wfn.org | The agony of East Timor

[PCUSA NEWS <pcusa.news@ecunet.org>]

13-September-1999 
99299 
 
    The agony of East Timor 
 
    Observer suggests U.S. was 
    ready partner in genocide 
 
    By John Filiatreau 
    Special to The Courier-Journal 
 
    What is happening in East Timor these days is merely a continuation of 
a systematic program of genocide that Indonesia has been pursuing there, 
with the complicity of the United States, for a quarter of a century. 
 
    Writer/activist Noam Chomsky says the small island territory, a 
predominantly Christian enclave in mostly Islamic Indonesia, has suffered 
"perhaps the greatest death toll relative to the population since the 
Holocaust." 
 
    In the past 25 years, Indonesia is believed to have killed about a 
quarter of a million East Timorese, a number roughly equal to one-third of 
East Timor's population in 1975, when the occupation began. 
 
    The Indonesian government has stubbornly asserted that the violence in 
East Timor is the result of a long-running clash between two armed militia 
groups, one pro-independence and one pro-Indonesian. But that was a lie 
during the campaign for the Aug. 30 referendum on East Timor's future, and 
it's a lie today. The pro-Indonesia militias have not fought a single 
battle against armed pro-independence guerrillas. There is no armed 
pro-independence militia today. 
 
    Here is the truth: The Indonesian military, and a number of 
anti-independence militias composed mostly of common street thugs, 
supported, armed and commanded by the Indonesian military, are wantonly 
killing unarmed East Timorese civilians, as they have been doing for a 
quarter-century. 
 
    In a typical incident last April 6, militias allied with Indonesia 
attacked hundreds of helpless refugees sheltered in a church in Liquica, 
slashing them with axes and machetes, killing 57 people, including many 
women and children. 
 
    In 1991, Indonesian soldiers armed with automatic weapons fired upon a 
crowd of people taking part in a peaceful demonstration in a Dili 
graveyard, killing more than 200, again including many women and children. 
 
    Shortly before the recent referendum on independence in East Timor, a 
spokesman for the Indonesian armed forces told an Australian TV crew, "We 
will kill as many people as we want." 
 
    Despite widespread intimidation and death threats, the East Timorese 
marched resolutely to the polls on Aug. 30 (an incredible 98.5 percent of 
registered voters actually turned out) and chose independence over 
"autonomy" within Indonesia by a margin of nearly 4 to 1. 
 
    Is racism a factor in this slaughter? Would the world have been so slow 
to comprehend the horror of Indonesia's brutality if the 250,000 victims 
had been Europeans? 
 
    Is religion a factor? Would Indonesia's behavior have been so barbaric 
if East Timor were Islamic rather than Christian? 
 
    The Indonesians and their Timorese proxies reportedly have mounted the 
severed heads of some East Timorese victims on poles for display, calling 
to mind the worst excesses of the Crusades. 
 
    Indonesian officials have also claimed from time to time that the 
brutality is largely the work of "militias run amok," armed groups that 
Indonesian security forces have been powerless to control. However, the 
militias actually are working closely with the Indonesian army in a 
well-coordinated campaign, and the Indonesian officers and soldiers in East 
Timor have not lifted a finger to disarm the militias or to stop the 
killing. Indeed, they have done some of the killing. 
 
    Estimates of the number of East Timorese who have been killed in the 
violence, succumbed to violence-related illness or starvation, or simply 
"disappeared," range from 200,000 to about twice that number. 
 
    Today, East Timor is a land of young widows, a society with 
conspicuously few men between the ages of 30 and 50. 
 
    And while most of the blame for the slaughter comes to rest at the feet 
of the Indonesian armed forces, which have always been at their best and 
bravest when killing unarmed civilians (as in 1965, when in a Soviet-style 
purge they slaughtered an estimated one million Indonesian citizens who had 
been identified as "Communist" enemies of the government), the United 
States is not without responsibility. 
 
    In 1975, just after Portugal gave up its colonial claim to East Timor 
after 400 years, the Indonesian military moved in, raping, torturing and 
slaughtering East Timorese civilians. In one of its many unaccountable 
lapses of taste, Indonesia chose to launch the invasion on Dec. 7, 1975, 
the 34th anniversary of the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor. 
 
    Two days before the killing began, U.S. President Gerald Ford and 
Secretary of State Henry Kissinger had sipped tea in Jakarta, the capital, 
with former Indonesian President Suharto - and "signed off" on the invasion 
plan. 
 
    The U.S. government had weighed the human rights of the people of East 
Timor against the economic and strategic value of its relationship with 
Indonesia, and decided, with what has been called "Kissingerian realism," 
that the former could be sacrificed for the latter. 
 
    In the heat of the Cold War, the United States had come to regard 
Indonesia as its principal Southeast Asian bulwark against Communism. 
 
    According to Philip Liechty, a former CIA officer in Jakarta, "Suharto 
was given the green light" to launch the invasion, and the main concern of 
the State Department and the U.S. Embassy in Jakarta was "the problems that 
would be created for us if the public and Congress became aware" of 
America's complicity. 
 
    Liechty told author Matthew Jardine that the United States immediately 
stepped up its shipments of military hardware to Jakarta, "everything you 
need to fight a major war against somebody who doesn't have any guns." 
 
    A former U.S. ambassador to the United Nations, Daniel Patrick 
Moynihan, said of the Indonesian invasion: "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 me, and I carried it forward 
with no inconsiderable success." 
 
    Citing a figure of 60,000 as the number of East Timorese killed in the 
first few months of the invasion, Moynihan observed that that was "almost 
the proportion of casualties experienced by the Soviet Union during the 
Second World War." 
 
    In July 1976, Suharto signed legislation officially integrating East 
Timor into the Unitary State of the Republic of Indonesia. Five days later, 
the United Nations General Assembly passed a resolution deploring the 
invasion, calling on Indonesia to withdraw, and upholding East Timor's 
right of self-determination. The vote was 72-10, with 43 abstentions. One 
of the abstainers was the United States. 
 
    Seven subsequent resolutions to the same effect have been passed by the 
General Assembly. On most of them, France, Britain and Germany have 
abstained, while the United States, Australia and Japan have voted "no." 
 
    Early in 1976, the U.S. government endorsed Indonesia's annexation of 
East Timor. A State Department spokesman told reporters, "In terms of the 
bilateral relations between the U.S. and Indonesia, we are more or less 
condoning the incursion into East Timor." 
 
    Indonesia, the fourth-most-populous nation on the globe with almost 200 
million people, is a screaming economic engine, a major center for 
international commerce, and a model for other developing nations. Former 
President Richard Nixon called it "by far the greatest prize in the 
southeast Asian area." Under Suharto's government, Indonesia repealed its 
restrictive investment laws and cleared the way for large-scale foreign 
investment; by the early 1970s, the United States was investing more money 
in Indonesia than in any other Southeast Asian country including the 
Philippines. The new investment climate and Indonesia's repressive labor 
conditions (with a minimum wage of less than $2 a day) made it very 
attractive to western companies. 
 
    In the year after the invasion, the Ford administration more than 
doubled its military aid to Indonesia, to nearly $150 million. In 1977, 
when Indonesia said it was running short of military equipment (partly 
because it was devoting vast resources to the East Timor campaign), the 
Carter administration authorized $112 million in commercial arms sales, an 
increase of almost 2000 percent from the previous year. U.S. military sales 
peaked during the Reagan administration in the early 1980s, at more than 
$300 million a year. More than 2,500 Indonesian military officers also have 
received training in the United States. 
 
    Billions of dollars in grants and bank credits have been bestowed on 
Indonesia's government by the Inter-Governmental Group on Indonesia (IGGI), 
a consortium of donor countries including Japan, France, Britain, the 
Netherlands, Germany and the United States. Today Indonesia is the 
third-largest debtor nation in the developing world, behind only Mexico and 
Brazil. 
 
    Chomsky claims the slaughter in East Timor is particularly hurtful 
because "it would have been so easy to prevent, and to bring to an end at 
any time." 
 
    "There is no need for threats to bomb Jakarta, or even to impose 
sanctions on the aggressor," he wrote in 1994. "It would suffice for the 
great powers to refrain from their eager participation in Indonesia's 
crimes - to stop putting guns into the hands of the killers and torturers." 
 
    The United States and other nations recently have bemoaned the fact 
that Indonesia has permitted, perhaps encouraged, a brutal, well-armed 
group of outlaws to murder innocent, unarmed civilians. But that's exactly 
what the United States is doing through its unwavering support of the 
Indonesian regime. 
 
    And people who marvel at the grand scale of Indonesia's genocidal 
campaign in East Timor, and wonder how the United States can be supportive 
of it, might consider the history of U.S. relations with Native Americans 
over the past three centuries. 
 
    In the days after the referendum, officials of UNAMET (the United 
Nations Assistance Mission for East Timor) said repeatedly during daily 
security briefings that they had noticed a heartening change in the 
attitudes of high-ranking Indonesian government officials, a greater 
resolve to discharge their responsibility for keeping the peace, a greater 
willingness to compromise, but that these new attitudes had not been 
transmitted to military officers "on the ground." 
 
    The impression they conveyed was that the Indonesian armed forces and 
their commanders were beyond the control of civilian officials in Jakarta. 
 
    That impression was strongly reinforced on Sept. 5 when Indonesian 
Foreign Minister Ali Alatas and Gen. Wiranto, the armed forces chief, flew 
to East Timor for discussions with Ian Martin, the UN mission chief. They 
said they were not able to leave the airport in Dili, the capital, because 
of a "lack of security" - although the capital was in the hands of a 
heavily armed security force of more than 20,000 of their own crack troops. 
 
    U.S. Defense Secretary William Cohen said last week that the United 
States has no plans to contribute troops to any peacekeeping force in East 
Timor or elsewhere in Indonesia. 
 
    Indonesian government officials have rejected calls for a deployment of 
international peacekeepers. 
 
    East Timorese independence activist Jose Ramos-Horta, a co-winner of 
the 1996 Nobel Peace Prize, said recently that, unless a peacekeeping force 
arrives with a few days, "the people of East Timor are doomed." 
 
    In a chaotic and confusing situation, one thing is amply clear: The 
slaughter will continue until someone takes decisive action to stop it. 
 
    John Filiatreau, who works for the Presbyterian Church (U.S.A.) in 
Louisville, served as an international observer during the recent 
plebiscite in East Timor. He is a former reporter and editor for The 
Courier-Journal, from which this story is reprinted with permission. 

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