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]