aviation1965

[aviation1965]

The Retrospective

(From  Le Monde diplomatique, October, 1999).

It is not easy to write with feigned calm and dispassion about the events that have been unfolding in East Timor. Horror and shame are compounded by the fact that the crimes are so familiar and could so easily have been terminated by the international community a long time ago.

Indonesia invaded the territory in December 1975, relying on US diplomatic support and arms, used illegally, but with secret authorisation from Washington; there were even new arms shipments sent under the cover of an official “embargo”. There was no need to threaten bombing or even sanctions. It would have sufficed for the US and its allies to withdraw their active participation, and inform their close associates in the Indonesian military command that the atrocities must be terminated and the territory granted the right of self-determination that has been upheld by the United Nations and the International Court of Justice. We cannot undo the past, but we should at least be willing to recognise what we have done, and face the moral responsibility of saving the remnants and providing ample reparations – a small gesture of compensation for terrible crimes.

The latest chapter in this painful story of betrayal and complicity opened right after the referendum of 30 August 1999 when the population voted overwhelmingly for independence. At once, atrocities mounted sharply, organised and directed by the Indonesian army. The UN mission (Unamet) gave its appraisal on 11 September: “The evidence for a direct link between the militia and the military is beyond dispute and has been overwhelmingly documented by Unamet over the last four months. But the scale and thoroughness of the destruction of East Timor in the past week has demonstrated a new level of open participation of the military in the implementation of what was previously a more veiled operation.”

The mission warned that “the worst may be yet to come… It cannot be ruled out that these are the first stages of a genocidal campaign to stamp out the East Timorese problem by force” (1).

John Roosa, historian on Indonesia and official observer of the vote, described the situation starkly: “Given that the pogrom was so predictable, it was easily preventable… But in the weeks before the ballot, the Clinton Administration refused to discuss with Australia and other countries the formation (of an international force). Even after the violence erupted, the administration dithered for days” (2). Finally it was compelled by international (primarily Australian) and domestic pressure to make some timid gestures. Even these ambiguous messages sufficed to induce the Indonesian generals to reverse course and accept an international presence.

While President Clinton “dithered,” almost half the population were expelled from their homes, according to UN estimates, and thousands murdered (3). The air force that was able to carry out pin-point destruction of civilian targets in Novi Sad, Belgrade and Ponceva lacked the capacity to drop food to people facing starvation in the mountains to which they had been driven by the terror of the Indonesian forces, armed and trained by the US and its no less cynical allies.

The recent events will evoke bitter memories among those who do not take refuge, like the so-called international community, in “intentional ignorance”. We are witnessing a shameful replay of events of 20 years ago. After carrying out a huge slaughter in 1977-78 with the decisive support of the Carter Administration, Indonesia felt confident enough to permit a brief visit by members of the Jakarta diplomatic corps, among them the US ambassador, Edward Masters. They recognised that an enormous humanitarian catastrophe had been created. The aftermath was described by Benedict Anderson, one of the most distinguished scholars on Indonesia. Anderson testified before the UN that “For nine long months” of starvation and terror, “Ambassador Masters deliberately refrained, even within the walls of the State Department, from proposing humanitarian aid to East Timor.” He was waiting “until the generals in Jakarta gave him the green light” – until, as an internal State Department document recorded, they felt “secure enough to permit foreign visitors” (4).

One gruesome illustration of US complicity was the coup that brought General Suharto to power in 1965. Army-led massacres slaughtered hundreds of thousands in a few months, mostly landless peasants. The powerful communist party was destroyed. The achievement elicited unrestrained euphoria in the West and fulsome praise for the Indonesian “moderates”, Suharto and his military accomplices, who had cleansed society and opened it to foreign plunder. Robert McNamara, then Secretary of Defence, informed Congress that US military aid and training had “paid dividends” – including half a million corpses. A congressional report concluded they were “enormous dividends”. McNamara informed President Johnson that that US military assistance “encouraged (the army) to move against the communist party when the opportunity was presented.” Contacts with Indonesian military officers, including university programmes, were “very significant factors in determining the favourable orientation of the new Indonesian political elite” – the army (5).

So matters continued during 35 years of intensive military aid, training, and communication. As Indonesian troops and their back-ups were burning Dili, and the killings and destruction had reached new heights, the Pentagon announced that a US-Indonesian “training exercise” on rescue and humanitarian actions in disaster situations had ended on 25 August (6), five days before the referendum. The lessons of this cooperation were rapidly put into practice.

A few months earlier, shortly after the massacre of dozens of refugees who had taken shelter in a church in Liquica, Admiral Dennis Blair, the US Pacific Commander, had assured General Wiranto, head of the Indonesian armed forces and defence minister, of US support and assistance, proposing a new US training mission (7).

The degree of cooperation between Washington and Jakarta is impressive. US weapons sales to Indonesia amount to over $1 billion since the 1975 invasion. Military aid during the Clinton years is about $150 million, and in 1997 the Pentagon was still training Kopassus units (see article by Romain Bertrand), in violation of the intent of congressional legislation. In the face of this record, the US government lauded “the value of the years of training given to Indonesia’s future military leaders in the US and the millions of dollars in military aid for Indonesia” (8).

The reasons for the disgraceful record have sometimes been honestly recognised. During the latest phase of atrocities, a senior diplomat in Jakarta described “the dilemma” faced by the great powers: “Indonesia matters and East Timor doesn’t” (9). It was therefore understandable that Washington should keep to ineffectual gestures of disapproval while insisting that internal security in East Timor was “the responsibility of the government of Indonesia, and we don’t want to take that responsibility away from them”. This official stance, reaffirmed a few days before the August referendum, was repeated and maintained in full knowledge of how that “responsibility” had been carried out (10).

The reasoning of the senior diplomat was spelled out more fully by two Asia specialists from the New York Times. The Clinton Administration, they wrote, “has made the calculation that the United States must put its relationship with Indonesia, a mineral-rich nation of more than 200 million people, ahead of its concern over the political fate of East Timor, a tiny impoverished territory of 800,000 people that is seeking independence.” The Washington Post quoted Douglas Paal, president of the Asia Pacific Policy Centre, describing the facts of life: “Timor is a speed bump on the road to dealing with Jakarta, and we’ve got to get over it safely. Indonesia is such a big place and so central to the stability of the region” (11).

In the rhetoric of official Washington, “We don’t have a dog running in the East Timor race”. Accordingly, what happens there is not US business. But after intensive Australian pressure, the calculations shifted. A senior government official concluded: “We have a very big dog running down there called Australia and we have to support it” (12). The survivors of US-backed crimes in a “tiny impoverished territory” are not even a “small dog”.

The guiding principles were articulated in 1978, three years after Indonesia’s invasion of East Timor, by Washington’s ambassador to the UN, Daniel Patrick Moynihan. His words should be committed to memory by anyone with a serious interest in international affairs, human rights, and the rule of law. In his memoirs, Moynihan wrote: “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” (13).

Success was indeed considerable. Moynihan cited reports that within two months some 60,000 people had been killed: “10 percent of the population, almost the proportion of casualties experienced by the Soviet Union during the second world war”. A sign of the success, he added, was that within a year “the subject disappeared from the press.” So it did, as the invaders intensified their assault. Atrocities peaked in 1977-78. Relying on a new flow of advanced military equipment from the Carter Administration – with its emphasis on human rights – the Indonesian military carried out a devastating attack against the hundreds of thousands who had fled to the mountains, driving the survivors to Indonesian control. It was then that highly credible Church sources in East Timor sought to make public the estimates of 200,000 deaths – long denied, but now at last accepted. As the slaughter reached near-genocidal levels, Britain and France joined in, along with other powers, providing diplomatic support and even arms.

This year opened with a moment of hope. Indonesia’s interim president, B J Habibie, had called for a referendum with a choice between incorporation within Indonesia (“autonomy”) or independence. The army moved at once to prevent this outcome by terror and intimidation. In the months leading to the August referendum, 3,000 to 5,000 were killed (14) – a far larger order of magnitude of deaths than that cited by Nato (2,000) in the year leading up to the bombing in Kosovo.

Braving violence and threats, almost the entire population voted, many emerging from hiding to do so. Close to 80% chose independence. Then followed the latest phase of atrocities by the Indonesian army in an effort to reverse the outcome by slaughter and expulsion. Much of the country was reduced to ashes. Within two weeks more than 10,000 people may have been killed, according to Bishop Carlos Filipe Belo, the Nobel Peace laureate (see article by Sylvain Desmille). The bishop was driven from his country under a hail of bullets, his house burned down, and the refugees sheltering there dispatched to an uncertain fate (15).

Even before Habibie’s surprise call for a referendum, the army anticipated threats to its rule, including its control over East Timor’s resources, and undertook careful planning with “the aim, quite simply, … to destroy a nation”. The plans were known to Western intelligence. The army recruited thousands of West Timorese and brought in forces from Java. More ominously, the military command sent units of its dreaded US-trained Kopassus special forces, and, as senior military adviser, General Makarim, a US-trained intelligence specialist with experience in East Timor and “a reputation for callous violence” (16).

Terror and destruction began early in the year. The army forces responsible have been described as “rogue elements” in the West. There is good reason, however, to accept Bishop Belo’s assignment of direct responsibility to General Wiranto (17). It appears that the militias have been managed by elite units of Kopassus, the “crack special forces unit” that had, according to veteran Asia correspondent David Jenkins, “been training regularly with US and Australian forces until their behaviour became too much of an embarrassment for their foreign friends” (18).

These forces adopted the tactics of the US Phoenix programme in the Vietnam war, that killed tens of thousands of peasants and much of the indigenous South Vietnamese leadership, Jenkins writes, as well as “the tactics employed by the Contras” in Nicaragua. The state terrorists were “not simply going after the most radical pro-independence people, but going after the moderates, the people who have influence in their community.”

Well before the referendum, the commander of the Indonesian military in Dili, Colonel Tono Suratman, warned of what was to come: “If the pro-independents do win … all will be destroyed… It will be worse than 23 years ago” (19). An army document of early May, when international agreement on the referendum was reached, ordered that “Massacres should be carried out from village to village after the announcement of the ballot if the pro-independence supporters win.” The independence movement “should be eliminated from its leadership down to its roots” (20). Citing diplomatic, church and militia sources, the Australian press reported “that hundreds of modern assault rifles, grenades and mortars are being stockpiled, ready for use if the autonomy option is rejected at the ballot box” (21).

All of this was understood by Indonesia’s “foreign friends”, who also knew how to bring the terror to an end, but preferred evasive and ambiguous reactions that the Indonesian generals could easily interpret as a “green light” to carry out their work.

The sordid history must be viewed against the background of US-Indonesia relations in the post-war era (22). The rich resources of the archipelago, and its critical strategic location, guaranteed it a central role in US global planning. These factors lie behind US efforts 40 years ago to dismantle Indonesia, perceived as too independent and too democratic – even permitting participation of the poor peasants. These factors account for Western support for the regime of killers and torturers who emerged from the 1965 coup. Their achievements were seen as a vindication of Washington’s wars in Indochina, motivated in large part by concerns that the “virus” of independent nationalism might “infect” Indonesia, to use Kissinger-like rhetoric.

Surely we should by now be willing to cast aside mythology and face the causes and consequences of our actions, and not only in East Timor. In that tortured corner of the world there is still time, though precious little time, to prevent a hideous conclusion to one of the most appalling tragedies of the terrible century that is winding to a horrifying, wrenching close.

(1) Report of the Security Council Mission to Jakarta and Dili, 8 to 12 September 1999.

(2) New York Times, 15 September 1999.

(3) Boston Globe, 15 September 1999.

(4) Benedict Anderson, Statement before the Fourth Committee of the UN General Assembly, 20 October 1980. See also Noam Chomsky, Towards a New Cold War, Pantheon, New York, 1982.

(5) For review and sources, see Noam Chomsky, Year 501, South End, Boston, 1993.

(6) AP on line, 8 September 1999.

(7) The Nation, New York, 27 September 1999.

(8) New York Times, 14 September 1999.

(9) Financial Times, London, 8 September 1999; Christian Science Monitor, Boston, 14 September 1999.

(10) Sydney Morning Herald, 25 August 1999, citing State Department spokesman James Foley. Defence Secretary William Cohen, press briefing, 8 September 1999.

(11) Elizabeth Becker and Philip Shenon, New York Times, 9 September 1999. Steven Mufson, Washington Post, 9 September 1999.

(12) Australian Financial Review, Sydney, 13 September 1999.

(13)Daniel Patrick Moynihan, A Dangerous Place, Little Brown, Boston, 1978.

(14) Washington Post, 5 September 1999.

(15) New York Times, 13 September 1999.

(16) The Observer, London, 13 September 1999.

(17) Shenon, op. cit.

(18) Sydney Morning Herald, 8 July 1999.

(19) Australian Financial Review, 14 August 1999.

(20) The Observer, op. cit.

(21) Sydney Morning Herald, 26 July 1999.

(22) See Noam Chomsky, “Indonesia, master card in Washington’s hand”, Le Monde diplomatique, English Internet edition, June 1998, English print edition, September 1998.

[aviation1965]

Care about East Timor

(From Mother Jones, August 26, 1999). 

There are three good reasons why Americans should care about East Timor. First, since the Indonesian invasion of December 1975, East Timor has been the site of some of the worst atrocities of the modern era — atrocities which are mounting again right now. Second, the US government has played a decisive role in escalating these atrocities and can easily act to mitigate or terminate them. It is not necessary to bomb Jakarta or impose economic sanctions. Throughout, it would have sufficed for Washington to withdraw support and to inform its Indonesian client that the game was over. That remains true as the situation reaches a crucial turning point — the third reason.

President Clinton needs no instructions on how to proceed. In May 1998, Secretary of State Madeleine Albright called upon Indonesian President Suharto to resign and provide for “a democratic transition.” A few hours later, Suharto transferred authority to his handpicked vice president. Though not simple cause and effect, the events illustrate the relations that prevail. Ending the torture in East Timor would have been no more difficult than dismissing Indonesia’s dictator in May 1998.

Not long before, the Clinton administration welcomed Suharto as “our kind of guy,” following the precedent established in 1965 when the general took power, presiding over army-led massacres that wiped out the country’s only mass-based political party (the PKI, a popularly supported communist party) and devastated its popular base in “one of the worst mass murders of the 20th century.” According to a CIA report, these massacres were comparable to those of Hitler, Stalin, and Mao; hundreds of thousands were killed, most of them landless peasants. The achievement was greeted with unrestrained euphoria in the West. The “staggering mass slaughter” was “a gleam of light in Asia,” according to two commentaries in The New York Times, both typical of the general western media reaction. Corporations flocked to what many called Suharto’s “paradise for investors,” impeded only by the rapacity of the ruling family. For more than 20 years, Suharto was hailed in the media as a “moderate” who is “at heart benign,” even as he compiled a record of murder, terror, and corruption that has few counterparts in postwar history.

Suharto remained a darling of the West until he committed his first errors: losing control and hesitating to implement harsh International Monetary Fund (IMF) prescriptions. Then came the call from Washington for “a democratic transition” — but not for allowing the people of East Timor to enjoy the right of self-determination that has been validated by the UN Security Council and the World Court.

In 1975, Suharto invaded East Timor, then being taken over by its own population after the collapse of the Portuguese empire. The United States and Australia knew the invasion was coming and effectively authorized it. Australian Ambassador Richard Woolcott, in memos later leaked to the press, recommended the “pragmatic” course of “Kissingerian realism,” because it might be possible to make a better deal on Timor’s oil reserves with Indonesia than with an independent East Timor. At the time, the Indonesian army relied on the United States for 90 percent of its arms, which were restricted by the terms of the agreement for use only in “self-defense.” Pursuing the same doctrine of “Kissingerian realism,” Washington simultaneously stepped up the flow of arms while declaring an arms suspension, and the public was kept in the dark.

The UN Security Council ordered Indonesia to withdraw, but to no avail. Its failure was explained by then-UN Ambassador Daniel Patrick Moynihan. In his memoirs, he took pride in having rendered the UN “utterly ineffective in whatever measures it undertook” because “[t]he United States wished things to turn out as they did” and “worked to bring this about.” As for how “things turned out,” Moynihan comments that, within a few months, 60,000 Timorese had been killed, “almost the proportion of casualties experienced by the Soviet Union during the Second World War.”

The massacre continued, peaking in 1978 with the help of new arms provided by the Carter administration. The toll to date is estimated at about 200,000, the worst slaughter relative to population since the Holocaust. By 1978, the United States was joined by Britain, France, and others eager to gain what they could from the slaughter. Protest in the West was minuscule. Little was even reported. US press coverage, which had been high in the context of concerns over the fall of the Portuguese empire, declined to practically nothing in 1978.

In 1989, Australia signed a treaty with Indonesia to exploit the oil of “the Indonesian Province of East Timor” — a region sober realists tell us is not economically viable, and therefore cannot be granted the right of self-determination. The Timor Gap treaty was put into effect immediately after the army murdered several hundred more Timorese at a graveyard commemoration of a recent army assassination. Western oil companies joined in the robbery, eliciting no comment.

After 25 terrible years, steps are finally being taken that might bring the horrors to an end. Indonesia agreed to permit a referendum in August 1999 in which the Timorese were to be permitted to choose “autonomy” within Indonesia or independence from it. It is taken for granted that if the vote is minimally free, pro-independence forces will win. The occupying Indonesian army (TNI) moved at once to prevent this outcome. The method was simple: Paramilitary forces were organized to terrorize the population while TNI adopted a stance of “plausible deniability,” which quickly collapsed in the presence of foreign observers who could see firsthand that TNI was arming and guiding the killers.

The militias are credibly reported to be under the direction of Kopassus, the dreaded Indonesian special forces modeled on the US Green Berets and “legendary for their cruelty,” as the prominent Indonesia scholar Benedict Anderson observes. He adds that in East Timor, “Kopassus became the pioneer and exemplar for every kind of atrocity,” including systematic rapes, tortures, and executions, and organization of hooded gangsters. Concurring, Australia’s veteran Asia correspondent David Jenkins notes that this “crack special forces unit [had] been training regularly with US and Australian forces until their behavior became too much of an embarrassment for their foreign friends.” Congress did bar US training of the killers and torturers under IMET, but the Clinton Administration found ways to evade the laws, leading to much irritation in Congress but little broader notice. Now, congressional constraints may be more effective, but without the kind of inquiry that is rarely undertaken in the case of US-backed terror, one cannot be confident.

Jenkins’s conclusion that Kopassus remains “as active as ever in East Timor” is verified by close observers. “Many of these army officers attended courses in the United States under the now-suspended International Military Education and Training (IMET) program,” he writes. Their tactics resemble the US Phoenix program in South Vietnam, which killed tens of thousands of peasants and much of the indigenous South Vietnamese leadership, as well as “the tactics employed by the Contras” in Nicaragua, following lessons taught by their CIA mentors that it should be unnecessary to review. The state terrorists “are not simply going after the most radical pro-independence people but going after the moderates, the people who have influence in their community.”

‘It’s Phoenix’ … notes a well-placed source in Jakarta,” Jenkins writes. That source adds that the aim is “‘to terrorize everyone’ — the NGOs, the [Red Cross], the UN, the journalists.”

The goal is being pursued with no little success. Since April, the Indonesian-run militias have been conducting a wave of atrocities and murder, killing hundreds of people — many in churches to which they fled for shelter — burning down towns, driving tens of thousands into concentration camps or the mountains, where, it is reported, thousands have been virtually enslaved to harvest coffee crops. “They call them ‘internally displaced persons,'” an Australian nun and aid worker said, “but they are hostages to the militias. They have been told that if they vote for independence, they will be killed.” The number of the displaced is estimated at 50,000 or more.

Health conditions are abysmal. One of the few doctors in the territory, American volunteer Dan Murphy, reported that 50 to 100 Timorese are dying daily from curable diseases while Indonesia “has a deliberate policy not to allow medical supplies into East Timor.” In the Australian media, he has detailed atrocious crimes from his personal experience, and Australian journalists and aid workers have compiled a shocking record.

The referendum has been delayed twice by the UN because of the terror, which has even targeted UN offices and UN convoys carrying sick people for treatment. Citing diplomatic, church, and militia sources, the Australian press reports “that hundreds of modern assault rifles, grenades, and mortars are being stockpiled, ready for use if the autonomy option is rejected at the ballot box,” and warns that the TNI-run militias may be planning a violent takeover of much of the territory if, despite the terror, the popular will is expressed.

Murphy and others report that TNI has been emboldened by the lack of interest in the West. “A senior US diplomat summarized the issue neatly: ‘East Timor is Australia’s Haiti'” — in other words, it’s not a problem for the United States, which helped create and sustain the humanitarian disaster in East Timor and could readily end it. (Those who know the truth about the United States in Haiti will fully appreciate the cynicism.)

Reporting on the terror from the scene, Nobel Laureate Bishop Carlos Ximenes Belo called for “an international military force” to protect the population from Indonesian terror and permit the referendum to proceed. Nothing doing. The “international community” — meaning Western powers — prefers that the Indonesian army provide “security.” A small number of unarmed UN monitors have been authorized — but subsequently delayed — by the Clinton administration.

The picture in the past few months is particularly ugly against the background of the self-righteous posturing in the “enlightened states.” But it simply illustrates, once again, what should be obvious: Nothing substantial has changed, either in the actions of the powerful or the performance of their flatterers. The Timorese are “unworthy victims.” No power interest is served by attending to their suffering or taking even simple steps to end it. Without a significant popular reaction, the long-familiar story will continue, in East Timor and throughout the world.