By the late 1950s, the U.S. was pouring $20 million per year into the Indonesian military. However, Sukarno wanted increasingly less to do with foreign “supporters.” He wanted to deprivatize all industrial and commercial holdings and return the wealth to the people. In keeping with this view, he leaned increasingly toward the left, allying himself with the growing Indonesian communist party PKI. In 1964, Sukarno refused to accept anymore aid from the U.S. government.
But his push for independence and socialization were his downfall. The CIA had begun to create and disseminate vicious anti-communist propaganda, while quietly continuing to funnel money and arms to the Indonesian military, all the while cultivating an alliance with the ultra-right-wing General Suharto.
In the global wings, U.S. corporations were circling like sharks, waiting to go in for the kill. For example, in 1965, Freeport Sulfur cut a private deal - with Henry Kissinger reportedly the deal broker - with Indian officials for a share in a proposed gold-copper mining, while Mobile Oil Indonesia entered into a contract with the Indonesian state oil company, Pertamina. Over a dozen other oil companies were waiting for their chance to pounce. All that was needed to complete the scheme was to get rid of Suharno to avoid the risk of most profits going to the Indonesian people.
The CIA helped Suharto plan and Stage a three-part coup. First, in 1965, all of the left-leaning military leaders were murdered and their deaths blamed on the PKI. Second, by convincing the public and Sukarno that the communists were trying to topple the government, Suharto got clearance to lead an all-out slaughter of communists. Between 1965-1966 an estimated 500,000 to one million men, women, and children known or suspected of being communists were massacred. Some were murdered in their beds, and a large percentage were killed with U.S.-supplied weapons. “Time” magazine reported during this period that “travelers from [some] areas tell of small rivers and streams that have been literally clogged with bodies.”
In the final step of the coup, Suharto deposed Sukarno. What followed was a feeding frenzy by Suharto, his henchmen and U.S. corporations. Like a warlord, Suharto approriated the best of everything he could for himself and his family - oil wells, timber lands, and sugar plantations. Thousands of acres of land were seized by companies with the blessings of Suharto. Tens of thousands of native people were killed, displaced, or “disappeared” to make way for mining, logging, and drilling operations.
The Freeport gold operation Kissinger helped orchestrate (and of which he is today the primary stockholder, as well as collecting $500,000 a year as its chief legal rep through his law firm Kissinger Associates) was the first company to be officially licensed after the coup. By 1969, nineteen U.S. oil companies were vying for the rights to the oil beneath Indonesia’s coastal waters, while Weyerhaueser, International Paper, and Boise Cascade were hacking down huge tracts of tropical forests in Sumatra as fast as they could hack. Meanwhile, now that the U.S. had “saved” the Indonesian people from communism, they forced the natives to work in the new factories and industrial operations at an average wage of 10 cents an hour.
It is certainly no coincidence that during the same “formative years” of the exploitation of Southeast Asia – 1965-1969 – that the war in Vietnam was being launched and prosecuted full force. Why? The main oil and gas shipping corridor from Indonesia to Japan (and thence to the U.S.) lays between Indonesia and Vietnam. It is interesting to note that Hainan Island also lies in this corridor – the same area that was the center of our recent spy plane incursion. This corridor is mentioned in Baker Institute reports on U.S. energy policy as being a “keep out of the hands of the Chinese at all costs” zone.
The main shipping corridor to India (another growing oil consumer at that time and now as well) lays between northwestern Indonesia and Cambodia, a fact which just may explain Henry Kissinger’s otherwise inexplicable decision during the Vietnam war to bomb neutral Cambodia back into the stone age (sending the country from thence into the nightmare of life under the Khmer Rouge).
While the U.S. companies ripped billions of dollars out of the Indonesian landscape, over 60% of the nation lived below the poverty line, many at the point of starvation. Yet, the Suharto government would always point to all of the new schools and the improved education system as proof of his compassion for his country. (Sound familiar?)
As always, when it comes to corporate greed, enough is never enough.
By 1974, the U.S. had lost Vietnam and, under Suharto’s despotic, corrupt rule, there were constant outbreaks of rebellion in Indonesia. Nowhere was the push for independence more well-organized and persistent than in East Timor. The progressive governor there decided to allow the formation of multiple political parties, which in turn lead to an intensified push for independence from the oppression of Suharto and foreign interests. The prospect of East Timorese autonomy dismayed Suharto because he and his friends had very valuable holdings in the region, including three oil wells.
If the push for independence succeeded, he might lose his “investments” (or should we say seizures). Worse yet, the push for independence could spread through the country, threatening other interests, such as Kissinger’s gold mine!
In 1975, Kissinger orchestrated a surprise invasion of East Timor by the Indonesian military (a fact supported by documents since revealed). Kissinger and Gerald Ford are believed (by many human rights observers and historians) to have been in on the planning of the invasion right up to the moment of initiation.
In any case, the two were visiting Suharto on December 6, 1975. The next day, just an hour or so after Air Force One had cleared Indonesian air space, headed for the U.S., the attack was launched and East Timor was declared Indonesia’s 27th province. In the process, over 200,000 East Timorese people were slaughtered. Since then, for the oil and mining industries in Indonesia, it has been business as usual.
The 1997-1998 Asian economic crisis hit Indonesia hard and contributed to the long-hoped-for ouster of Suharto. He was replaced in May of 1998 by B.J. Habibe. But the Indonesian people had had enough of being oppressed and abused, of receiving a tiny percentage of the money – if any – generated by the exploitation of their natural resources. The push for freedom which had sporadically continued in some areas since the terrors of 1975 had reached new, widespread dimensions.In 1999, rioting broke out in Aceh, Ambon, Borneo, and Irian Jaya – all areas heavily exploited by American corporations.
The threat of a new rebellion by East Timor, was, once more, particularly irksome to the corporations and to the oil-fed Indonesian government. A 38,000-square-mile zone called the Timor Gap had just been staked out off the coast of the country and promised to yield unheard of volumes of oil. Habibe was either colossally weak or extraordinarily Machiavellian (or, more likely, was advised by someone extraordinarily Machiavellian).
In a show of democratic good will, he allowed East Timor to hold a referendum to decide its independence. An overwhelming 80% of all voters opted for independence. But, as soon as the results had been tallied, the Indonesian government stormed in, just as they had when Suharno had pressed for nationalization. Thousands of East Timorese were massacred, while one-third of the country’s residents were forced out of the region and 80% of all structures in the little nation were destroyed. UNICEF reported in 1999 that 114 children had died in concentration camps in West Timor where an estimated 200,000 East Timorese were held in squalid conditions. Hundreds more children were abuducted, many for sexual slavery.
Habibe did nothing to stop the military. Meanwhile, he continued to scoop up the largesse of the oil companies. At the height of the slaughter, Philips Petroleum, which had heavy interests in East Timor, paid $2.9 million to the Indonesian government. According to human rights activist Jose Ramos Horta (a 1996 Nobel Peace Prize winner), Philips had at that point, never paid a cent to East Timor for the billions of barrels of oil it had removed from the country’s waters.
Many Timorese activists believe that the destruction of 80% of the country’s buildings was all part of the collusion between the Indonesian government and foreign powers, including the U.S. Since the tragedy, $1.2 billion in rebuilding funds have poured into East Timor, along with thousands of foreign “carpet baggers” eager to “rebuild.” It was 1975 all over again “This is not much different from the [previous] Indonesian invasion,” says Maria Bernadino of East Timor’s “Rebuild Watch.” “All they need to do now is to go around shooting people and torturing people.” And, as always, all the jobs in the “rebuilding” effort went (and are still going) to foreigners, while a staggering 95% of natives have, on occasion in the past few years, been unemployed.
In a last crowing outrage – and proof of the repeating patterns at work – as the political smoke subsided, in February 2000, Habibe’s recently-appointed replacement Wahid announced that he had named Henry Kissinger his advisor. Just one year later, at the first big shingidg thrown in Washington, D.C. for newly-sworn in Bush, Kissinger was also be there, ready to advise – and help begin a new reign of energy despotism…this time on U.S. soil. |
