by John Pilger
I asked Liechty how he felt as he saw the evidence of genocide and its cover-up unfold before him in Jakarta. ‘When the atrocity stories began to appear in the CIA reporting’, he said, ‘the way they dealt with these was to cover them up as long as possible; and when they couldn’t be covered up any longer, they were reported in a watered down, very generalised way, so that even their own sourcing was sabotaged. In intelligence, sourcing is the most important thing. At that time my disillusion was already low. I continued to do what I was supposed to do on my tour. I certainly didn’t feel like being the Lone Ranger. There certainly were others who felt as badly as I did.’ I asked him what would have happened had anyone spoken out. ‘Your career would end,’ he replied.
With the inauguration of President Clinton, American policy on East Timor seemed to change. During his election campaign, Clinton had referred to the Indonesian occupation as ‘unconscionable’. In March 1993 the United States supported a resolution of the United Nations Human Rights Commission expressing ‘deep concern’ over Indonesia’s behaviour in East Timor. Under Presidents Reagan and Bush, the United States had helped to block similar resolutions. In July, in Tokyo, Clinton handed Suharto a letter signed by 43 Senators protesting at the Indonesian occupation. (In response, Suharto told Clinton that it was ‘out of respect for the human rights of East Timor’s people’ that Indonesia had invaded.)132
Clinton also supported an amendment to the Foreign Aid Bill which, in its original wording, demanded ‘immediate and unrestricted access’ for humanitarian groups to East Timor and ‘withdrawal of Indonesian armed forces’ and ‘the right of self-determination’ for the East Timorese. Unless Indonesia complied, all American arms sales would cease.
As a result of vigorous lobbying of Congress by the Suharto regime, its American advisers and front organisations, and with the State and Defence departments reportedly ‘working together to neutralise the amendment’,133 the wording was diluted so that the President would be required only to ‘consider’ the human rights situation in East Timor before approving major weapons sales. By the end of 1993 the Foreign Aid Bill still had not reached the floor of Congress. At the time of writing it seems likely to be postponed for up to a year, or indefinitely. The sound and fury of the American system had promised much and delivered little. Even a modest ruling by Congress in the aftermath of the Santa Cruz massacre – that Indonesian military officers were no longer to receive training in the United States – was ignored. ‘Congress’s action’, said a State Department official, ‘did not ban Indonesia’s purchase of training with its own funds . . .’134
It is ironic that one of the obstacles to bringing pressure on a Western-backed tyranny like Indonesia is the very concept of ‘human rights’, which has become part of the language of post-Cold War politics. Clinton’s expressions of concern for ‘human rights’ are reminiscent of those of President Carter, who described ‘human rights’ as ‘the soul of [American] foreign policy’135 while increasing American arms supplies to Indonesia at the height of the slaughter in East Timor. Under Clinton a change in policy seems possible. But the rhetoric goes on, while American military and economic support for Suharto goes on (as it does, of course, for other acceptable dictatorships).
In other words, while the impression is given that ‘human rights’ are integral to American and all of Western policy-making, the opposite is the functional truth; ‘human rights’ are a useful cosmetic but otherwise irrelevant. As the historian Mark Curtis has pointed out, ‘The justification for supporting bloodthirsty dictatorships and mass murderers can no longer be made by referring to the evils of the other side [in the Cold War]. The excuse that still worse atrocities would be committed if favoured states fell into the Soviet bloc is no longer available . . . Another formulation is currently popular: that Third World states conducting mass repression and who happen to pursue economic policies favourable to Western business interests are somehow unable, because of cultural reasons, to safeguard human rights. Western attempts to impose our high standards might be viewed as interference in their internal affairs (something which surely we could not contemplate) and therefore business should continue as normal . . .
‘In the extremely unlikely event that Indonesia adopted economic policies preferential to its poor – thus threatening the right of international capitalism to exploit the nation’s resources – the historical record suggests that Western leaders would suddenly discover human rights as a relevant issue in their relations with Jakarta and start condemning Indonesia’s brutal aggression as an outrageous act intolerable by any civilised standards.’136
In the meantime, the US Department of Commerce says that Indonesia offers ‘excellent trade and investment opportunities for US companies [that are] too good to be ignored’.137 The British government has been one of the first to seize these ‘opportunities’. A few months before the Indonesian invasion the Confederation of British Industry (CBI) announced that Indonesia presented ‘enormous potential for the foreign investor’.138 Since then British companies have made huge profits in the ‘favourable political climate’ offered by General Suharto and by a labour market in which the better paid workers receive some 20 pence an hour.
Shortly before the Santa Cruz massacre Douglas Hurd urged the European Community to ‘cut aid to countries that violate human rights’.139 Shortly after the massacre the British government increased its aid to the Suharto regime by 250 per cent to £81 million, the largest percentage rise of any donor country.140 A government minister, Baroness Chalker, claimed in Parliament that this was ‘helping the poor in Indonesia’.141 In fact, half of British aid to Indonesia is made up of Aid for Trade Provisions (ATP), which ensures concessionary loans and highly favourable credits for British goods and investment. Rio Tinto Zinc, British Petroleum, British Gas, Britoil, Rolls-Royce and British Aerospace are among the British conglomerates helping Indonesia’s poor.
The British war industry has provided a vital prop for Suharto since 1978 when Foreign Secretary David Owen dismissed estimates of East Timorese dead as ‘exaggerated’ and sold the Indonesian generals eight Hawk ground-attack aircraft worth £25 million each. By the end of 1994 Britain will have sold, or agreed to sell, a further 40 Hawks, and more are ‘in the pipeline’. These are in addition to Wasp helicopters, Sea Wolf and Rapier SAM missiles, Tribal Class frigates, battlefield communications systems, seabed mine disposal equipment, Saladin, Saracen and Fernet armoured vehicles, a fully-equipped Institute of Technology for the Indonesian army and training for Indonesian officers in Britain.
When a Foreign Office minister, Baroness Trumpington, was asked about the military potential of Land Rovers sold to the Indonesian army, she said, derisively, ‘My farmer friends would laugh . . . to think that they were offensive weapons!’ British Aerospace manufactures the Land Rover, which it describes as one of ‘the world’s most successful pieces of defence hardware’.142 I saw Land Rovers used widely in East Timor by the occupying forces. It is very likely that the bodies of the young people murdered or wounded in the Santa Cruz massacre were thrown into the back of British Land Rovers.
In Washington a line often heard is that it doesn’t matter what the US does to withhold arms from Indonesia, because Jakarta will simply get what it needs from Britain. A great deal of British mendacity has been deployed in justifying its underpinning of one of the world’s most barbarous regimes. This has concentrated on the Hawk aircraft, an especially efficient weapon. ‘The point of selling Hawk aircraft to Indonesia’, the armed services minister, Archie Hamilton, told Parliament in 1993, ‘is to give jobs to people in this country. There is no doubt in my mind that a Hawk aircraft can do nothing to suppress the people of East Timor. The aircraft is not suitable for that purpose and we have guarantees from the Indonesians that the aircraft would not be used for internal suppression.’143
This was an extraordinary statement even by modern parliamentary standards. Since Hamilton uttered it, British Aerospace have sacked more than 4,000
workers. It is, however, constantly echoed. ‘There is no evidence’, said Baroness Chalker, ‘that aircraft sold in the past to Indonesia have been used for internal security purposes.’144 When the defence minister, Jonathan Aitken, was asked in Parliament ‘how many dead or tortured East Timorese are acceptable to the government in exchange for a defence contract with Indonesia’, he replied, ‘That is a ridiculous question.’145 But of course it was not.
The government has promoted the Hawk as a mere ‘trainer’. British Aerospace, however, say that it ‘has been designed from the outset with a significant ground attack capability’.146 The Indonesians appear to be in no doubt. According to the Research and Technology minister, B. J. Habibie, the Hawks ‘will be used not only to train pilots but for ground attack’.147
The independent Center for Defense Information in Washington is even more explicit. Its director, retired US Rear Admiral Eugene J. Carroll, told me, ‘These British aircraft are ideal counter-insurgency aircraft, designed to be used against guerrillas who come from and move among civilian populations and have no adequate means of response to air attack. In other words, they are there to shoot high velocity cannon and deliver ordnance at low levels against unprotected human beings.’148
As for there being ‘no evidence’ that the Hawks are used in East Timor, there are plenty of eye-witnesses. In interviews with myself and Max Stahl, Timorese have described in detail Hawks attacking civilian areas.
José Gusmao, a Timorese now exiled in Australia, said, ‘I watched a Hawk attack on a village in the mountains. It used its machine-guns and dropped incendiary bombs. The Hawk is quite different from the American planes; it has a particular nose. You can tell it anywhere.’ Another Timorese eye-witness, José Amorin, told me, ‘I first saw the Hawks in action in 1984. They were standing at the airport at Baucau, where they are based. They are a small aircraft, not at all like the OV-10 Bronco and the Skyhawk from the US. They are perfect for moving in and out of the mountains. They have a terrible sound when they are coming in to bomb, like a voice wailing. We immediately go to the caves, into the deepest ones, because their bombs are so powerful. They fly in low . . . and attack civilians, because the people hiding in the mountains are civilians. Four of my cousins were killed in Hawk attacks near Los Palos. They were hiding in caves as the Hawks bombed every day for almost a week. On the sixth day they bombed the mountain so that stones covered the cave entrance, and my cousins were trapped. They died in the cave. Most people in East Timor know about the British Hawks. Why doesn’t the British government send a fact-finding mission and ask the people?’
José Amorin came to London in November 1993 and presented his evidence at the Foreign Office. He told me, ‘I met a senior official and gave him a lot of information. I told him where the Hawks were based in East Java and East Timor. He said they were only trainers. I replied that if they were used for training, it was on live targets in East Timor. I described to him everything. He said he would take seriously my points and pass them to the Minister. He could give me no categorical assurance that the Hawks were not being used in East Timor.’ (Later, this official denied that he had been given any such evidence.)
In 1992 a spokesman for the East Timorese independence movement described Britain as ‘the single worst obstructionist of any industrialised country’ in promoting international action on East Timor.149 The British Foreign Office has played a leading, some would say traditional, role in this process.
Following the murder of the two television crews by the Indonesian army in October 1975, the Foreign Office refused to give out details of the two Britons killed, Malcolm Rennie and Brian Peters. An official said that the families did not wish to be ‘disturbed by the media’. This was a lie. Brian Peters’ sister, Maureen Tolfree, told me she had had no contact with the Foreign Office and had not even been notified that Brian had been killed, and that all their mother knew was what she had read in the press. ‘It was as if he never existed,’ she said. Certainly, no public protest was made to the Jakarta regime. When she flew to Jakarta to attempt to collect Brian’s remains she was taken to a room in the airport where a British or Australian embassy official – she cannot say which – telephoned her and told her it would be unwise for her to stay in Indonesia.
When The Times published a report in 1977, headlined ‘Indonesia Accused of Mass Murder in East Timor’,150 the journalist responsible was called to the Foreign Office and asked to explain his interest in East Timor. ‘It was obvious’, said David Watts, a South East Asia specialist, ‘that I was being warned off the story. It had the opposite effect.’151
When people write to the government or their MP about East Timor, they receive replies that not only deny any British complicity, but attempt to devalue the scale of suffering of the East Timorese. J. L. Wilkins of the South East Asia Department of the Foreign Office is the author of a number of these replies. ‘No one really knows the truth’ about the death toll is his message, because some estimates ‘are sometimes so dramatically different’ from the British government’s that they ‘cannot help but suspect them to be exaggerated’.152 The same devotion to historical accuracy was shown by a Foreign Office official who, when asked about the large death toll, said, ‘Yes, but it didn’t happen in one year.’153
When the United Nations Human Rights Commission met in Geneva in April 1993, a posse of Foreign Office officials allied themselves with representatives of the Jakarta regime in an attempt to divide the European Community vote and prevent a resolution condemning Indonesia. Only when this ‘disgraceful bullying role’, as one observer called it, was clearly failing did Britain fall in with its EC partners and vote for the resolution.154
Two months later the same officials, reported the Guardian, ‘deliberately misled critics of Indonesia into thinking that the British government was pushing for International Red Cross access to political prisoners in East Timor’. A ‘restricted access’ Telex from the British Embassy in Jakarta said, ‘Pont [Pierre Pont, the ICRC delegate to East Timor] judges, and I agree, that for the moment the military and civilian authorities will be fighting this out behind the scenes and that pressure from outside would contribute little.’155
The Telex was dated June 24. On June 30 a Foreign Office minister, Alastair Goodlad, wrote to Labour MP Greg Pope saying that Britain was urging Indonesia to allow access to the resistance leader, Xanana Gusmao, and other political prisoners. A later version of the same letter, signed by the head of the Indonesia section at the Foreign Office, Richard Sands, emphasised that ‘we are currently pressing the Indonesians to allow resumed ICRC access to Xanana Gusmao and others’. This was entirely false. An internal Foreign Office memorandum, which accompanied both the Telex and the second letter, read, ‘Attached for infn/edification. The letter is for stonewalling.’156
British closeness to the Indonesian tyranny was nurtured by Margaret Thatcher. As with arms deals she personally promoted in the Gulf and elsewhere, it was Thatcher who pushed the most recent sale of Hawks when she visited Jakarta in 1985. In 1992 she became the first foreigner to receive the annual award from the Association of Indonesian Engineers: a reward for ‘a decade of enhancing UK-Indonesian cooperation in technology’. She told the assembled chiefs of Indonesia’s weapons industry, ‘I am proud to be one of you.’157
One of Thatcher’s staunchest admirers is Alan Clark, the Tory multi-millionaire MP who lives in a castle in Kent and has a reputation for speaking his mind. As ‘defence procurement minister’ under Thatcher, Clark was responsible for the sale of the latest batch of Hawk aircraft to Indonesia for£500 million. I interviewed him in November 1993, in his London pied à terre in Albany, off Piccadilly. The following has been slightly abridged:
J.P. When the sale of Hawk aircraft was being finalised with Indonesia you told Parliament, ‘We do not allow the export of arms and equipment lightly to be used for oppressive purposes against civilians’. How does that work? How does the government not allow that?
A.C. Well, you sc
rutinise every military report. [The] equipment we’re talking about is police-type equipment. I mean, riot guns, CS gas, anti-personnel stuff and obviously instruments of torture, gallows, that kind of thing [and] perhaps a water cannon, armoured cars, sort of heavy-riot control kit. But once you get into military equipment, you’re into a different category of decision.
J.P. But can’t military equipment be used as police equipment?
A.C. Oh yes.
J.P. I mean, Hawk low-flying attack aircraft are very effective at policing people on the ground, I would have thought.
A.C. No, they’re not, because policing means one thing. In this case it means repression by an authoritarian regime of domestic incidents . . . riots, protests, that sort of thing. I mean, aircraft are used in the context of a civil war.
J.P. But East Timor isn’t a civil war. The civil war has been over for eighteen years. This is an illegal occupation, which the British government acknowledges to be an illegal occupation.
A.C. I’m not into that. I don’t know anything about that.
J.P. Well, you were the minister.
A.C. Yeah, but I’m not interested in illegal occupations or anything like that . . . I mean you call it illegal . . .
J.P. No, the United Nations does.
A.C. Okay, well, anyway, there is this distinction between police equipment which covers riot control, the instruments of torture, the low-grade stuff, the military equipment which is also subject to very high-level scrutiny.
J.P. Your colleagues in government have talked about getting guarantees from the Indonesians so that the Hawks won’t be used for oppressive purposes in East Timor. What exactly are these guarantees?
A.C. Well, I never asked for a guarantee. That must have been something that the Foreign Office did . . . a guarantee is worthless from any government as far as I’m concerned.