by Noam Chomsky
All of this was understood by the “foreign friends,” who 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. The rich resources of the archipelago, and its critical strategic location, guaranteed it the 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 leftist, peasant-based PKI. The same factors account for Western support for the regime of killers and torturers who brought about a “favorable orientation” in 1965. Their achievements were, furthermore, understood to be a vindication of Washington’s wars in Indochina, motivated in large part by concerns that the “virus” of independent nationalism might “infect” Indonesia, to borrow Kissingerian rhetoric. Support for the invasion of East Timor and subsequent atrocities was reflexive, though a broader analysis should attend to the fact that the collapse of the Portuguese empire had many of the same consequences in Africa, where South Africa was the agent of Western-backed terror. Throughout, Cold War pretexts were routinely invoked, serving as a convenient disguise for ugly motives and actions, particularly so in Southeast Asia.
The Routine Response
According to reports in Fall 1999, the UN mission in East Timor has been able to account for just over 150,000 people out of an estimated population of 850,000.22 It reports that 260,000 “are now languishing in squalid refugee camps in West Timor under the effective control of the militias after either fleeing or being forcibly removed from their homes,” and that another 100,000 have been relocated to other parts of Indonesia. The rest are presumed to be hiding in the mountains. The Australian commander expressed the natural concern that displaced people lack food and medical supplies. Touring camps in East and West Timor, US Assistant Secretary of State Harold Koh reported that the refugees are “starving and terrorized,” and that disappearances “without explanation” are a daily occurrence.
To appreciate the scale of this disaster, one has to bear in mind the virtual demolition of the physical basis for survival by the departing Indonesian army and its paramilitary associates (“militias”), and the reign of terror to which the territory has been subjected for a quarter-century.
For much of 1999, Western intellectuals have been engaged in one of history’s most audacious displays of self-adulation over their magnificent performance in Kosovo. Among the many facets of this grand achievement dispatched to the proper place was the fact that the huge flow of brutalized refugees expelled after the bombing could receive little care, thanks to Washington’s defunding of the responsible UN agency. Its staff was reduced 15 percent in 1998, and another 20 percent in January 1999; it now endures the denunciations of Tony Blair for its “problematic performance” in the wake of the atrocities that were the anticipated consequence of US/UK bombing. While the mutual admiration society was performing as required, atrocities mounted in East Timor.
As of October 1999, the US had provided no funds for the Australian-led UN intervention force (in contrast, Japan, long a fervent supporter of Indonesia, offered $100 million). But that is perhaps not surprising, in the light of its refusal to pay any of the costs of the UN civilian operations even in Kosovo. Washington has also asked the UN to reduce the scale of subsequent operations, because it might be called upon to pay some of the costs. Hundreds of thousands of missing people may be starving in the mountains, but no call has been heard for even elementary humanitarian measures. Hundreds of thousands more are facing a grim fate within Indonesia. A word from Washington would suffice to end their torment, but there is no word, and no comment.
In Kosovo, preparation for war crimes trials began in May 1999, expedited at US-UK initiative, including unprecedented access to intelligence information. In East Timor, investigations of crimes, with Indonesian participation, are “an absolute joke, a complete whitewash,” according to UN officials quoted in the British press. A spokesperson for Amnesty International added that the inquiry as planned “will cause East Timorese even more trauma than they have suffered already. It would be really insulting at this stage.” Indonesian generals “do not seem to be quaking in their boots,” the Australian press reports. One reason is that “some of the most damning evidence is likely to be . . . material plucked from the air waves by sophisticated US and Australian electronic intercept equipment,” and the generals feel confident that their old friends will not let them down—if only because the chain of responsibility might be hard to snap at just the right point.
There is also little effort to unearth evidence of atrocities in East Timor. In striking contrast, Kosovo has been swarming with police and medical forensic teams from the US and other countries in the hope of discovering large-scale atrocities that can be transmuted into justification for the NATO bombing of which they were the anticipated consequence—as Milosevic had planned all along, it is now claimed, though NATO Commander General Wesley Clark reported a month after the bombing that the alleged plans “have never been shared with me” and that the NATO operation “was not designed [by the political leadership] as a means of blocking Serb ethnic cleansing. . . . There was never any intent to do that. That was not the idea.”
Commenting on Washington’s refusal to lift a finger to help the victims of its crimes, the veteran Australian diplomat Richard Butler observed that “it has been made very clear to me by senior American analysts that the facts of the alliance essentially are that: the US will respond proportionally, defined largely in terms of its own interests and threat assessment.” The remarks were not offered in criticism of Washington; rather, of his fellow Australians, who do not comprehend the facts of life: that others are to shoulder the burdens, and face the costs—which for Australia, may not be slight. It will hardly come as a great shock if a few years hence US corporations are cheerfully picking up the pieces in an Indonesia that resents Australian actions, but has few complaints about the overlord.
The chorus of self-adulation has subsided a bit, though not much. Far more important than these shameful performances is the failure to act—at once, and decisively—to cast aside mythology and face the causes and consequences of our actions, and to save the remnants of one of the most terrible tragedies of this awful century.
5
“Plan Colombia”
In 1999, Colombia became the leading recipient of US military and police assistance, replacing Turkey (Israel and Egypt are in a separate category). Colombia receives more US military aid than the rest of Latin America and the Caribbean combined. The total for 1999 reached about $300 million, along with $60 million in arms sales, approximately a threefold increase from 1998. The figure is scheduled to increase still more sharply with the anticipated passage of some version of Clinton’s Colombia Plan, submitted to Congress in April 2000, which called for a $1.6 billion “emergency aid” package for two years. Through the 1990s, Colombia has been by far the leading recipient of US military aid in Latin America, and has also compiled by far the worst human rights record, in conformity with a well-established and long-standing correlation.1
In theory, “Plan Colombia” is a two-year Colombian government program of $7.5 billion, with the US providing the military muscle and token funds for other purposes, and some $6 billion from the Colombian government, Europe, the IMF, and the World Bank for social and economic programs that Colombia is to prepare. According to non-US diplomats, the draft of “Plan Colombia” was written in English, not Spanish. The military program (arms, training, intelligence infrastructure) was in place in late 1999, but “the Colombian government has yet to present a coherent social investment program” as of mid-2000, and few governments are “willing to climb aboard what is widely perceived as an American project to clean up its backyard,” by means that are familiar to those who do not choose what has
been called “intentional ignorance.”2
We can often learn from systematic patterns, so let us tarry for a moment on the previous champion, Turkey. As a major US military ally and strategic outpost, Turkey has received substantial military aid from the origins of the Cold War. But arms deliveries began to increase sharply in 1984. Evidently, there was no Cold War connection at all. Rather, that was the year when Turkey initiated a large-scale counterinsurgency campaign in the Kurdish southeast, which also is the site of major US air bases and the locus of regional surveillance, so that everything that happens there is well known in Washington. Arms deliveries peaked in 1997. In that year alone, they exceeded the total from the entire period 1950-83. US arms amounted to about 80 percent of Turkish military equipment, including heavy armaments (jet planes, tanks, etc.), often evading congressional restrictions.3
By 1999, Turkey had largely suppressed Kurdish resistance by extreme terror and ethnic cleansing, leaving some 2 to 3 million refugees, 3,500 villages destroyed (seven times as high as in Kosovo under NATO bombs), and tens of thousands killed, primarily during the Clinton years. A huge flow of US arms was no longer needed to accomplish these objectives. Turkey can therefore be singled out for praise for its “positive experiences” in showing how “tough counterterrorism measures plus political dialogue with non-terrorist opposition groups” can overcome the plague of violence and atrocities, so we learn from the lead article in the New York Times on the State Department’s “latest annual report describing the administration’s efforts to combat terrorism.”4 More evidence, if such is needed, that cynicism is utterly without limits.
A few days later more was reported about Turkey’s “positive experiences” with “tough counterterrorism measures.” Turkey’s parliamentary human rights commission described “widespread resort to torture” by the police and “an array of torture equipment,” and a spokesperson informed the press that visits to the eastern region had “confirmed grim tales of torture” in police prison cells, specifically those of anti-terrorism units. The commission then released a six-volume report based on a two-year investigation, with photographs and other details, confirming extensive evidence that the abuses are systematic, and continue without significant change. These revelations received little notice, ignoring Washington’s involvement, but the press did feature impassioned rhetoric on the need to maintain very harsh sanctions against Cuba because its human rights violations so offend our humanitarian sensibilities. The parliamentary inquiry into the ongoing atrocities supported lavishly by Washington perhaps received oblique acknowledgment in a report by New York Times bureau chief Stephen Kinzer on Turkey’s current progress, shown by the military’s willingness to permit films that “portray the torture that was widespread in military prisons” in the early 1980s.5
Nevertheless, despite the great success achieved by some of the most violent state terror of the 1990s, military operations continue, while Kurds are still deprived of elementary rights.6 On April 1, 2000, 10,000 Turkish troops began new ground sweeps in the regions that had been most devastated by the US-Turkish terror campaigns of the preceding years, also launching another offensive into northern Iraq to attack Kurdish guerrilla forces (PKK)—in a no-fly zone where Kurds are protected by the US air force from the (temporarily) wrong oppressor. Asked about the renewed operations in Iraq, State Department spokesperson James Rubin said that US “policy remains the same. We support the right of Turkey to defend itself against PKK attacks, so long as its incursions are limited in scope and duration and fully respect the rights of the civilian inhabitants of the region”; he declined to answer the question whether Turkey had been “attacked,” stating only that the US had no “independent confirmation” of Turkish military operations in this region of intense surveillance and regular US bombardment.7
As the renewed Turkish campaigns were beginning, Secretary of Defense William Cohen addressed the American-Turkish Council, a festive occasion with much laughter and applause, according to the government report.8 He praised Turkey for taking part in the humanitarian bombing of Yugoslavia, apparently without embarrassment, and announced that Turkey had been invited to join in co-production of the new Joint Strike Aircraft, just as it has been co-producing the F-16s that it used to such good effect in approved varieties of ethnic cleansing and atrocities within its own territory, as a loyal member of NATO.
In Colombia, however, the military armed and trained by the United States has not crushed domestic resistance, though it continues to produce its regular annual toll of atrocities. Each year, some 300,000 new refugees are driven from their homes, with a death toll of about 3,000 and many horrible massacres. The great majority of atrocities are attributed to paramilitary forces. These are closely linked to the military, as documented in considerable and shocking detail once again in February 2000 by Human Rights Watch, and in April 2000 by a UN study which reported that the Colombian security forces that are to be greatly strengthened by the Colombia Plan maintain an intimate relationship with death squads, organize paramilitary forces, and either participate in their massacres directly or, by failing to take action, have “undoubtedly enabled the paramilitary groups to achieve their exterminating objectives.” In more muted terms, the State Department confirms the general picture in its annual human rights reports, again in the report covering 1999, which concludes that “security forces actively collaborated with members of paramilitary groups” while “government forces continued to commit numerous, serious abuses, including extrajudicial killings, at a level that was roughly similar to that of 1998,” when the report attributed about 80 percent of attributable atrocities to the military and paramilitaries. The picture is confirmed as well by the Colombian Office of UN Human Rights Commissioner Mary Robinson. Its director, a respected Swedish diplomat, assigns the responsibility for “the magnitude and complexity of the paramilitary phenomenon” to the Colombian government, hence indirectly to its US sponsor.9
Resort to paramilitary forces for atrocities is well-established practice, for understandable reasons, including in recent years Serbia in Kosovo and Indonesia in East Timor (though in the latter case, the facts were suppressed in favor of “militia violence” and “rogue elements” as long as possible). There is a long history in the practice of terrorist states and imperial powers.
The Colombian Commission of Jurists reported in September 1999 that the rate of killings had increased by almost 20 percent over the preceding year, and that the proportion attributable to the paramilitaries had risen from 46 percent in 1995 to almost 80 percent in 1998, continuing through 1999. The Colombian government’s Human Rights Ombudsman’s Office (Defensoria del Pueblo) reported a 68 percent increase in massacres in the first half of 1999 as compared to the same period of 1998, reaching more than one a day, overwhelmingly attributed to paramilitaries. Daniel Bland, a human rights researcher who worked in Colombia through most of the 1990s, concludes that in the past three years alone, “more than a million people have been forced from their homes in the countryside, and between 5,000 and 7,000 unarmed peasants have been slaughtered by right-wing paramilitaries.” Of nine people he interviewed for a documentary on human rights in 1997—professors, journalists, priests, human rights workers—“three have since been murdered by paramilitary gunmen; four have fled with their families after receiving death threats.” UNICEF and the Colombian Human Rights Information Bureau CODHES estimate that in June-August 1999 alone, 200,000 more people were driven from their homes.10
It would be unfair to charge Washington with lack of concern over paramilitary terror. After the April 2000 release of its annual report “describing the administration’s efforts to combat terrorism,” praising Turkey for its “positive experiences” in this common pursuit, the State Department held a press conference on the report. Counterterrorism Coordinator Michael Sheehan was asked why the Colombian paramilitaries are not listed among terrorist groups, though the State Department has long recognized them to be responsible for the overwhelming majorit
y of the atrocities, including the most atrocious of them, and they are surely the most violent and brutal terrorist organization in the Western hemisphere, ranking high in the world. They are, furthermore, agents of the more serious crime of state terrorism, in view of their close relation to the military establishment in Colombia, hence also the United States. Sheehan explained that the paramilitaries do not escape Washington’s vigilant eye, but the Department cannot jump to conclusions. Terrorists are identified in the report only after scrupulous investigation: “it’s a legal process, and one that was very meticulous.” The paramilitaries are “under review right now” and “if we come up with a case, if we can make the case from our legal definition, they’ll be designated” as terrorists.
In contrast, Cuba easily satisfies the requirements as one of the seven states engaged in terrorism, as demonstrated in the 85 words devoted to it in this 107-page document. The State Department would be “absolutely” ready to take its case against Cuba to Court, Sheehan stated: after all, Cuba “has links to several terrorist organizations that it needs to address,” including the Colombian guerrilla organizations. These do satisfy the Department’s meticulous criteria—by definition, a realistic commentator might add, since the US opposes them.11
We may recall that in the early months of 1999, while massacres were proceeding at over one a day in Colombia, there was also a large increase in atrocities (including many massacres) in East Timor, carried out by Indonesian commandoes armed and trained by the US. In one massacre alone, in a church in Liquica on April 6, 1999, Western investigators believe that 200 or more people were murdered. An American police officer on the scene comments that “officially we must stay with the number of bodies that we have actually lifted, but the total number of people killed in this district is much, much higher than that, perhaps even astronomical.” The full story will never be known, because the plea of the UN mission for forensic experts was rejected by the US and its allies—unlike Kosovo, teeming with investigators at once in an effort to find atrocities that could provide retrospective justification for the NATO bombing that precipitated them, by intriguing logic.12