by John Pilger
‘Australia is the big one, the jewel of south-east Asia,’ the former CIA strategist, Victor Marchetti, told me. ‘What with the way things are going in the Philippines, what may happen in Formosa . . . looking down the road Australia is going to be increasingly important to the United States, and so long as Australians keep electing the right people, then there’ll be a stable relationship between the two countries.’
I asked Marchetti what the CIA had learned from Whitlam. ‘Oh, I think we learned a lot,’ he replied. ‘When Hawke came along we didn’t panic to begin with, and then Hawke immediately sent signals that he knew how the game was played and who was buttering his bread. He became very co-operative, and even obsequious in some fashion.’10
After coming to power in 1983 one of Prime Minister Hawke’s first ‘signals’ was to agree secretly to test the American first-strike MX missile in Australian coastal waters, a move considered so rash that it was turned down by his own Cabinet. In the same year the Hawke Government issued a policy statement which effectively welcomed foreign nuclear-armed ships into Australia’s ports and dry docks. The statement was dictated, virtually word for word, by the American Secretary of State, George Shultz. ‘Now there are not many countries in the world’, said Bob Hawke, ‘where a Prime Minister can just say to his Foreign Minister to ring George Shultz, knowing that, if we ring, we’ll be listened to immediately.’11
Prime Minister Hawke went regularly to Washington, where he had many ‘old Mates’. During one visit he announced he had been given an ‘unqualified assurance’ that none of the American bases in Australia were being used for ‘Star Wars’ research.12 The veracity of this is challenged by the head of strategic and defence studies at the Australian National University, Desmond Ball. Using American sources, Ball has established that the data drawn from the monitoring of Soviet missile and satellite launches at the most secret of the bases, Nurrungar, has been passed on to the Star Wars organisation. This has enabled American scientists to conclude that ‘a space-based infra-red sensor system can be developed . . .’: in other words, a Star Wars system.13 In 1988 Hawke announced that his Government had signed a new agreement with Washington to continue operations at Nurrungar and nearby Pine Gap for ten years. He described Nurrungar as a warning station and Pine Gap as ‘vital for verification of arms control’. He made no mention of their other purpose.14 During the Gulf War in 1991, both Nurrungar and Pine Gap were used by Washington to gather intelligence and further its war aims against Iraq.
There is limitless promise and tragedy in the American perception of Australia as ‘the jewel’ of south-east Asia. When the New Zealand Labor Government of David Lange was elected in 1984, it banned nuclear weapons and nuclear-armed ships from New Zealand’s waters and promoted the idea of a truly nuclear-free zone in the south Pacific. For this, it was expelled from the ANZUS Pact by the United States, with the zealous backing of the Australian Government.
New Zealand’s stand was shared by most governments of the south Pacific. It was warmly supported by the new Labour Government of Fiji. When, in 1987, Colonel Rabuka marched into the Fijian Parliament with a gun and put an end to Fijian democracy, his actions were greeted in Washington. ‘We’re kinda delighted,’ said a Pentagon official. ‘All of a sudden our [nuclear armed] ships couldn’t go to Fiji and now all of a sudden they can. We got a little chuckle outta the news.’15
The reaction in Canberra was not quite as direct. Australian commercial interests, such as those of the BHP mining corporation, owner of gold mines, had long controlled the Fijian economy. The Australian Government eventually recognised the illegal and racially motivated Rabuka regime. No attempt was made to use Australia’s considerable economic influence. The deposed Prime Minister, Dr Timoci Bavandra, told me, not long before he died, that he had tried to speak to Bob Hawke on the phone for almost a year. ‘He was always unavailable,’ he said. ‘It hurt me a bit, I must say.’16
According to Dr Alfred McCoy, whose studies on foreign intervention in Asia have earned wide respect, Australia’s actions over Fiji ‘could well be the turning point where it surrenders all influence in the Pacific and an era begins of healthy democracies being replaced by banana republics that are weak, divided client states of the US.’ He pointed to the Caribbean experience, which demonstrated how the US interest lay in ‘bumping off’ island democracies and subjugating them.17
A similar ‘bumping off’ process is under way in the subjugation of trade unions throughout the Pacific, using Australia as a base. In 1983 the CIA-linked Labor Committee for Pacific Affairs held its first major conference in Sydney. The LCPA was set up by the Georgetown International Labor Program with a grant of $US300,000 from the United States Information Agency, the propaganda arm of the US Government.18 The Georgetown International Labor Program was itself established with the help of an extreme right-wing ‘think tank’, the Centre of Strategic and International Studies. The New Zealand Times, in exposing the LCPA, described one of its ‘backroom boys’, Gerry O’Keefe, as ‘a CIA agent with considerable clout’.19 O’Keefe was one of three CIA officers closeted with Bob Hawke shortly before his election as President of the Australian Council of Trade Unions in 1969. Four years later he was exposed as a CIA agent operating inside the trade unions in Chile shortly before the Allende Government was overthrown.20
One of the aims of the LCPA has been to counter the anti-nuclear policies of the New Zealand and other Pacific governments. Trade unionists in the region are given all-expenses-paid ‘study trips’ to the United States. Their itinerary has included lectures by CIA agent Gerry O’Keefe on the Soviet ‘threat’ to the south Pacific. The organising secretary of the LCPA, Michael Easson, was appointed Secretary of the powerful New South Wales Labor Council. He has strongly denied these CIA links and says the people involved are ‘all liberal Democrats’.21 In a letter to Easson, dated December 16, 1983 and signed by his private secretary, Prime Minister Hawke expressed his ‘sincere regrets’ that he could not accept an invitation to open the first LCPA conference. The letter concluded that ‘Mr Hawke was pleased to see the formation of this organisation . . . and sends his best wishes for the success of the conference.’22
The Treaty of Raratonga, signed by the small island nations of the south Pacific, is a bold and imaginative attempt to abolish nuclear weapons from a vast area of the southern world, much of it defiled by American and French nuclear testing. To most of its signatories, the treaty is an article of faith in the peaceful future of their region and in their own independence. Although Australia has signed the treaty, Australian diplomats have worked hard to minimise its provisions so that American nuclear-powered and armed ships are allowed into the zone. Only in this way, the Australians have argued, will Washington join in and sign. This has proven a forlorn hope. The Pentagon, not surprisingly, wants nothing to do with it.
In 1986 the Australian Labor Party reaffirmed its opposition to selling the principal ingredient of nuclear weapons, uranium, to France while the French continue to test nuclear weapons in the Pacific. In 1988 secret documents leaked from the European regulatory body, Euratom, disclosed that Australian uranium was being ‘re-flagged’, or re-labelled, so that it appeared to originate in other countries. There was nothing to prevent it ending up in French bombs.23 In 1988 the Hawke Government sold $A66 million worth of Government-held uranium stock to France, clearing the way for uranium sales eventually to go ahead.
Australia’s promise and tragedy are no more acute than in south-east Asia, where generations of Australians have been sent to fight. In Cambodia the return of Pol Pot’s genocidal Khmer Rouge is a real possibility. For several years Bill Hayden distinguished himself as the only Western diplomat working to bring about a regional settlement. In March 1985 he met the then Cambodian Foreign Minister, Hun Sen, in Saigon, and was attacked by the Australian press for his initiative. Senior Vietnamese officials have told me that had Hayden been allowed to proceed, he might have helped to start negotiations for the first real pea
ce in Indo-China for more than a generation.
Today Pol Pot and his murderous gang are being wheeled back to power in Cambodia in a Trojan Horse built by China and Western governments, notably the Australian Government. This is not what Australians have been told. The Government’s version of the present United Nations ‘peace plan’ for Cambodia is that it is the only hope for a ‘comprehensive settlement’, as well as a triumph for the so-called ‘Evans Plan’, upon which it is based. The Evans Plan came to light in November, 1989 as the direct result of public concern in Australia that the Hawke Government was selling out Cambodia as part of Washington’s continuing war of attrition and revenge against Vietnam.
At the Paris conference on Cambodia in August of that year none had been more zealous than the Australian Minister for Foreign Affairs, Gareth Evans, in supporting US and Chinese plans to bring the Khmer Rouge into the ‘peace process’ – itself a striking contradiction in terms. Evans supported American and Chinese demands that all reference to ‘genocide’ should be excluded from official statements. In a briefing document bearing Evans’ hand-writing, a ‘specific stumbling block’ is ‘identified’ as ‘whether it is appropriate or not to refer specifically to the genocidal practices of the past . . .’ Nowhere in the 153 pages of the Australian Government’s ‘working paper’ prepared for a subsequent conference in Djakarta, and effectively a draft of the Evans Plan, is there mention of Khmer Rouge atrocities. These are dismissed as ‘human rights abuses of a recent past’: a euphemism agreed between Washington and Peking.
Like so much Australian foreign policy, the Evans ‘initiative’ complied with Washington’s plan for Cambodia – guided, promoted and defended by Congressman Stephen Solarz, the influential Chairman of the House Committee on Asian and Pacific Affairs and the architect of much of US policy in the region. A pugnacious personality with cold war views, Solarz has long lobbied for the Khmer Rouge to be accepted in the ‘peace process’ as ‘necessary realpolitic’: in truth, as a means of ensuring an anti-Vietnamese regime in Phnom Penh and that pressure remains on Hanoi. When Evans briefly departed from the Solarz line and proposed that Cambodia’s seat at the UN should be declared vacant, he was told the Bush administration would never agree to it. The proposal was dropped. Thus, the Khmer Rouge, as members of a ‘Supreme National Council’, have maintained their diplomatic network and effective veto over the ‘peace process’, and two of Pol Pot’s most trusted henchmen, one of them directly complicit in mass murder, are currently ensconced in Phnom Penh, protected by the United Nations. Solarz has recommended Evans for the Nobel Peace Prize.
The upheavals of Indo-China, especially the Vietnam war remain deep in the Australian memory and psyche. Many Australians, like many Americans, have found that excising the war without understanding its atrocious nature, is impossible; and that sublimating it is destructive. They say that coming to terms with what was done must be a gradual process, and helping the people of Vietnam is an essential part of that process. In February 1983, a few weeks before the election of the Labor Government, Hayden said, ‘Without any hesitation at all we will re-establish aid programmes to Vietnam and seek to encourage other countries to provide aid.’24 It was a popular commitment because it provided the first opportunity to help the Vietnamese and to express a common decency unrelated to the Cold War requirements of Australia’s great ally. It was also seen by some as a modest expression of Australian independence.
Within a few weeks of his election, Bob Hawke received two phone calls from his Mate, George Shultz, who raised the question of Australia’s assistance to Vietnam in the context of Hawke’s first visit to Washington. As a result, the Cabinet deferred the decision on aid until after the visit in June 1983. When Hawke returned from Washington, the matter became a ‘non-issue’. In 1989 the Vietnamese army withdrew from Cambodia, taking with it a pretext of the Hawke Government to deny aid to Vietnam. In the same year the Sydney Morning Herald published a one-paragraph item saying that a million Vietnamese were suffering from famine.25
In 1987 Australians who had fought in Vietnam were given a long-awaited parade through the streets of Sydney. The marching, limping boys of the 1960s got cheers and tears, but no public apology. Today, Australian schoolchildren are taught little about why their fathers were sent on false pretences to join in the destruction of a small, impoverished country. The Hollywood version, of movies that celebrate and pity the invader, has become the popular history.
This is not to suggest that Australian governments have simply gone along with American designs for the region and expected nothing for themselves, apart from American ‘protection’. The tragedy of East Timor is illustrative of Australia not only backing an important American client-regime, but of taking its cut of the spoils. There is, of course, no Evans ‘peace plan’ for East Timor, which lies considerably closer to Australia than Cambodia and has been illegally occupied by Indonesia since 1975. In December of that year the UN Security Council unanimously called on ‘the Government of Indonesia to withdraw without delay all its forces from the territory’ and ‘all states to respect the territorial integrity of East Timor as well as the inalienable right of its people to self-determination . . .’26
The similarity of East Timor’s plight with that of Kuwait under Saddam Hussein is striking, yet no international force, led by the United States, has gone to the aid of the Timorese – in spite of the fact that some 200,000 people or about a third of the population, have died during the years of Indonesian oppression and terror. On the contrary, the American Ambassador to the UN, Daniel Patrick Moynihan, has described implementing State Department directives to render the UN ‘utterly ineffective in whatever measures it undertook’ in response to Indonesia’s invasion, because ‘the United States wished things to turn out as they did and worked to bring this about’.27
For the Hawke government, the invasion of Kuwait was quite different. Explaining why Australian warships were being sent to the Gulf, Hawke invoked the ‘commanding moral authority of the UN’ 33 times in one speech, concluding: ‘So now we must fight!’28 Driving home the point, Hawke declared, ‘Big countries cannot invade small countries and get away with it’.29 Contrast that with Hawke’s reaction to the latest known Indonesian massacre in East Timor: that of at least 100 mourners at a funeral in 1991. In what was considered a strong statement, Hawke asked Indonesia for ‘genuine contrition, a dinkum enquiry and an intention to punish those responsible’.30 The equivalence of this would have been the Australian Prime Minister asking Saddam Hussein for ‘genuine contrition’ following a massacre of Kuwaitis, while knowing that the prize for Australia was a share of Kuwaiti oil.
Five months before the Indonesian invasion in 1975, Australia’s Ambassador in Djakarta, Richard Woolcott (who became head of the Department of Foreign Affairs) sent this message to Canberra:
(We) 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. I know I am recommending a pragmatic rather than a principled stand but that is what national interest and foreign policy is all about.31
Two years later Australia gave de jure recognition to Indonesia’s integration of East Timor as the preliminary to finalising a sea-bed accord and exploiting the off-shore oil. A 1977 study forecast production of between one and seven billion barrels of oil. In December 1989 Australia and Indonesia signed the Timor Gap Treaty assuring lucrative expansion of petroleum resources32. At the time Foreign Affairs Minister Evans said, ‘There is no binding legal obligation not to recognise acquisition of territory that was acquired by force’.33 Earlier he had put it more succinctly: ‘The world’, he said, ‘is a pretty unfair place’.34
I count myself among the many Australians who have not forgotten the vision, if not the turmoil, of the Evatt and Whitlam years, however flawed. We were briefly, tenuously, almost an independent community with the hope of a future not pre-empted by a war of attrition
between nuclear giants and by a discredited piety known as ‘anti-communism’. The regression has been sketched in this book. That Australia, a nation of Asia and the Pacific, which did much to establish the independent voting rights of small countries at the United Nations, should now vote predominantly with what is known as the ‘Western European and Other Group’, is a measure of that regression. That the Australian Prime Minister on his Bicentenary visit to the United States should feel the need to describe himself as Crocodile Dundee, then to eulogise ‘American leadership’, only to be told that the Senate Majority Leader did not have the time to see him, is also a measure of that regression. That Hawke in the Gulf War should do precisely as Menzies did in Vietnam – that is, ask the American President to ‘request’ Australian military assistance – is a measure of the obsequiousness that is still with us. That members of both houses of the Federal Parliament should be flown back to Canberra during the Christmas recess just to hear George Bush utter inanities about Australia and America together ‘until the end of eternity’ is more of the same. That Australia remains literally a second-class monarchy overseen by a viceroy who once was proud of his republicanism, is the vision lost.
This need not be so. Across the Tasman Sea in New Zealand there is, among the majority of the people, a compelling example. When I first went to New Zealand in 1973, New Zealanders led the opposition to France’s nuclear testing in the Pacific. I found a society much like Australia’s on the surface, yet quite different. This is especially true of the regard people have for the land, whose beauty is invested almost with sanctity. In that year the Government declared almost 10 per cent of the land surface to be a national park, a move not considered at all radical. A few years earlier New Zealanders had demonstrated their deep and emotional opposition to the establishment of an American Omega communications base in the South Island; as a result, the base was moved to Australia. An argument that might have held sway in Australia – that American ‘protection’ was needed against the gravitational threat of the Red and Yellow Perils – was irrelevant in a country relatively unblighted by such phobia.