safely. Indonesia is such a big place and so central to the stability of the region.”^[114] “We have myriad interests” in Indonesia, was the observation of the U.S. State Department spokesman James Rubin - “and what our job is, is to try to balance those various interests.” Identifying the competing U.S. interests in Indonesia and East Timor, Rubin summed up the central determinant of U.S. foreign policy towards the region: “We have a business interest.”^[115]

Throughout the history of this sordid conflict, the Western powers under U.S. leadership have formulated their consistently anti-humanitarian policies with intent to protect their multiple “business interests” in the strategic region, namely: “Nike’s subcontractor factories; the mines of Freeport McMoRan; the oil drilling of Texaco, Chevron and Mobil,” as Russell Mokhiber and Robert Weissman of Corporate Watch observe. Mokhiber and Weissman add that the Western powers feared the distinct possibility that a win for East Timorese independence would, in the style of the ‘domino’ theory, extend to Indonesian separatist movements in Aceh and Irian Jaya, where Mobil is heavily invested and Freeport McMoRan runs the world’s largest gold mine, respectively.^[116] In further emphasis of the pre-eminent role of the “business interest”, the New York Times noted that the U.S. was principally concerned that a threatened IMF and aid cut-off to Indonesia “could also harm American corporations that have large investments in Indonesia.”^[117] In light of such concerns, it was necessary to designate the status of East Timor to that of “a speed bump on the road to dealing with Jakarta”. Other than the immediate “business interests”, however, the U.S. considers good ties with the Indonesian military regime of crucial geopolitical significance in relation to the protection of broader regional interests. Indonesia is viewed as a counterweight to the rival superpower China, and a dependable ally in the region.^[118] As Karen Talbot points out: “The unfolding events in Indonesia and East Timor appear to be closely related to plans for establishing a U.S.-controlled NATO-type military alliance in that region and to counter a purely Asian military association.”^[119]

Indonesia too had significant oligarchic interests in maintaining hegemony over the country. According to the Catholic Institute of International Relations:

“Lucrative Coffee plantations and oil deposits are situated in the Western districts of East Timor, the very areas which the militias are now desperately trying to retain for their Indonesian masters. Who owns them? Important oil concessions are held by two of Suharto’s children, Tutut and Tommy. The army has had a large hand in running the coffee plantations and retired military men are desperate to hang on to their investments.”^[120]

Western connivance with Indonesia has always been the major ongoing determinant in East Timor’s humanitarian crisis. Not only did the Western powers, co-working with their Indonesian client-regime, manufacture the conditions of crisis in East Timor while pretending that the crisis was the result of the actions of isolated “rogue elements”; by keeping to continuous evasive and ambiguous reactions, in which the Indonesian authorities were neither blamed nor condemned, and in which military ties were maintained until the very end, the West allowed Indonesia to bring its scorched earth policy to bloody fruition. Subsequently, a UN intervention was undertaken under immense public pressure, monopolising on the covertly engineered catastrophe as a vehicle for the establishment of international military hegemony over East Timor. The UN role has turned out to provide a means for the continuation of Western complicity, allowing the Western powers to annul the significance of the independence movement and ensure that East Timor remains under the hegemony of Western business interests.

III.V The Real Agenda for Intervention

An analysis of the ramifications of ongoing Western policies in East Timor reveals the more sordid anti-humanitarian motivations thereof. As the London Guardian reports:

“The real agenda for the UN ‘peacekeeping’ is to ensure that East Timor, while nominally independent in the future, remains under the sway of Jakarta and western business interests.”^[121]

This has also been candidly confirmed by Richard Woolcott, a former Australian ambassador to Indonesia and then secretary of the Department of Foreign Affairs and Trade. Writing in the Australian Financial Review, Woolcott revealed how Western governments and oil companies were entering into negotiations over the future of East Timor’s considerable oil and natural gas reserves, including those in the Timor Gap. He openly admitted that East Timor’s independence could endanger the already negotiated Timor Gap Treaty which legislated for the West’s corporate plundering of regional resources: “[A]part from an issue of regional significance, such as the possible fracturing of Indonesia, the changes could lead to substantial financial implications for the government if the Timor Gap Treaty, signed in 1989, were to unravel.” Observing how Western corporations had been exploring for oil and gas for some time in accordance with the terms of the agreement, with oil production commencing in the Elang Kakatua and Kakatua North fields in July 1998, he pointed out that if Indonesian sovereignty over East Timor was no longer recognised, the agreement could be nullified resulting in substantial financial claims. In this context, it is clear that significant Western corporate interests have been protected under the auspices of the UN mission, thereby halting any process of genuine, substantial and meaningful independence. The covert aim of the operation appears to be the maintenance of Jakarta’s sway over East Timor to uphold the privileges of the Timor Gap Treaty. As Woolcott emphasised, the principle of self-determination “is not a sacred cow”.^[122]

The position of the Australian Labour Party is particularly revealing. In 1999 Labour called for the renegotiation of the Timor Gap Treaty to transfer Indonesian royalties to the autonomous East Timorese administration run by the UN Security Council powers, i.e. the United States, the United Kingdom, France, Germany among others. According to the estimate of Labour’s foreign affairs spokesman Laurie Brereton, the UN administration in East Timor would have access to $A150 million a year in oil and gas royalties. On 25^th October, six days after the Indonesian People’s Consultative Assembly endorsed the East Timorese ballot results, the UN Security Council adopted Resolution 1272 (1999) establishing the United Nations Transitional Administration in East Timor (UNTAET). UNTAET would be “endowed with overall responsibility for the administration of East Timor and will be empowered to exercise all legislative and executive authority including the administration of justice.” The profits to be reaped would accrue to the Western administration in East Timor under UN-auspices, not the population, as with legal and political control over the enclave. East Timor has, in other words, been relegated to the status of a colony.^[123]

Thus, despite the latest UN-supervised elections to establish a Constituent Assembly held on 30^th August 2001, East Timor’s politico-economic structure remains under the hegemony of Western international agencies. The UN administrator of East Timor, Sergio Vieira de Mello, still holds absolute power under the terms of the UN protectorate. Even in the aftermath of the elections, the UN is set to remain in charge until some time next year at least. Although the former independence movement, Fretilin, was predicted by the UN to win the election by a massive 90 per cent landslide, the party’s popularity has been on the wane. Fretilin barely managed to scrape 57 per cent, taking 55 seats in the 88-seat Assembly - two thirds short of the majority required for drafting the national constitution. Despite prolific promises and other such rhetoric, Fretilin, closely allied with the UN administration, has failed to alleviate the escalating impoverishment and inequity in East Timor. In contradiction to the party’s past outstanding record of mass support and promotion of egalitarian social reforms, Fretilin has expressed its intent to implement free market capitalism under Western tutelage. On 6^th September 2001, World Bank officials and UN administrator Vieira de Mello held high level discussions with Fretilin representatives in Dili on what the new government would comprise. They also met with Mari Alkatiri, Fretilin’s Secretary-General, to discuss the drafting of East Timor’s constitution. Clearly, the UN remains the principal authority in the enclave, while the new government that is set to come to power in the future will be structured and dominated by international agencies, principally the World Bank and the IMF, and thus foreign investors. The implications are disastrous. Former Chief Economist of the World Bank, former Chairman of President Bill Clinton’s council of economic advisers, and winner of the Nobel Prize for economics, Professor Joseph Stiglitz, has scathingly revealed the hidden agenda of the global economic system under U.S./Western domination. In a detailed interview with Gregory Palast of the London Observer, Professor Stiglitz noted that IMF and World Bank programmes systematically manufacture social, political and economic crises around the world wherever they are applied, culminating in mass impoverishment, increasing inequality, reduction of meaningful democracy through the imposition of structural reforms and other enforced policy formulas, and even internal conflicts, all in the name of securing Western access to regional resources, resulting in huge elite profits for foreign investors and corresponding declines in domestic socio-economic conditions.^[124]

George J. Aditjondro, an Indonesian Professor in the Department of Sociology and Anthropology at the University of Newcastle, reports that “foreign nationals are making all strategic decisions” in East Timor.

“For the next two to three years, the Timor Loro Sa’e people - many of them prefer to be called, the Maubere people - are still to be administered by UN officials through the UN Transitional Administration in East Timor (UNTAET), which is headed by a Brazilian diplomat, Sergio Vieira de Mello, as Special Representative of the Secretary General… His administrative power is supported by the economic muscle of the World Bank, which has appointed a senior official, Klaus Roland, to be the Bank’s director responsible for reconstruction of the country.”

Professor Aditjondro notes that the destruction of East Timor and the forced deportation of at least a quarter of its population seems to have fallen quite nicely within the matrix of interests of the Western powers, creating “a bonanza for Australian businesses and a handful of Timorese business partners.” An estimated “$1.2 billion will be up for grabs for businesses from all around the world in Timor Loro Sa’e during the next two to three years. This has come as very good news to the Northern Territory (NT) business people and administrators… One of the attractions of opening shop in the newborn (or reborn) nation without a functioning state apparatus is that wages are still very low.”^[125] He cites a revealing news bulletin catering mainly for the Timorese business community: “The going rate is about $5 a day, $25 a 5-day week or, at an exchange rate of Rp 4000, Rp 20,000 and 100,000 respectively.”^[126] “This $5 or Rp 20,000 daily wage is not only the ‘going rate’ among the expatriate business community,” comments Aditjondro, “but is also endorsed and practised by the UN authorities themselves.” According to sources in Dili, “the UN Office for the Coordination of Humanitarian Affairs, which coordinates the dozens of international and national NGOs involved in the relief work in the country have suggested the Rp 20,000 daily wage rate to the foreign NGOs…

“Then, the UNTAET cafeteria itself pays a daily wage of between $2 to $3 to its Timorese employees, while a meal at the cafeteria costs $6. Obviously, this top-down exploitative labour policy turns Timor Loro Sa’e into a paradise for expatriate business people… There are still other attractions for these foreign businesses in Timor Loro Sa’e: they do not have to pay tax to any government authority. In addition, they also - for the time being - often do not have to pay rent for the buildings in which they are squatting, as well as no water and electricity bills on some occasions. With a captive market of a couple of hundred foreigners, a handful of big businesses could practically have a monopoly over certain commodities and services.”

Aditjondro goes on to document extensively the massive Western corporate annexation of virtually the entire infrastructure of East Timor in the wake of the UN intervention.^[127] Reporting from the ground on the impact of these policies, Australian journalist Gerald Tooth commented that: “With the UN, aid agencies and private consortiums all coming in since the independence ballot, some East Timorese are even saying as though they’re standing by yet again, as another invasion takes place.” Such sentiments were explained by the East Timorese activist Maria Bernadino, spokesperson for Rebuild Watch - an organisation established by the indigenous population in the wake of the UN intervention:

“At this point in time it feels like East Timor is going through another invasion. Foreign business invasion, foreign UN invasion of East Timor… This is no different, or at least not much different from the Indonesian invasion. All they need to do now is go around shooting people and torture people and that’ll be exactly the same. The discrimination is still there. The ill treatment is still there, the Timorese are treated as animals in East Timor. We are discriminated upon. Their skills are not being recognised. They’re discriminated when it comes to employment as well. We have had no help so far from [the] international community, in trying to set up the business, or UN.”

Elaborating on her concerns, Tooth elaborated that: “Her claims of discrimination against East Timorese workers are based on the lack of work in East Timor, while foreigners are seen to be winning highly paid contracts with the UN...

“Unemployment is estimated to be as high as 95 per cent. It’s a figure the UN disputes without offering an alternative.  And those East Timorese who do find jobs find stark wage disparities between foreigners and locals. UNTAET has set a maximum wage of five American dollars a day for unskilled Timorese workers, while foreigners working for the same organisation could be earning ten times that in hardship allowance alone.”^[128]

It is unsurprising then that then U.S. President Clinton himself summarised the interests in the region quite remarkably in a single sentence, when attempting to justify the UN mission: “This mission is in America’s interests for several reasons. Indonesia’s future is important to us not only because of its resources and its sea lanes, but for its potential as a leader in the region and the world.” Australian diplomat Richard Butler further clarified that: “[I]t has been made very clear to me by senior American analysts that the facts of the alliance essentially are that: the U.S. will respond proportionally, defined largely in terms of its own interests and threat assessments.” It is for this reason that the humanitarian crisis of East Timor has existed, and been able to continue: the economic and strategic “interests” - and the indigenous “threat” to these - that render humanitarian considerations irrelevant.^[129]

Notes:

^[1] Cited in ‘End the Atrocity in East Timor’, The Guardian (Australia), 22 March 1995.

^[2] Ibid.

^[3] Cited in Chomsky, Noam, Powers and Prospects: Reflections on Human Nature and the Social Order, South End Press, Cambridge, MA, 1996, Chapter 7.

^[4] Cited in ‘End the Atrocity in East Timor’, op. cit.

^[5] Kolko, Gabriel, Confronting the Third World: United States foreign policy 1945-1980, Pantheon, New York, 1988, p. 181. For more on the U.S.-backed coup in Indonesia, see Curtis, The Ambiguities of Power, op. cit. Also see Chomsky, Noam, ‘A curtain of ignorance’, Southeast Asia Chronicle, August 1980; and the new version of this in Chomsky, Towards a New Cold War, Sinclair Brown, London, 1982.

^[6] Smith, J. W., ‘Simultaneously Suppressing the World’s Break for Freedom’, from Smith’s book, Economic Democracy: The Political Struggle of the Twenty-First Century, M. E. Sharpe, New York, Armonk, 2000. Also see Institute for Economic Democracy, http://www.slonet.org/~ied .

^[7] Stockwell, John, The Praetorian Guard: The US  in the New International Security State, South End Press, December 1990.

^[8] Ibid.

^[9] Blum, William, Killing Hope: US Military and CIA Interventions Since World War II, Common Courage Press, Monroe, Maine, 1995, Chapter 14, ‘Indonesia 1957-58: War and Pornography’.

^[10] Cited in Curtis, Mark, Ecologist, September-October 1996., Vol. 26, No. 5.

^[11] Cited in Budiardjo, Carmel, ‘Indonesia: Mass extermination and the consolidation of authoritarian power’, in George, Alexander (ed.), Western state terrorism, Polity Press, Cambridge, 1991, p. 181.

^[12] Cited in Chomsky, Noam, Year 501: The Conquest Continues, South End Press, Cambridge, MA, 1993.

^[13] Herman, Edward, ‘The Human Rights Charade’, Z Magazine, January 1998.

^[14] AI Report, Power and Impunity: Human Rights Under the New Order, Amnesty International, London, 1994.

^[15] Ibid. For an analysis of the nature of the monolithic military-intelligence dictatorship thus established as a result of Western policy see Tanter, Richard, ‘After Kopkamtib: Indonesia’s intelligence and security apparatus’, Inside Indonesia, April 1989, p. 4-6. For a more extended treatment see Tanter, Richard, ‘The totalitarian ambition: the Indonesian intelligence and security apparatus’, in Budiman, Arief (ed.), State and Society in Contemporary Indonesia, Centre of Southeast Asian Studies, Monash University, Victoria, Clayton, 1991, p. 215-288.

^[16] Herman, Edward, ‘The Human Rights Charade’, op. cit.

^[17] Budiardjo, Carmel, A global failure on human rights in East Timor: East Timor in Transition. Sovereignty, Self-Determination and Human Rights, TAPOL Conference Speech, Nottingham University, May 1999.

^[18] Herman, Edward, ‘The Human Rights Charade’, op. cit.

^[19] Barbedo de Magalhaes, Antonio, East Timor - A People Shattered By Lies & Silence, Oporto University, 17 July 1996, http://www.sfu.ca/~rdr/silence.html .

^[20] Ibid. Indonesian elites also had other significant interests in annexing East Timor which came to light during the occupation. East Timor shortly became, in the words of the Indonesian Professor of Sociology and Anthropology, George Aditjondro, “the Indonesian ‘province’ with the second largest landholdings under control of the Soeharto family, namely 564,867 hectares”, worth millions of dollars. They “stretch from the Western border to the Eastern tip of East Timor, consisting of a 50,000 hectares timber plantation allocated to Bob Hasan, one of the Soeharto family’s business operators, to tens of thousands of hectares of sugarcane plantations awarded to the kids on the Southern coast, stretching from Suai to Viqueque and to Los Palos in the district of Lautem. In addition, the best marble deposits in Manatuto, has been awarded to Siti Hardiyanti Rukmana, Soeharto’s eldest daughter, who also has a monopoly over coffee production and export from East Timor, through a company of hers in Dili. These Soeharto interests are closely intertwined with the business interests of other generals who had served under Soeharto, both during the Seroja Operation to invade and annex East Timor, as well as in other military operations. Batara Indra, an Indonesian conglomerate backed by Ret. Generals Benny Moerdani and Dading Kalbuadi, the mastermind behind the killings of Australian-based journalists in Balibo and Dili, controls the sandalwood forests of East Timor, and the production of sandalwood oil for export to produce sandalwood perfumed soap in France and sandalwood powder for incense sticks for export to East Asia. Batara Indra also exports Buddhist statues to Taiwan and Catholic statues to Italy, made from East Timorese sandalwood and marble. Most of the hotels and the only cinema in Dili, are owned by Batara Indra, while all the large construction firms in Dili, which are involved in all the large infrastructure projects, including building the irrigation canals and ditches for Indonesian ‘transmigrants’, either belong to Benny Moerdani’s Batara Indra Group, or to the Anak Liambau Group of the Jakarta-appointed governor, Jose Abilio Osorio-Soares.” Aditjondro goes on to take note of the oil interests of the Indonesian companies in tandem with Western companies, as well as the links of the pro-integration militias in East Timor to Suharto’s family and to similar lang-grabbing practices (Aditjondro, George J., ‘Unmasking the Indonesian interests behind the pro-Jakarta militias’, East Timor International Support Center: News, 8/9/99).

^[21] Barbedo de Magalhaes, Antonio, East Timor, Indonesian Occupation and Genocide, Oporto University, 1992.

^[22] Pilger, John, Death of a Nation: The Timor Conspiracy, Part 3 ‘The 1975 Invasion’, Hidden Agendas: The Films & Writing of John Pilger, http://www.pilger.carlton.com . For a brief but well-documented account of Operation Komodo, see Jardine, Matthew, East Timor: Genocide in Paradise, Odonian Press, 1999. An online version of this document is also available at the Office of the Americas (OOA), http://www.officeoftheamericas.org . In June 1974, Portugal had essentially begun the process of decolonisation. By May 1975 it was agreed by the newly formed East Timorese political parties that a transitional government would be established by October. By late 1976 it was also planned that elections for a national constituent assembly would be held.  However Operation Komodo was successful in sabotaging this process (See ibid.)

^[23] Naidu, G. V. C., ‘The East Timor Crisis’, Strategic Analysis, December 1999 Vol. XXIII No. 9.

^[24] Toohey, Brian and Wilkinson, Marian, ‘The Timor Papers’, The Book of Leaks, Angus & Robertson, Sydney, p. 143-95.

^[25] Ibid.

^[26] Naidu, G.V.C., ‘The East Timor Crisis’, op. cit.

^[27] Lawless, Robert, ‘The Indonesian Takeover of East Timor’, Asian Survey, 1976, 16(10), 948-964.

^[28] For these three issues, see ETISC Discussion Paper, Referendum - Still Waiting, East Timor International Support Center, 14 August 1998.

^[29] Cited in Jardine, Matthew, East Timor: Genocide in Paradise, op. cit.

^[30] Ibid.

^[31] Mahdi, Waruno, ‘Why is Indonesia Not Falling Apart?’, Indonesia Publications, Indonesia-L, 10 April 1999, http://www.indopubs.com/archives .

^[32] Barbedo de Magalhaes, Antonio, East Timor - A People Shattered By Lies & Silence, op. cit.

^[33] ‘History Since 1974‘, East Timor International Support Center, http://www.easttimor.com/history .

^[34] ETISC Discussion Paper, Referendum - Still Waiting, op. cit. With regard to the Act of Integration, we may further refer to the remarks of the Indonesian organisation Solidamor: “Within two weeks of the invasion [by Indonesia] a provisional Timorese government was established, consisting of ‘ministers’ from the pro-Indonesian Apodeti party. On 31 May 1976 an ‘Act of Integration’ was staged in a former sports hall in Dili. The provisional Government convened a Regional People’s Assembly, at which 28 hastily conscripted delegates, in a short ceremony conducted in Portuguese without translation, signed a petition asking Soeharto to grant integration. Journalists were flown in from Jakarta for a three-hour visit, but were not allowed to leave the building or speak to the delegates. This ‘Act of Integration’ took place less than 6 months after the invasion, at a time when over 80% of East Timor was in the hands of the Fretilin army, and the remaining 20% were being terrorized. However this is the act that Indonesia refers to when justifying the legality of its presence in East Timor, and when indicating that the people of East Timor have already expressed their choice for integration with Indonesia, and that therefore there is no need for a further referendum.” (‘History of East Timor: Indonesianization’, Solidamor, http://www.solidamor.org )

^[35] In this context, it is worth quoting copiously the comments of Waruno Mahdi: “Though formally declared a province of Indonesia by this country’s highest legislative body (the Peoples Consultative Assembly) in 1976, [East Timor] had actually never been considered part of Indonesia before. It was not included when, at the celebration of the 10th anniversary of Budi Utomo in 1918, Suwardi Suryaningrat (the later Ki Hajar Dewantara) for the first time formulated and substantiated the concept of a future independent Indonesia within the borders of Dutch East Indies. It was not included, when representatives of Indonesian youth from various ethnicities pledged to one nation, one fatherland, and one language in October 1928. It was not considered as part of the territory to be defended against an anticipated Japanese invasion when the most representative assembly of the Indonesian population ever to have been convened in colonial Indonesia, the Congres Ra’iat Indonesia, formulated its proposal to help defend the territory of Dutch East Indies in December 1939. It was not included when the Committee for Preparation of Independence formulated the basic concepts that were to be embodied in the Republic of Indonesia proclaimed in August 1945, and that were to be reflected in the constitution published shortly after that. It was not part of the country, for the independence of which Indonesians between Sabang and Merauke fought with their lives from 1946 till 1949, in some places also in subsequent years. It was not included in the territory of the Indonesia that became member of the United Nations Organization in 1949, and it was not part of the Indonesia that hosted the Afro-Asian Conference in Bandung and that contributed to the setting up of the Movement of Non-Aligned Countries. In a letter dated June 17, 1974, the Indonesian foreign minister Adam Malik explicitly confirmed the right of East Timor for independence, and that Indonesia had no intentions to annex the territory. The occupation of Balibo in October 1975, and of the rest of East Timor in December 1975, was in flagrant contradiction with the UN Charter as well as with the Five Principles of the Bandung Conference, both of which had been ratified by Indonesia. So, it was also illegal by Indonesian law… Thus, 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.” (Mahdi, Waruno, ‘Why is Indonesia Not Falling Apart?’, op. cit.)

We may also note that the historical fact that Timor has never been part of Indonesia even prior to the arrival of colonialists. As is reported  under the Timor Net section of the online Asia Studies library provided by the Research School of Pacific and Asia Studies, Australian National University: “Neither Hinduism nor the Islam had influence on the Timorese beliefs. That achievement was reserved to the Christian missionaries. When they first disembarked in Timor, inhabitants were found to be animists. Pigafetta, in 1522, referring to them as ‘gentiles‘, wrote that ‘when they go cut sandalwood, it was told to us that the demon appears in various forms and tells them to ask for something that they need‘. The priest Baltazar Dias states in a letter of 1559 that the Timorese ‘are the beastliest people that exist in these parts. Nothing do they adore, neither have [they] idols. Everything what the Portuguese tell them, they do it’. It is therefore acceptable that the expansion of Islamism, diffused from Malaysia in the 15th century, hadn’t reached Timor although it is said that the sultan of Ternate, Cachil Aeiro, should have subjected the island. The Muslims, Javanese and Malays frequented these islands before the arrival of the Portuguese, but the islamization didn’t constitute their purpose or wasn’t permitted by the local chiefs (liurais) who ‘had natural aversion for the Muslims’ in the words of the captain of Malacca, in 1518, to king D. Manuel. The Muslims, as in the beginning the Portuguese, should have inhabited the island for the short period of time sufficient to cut the sandalwood and embark it. As says Afonso de Castro, ‘one cannot find in Timor the fakest vestige of Islamic villages and in the different dialects that are spoken in the island, there isn't a single word of Arabic origin.’” (Timor Net, The obscure history of East Timor, ‘The Maubere Culture’, Asia Studies WWW Library, http://www.uc.pt/timor/culture.html .) For further discussion see Barbedo de Magalhães,  Anatonio, ‘Population Settlements in East Timor and Indonesia’, Oporto University, 24 October 1994, also available online at Asia Studies WWW Library, http://www.uc.pt/timor .

^[36] Cited in Pilger, John, Distant Voices, Vintage, London, 1994, pp. 297-8.

^[37] Munster, George. and Walsh, Richard., Documents on Australian defence and foreign policy, 1968-75, Hong Kong, 1980, pp. 192-3.

^[38]  Budiarjo, Carmel and Liong, Liem Soie, The war against East Timor, Zed, London, 1984, p. 49.

^[39] Collinson, Stephen, ‘U.S. approved invasion of East Timor’, The Age, 8 December 2001.

^[40] Cited in Toohey, Brian and Wilkinson, Mary, The Book of Leaks, Angus & Robertson, Sydney, section on ‘The Timor Papers’, p. 143-95; National Times (Sydney), 30 May, 6 June 1982; Walsh, Richard and Munster, George, Documents on Australian defence and foreign policy, 1968 - 1975, op. cit.

^[41] Mirsky, Johnathon, ‘War by famine kills 200,000’, Observer Foreign News Service, 20 November 1979.

^[42] Turner, Michele, Telling East Timor: Personal Testimonies, 1942-92, New South Wales University Press, Sydney, 1992, p. 107.

^[43] Ibid., p. 104-5.

^[44] Ibid., p. 13-18.

^[45] Simmons, Michael, ‘Amnesty says atrocities are continuing in East Timor’, The Guardian, 26 June 1985.

^[46] East Timor International Support Center (ETISC), http://www.easttimor.com/html/h_r_violations.html . For extensive documentation in the form of innumerable independent eyewitness reports, see Turner, Michele, Telling East Timor, op. cit.

^[47] Philadelphia Inquirer, 28 May 1982.

^[48] Asia Watch, Human Rights in Indonesia and East Timor, Human Rights Watch, New York, 1989, p. 253.

^[49] Joint Standing Committee on Foreign Relations, Defence and Trade, Australia’s Relations with Indonesia, Australian Government Publishing Service, Canberra, 1993, p. 96.

^[50] Defert, Gabriel, Timor Est le Genocide Oublié, L’Hartman, 1992.

^[51] CIIR Report, International Law and the Question of East Timor, Catholic Institute of International Relations/IPJET, London, 1995.

^[52] Hearings Before the Subcommittee on International Organizations of the Committee on International Relations, U.S. Policy on Human Rights and Military Assistance: Overview and Indonesia, 15 February 1978.

^[53] Budiarjo, Carmel and Liong, Liem Soie, The war against East Timor, op. cit., p. 27.

^[54] Financial Times, 5 April 1978.

^[55] Cooke, Kieran, ‘Why Indonesia bought British Rapiers’, Financial Times, 3 January 1985.

^[56] Financial Times, 21 June 1991; International Herald Tribune, 21 June 1991. Also see Curtis, Mark, The Ambiguities of Power: British Foreign Policy Since 1945, Zed, London, 1995.

^[57] Amnesty International Newsletter, Vol. XXXIII, No. 7, July 1993.

^[58] John Pilger’s documentary on East Timor, Death of a Nation: The Timor Conspiracy, aired on British Television, ITV Carlton, late 1998.

^[59] TAPOL and Campaign Against Arms Trade Press Release, ‘Arms Export Report Confirms Failure of Labour’s Ethical Foreign Policy’, 26 March 1999.

^[60] Pilger, John, Death of a Nation, op. cit.; ETAN Press Release, ‘Documents Reveal Troop Levels Unchanged Despite Indonesian Claims’, East Timor Action Network, 30 October 1998, http://www.etan.org .

^[61] TAPOL and Campaign Against Arms Trade Press Release, ‘Arms Export Report Confirms Failure of Labour’s Ethical Foreign Policy’, op. cit.

^[62] Pilger, John, Death of a Nation, op. cit.

^[63] ‘New Labour’s Deadly Trade: Lies, more lies and arms sales’, Socialist Worker, 18 September 1999. For an illuminating review of the ‘ethical’ British record, see Abrams, Fran, ‘What Cook said, What is happening’, The Independent, 23 May 1997; Norton-Taylor, Richard and War, Lucy, ‘Ministers attacked over military export licences’, The Guardian, 15 May 1998; Abrams, Fran, ‘Britain still selling Indonesia arms’, The Independent, 15 May 1998; Evans, Michael, ‘Britain accused of selling Jakarta anti-riot weapons’, The Times, 15 May, 1998; Pilger, John, ‘Blood on British Hands’, The Guardian, 25 January 1999

^[64] The Times, 19 April 1999.

^[65] See especially TAPOL, The Kopassus-militia alliance, Bulletin Online 154/5 - November 1999; TAPOL, East Timor Under the Indonesian Jackboot: An Analysis of Indonesian Army Documents, Occasional Report No. 26, October 1998.

^[66] ETAN Press Release, ‘Documents Reveal Troop Levels Unchanged Despite Indonesian Claims’, East Timor Action Network, 30 October 1998. For in-depth analysis see ETAN article at http://www.etan.org/et/1998/november/15-21/15analys.htm .

^[67] Nairn, Allan, ‘U.S. Complicity in Timor’, The Nation, 27 September 1999.

^[68] ETAN Update, ‘Killings Continue in East Timor as Indonesia Offers Independence Option’, East Timor Action Network, 8 April 1999.

^[69] ETAN Press Release, ‘Campaign of Terror Threatens to Derail August Vote’, East Timor Action Network, 10 June 1999.

^[70] See Moynihan, Daniel P. and Weaver, Suzanne, A Dangerous Place, Little, Brown, Boston, 1978.

^[71] Ibid.

^[72] Summary of World Broadcasts, FE/1658, AI/2, 8 April 1993.

^[73] New Statesman, 29 July 1994.

^[74] Australian, 21 December 1994.

^[75] Indonesian News, 20 June 1993, Vol. 20, No. 9.

^[76] Foreign Assistance and Related Programs: Appropriations for 1981. Hearings Before a Subcommittee of the Committee on Appropriations, House of Representatives, 96th Congress, June 1980. Cited in Southerland, Daniel, ‘U.S. Role in Plight of Timor: An Issue That Won’t Go Away’, Christian Science Monitor, 6 March 1980.

^[77] Cited in Herman, Edward, ‘The Human Rights Charade’, op. cit.

^[78] Indonesian News, February 1991, Vol. 19, No. 2.

^[79] TAPOL Bulletin, No. 119, October 1993, p. 1-2.

^[80] Walsh, Richard and Munster, George, Documents on Australian defence and foreign policy, 1968 - 1975, op. cit.

^[81] Barbedo de Magalhaes, Antonio, East Timor - A People Shattered By Lies & Silence, op. cit.

^[82] Reuters, ‘Text of UN chief’s statement on East Timor’, 3 September 1999.

^[83] East Timor backgrounder, ‘U.S. Policy Toward East Timor’, East Timor Action Network, 12 November 1997, http://www.etan.org/timor/uspolicy.htm .

^[84] ‘The East Timor Terror’, The Guardian, 22 April 1999.

^[85] Aglionby, John, ‘Secret papers reveal Timor pledge as sham’, The Observer, 13 June 1999.

^[86] ETAN Press Release, ‘Campaign of Terror Threatens to Derail August East Timor Vote’, op. cit.

^[87] Associated Newspapers, ‘Horror of the Timorese head hunters’, 6 September 1999.

^[88] Chomsky, Noam, ‘East Timor Is Not Yesterday’s Story’, ZNet Daily Commentary, ZNet, 23 October 1999, http://www.zmag.org . Associated Newspapers, ‘East Timor: curfew bid to end rampage’, 7 September 1999. Jenkins, Simon, ‘A faraway island: East Timor is not our concern. Robin Cook should have stayed at home’, The Times, 8 September 1999.

^[89] Cited in Chomsky, Noam, ‘East Timor: Comments On the Occasion of the Forthcoming APEC Summit’, ZNet, September 1999, http://www.zmag.org .

^[90] ‘Revealed: army’s plot to destroy a nation’, The Observer, 12 September 1999.

^[91] Lane, Max, ‘Generals Under Siege’, Indonesia East Timor Watch (journal of ASIET), No. 4, February-April 2000. The long-standing scorched earth policy plans, known as Operation Sapu Jagad (Clean Sweep) are also thoroughly documented in TAPOL, Indonesia’s Dirty War in East Timor, TAPOL Bulletin, 7 June 1999.

^[92] ‘Revealed: army’s plot to destroy a nation’, The Observer, 12 September 1999. Also see TAPOL Report, East Timor Under the Indonesian Jackboot: An Analysis of Indonesian Army Documents, No. 26, October 1998.

^[93] Cited in Chomsky, Noam, ‘East Timor: Comments On the Occasion of the Forthcoming APEC Summit’, op. cit.

^[94] Vulliamy, Ed and Barnett, Antony, ‘U.S. trained the butchers of Timor - Exclusive: Washington trained death squads in secret while Britain has spent £1m helping Indonesian army’, Observer International News Service and Guardian Weekly, 19 September 1999.

^[95] Chomsky, Noam, ‘East Timor Is Not Yesterday’s Story’, ZNet Daily Commentary, ZNet, 23 October 1999, http://www.zmag.org . For an extensive overview of the Western record concentrating on British complicity see Gilby, Nicholas, Arms Exports to Indonesia, Campaign Against Arms Trade, October 1999.

^[96] ETAN Press Release, ‘Documents Reveal Troop Levels Unchanged Despite Indonesian Claims’, op. cit.

^[97] Cited in Chomsky, Noam, ‘East Timor: Comments On the Occasion of the Forthcoming APEC Summit’, op. cit.

^[98] Ibid.

^[99] IPA Press Release, ‘East Timor: What’s Going On?’, Institute for Public Accuracy, Washington DC, 7 September 1999, http://www.accuracy.org/press.htm .

^[100]   This was the official position of the State Department a few days before the 30 August elections, which was generally reiterated for several days after the elections during approximately the first week of Indonesia’s “full scale offensive”. Cited in ibid.

^[101] Hipkin, John, ‘East Timor tests UN policing role’, letter to The Times, 8 September 1999.

^[102] Chomsky, Noam, ‘East Timor: Comments On the Occasion of the Forthcoming APEC Summit’, op. cit.

^[103] IPA Press Release, ‘East Timor and Economic Summit’, Institute for Public Accuracy, Washington DC, 10 September 1999, http://www.accuracy.org/press.htm . Also see Hartung, William D., ‘U.S. Arms Transfers to Indonesia’, World Policy Institute, http://www.worldpolicy.org/arms .

^[104] Gittings, John, ‘Plenty of promises, no action’, The Observer, 15 September 1999.

^[105] Ibid.

^[106] Nairn, Allan, ‘U.S. Complicity in Timor’, The Nation, 27 September 1999.

^[107] Gittings, John, ‘Plenty of promises, no action’, op. cit.

^[108] Chomsky, Noam, ‘East Timor Is Not Yesterday’s Story’, op. cit.; ETAN Press Release, ‘East Timor Action Network Urges Indonesia’s President  to Fulfil Commitments to East Timor by Stopping Militia Violence, Assisting Return of Refugees and Cooperating with Rights Investigations: ETAN Says Clinton Must Keep Military Assistance Suspension, Release Rights Data’, East Timor Action Network, 11 November 1999, http://www.etan.org .

^[109] ETAN Alert, ‘Action For A Free East Timor, An End To Military Repression In Indonesia: Urge Congress To Increase Aid For East Timor And Continue Cut-Off Of Support For Indonesia’s Military’, ETAN, March 2000, http://www.etan.org .

^[110] ETAN Press Release, ‘Returning Delegation Calls for U.S. and Indonesia to End East Timor Refugee Crisis’, East Timor Action Network, 11 May 2000, on the findings of a delegation of congressional staffers, human rights advocates, journalists, and a noted filmmaker Jakarta and Dili, East Timor, meeting with Indonesian NGOs, church leaders, government and military officials, as well as East Timorese NGO leaders and international aid workers. The delegation was composed of congressional staffers Jaron Bourke from the office of Congressman Dennis Kucinich (D-OH), Daniel McGlinchey from the office of Congressman Barney Frank (D-MA), and Jeannette Windon from the office of Congressman John Porter (R-IL); novelist, screenwriter and filmmaker John Sayles; human rights advocates Karen Orenstein from the East Timor Action Network, and Pamela Sexton and Charmain Mohamed from Peace Brigades International; Indonesian politics and history researcher Loren Ryter; and freelance journalists Carolyn Robinson (CNN International and Reuters Television) and Lisa Upton (Australian Broadcasting Corporation and SBS).

^[111] CIIR News, ‘East Timorese must be empowered’, Catholic Institute of International Relations, London, 25 June 2000. Also see CIIR News, ‘East Timorese refugees in West Timor’, 16 March 2000.

^[112] Cited in Chomsky, Noam, ‘East Timor: Comments On the Occasion of the Forthcoming APEC Summit’, op. cit.

^[113] Ibid.

^[114] Ibid.

^[115] Cited in Mokhiber, Russell and Weissman, Robert, ‘Timor: Business Interests Cause U.S. to Move Slowly’, Corporate Watch, Focus on the Corporation, 13 September 1999, http://www.corpwatch.org . Also in ‘With Other Goals in Indonesia, U.S. Moves Gently on East Timor’, New York Times, 9 September 1999.

^[116] Ibid.

^[117] New York Times, 9 September 1999.

^[118] Mokhiber, Russell and Weissman, Robert, ‘Timor: Business Interests Cause U.S. to Move Slowly’, op. cit.

^[119] Talbot, Karen, ‘Backing up Globalization with Military Might’, Covert Action Quarterly, No. 68, 1999. Covert Action Quarterly is an American political journal edited by former CIA officials.

^[120] CIIR News, ‘Economic causes of the violence in East Timor’, Catholic Institute of International Relations, London, 23 September 1999.

^[121] Pilger, John, ‘Under the influence: The real reason for the United Nations’ peacekeeping role in East Timor is to maintain Indonesian control’, The Guardian, 21 September 1991.

^[122] Woolcott, Richard, Australian Financial Review, January 1999.

^[123] For a concise overview see Mike Head, ‘East Timor and the politics of oil’, World Socialist Web Site, 23 January 1999, http://www.wsws.org . Also see CNRT, 1998; Gerald Tooth, Background Briefing, ‘Doing the Business in East Timor’, Radio National, 7/05/2000; George J. Aditjondro, ‘Cockroach Capitalism in East Timor’, Indonesia East Timor Watch, No. 4, February-April 2000.

^[124] The Observer, 29^th April 2001.

^[125] George J. Aditjondro, ‘Cockroach Capitalism in East Timor’, op. cit.

^[126] Dili Times, 19 November 1999.

^[127] George J. Aditjondro, ‘Cockroach Capitalism in East Timor’, op. cit.

^[128] Gerald Tooth, Background Briefing, ‘Doing the Business in East Timor’, op. cit

^[129] For an in-depth and scholarly overview of the 1999 crisis in East Timor and the West’s complicity, see Tanter, Richard & Selden, Mark & Shalom, Stephen (eds.), ‘East Timor, Indonesia and the World Community: Resistance, Repression and Responsibility, Bulletin of Concerned Asian Scholars, special double issue, Vol. 32, No. 1-2, January-June 2000. For a well-documented overview of the entire history of the crisis see Taylor, John G., East Timor: The Price of Freedom, Zed, London 2000.

Mr. Nafeez Ahmed is a political analyst and human rights activist based in London. He is Director of the Institute for Policy Research & Development and a Researcher at the Islamic Human Rights Commission.

Source:

by courtesy & © 2001 Nafeez Mosaddeq Ahmed

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