by John Pilger
Like all small nations living in the shadow of a regional power, the East Timorese looked to another likely guarantor of their right to independence. Many of Fretilin’s leaders were the sons of Timorese who had fought for the Australians against the Japanese in the Second World War and were confident that their former allies would discharge their moral debt, especially now that the inspiring anti-colonialist Gough Whitlam was prime minister. His government would surely support the rights of the people of East Timor, as it had supported those of other colonised or subjugated nations. The Whitlam government had been among the first to recognise the former Portuguese colony of Guinea-Bisseau; and Whitlam’s personal relationship with Suharto suggested that his views would be taken seriously in Jakarta.
What Fretilin’s leaders could not possibly measure was the depth and complexity of the Australian establishment’s obsession with Indonesia. In recent years deference to Jakarta has become an article of faith second only in importance to a veiled obedience to Washington among the makers of Australian foreign policy. By calling into question the latter Whitlam eventually hastened his own political demise; by acquiescing in a ‘special relationship’ with Jakarta, he appeared to obey the instincts that have dominated Australia’s post-Second World War view of the world, which – and it is a great irony – he had pledged to change.22
Since the Japanese bombed Darwin in 1942 and terrified those of us clinging to the southern seaboard, there has been a fear of Asia: that one day the brown and yellow ‘hordes’ to the north will fall down on under-populated white Australia as if by the force of gravity. This is seldom admitted, of course, and perhaps these days it is no longer widely believed. Strategic studies regularly assure the Australian people that they have nothing to fear from anyone. Yet ‘Asia’ lies deep within the political psyche; and ‘living with Asia’ is often the excuse for some astonishing acts of appeasement, known as realpolitik.
Long before he became prime minister, Gough Whitlam, already an outspoken champion of the rights of small nations, made it clear that the Indonesian archipelago was an exception. In 1963 he said that, although the East Timorese had the right to self-determination, ‘we must not get bogged down in another futile argument over sovereignty’.23 He was referring to West New Guinea, which Indonesia had swallowed in the early 1960s, after a long dispute with Australia and the United Nations. But there were no grounds for a dispute over East Timor. This was a Portuguese colony whose people had the same rights, under the UN Charter, as any other colonial people. Yet, wrote James Dunn, ‘No thought was given to what the East Timorese might want . . . The attitude that this ugly relic of old-world colonialism should not be allowed to get in the way of the urgent task of improving Australia–Indonesian relations came to dominate.’24
By 1966, after the populist Indonesian president Sukarno had been effectively deposed by Suharto, Australian politicians rushed to reward the new regime with their support for a consortium of Western aid. An influential Australian Indonesia specialist, Professor J. A. C. Mackie, expressed this enthusiasm in a eulogy for the Suharto regime’s ‘moderate’ character. The new government, he declared, was ‘clearly anti-communist and committed to a low-key, unassertive foreign policy, with a new stress on regionalism and “good neighbourly” relations with nearby countries. The stage was set for the working out of a new and more constructive, enduring set of links.’25
The fact that Suharto and his generals had, in seizing power, killed between 300,000 and a million Indonesians was not mentioned, as if this was irrelevant to the ‘new and constructive set of links’; and indeed it was.
The United States, to which Australia deferred in strategic matters in its region, had no time for Suharto’s predecessor, ‘Bung’ Sukarno. Under the non-aligned Sukarno, mass trade union, peasant, women’s and cultural movements had flourished. Between 1959 and 1965, more than 15 million people joined political parties or affiliated mass organisations that were encouraged to challenge British and American influence in South East Asia.26 Indonesia had one of the largest communist parties in the world.
None of this was acceptable to Washington which, in 1949, had declared that the ‘major function of the region was as a source of raw materials and a market for Japan and Western Europe’, in an emerging global system managed by the United States and ultimately subordinated to American interests.27 In 1967 Richard Nixon wrote, ‘With its 100 million people and its 300-mile arc of islands containing the region’s richest hoard of natural resources, Indonesia is the greatest prize in South East Asia.’28
A ‘new and constructive set of links’ between the United States and the Indonesian military had long been forged, allowing the generals to receive US equipment in spite of Sukarno’s hostility. In 1965, following rumours of a coup against Sukarno, six generals were murdered in what is often described as a ‘communist coup’. If it was that, it had unique features. None of the middle-ranking military officers who took part was a communist; and the US embassy denied that the Indonesian Communist Party (PKI) had any reason to take part.29
As Noam Chomsky has pointed out, the coup ‘miraculously spared the pro-US Suharto, while targeting elements of the military considered anti-American’ and allowing Suharto to carry out ‘an actual military coup which led to the slaughter of half a million people in a few months, mostly landless peasants, and crushed the popular-based Communist Party; at the same time, incidentally, turning Indonesia into a “paradise for investors”.’30
Declassified American documents have since revealed that the United States not only supported the slaughter but helped the generals to plan and execute it. The CIA gave them a ‘hit list’ of 5,000 Communist Party supporters including party leaders, regional committee members and heads of trade unions and women’s and youth groups, who were hunted down and killed.
In 1990 a former US embassy official in Jakarta disclosed that he had spent two years drawing up the hit list, which was ‘a big help to the army’. ‘I probably have a lot of blood on my hands,’ he said, ‘but that’s not all bad. There’s a time when you have to strike hard at a decisive moment.’ The list had been approved by the US Ambassador, who stated that the US had ‘a lot more information’ on the PKI than the Indonesian army. As people on the list were murdered, their names were crossed off by American officials.31
With the slaughter under way, US Secretary of State Dean Rusk cabled the Jakarta embassy that the ‘campaign against [the] PKI’ must continue and that the military ‘are [the] only force capable of creating order in Indonesia.’ The United States, he said, was prepared to back a ‘major military campaign against [the] PKI’. The US Ambassador passed this on to the generals, making it clear ‘that the Embassy and the US Government are generally sympathetic with and admiring of what the army is doing’. When the military replied that they needed more American weapons to sustain the slaughter, they were told that ‘carefully placed assistance’ – covert aid – would ‘help the army cope . . .’
‘No single American action in the period after 1945’, wrote the historian Gabriel Kolko, ‘was as bloodthirsty as its role in Indonesia, for it tried to initiate the massacre, and it did everything in its power to encourage Suharto.’32
The Congress and the mainstream American press welcomed the bloody events as the ‘gleam of light in Asia’ . . . ‘the West’s best news for years in Asia’ . . . ‘hope where there once was none’. The American land invasion of Vietnam in March of that year, 1965, was now justified as providing a ‘shield’ behind which the Indonesian generals were encouraged to carry out their important anti-communist work.33
The British Labour government did not stand in their way. A year after the extermination campaign, Foreign Secretary Michael Stewart visited Indonesia and reported ‘reach[ing] a good understanding’ with the Foreign Secretary, Adam Malik, a ‘remarkable man’ who was ‘resolved to keep his country at peace’.34 This remarkable man was to play a key role in the events that led to the second great slaughter, in East Timor.
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In September 1974 Australia’s prime minister, Gough Whitlam, met President Suharto at the village of Wonosobo in Java. According to well-informed journalists travelling with him, Whitlam’s clear signal to Suharto was that East Timor was his for the taking. Under the headline, ‘Canberra aim for Timor: go Indonesian’, Hugh Armfield of the Melbourne Age conveyed the background briefing he was given by Australian officials. ‘Australia is expected to take a significant step in the next few weeks’, he wrote, ‘towards ensuring that the tiny enclave on Timor becomes part of Indonesia. Australia and Indonesia are likely to make a joint approach to Portugal, urging that this is the only practical solution for its 450-year-old colony . . . Mr. Whitlam and President Suharto agreed last weekend that the best and most realistic future for Timor was association with Indonesia’.35
Peter Hastings of the Sydney Morning Herald, who was close to the Whitlam entourage, reported, ‘Mr. Whitlam went much further, one suspects, than his Indonesian hosts required in publicly announcing, by means of a Foreign Affairs official press briefing, that “an independent Timor would be an unviable state and a potential threat to the area”, even though the AAP report added that the Prime Minister is thought to have made clear that the people of the colony should have the ultimate decision on their future’.36
Some have argued that Whitlam’s extraordinary, contradictory statements stemmed from disinterest, even ignorance. Certainly, applying his reasoning, it could be said that the small independent Pacific states of Nauru, Tonga, Samoa and Papua New Guinea were also ‘unviable’. Peter Hastings later blamed Whitlam’s advisers who, he wrote, ‘furnished the Prime Minister with such an unsophisticated briefing before he left for Central Java to give away, without being asked, what was not his to give away.’37
Yet Gough Whitlam had built a reputation as a politician who did not rely on advisers. His actions remain a puzzle. Here was a man who defended even the right of the Baltic states to independence from the Soviet Union. He was the champion of the weak against the strong: of the Vietnamese against Nixon and Kissinger, of draft resisters at home, of the Palestinians and Cubans, and Polynesians suffering under France’s nuclear tests. He was the first Australian prime minister to give land back to the Aborigines. His breadth of vision and determination to open up new horizons to the Australian people were, to my generation, without precedent; and perhaps here lies part of the explanation.
Whitlam wanted to lead Australia away from its Eurocentricity and give it a new, vital role in its own region. He wanted the great nations of Asia – China and Indonesia – to take white Australia seriously; and he was impatient to achieve this in what he must have known would be only a relatively brief period in office. ‘Perhaps he perceived’, wrote James Dunn who, like me, admired Whitlam, ‘that [Australia] would have become bogged down in an acrimonious and confrontational dispute with Indonesia, which may have revived all the “yellow peril” fears of the past, forcing us back, as it were, into our isolationist and racist shell’.38
Whatever his motives, tiny East Timor became, to paraphrase a remark by the present Indonesian foreign minister, ‘grit in his shoe’. What makes Whitlam even more of an enigma to his admirers is that, as the evidence of his misjudgement has mounted year upon year, he has taken a combative line, even flying to the United Nations in an attempt to get it to drop East Timor as an issue. In an article in the Sydney Morning Herald in 1991 he accused the Australian media of conducting a ‘vendetta against Indonesia since the deaths of two television teams’ and Fretilin of ‘massacres’ and general ‘brutality’ while not once referring to Indonesia’s genocide. On the contrary, he heaped praise upon the Indonesian dictator. ‘President Suharto is a reasonable and honourable man’, he wrote. ‘Every Australian ambassador will confirm that. It is outrageous what Australian newspapers and persons in public positions say about him and his Government . . . In due course our correspondence and the records of our conversations will reveal the range and depth of our relationship’.39 Did this ‘range and depth’ include discussion of Australia’s responsibility towards a small and vulnerable neighbour and the predictable consequences of Indonesian aggression?
Within weeks of the Whitlam/Suharto meeting in Java, a clutch of generals close to Suharto launched a secret intelligence operation, code-named Operasi Komodo, aimed at destroying the East Timorese independence movement, which, far from being ‘unviable’, was then making significant progress.
In January 1975 Fretilin and its main opponent, UDT, established a united front to demand independence. This was short-lived. Agents of Operasi Komodo influenced UDT, creating divisions, distrust and eventually conflict. The UDT leaders were told independence was only possible if the ‘communists’ of Fretilin were ‘neutralised’. Backed by Jakarta, UDT mounted a coup attempt with the Portuguese stepping aside and creating a political vacuum. This led to civil war and between 1,500 and 2,000 deaths. (When Indonesian officials and their foreign supporters attempt to explain the years of slaughter that followed the Indonesian invasion, they often blame the ‘civil war’ that lasted less than a month.)
During the coup attempt the Portuguese governor and administration left Dili for the nearby Atauro Island, to avoid being directly involved in the fighting. Fretilin had recently won a victory in local elections and was now firmly in control. Its popularity was confirmed by two Australian delegations that travelled widely in East Timor following the civil war. James Dunn was a member of a group from the Australian Council for Overseas Aid (ACOA). ‘Whatever the shortcomings of the Fretilin administration’, he reported, ‘it clearly enjoyed widespread support from the population, including many hitherto UDT supporters . . . Australian relief workers visited most parts of Timor and, without exception, they reported that there was no evidence of any insecurity or any hostility towards Fretilin. Indeed, Fretilin leaders were welcomed warmly and spontaneously in all main centres by crowds of Timorese. In my long association with Portuguese Timor, which goes back fourteen years, I had never before witnessed such demonstrations of spontaneous warmth and support from the indigenous population.’40
With Portugal distracted by political upheaval at home and Fretilin the de facto government in East Timor, Western governments became alarmed. In July, the British Ambassador in Jakarta, Sir John Archibald Ford, sent his Head of Chancery to East Timor. ‘The people of Portuguese Timor are in no condition to exercise the right of self-determination,’ he reported. ‘If it comes to the crunch and there is a row in the United Nations we should keep our heads down and avoid siding against the Indonesian Government.’41 Ford recommended to the Foreign Office that it was in Britain’s interests that Indonesia should ‘absorb the territory as soon as and as unobtrusively as possible’.42
The US Secretary of State, Henry Kissinger, having recently watched American power and his own ambitions humiliated in the ‘fall’ of Saigon, signalled to Jakarta that the United States would not object if Indonesia invaded East Timor.43 Within weeks a clandestine invasion began. On September 4, the CIA reported that ‘two Indonesian special forces groups entered Portuguese Timor’. On September 17 the CIA reported, ‘Jakarta is now sending guerrilla units into the Portuguese half of the island in order to engage Fretilin forces, encourage pro-Indonesian elements, and provoke incidents that would provide the Indonesians with an excuse to invade . . .’44
The CIA and other American intelligence agencies intercepted much of Indonesia’s military and intelligence communications at a secret base run by the Australian Defence Signals Directorate (DSD) near Darwin. The information gathered was shared under treaty arrangements with Canberra and London and summarised in the National Intelligence Daily, published by the CIA, which was on President Ford’s desk early each morning in 1975. Thus, Western governments knew well in advance Indonesia’s intentions and the day-by-day detail of its covert operations. Moreover, leaked diplomatic cables from Jakarta, notably those sent by the Australian Ambassador Richard Woolcott, confirmed this.
Amba
ssador Woolcott reported that two of the principal conspirators, including Suharto’s crony General Benny Murdani, had ‘assured’ him that when Indonesia decided to launch a full-scale invasion, Australia would get ‘not less than two hours’ notice’.45 In one remarkable cable sent to Canberra in August 1975, Woolcott argued Indonesia’s case and how Australian public opinion might be ‘assisted’. ‘What Indonesia now looks to from Australia, in the present situation,’ he wrote, ‘is some understanding of their attitude and possible action to assist public understanding in Australia rather than action on our part which could contribute to criticism of Indonesia’. The government could say publicly, Woolcott advised, that ‘Australia cannot condone the use of force in Timor, nor could we accept the principle that a country can intervene in a neighbouring territory because of concern, however well based that concern might be, over the situation there. At the same time [we] could concede that Indonesia has had a prolonged struggle for national unity and could not be expected to take lightly a breakdown in law and order in Portuguese Timor . . .’
Woolcott proposed that ‘[we] leave events to take their course . . . and act in a way which would be designed to minimise the public impact in Australia and show private understanding to Indonesia of their problems . . . although’, he added, ‘we do not want to become apologists for Indonesia’. He concluded, ‘I know I am recommending a pragmatic rather than a principled stand but that is what national interest and foreign policy is all about . . .’46 There was not a word of concern for the interests or the fate of the East Timorese, who were, it was apparent, expendable.