a short history lesson on E. Timor
We helped them descend into hell
==========================
As the people of East Timor face genocide at the hands of their
Indonesian oppressors, the west seems to forget how this crisis
began, writes John Pilger
September 13, 1999
New Statesman
newstatesman.co.uk
It had been a long night of waiting for the Indonesian troop
convoy to pass. Two of us then crossed the border into East Timor
clandestinely, through a forest of dead, petrified trees that
appeared as silhouetted needles around which skeins of fine white
sand drifted, like mist. As the sun rose, there stood the surreal
crosses.
They were almost everywhere; great black crosses etched against
the sky, crosses on peaks, crosses in tiers on the hillsides,
crosses beside the road, overlooking white slabs. They littered
the earth and crowded the eye. As we trudged through dense scrub,
we came upon them: on a riverbank, an escarpment, commanding all
before them. The inscriptions on some were normal: those of
generations departed in proper time and sequence. However, the
dates of these were all prior to 1975, when proper time and
sequence ended. The majority revealed the extinction of whole
families, wiped out in the space of a year, a month, a day: "RIP
Mendoca, Crismina, 7.6.77 . . . Filismina . . . 7.6.77 . . . Ada-
lino . . . 7.6.77 . . . Alisa . . . 7.6.77 . . . Rosa . . .
7.6.77 . . . Anita . . . 7.6.77."
I carried with me hand-drawn maps of other, unmarked graves where
some of those murdered by Indonesian troops at the 1991 Santa
Cruz massacre had been buried; I had no idea that so much of the
country was a vast grave, marked by paths that ended abruptly,
and fields inexplicably bulldozed, and earth inexplicably covered
with tarmac, and villages that are not so much human entities as
memorials.
Kraras is one of them. It is known as the "village of the
widows", because the whole community of 287 people was
slaugh-tered by the Indonesians. In a meticulous hand that
carried on from a faded typewriter ribbon, a priest recorded the
name, age, cause of death and date and place of the killing of
every victim. In the last column, he identified the Indonesian
battalion responsible for each murder. I have the document, which
I always find difficult to put down, as if the blood of East
Timor is fresh on its pages. Like the ubiquitous crosses, it
records the Calvary of perhaps 40 families, among them the dos
Anjos family.
In 1987, I interviewed Arthur ("Steve") Stevenson, a former
Australian commando who had fought the Japanese in Timor. He told
me the story of Celestino dos Anjos, whose ingenuity and courage
had saved his life, and other Australian lives, behind Japanese
lines - the kind of man to whom leaflets dropped by the Royal
Australian Air Force were addressed, as the Australians
retreated, leaving the Timorese to their fate. "We shall never
forget you," the leaflets said.
In 1986, Steve Stevenson received a letter from Celestino's son,
Virgillo, who was the same age as his own son. He wrote that his
father had survived the Indonesian invasion in 1975, but he went
on: "In August 1983, Indonesian forces entered our village,
Kraras. They looted, burned and massacred, with fighter aircraft
overhead. On 27 September 1983, they made my father and my wife
dig their own graves and they machine-gunned them. My wife was
pregnant." On the Kraras list, I found the name of Cacildo dos
Anjos. The priest has recorded him as "aged 2 . . . shot". He was
Celestino's grandson, the last to be executed.
The Kraras list is among my most valued possessions. Not only is
it true evidence of genocide, it is an extraordinary political
document that shames Indonesia's Faustian partners in the western
democracies. The priest, whose name I shall not use because he
may still be there, wrote on the final page the following appeal
to the world: "The international community continues to miss the
point in the case of East Timor. There is only one crime . . . To
the capitalist governors of the world, Timor's petroleum smells
better than Timorese blood and tears. It even seems as if the
United Nations itself is easing the path of the aggressor, giving
it the time and conditions necessary to execute the ethnic and
cultural genocide of the Timorese people and, finally, declare
that East Timor is definitely integrated into the Indonesian
republic . . . Who will take the truth to the world?"
In my experience, East Timor is the greatest, most enduring crime
of the late 20th century. Not only do the horrors committed by
the Suharto dynasty lay claim to this distinction -
proportionally, not even Pol Pot put to death as many people -
but no other recent crime against humanity, from the American
devastation of Indochina to Rwanda, offers such a comprehensive
charge sheet. "Descent into violence" has become the most worked
media cliche of the past few weeks, as if a collective, almost
wilful amnesia prevents the current crop of western politicians
and commentators remembering when the descent really began, and
who were Indonesia's partners in its crime.
On 7 December 1975, when Air Force One, carrying President Ford
and his secretary of state, Henry Kissinger, had climbed out of
Indonesian airspace, Indonesian paratroopers dropped on Dili,
East Timor's capital, and the bloodbath began.
"[Ford and Kissinger] came and gave Suharto the green light,"
Philip Liechty, the CIA desk officer in Jakarta at the time, told
me. "The invasion was delayed two days so they could get the hell
out. We were ordered to give the Indonesians everything they
wanted, and US arms were shipped straight to East Timor without
Congress knowing. I saw all the hard intelligence; the place was
a free fire zone . . . and all because we didn't want some little
country being neutral or leftist at the UN."
There were other, more pressing reasons. "With the region's
richest hoard of natural resources," wrote Richard Nixon in 1967,
"Indonesia is the greatest prize in South-east Asia."
When Suharto came to power in the mid-1960s, exterminating more
than half a million Indonesians in what a CIA report called "the
greatest single mass murder of modern times", Michael Stewart,
Harold Wilson's mild-mannered foreign secretary, visited Jakarta
and reported that the "economic chaos of Indonesia" promised
"great potential opportunities for British exporters . . . I
think we ought to take an active part and try to secure a slice
of the cake ourselves". The Americans, Japanese, Europeans,
Australians, Singaporeans, Koreans and Thais all had the same
idea.
The petroleum referred to by the Kraras priest comes from the
Timor Sea, believed to contain the seventh-largest oil and gas
reserves on Earth. Gareth Evans, the former Australian foreign
minister who toasted his Indonesian counterpart in champagne as
they flew over the Timor Sea in 1989, having signed a piratical
treaty to share the spoils below, was asked to estimate the
potential profit. "Zillions," he said. Since then, western
multinationals have, in effect, annexed East Timorese maritime
territory.
The British empire was reborn in Indonesia. Britain is the
largest investor in chemicals, paper, electricity and weapons.
Name a major British multinational and you can bet it is
"investing" in Indonesia. The list ranges from Shell and BP, to
the BOC Group and Marks & Spencer, to Unilever and Glaxo
Wellcome, to Rio Tinto, which has a huge holding in the $3
billion Freeport copper-and-gold mining operation in West Papua -
a territory virtually handed to Indonesia in 1960 by the United
Nations.
However, it is the British war industry that has provided the
Jakarta gang with its most vital prop since 1978. In that year,
the then Labour foreign secretary David Owen dismissed estimates
of East Timorese dead as "exaggerated" and approved the first
Hawk fighter-bombers to Indonesia. As many as 40 Hawks, made by
British Aerospace, have since been supplied or will be in the
near future. Then there are the Wasp helicopters, Sea Wolf and
Rapier SAM missiles, Tribal class frigates, battlefield
communication systems, seabed mine disposal equipment, armoured
vehicles, a fully equipped Institute of Technology for the
Indonesian army, and training for Indonesian officers in Britain.
The Blair government, clearly guided by its crusading leader's
"new kind of moral internationalism", has been the biggest arms
suppliers. Last year, Blair's ministers approved the sale of
£6.25 billion in arms throughout the world, most of it to
countries with appalling human rights records. This figure was
never reached by the Tories and is surpassed only by the United
States.
The shame of East Timor's betrayal might finally enlighten those
still smitten by the ridiculous notion that their Labour
government is an "ethical" agent. While the Indonesian military
and its death squads "cleanse" Dili, Blair has refused to use
Britain's considerable clout. On Tuesday, the Foreign Office
minister, John Battle, refused even to consider economic
sanctions or to freeze arms sales. On Newsnight, his colleague,
Tony Lloyd, appeared as a memorably unctuous apologist for the
government's complicity.
None, however, can match Robin Cook who, in 1994, told parliament
that Hawk aircraft had been "observed on bombing runs in East
Timor in most years since 1984". He then denied his own words
and, once in government, allowed his Foreign Office underlings to
lie that no Hawks were operational in East Timor. The 1998 Human
Rights Report, produced by the Foreign Office, makes not a single
reference to arms sales, while there is a colour photograph of
Cook smiling at Suharto, the genocidist.
Britain and the United States could probably stop the Indonesians
in their tracks if they wanted to. At this weekend's meeting of
the Asia Pacific Economic Conference (Apec) in New Zealand,
President Bill Clinton could say that the £27 billion economic
aid promised to restore Indonesia's collapsed economy, funds that
the US controls, would be withheld until Indonesian troops left
East Timor, taking their militia goons with them. The precedent
is South Africa. It was only when Congress forced Ronald Reagan
to end "constructive engagement" with the Pretoria regime and
forced American capital to pull out of South Africa that F W de
Klerk made his historic compromises.
If Blair announced an immediate freeze on all investment, loans
and especially arms sales to Jakarta, the rapid-firing
machine-guns supplied to the Kopassus Gestapo by British
Aerospace would not stop firing, but the psychological and
political impact would be immense; the Indonesian military,
already unsure of itself since the resignation of Suharto, would
begin to be isolated.
Without pressure from their godfathers in Washington and London,
the Indonesians are telling the United Nations and the world to
go to hell; and the UN is scuttling, which means, in many
respects, the beginning of its demise. Public opinion in the west
is a greater force for change than most people realise. Are we
going to let the East Timorese people, bravest of the brave, who
have defied the genocidists and come out to vote for democracy
and freedom, fall before our eyes? Are we really going to let the
Blairs and Battles and Lloyds and Cooks get away with their
cynicism and complicity, applied in our name?
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