The Rape of East Timor: "Sounds Like Fun"

by John Pilger

Secret documents found in the Australian National Archives provide a glimpse of how one of the greatest crimes of the 20th century was executed and covered up. They also help us understand how and for whom the world is run.

The documents refer to East Timor, now known as Timor-Leste, and were written by diplomats in the Australian embassy in Jakarta. The date was November 1976, less than a year after the Indonesian dictator General Suharto seized the then Portuguese colony on the island of Timor.

The terror that followed has few parallels; not even Pol Pot succeeded in killing, proportionally, as many Cambodians as Suharto and his fellow generals killed in East Timor. Out of a population of almost a million, up to a third were extinguished.

This was the second holocaust for which Suharto was responsible. A decade earlier, in 1965, Suharto wrested power in Indonesia in a bloodbath that took more than a million lives. The CIA reported: "In terms of numbers killed, the massacres rank as one of the worst mass murders of the 20th century."

This was greeted in the Western press as "a gleam of light in Asia" (Time). The BBC's correspondent in South East Asia, Roland Challis, later described the cover-up of the massacres as a triumph of media complicity and silence; the "official line" was that Suharto had "saved" Indonesia from a communist takeover.

"Of course my British sources knew what the American plan was," he told me. "There were bodies being washed up on the lawns of the British consulate in Surabaya, and British warships escorted a ship full of Indonesian troops, so that they could take part in this terrible holocaust. It was only much later that we learned that the American embassy was supplying [Suharto with] names and ticking them off as they were killed. There was a deal, you see. In establishing the Suharto regime, the involvement of the [US-dominated] International Monetary Fund and the World Bank were part of it. That was the deal."

I have interviewed many of the survivors of 1965, including the acclaimed Indonesian novelist Pramoedya Ananta Toer, who bore witness to an epic of suffering "forgotten" in the West because Suharto was "our man". A second holocaust in resource-rich East Timor, an undefended colony, was almost inevitable.

In 1994, I filmed clandestinely in occupied East Timor; I found a land of crosses and unforgettable grief. In my film, Death of a Nation, there is a sequence shot on board an Australian aircraft flying over the Timor Sea. A party is in progress. Two men in suits are toasting each other in champagne. "This is a uniquely historical moment," babbles one of them, "that is truly, uniquely historical."

This is Australia's foreign minister, Gareth Evans. The other man is Ali Alatas, the principal mouthpiece of Suharto. It is 1989 and they are making a symbolic flight to celebrate a piratical deal they called a "treaty". This allowed Australia, the Suharto dictatorship and the international oil companies to divide the spoils of East Timor's oil and gas resources.

Thanks to Evans, Australia's then prime minister, Paul Keating -- who regarded Suharto as a father figure -- and a gang that ran Australia's foreign policy establishment, Australia distinguished itself as the only western country formally to recognise Suharto's genocidal conquest. The prize, said Evans, was "zillions" of dollars.

Members of this gang reappeared the other day in documents found in the National Archives by two researchers from Monash University in Melbourne, Sara Niner and Kim McGrath. In their own handwriting, senior officials of the Department of Foreign Affairs mock reports of the rape, torture and execution of East Timorese by Indonesian troops. In scribbled annotations on a memorandum that refers to atrocities in a concentration camp, one diplomat wrote: "sounds like fun". Another wrote: "sounds like the population are in raptures."

Referring to a report by the Indonesian resistance, Fretilin, that describes Indonesia as an "impotent" invader, another diplomat sneered: "If 'the enemy was impotent', as stated, how come they are daily raping the captured population? Or is the former a result of the latter?"

The documents, says Sarah Niner, are "vivid evidence of the lack of empathy and concern for human rights abuses in East Timor" in the Department of Foreign Affairs. "The archives reveal that this culture of cover-up is closely tied to the DFA's need to recognise Indonesian sovereignty over East Timor so as to commence negotiations over the petroleum in the East Timor Sea."

This was a conspiracy to steal East Timor's oil and gas. In leaked diplomatic cables in August 1975, the Australian Ambassador to Jakarta, Richard Woolcott, wrote to Canberra: "It would seem to me that the Department [of Minerals and Energy] 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 Portuguese Timor." Woolcott revealed that he had been briefed on Indonesia's secret plans for an invasion. He cabled Canberra that the government should "assist public understanding in Australia" to counter "criticism of Indonesia".

In 1993, I interviewed C. Philip Liechty, a former senior CIA operations officer in the Jakarta embassy during the invasion of East Timor. He told me: "Suharto was given the green light [by the US] to do what he did. We supplied them with everything they needed [from] M16 rifles [to] US military logistical support ... maybe 200,000 people, almost all of them non-combatants died. When the atrocities began to appear in the CIA reporting, the way they dealt with these was to cover them up as long as possible; and when they couldn't be covered up any longer, they were reported in a watered-down, very generalised way, so that even our own sourcing was sabotaged."

I asked Liechty what would have happened had someone spoken out. "Your career would end," he replied. He said his interview with me was one way of making amends for "how badly I feel".

The gang in the Australian embassy in Jakarta appear to suffer no such anguish. One of the scribblers on the documents, Cavan Hogue, told the Sydney Morning Herald: "It does look like my handwriting. If I made a comment like that, being the cynical bugger that I am, it would certainly have been in the spirit of irony and sarcasm. It's about the [Fretilin] press release, not the Timorese." Hogue said there were "atrocities on all sides".

As one who reported and filmed the evidence of genocide, I find this last remark especially profane. The Fretilin "propaganda" he derides was accurate. The subsequent report of the United Nations on East Timor describes thousands of cases of summary execution and violence against women by Suharto's Kopassus special forces, many of whom were trained in Australia. "Rape, sexual slavery and sexual violence were tools used as part of the campaign designed to inflict a deep experience of terror, powerlessness and hopelessness upon pro-independence supporters," says the UN.

Cavan Hogue, the joker and "cynical bugger", was promoted to senior ambassador and eventually retired on a generous pension. Richard Woolcott was made head of the Department of Foreign Affairs in Canberra and, in retirement, has lectured widely as a "respected diplomatic intellectual".

Journalists watered at the Australian embassy in Jakarta, notably those employed by Rupert Murdoch, who controls almost 70 per cent of Australia's capital city press. Murdoch's correspondent in Indonesia was Patrick Walters, who reported that Jakarta's "economic achievements" in East Timor were "impressive", as was Jakarta's "generous" development of the blood-soaked territory. As for the East Timorese resistance, it was "leaderless" and beaten. In any case, "no one was now arrested without proper legal procedures".

In December 1993, one of Murdoch's veteran retainers, Paul Kelly, then editor-in-chief of The Australian, was appointed by Foreign Minister Evans to the Australia-Indonesia Institute, a body funded by the Australian government to promote the "common interests" of Canberra and the Suharto dictatorship. Kelly led a group of Australian newspaper editors to Jakarta for an audience with the mass murderer. There is a photograph of one of them bowing.

East Timor won its independence in 1999 with the blood and courage of its ordinary people. The tiny, fragile democracy was immediately subjected to a relentless campaign of bullying by the Australian government which sought to manoeuvre it out of its legal ownership of the sea bed's oil and gas revenue. To get its way, Australia refused to recognise the jurisdiction of the International Court of Justice and the Law of the Sea and unilaterally changed the maritime boundary in its own favour.

In 2006, a deal was finally signed, Mafia-style, largely on Australia's terms. Soon afterwards, Prime Minister Mari Alkitiri, a nationalist who had stood up to Canberra, was effectively deposed in what he called an "attempted coup" by "outsiders". The Australian military, which had "peace-keeping" troops in East Timor, had trained his opponents.

In the 17 years since East Timor won its independence, the Australian government has taken nearly $5 billion in oil and gas revenue - money that belongs to its impoverished neighbour.

Australia has been called America's "deputy sheriff" in the South Pacific. One man with the badge is Gareth Evans, the foreign minister filmed lifting his champagne glass to toast the theft of East Timor's natural resources. Today, Evans is a lectern-trotting zealot promoting a brand of war-mongering known as "RTP", or "Responsibility to Protect". As co-chair of a New York-based "Global Centre", he runs a US-backed lobby group that urges the "international community" to attack countries where "the Security Council rejects a proposal or fails to deal with it in a reasonable time". The man for the job, as the East Timorese might say.

REPORT: Henry Kissinger’s Long History Of Complicity In Human Rights Abuses

by Jaid Jilani

Think Progress

Earlier this month, audio tapes from the Nixon White House were revealed to the public that captured a shocking exchange between Nixon and then Secretary of State Henry Kissinger. In the tapes, Kissinger responds to an appeal made by Israeli leader Golda Meir to Soviet leaders to allow the emigration of Russian Jews to her country. He tells Nixon that the “emigration of Jews from the Soviet Union is not an objective of American foreign policy. And if they put Jews into gas chambers in the Soviet Union, it is not an American concern. Maybe a humanitarian concern.”

Since these comments were revealed to the public, there has been an uproar in the media, with the New York Times writing that the tapes showed that Kissinger was “brutally dismissive” of human rights concerns related to Soviet Jews.

The former secretary of state has gone on a media offensive, attempting to save his public image among the media furor. In an op-ed piece published Sunday, Kissinger wrote that he was sorry he “made that remark 37 years ago,” and argued that it was taken out of context. Curiously, the Anti-Defamation League’s Abraham Foxman, while condemning the comments, also rose to Kissinger’s defense, saying, “I think what Kissinger said is horrendous, offensive, painful, but also I’m not willing to judge him. The atmosphere in the Nixon White House was one of bigotry, prejudice, anti-Semitism, the intimidation of the anti-Semitism, the stories, the bigotry.” David Harris of the American Jewish Committee offered a similar defense: “Perhaps Kissinger felt that, as a Jew, he had to go the extra mile to prove to the president that there was no question of where his loyalties lay.”

But what both the press that is reporting about Kissinger’s comments and what his most passionate defenders are omitting is that these revealed remarks only the tip of the iceberg when it comes to the former secretary of state’s complicity in human rights violations. The mentality revealed in his remarks about Soviet Jews are not an aberration but a major feature of his approach to foreign policy: disregarding human rights in pursuit of other strategic goals. Kissinger has a long history of complicity in major human rights abuses in every corner of the globe, one that is rarely reported on in the press in its reports on the former secretary of state. Here are just a few of these abuses:

- Bangladesh: In 1971, Bangladesh, which was at the time East Pakistan, declared its independence from Pakistan. The Pakistani military responded with a brutal military campaign that included massive killings and the estimated systematic raping of nearly 200,000 Bangladeshi women. When Daka Consul General Archer Blood and other American diplomatic staff began to protest the Pakistani army’s behavior to Washington, Nixon and Kissinger had him dismissed. During the height of the atrocities, Kissinger sent a message to Pakistan General Yahya Khan, congratulating him on his “delicacy and tact” in his military campaigns in Bangladesh. When Kissinger received word that massive famines were going to spring up in the country in 1971, he warned USAID to try to avoid helping, saying that Bangladesh was “not necessarily our basket case.” Soon after becoming secretary of state, Kissinger downgraded the American diplomatic staff who had signed onto a protest of Pakistani atrocities in 1971.

- Cambodia: Kissinger was one of the chief masterminds of the Nixon administration’s secret and illegal bombing campaign of Cambodia — he wanted the bombing of “anything that flies, on anything that moves” and warned that it must be secretly done to avoid congressional scrutiny — the extent of which was not discovered until President Bill Clinton declassified related documents in 2000. By the end of the American bombing campaign of Cambodia, the country was perhaps the “most heavily bombed country in history.” The bombings killed more than a half a million people, and were a major factor in the rise of the genocidal Khmer Rouge.

- Chile: In 1973, Kissinger aided and abetted a right-wing military faction that deposed the democratically elected government of Salvador Allende. The faction then installed the dictator General Augusto Pinochet, who went on to torture and/or murder tens of thousands of peaceful dissidents in the country. “I don’t see why we need to stand by and watch a country go Communist due to the irresponsibility of its people,” Kissinger said in rationalizing his actions, falsely accusing Allende of being a communist and essentially declaring that the United States should have the power to decide Chile’s government. Due to his complicity in bringing Pinochet to power, Kissinger was summoned for questioning and has arrest warrants out in his name in Chile, Argentina, and France. Since the warrants were issued he has not returned to any of those three countries.

- Indonesia and East Timor: In 1975, President Gerald Ford and Kissinger met with Indonesian’s leader, General Suharto. During the meeting, Ford and Kissinger essentially gave “full approval” to Suharto to invade neighboring East Timor. In the resulting invasion, hundreds of thousands of Timorese civilians were massacred. Kissinger repeatedly denied that he had such conversations with Suharto, but these denials were found to be false after the declassification of government documents in 2001.

- Iraq: In 1975 Kissinger both encouraged a Kurdish revolt against Saddam Hussein and then abandoned the rebels to be killed following invocations from the Shah of Iran. Bob Woodward’s book State of Denial revealed that Kissinger was a major Iraq policy advisor to President George W. Bush and Vice President Dick Cheney. He warned Bush speechwriter Michael Gerson of the same analogy he used during the Vietnam years, that troop withdrawals would be like “salted peanuts to the American public; the more U.S. troops come home, the more will be demanded.” Woodward writes that when Gerson asked Kissinger why he supported the war, he replied, “Because Afghanistan wasn’t enough,’ … In the conflict with radical Islam, he said, they want to humiliate us. ‘And we need to humiliate them’ … In Manhattan, this position got him into trouble, particularly at cocktail parties, he noted with a smile.”

- Vietnam: Kissinger, in a possible violation of the Logan Act, helped scuttle peace talks in 1968, prolonging the Vietnam War to advantage Richard Nixon in the presidential election. This extension of the war cost thousands of American lives and those of more than a million people in Indochina.

Viewed with the context of Kissinger’s actions while he was a senior official in multiple American administrations, his comments about Soviet Jews are hardly surprising. Unfortunately, most of the major media’s reporting about Kissinger’s comments does not include this history of complicity in human rights abuses.

In fact, despite his complicity in these abuses, the former secretary of state continues to be a lauded public figure in the United States. He is regularly uncritically featured on major news programs, was recently honored at the State Department, and was even cast as a cartoon character’s voice on a children’s TV show. If history is any judge, this latest revelation about Kissinger will soon be forgotten by major media and elites in the public sphere. But that does not change the actual facts and Kissinger’s long, sordid history of human rights abuses.

Obama’s Bad Prescription for Indonesia

by Amy Goodman

Truthdig

President Barack Obama dedicated the signing of health care legislation to a number of people, including his mother, S. Ann Dunham Soetoro, who, he said, “argued with insurance companies even as she battled cancer in her final days.” The health care legislative process and its frenetic endgame prompted the president to postpone a trip to the country where his mother raised him for several years of his childhood: Indonesia. While his health care bill is considered by many a huge step forward, Obama is simultaneously, and with far less scrutiny, potentially taking a huge step backward with Indonesia.

News is breaking in Indonesia about the role of the Indonesian military in the murder of political activists in the province of Aceh last year, in the lead-up to elections.

This is happening while the White House is engaged in fierce behind-the-scenes negotiations with Congress on whether to restore aid to the Indonesian military, including one of its most notorious elements, the special-forces command known as Kopassus. Military aid to Indonesia was suspended in 1999 after its military, the TNI, unleashed a campaign of terror on the people of East Timor. In 2005, the Bush administration partially restored military aid, but conspicuously denied aid and training to the Kopassus, thanks largely to the efforts of grass-roots activists and the intervention of Sen. Patrick Leahy, D-Vt.

My colleague Allan Nairn, reporting from Indonesia, broke the story this past week on “Democracy Now!,” the news hour I host, and on his blog, allannairn.com. He reported that the TNI “assassinated a series of civilian activists during 2009 ... as part of a secret government program, authorized from Jakarta, coordinated in part by an active-duty, U.S.-trained Kopassus special-forces general who has just acknowledged on the record that his TNI men had a role in the killings.” Aceh is a resource-rich province at the western tip of Indonesia. After the devastation Aceh suffered in the tsunami of 2004, the government reached a political settlement with the Free Aceh Movement. The elections in 2009 were a result of that. Nairn details two of the eight assassinations of members of the pro-independence Partai Aceh, citing numerous sources, most of whom, fearing for their safety, remain unnamed.

Allan and I are no strangers to the Indonesian military. In 1991, we survived a massacre in East Timor. East Timor was invaded by Indonesia in 1975, with the full support of President Gerald Ford and Secretary of State Henry Kissinger. In the next quarter-century, the Indonesian military killed more than 200,000 Timorese, a third of the population. Allan and I went there to report on the situation and ended up covering a march to a cemetery in Timor’s capital city, Dili. As the mass of unarmed civilians was hemmed in by the cemetery walls, Indonesian soldiers marched in formation, their U.S.-supplied M-16s at the ready, and without warning, without provocation, opened fire on the crowd. Allan and I were beaten to the ground. Swinging their M-16s like baseball bats, the soldiers fractured Allan’s skull. We survived, but more than 270 Timorese were killed that day. We managed to escape, and to report on the massacre. While I was denied entry in 1999, Allan sneaked in to Timor and reported on the TNI atrocities there, as they burned much of East Timor to the ground. They arrested Allan, but he continued reporting from prison, giving new meaning to “cell phone.”

Since Allan broke the news this past week, the Indonesian press has been buzzing with the allegations. Air Vice Marshal Sagom Tamboen, a spokesman for the TNI, told the Jakarta Globe that the military is considering legal action against Nairn. Nairn told me, “I welcome this threat from TNI, a force which has murdered many hundreds of thousands, and challenge them to arrest me so that we can face off in open court.”

Human Rights Watch recently wrote a letter to Secretary of State Hillary Clinton and Secretary of Defense Robert Gates, outlining serious concerns about possible re-engagement with Kopassus. ETAN, the East Timor and Indonesia Action Network, has launched a petition campaign at etan.org to block the funding.

Much of the political class in the United States is now chattering and twittering about the health care bill’s passage into law, and the potential political consequences. They should spend time focusing on Obama’s plans for Indonesia, and the possibility that he may restore funding and training for one of the world’s most notorious, human-rights-abusing military forces, the Indonesian Kopassus.

Denis Moynihan contributed research to this column.

Amy Goodman is the host of “Democracy Now!,” a daily international TV/radio news hour airing on more than 800 stations in North America. She is the author of “Breaking the Sound Barrier,” recently released in paperback and now a New York Times best-seller.

A travesty of omissions

by John Pilger

The New Statesman

It is ten years since East Timor’s referendum on freedom from Indonesia – but, as the gaps in a new film show, the western cover-up continues

On 30 August it will be a decade since the people of East Timor defied the genocidal occupiers of their country to take part in a United Nations referendum and vote for their freedom and independence. A "scorched earth" campaign by the Indonesian dictatorship followed, adding to a toll of carnage that had begun 24 years earlier when Indonesia invaded tiny East Timor with the secret support of Australia, Britain and the United States. According to a committee of the Australian parliament, "at least 200,000" died under the occupation, a third of the population.

Filming undercover in 1993, I found crosses almost everywhere: great black crosses etched against the sky, crosses on peaks, crosses in tiers on the hillsides, crosses beside the road. They littered the earth and crowded the eye. A holocaust happened in East Timor, and it tells us more about rapacious western power, its propaganda and true aims, than even current colonial adventures. The historical record is unambiguous that the US, Britain and Australia conspired to accept such a scale of bloodshed as the price of securing south-east Asia's "greatest prize" with its "hoard of natural resources".

Philip Liechty, the CIA operations officer in Jakarta at the time of the invasion, told me: “I saw the intelligence. There were people being herded into school buildings by Indonesian soldiers and the buildings set on fire. The place was a free fire zone . . . We sent them everything that you need to fight a major war against somebody who doesn't have any guns. None of that got out . . . [The Indonesian dictator] Suharto was given the green light to do what he did."

Britain supplied Suharto with machine-guns and Hawk fighter-bombers, which, regardless of fake "assurances", were used against defenceless East Timorese villages. The critical role was played by Australia: this was Australia's region. During the Second World War, the people of East Timor had fought heroically to stop a Japanese invasion of Australia. Their betrayal was spelled out in a series of leaked cables sent by the then Australian ambassador in Jakarta, Richard Woolcott, prior to and during the Indonesian invasion in 1975.

Echoing Henry Kissinger, he urged "a pragmatic rather than a principled stand", reminding his government that it would "more readily" exploit the oil and gas wealth beneath the Timor Sea with Indonesia than with its rightful owners, the East Timorese. "What Indonesia now looks to from Australia", he wrote, as Suharto's special forces slaughtered their way across East Timor, "is some understanding of their attitude and possible action to assist public understanding in Australia".

Two months earlier, Indonesian troops had murdered five newsmen from Australian TV near the East Timorese town of Balibo. On the day the capital, Dili, was seized, they shot dead a sixth journalist, Roger East, throwing his body into the sea. Australian intelligence had known 12 hours in advance that the journalists in Balibo faced imminent death, and the government did nothing. Intercepted at the Australian spy base Defence Signals Directorate near Darwin, which supplies US and British intelligence, the warning was suppressed so that it would not expose the western governments' part in the conspiracy to invade, or the official lie that the journalists had been killed in "crossfire".

The then secretary of the Australian defence department, Arthur Tange, a notorious cold warrior, demanded that the government should not even inform the journalists' families of their murders. No minister protested to the Indonesians.
This criminal connivance is documented in Death in Balibo, Lies in Canberra, by Desmond Ball, a renowned intelligence specialist, and Hamish McDonald.

The Australian government's complicity in the journalists' murder and, above all, in a bloodbath greater proportionally than that perpetrated by Pol Pot in Cambodia has been cut from a major new film, Balibo, which has begun its international release in Australia. Claiming to be a "true story", it is a travesty of omissions. In eight of 16 drafts of his screenplay, David Williamson, the distinguished Australian playwright, graphically depicted the chain of true events that began with the original radio intercepts by Australian intelligence and went all the way to Prime Minister Gough Whitlam, who believed East Timor should be "integrated" into Indonesia. This is reduced in the film to a fleeting image of Whitlam and Suharto in a newspaper wrapped around fish and chips.

Williamson's original script described the effect of the cover-up on the families of the murdered journalists, their anger and frustration at being denied information and their despair at Canberra's scandalous decision to have the journalists' ashes buried in Jakarta with Ambassador Woolcott, the arch-apologist, reading the oration. What the government feared if the ashes came home was public outrage, directed at the west's client in Jakarta. All this was cut.

The "true story" is largely fictitious. Finely dramatised, acted and located, the film is reminiscent of the genre of Vietnam movies, such as The Deer Hunter (1978), which artistically airbrushed the truth of that atrocious war from popular history. Not surprisingly, Balibo has mostly been lauded in the Australian media, which took minimal interest in East Timor's suffering during the long years of Indonesian occupation. So enamoured of General Suharto was the country's only national daily, the Australian, owned by Rupert Murdoch, that its editor-in-chief Paul Kelly led Australia's principal newspaper editors to Jakarta to shake the tyrant's hand.

I asked Balibo's director, Robert Connolly, why he had cut the original script and omitted all government complicity. He replied that the film had "generated huge discussion in the media and the Australian government" and in that way "Australia would be best held accountable". Milan Kundera's truism comes to mind: "The struggle of people against power is the struggle of memory against forgetting."