by John Pilger
J.P. Shouldn’t the public be cynical about all this after what happened over Iraq? Shouldn’t the public be cynical about assurances, guidelines and denials from government about the sale of arms?
A.C. Well, I don’t know what you mean by the public, but I don’t think the majority of people give a damn about it . . . unless those weapons are going to be used against our own troops.
J.P. But it’s the assumption that the public doesn’t give a damn that allows ministers and officials to deceive; isn’t that correct?
A.C. Why should they want to deceive if the public doesn’t give a damn?
J.P. You say they don’t give a damn, but that’s an assumption that has yet to be tested scientifically . . . I would have thought that ministers are public servants, are they not?
A.C. Certainly, but you measure public opinion by dining-rooms in Hampstead.
J.P. I’ve never been in a dining-room in Hampstead.
A.C. Haven’t you?
J.P. No.
A.C. Well, I’ll accept your assurance. You see, there’s a concept known as the chattering classes, and they get tearful about different issues, and talk to each other about them. I hold them in complete contempt. They tend to regard themselves in some way as being ‘the public’. They get a lot of coverage in the Guardian and the Independent.
J.P. Should a government lie to its people?
A.C. No, certainly not . . . One must take very great care not to.
J.P. Mislead its people, deceive?
A.C. Well, deceive is the same thing. But misleading . . . you get into a very grey area of definition here. Misleading gets you into the territory of both semantics and gullibility. People often don’t want to believe things. They feel more comfortable if they don’t focus their attention on things . . .
J.P. The fact remains that British aircraft kill and maim people in East Timor, and the government allows the sale of these aircraft on flimsy assurances that they won’t be used there.
A.C. Flimsy, no. I mean, they are given in a proper diplomatic context. I attach very little value to such assurances.
J.P. Isn’t all this, in broad terms, about the right of a small country not to be invaded by a large neighbour?
A.C. Yeah, but they weren’t British, were they?
J.P. That makes a difference?
A.C. Of course it makes a difference.
J.P. So if they’re not British, you can then sell them aircraft to help a powerful neighbour get on with occupying the territory that it’s invaded?
A.C. I must caution you. In the way you express things [you] are constantly foreshortening these arguments and giving them a particular colouring . . .
J.P. This is a regime that has perhaps one of the bloodiest records of the twentieth century.
A.C. Well, that’s a very competitive sphere.
J.P. This regime has competed well in that league.
A.C. Has it? There’s Stalin, Pol Pot and others.
J.P. In East Timor it has killed more people proportionately than Pol Pot killed in Cambodia. By all credible accounts it’s killed a third of the population. Isn’t that ever a consideration for the British government?
A.C. It’s not something that often enters my . . . thinking, I must admit.
J.P. Why is that?
A.C. My responsibility is to my own people. I don’t really fill my mind much with what one set of foreigners is doing to another.
J.P. Did it bother you personally when you were the minister responsible [and] that British equipment was causing such mayhem and human suffering, albeit to a set of foreigners?
A.C. No, not in the slightest. It never entered my head.
J.P. You don’t lose sleep over it?
A.C. No.
J.P. I ask the question because I read that you were a vegetarian and you are seriously concerned about the way animals are killed.
A.C. Yeah.
J.P. Doesn’t that concern extend to the way humans, albeit foreigners, are killed?
A.C. Curiously not.
J.P. Why not?
A.C. Well, it’s a philosophic field. I suppose there is a relationship with the doctrine of original sin and innocence and so on . . .
J.P. In your view, are there categories of arms that should never be sold?
A.C. Yes. Nuclear, ballistic missile technology, chemical biological precursors, things like that. But in the conventional arms marketplace, as far as I’m concerned, it’s open season.
J.P. You have said that where a regime is oppressively outrageous, as the gassing of children is, an army supplier should back off. Do you consider the mass slaughter of children in East Timor oppressively outrageous?
A.C. Do you mean, lined up in front of a ditch?
J.P. Yes. One of the examples used is of children and their mothers being burnt alive in a house, trapped there and burnt by the Indonesians. What’s the difference?
A.C. I think gassing is dreadful. It’s one of those techniques that actually breaks through one’s protective indifference and is upsetting. But the other things that you mentioned . . . they just occur in combat or violent occupation situations.
J.P. I’m still not sure of the difference. Why is gassing any worse than shooting, burning, torturing?
A.C. I can’t tell. There’s something about it that deeply offends one’s natural instinct, I suppose. It’s a different threshold of violence. The other things, the examples you’ve given . . . I’m not familiar with the situation in East Timor . . .
J.P. You once asked a television audience, ‘Does anyone know where East Timor is?’ Am I right in taking from that rather contemptuous dismissal, that [East Timor] is simply expendable?
A.C. I don’t understand the use of the word expendable.
J.P. Of no consequence?
A.C. If you want to get worked up about something I can steer you in all sorts of directions, if that’s your hobby, bleeding . . .
J.P. Well, no, the bleeding has been done in East Timor . . . often because of British military equipment.
A.C. I mean you can look anywhere, so what’s all this about East Timor suddenly? . . . I mean, how many people are there in the world? A billion or something? I mean, if you want to rush round and say gosh, look how dreadful this is, whatever it is, you won’t have any problems. British military equipment is being used in Kashmir, and British military equipment is being used in Sri Lanka. We don’t live in an ideal world.
In my film Death of a Nation there is a sequence filmed on board an aircraft flying between northern Australia and Timor. A party is in progress; bottles of champagne are being uncorked. There is much false laughter as two men in suits toast each other. The larger man is uneasy and deferential as he raises his glass. ‘This is an historically unique moment’, he says, ‘ . . . that is truly uniquely historical.’ This is Gareth Evans, Australia’s foreign affairs minister since 1988. The other man is Ali Alatas, the Indonesian foreign minister. It is 1989 and the two are making a symbolic flight to celebrate the signing of the Timor Gap Treaty, which will allow Australian and international oil companies to exploit the seabed off East Timor. The ultimate prize could amount to seven billion barrels of oil or, as Gareth Evans put it, ‘zillions’ of dollars.158
Declared by Prime Minister Whitlam in 1975 to be too poor for a ‘viable’ independence, the East Timorese were now being denied any profit from their own natural wealth. When in 1979 the Australian government gave de jure recognition to Indonesia’s occupation, negotiations for the spoils were already under way. In 1985 Australia became the first Western country formally to recognise Indonesia’s sovereignty over East Timor with a blunt statement by Prime Minister Bob Hawke that the Timor Gap Treaty ‘can in practice be concluded only with the Indonesian government’.159 Asked about the international principle of not recognising territory acquired by force, Gareth Evans said, ‘What I can say is simply that the world is a pretty unfair place.’160
According to Professor Roger Clark, the Timor Gap Tre
aty also has a simple analogy in law. ‘It is acquiring stuff from a thief,’ he said. ‘If you acquire property from someone who stole it, you’re a receiver. As far as I’m concerned, the Indonesians are in the position of someone who stole territory, and the Australians are dealing with them as though they had some kind of legitimacy. I find that is complicity. The fact is that they have neither historical, nor legal, nor moral claim to East Timor and its resources.
‘Moreover, the obligation not to recognise the acquisition of territory acquired illegally is reflected in a very significant 1970 resolution of the General Assembly that was co-sponsored by Australia on the twenty-fifth anniversary of the United Nations. This spelt out in detail some of the legal principles that are stated broadly in the UN Charter. Australians were members of the committee that laboured for seven years to draft the language that was adopted unanimously and is a flat prohibition.’161
On a visit to Indonesia in February 1991 to finalise the treaty, Evans said, ‘I have taken the view that Australia does have a duty as an international good citizen to go on raising [human rights] issues . . . The truth of the matter is that the human rights situation [in East Timor] has, in our judgement, conspicuously improved, particularly under the present military arrangements . . .’162 Nine months later the Indonesian military killed or wounded more than 450 people in the Santa Cruz massacre. Evans described this as ‘an aberration, not an act of state policy’.163
The Indonesians agreed. A ‘special commission of enquiry’, set up by Suharto, blamed a few soldiers and said that the ultimate responsibility lay with the ‘provocations’ of the unarmed victims. Evans described the Indonesian reaction as ‘positive and helpful’ and ‘very encouraging’. He said he was ‘reasonably happy’ with the enquiry’s findings, adding that the victims unaccounted for ‘might simply have gone bush’.164 Within two months of the massacre, the joint Australian-Indonesian board overseeing exploitation of the Timor Gap awarded eleven contracts to Australian oil and gas companies.165 On the day that Australian Resources Minister Alan Griffiths signed a further part of the treaty with his Indonesian counterpart, Amnesty International described the massacre as probably a planned military operation and the Indonesian enquiry as totally lacking in credibility and ‘principally directed at the appeasement of domestic and international critics and the suppression of further political dissent in the territory’.166 An Indonesian court subsequently sentenced ten low-ranking officers mostly to a few months’ prison, including one who served his time on holiday in Bali. In contrast, eight Timorese demonstrators were given sentences ranging from five years to life.
When protesters planted crosses in front of the Indonesian Embassy in Canberra, one for each of the murdered, Gareth Evans had them removed. When a federal court ruled that Australia’s diplomatic regulations did not give him this power and ordered the crosses restored, Evans quickly changed the regulations. A spokesman for Evans explained that the Indonesians had complained that the ‘dignity of its embassy had been impaired by the crosses’.167
In September 1993, Australian Prime Minister Paul Keating arrived in Washington. It was the week following the US Senate Foreign Relations Committee’s unanimous vote to propose a bill banning arms sales to Indonesia unless it improved its human rights record in East Timor. Keating objected to this, and called on the Congress and the President to take a more ‘balanced’ view of human rights in Indonesia and to allow Suharto to have his say. Referring to ‘the East Timor thing’ he said, ‘You want to stay positively engaged with [the Indonesians] so you can still talk about the things that worry you as well as giving both sides an incentive for co-operation in economic areas where your interests do clearly line up.’168 The Indonesians were ecstatic. ‘What he has done’, said Jakarta’s ambassador in Canberra, ‘is walk right into the lion’s den and make our case. Keating is our comrade in arms.’169 Jakarta’s weapons chief, B. J. Habibie, said, ‘This is music to my ears.’170
Keating, who is proud of his pugnacious, often abusive style in Parliament – he has called his opponents ‘harlots’, ‘sleazebags’, ‘boxheads’, ‘loopy crims’, ‘pieces of criminal garbage’, ‘scumbags’ and ‘piss-ants’ – ordered a video to be made of his more theatrical performances and sent it to Suharto. According to the Sydney Morning Herald, the Indonesian dictator ‘showed the video to his entire cabinet, who were reportedly mightily impressed’.171
Two weeks before Death of a Nation was due to be shown on television in Britain, its disclosures about a second massacre in Dili, in November 1991, were published in the Australian press. This caused near-panic among Indonesia’s backers. Without having seen a frame of the film, Paul Keating, Jakarta’s ‘comrade in arms’, angrily condemned it, and me. My ‘credibility’, he said, was ‘under a cloud’ because of my work in Cambodia. This was a remarkable statement by the leader of a government whose ‘peace plan’ in Cambodia was the direct result of public response to my film, Cambodia Year Ten.172
Keating’s attack was inspired by Gareth Evans, whose dismissal of corroborated evidence he, too, had not seen was published under headlines such as ‘No evidence to back Pilger claims’.173 I doubt if there has been another time when an Australian prime minister and his foreign affairs minister have used their high office to vehemently deny evidence, unseen, of murderous violence carried out by a ruthless dictatorship in an illegally occupied territory. When Death of a Nation opened in Perth, federal police, who take their orders direct from Canberra, were sent to the Lumiere Cinema and demanded to know ‘who had told the cinema to put it on’.174
In their panic, Keating and Evans even cast doubt on the original Dili massacre. Keating said it had happened in a ‘murky period’ during which ‘it isn’t clear what happened’. Furthermore, said Evans, there were ‘a number of witnesses who have said nothing like what is claimed to have happened’.175
There were no such ‘witnesses’. Evans was referring to a priest presented to foreign journalists by Indonesian officials during a controlled visit to Dili – hurriedly arranged by the regime in order to pre-empt the worldwide showing of Death of a Nation and the UN Human Rights Commission hearings on East Timor. This was Marcus Wanandi, an Indonesian-Chinese priest installed in Dili by Suharto to ‘assist’ Bishop Belo, the outspoken Timorese who heads the Catholic Church and has never accepted Indonesian rule. Wanandi and his powerful family are close to Suharto; one brother runs a multi-million-dollar business with Suharto’s daughter, ‘developing’ East Timor; the other runs a ‘strategic institute’ in Jakarta that helped plan the invasion in 1975. Wanandi told a senior Australian bishop, Hilton Deakin, that talking to the Timorese was a waste of time because ‘they have just come out of the trees’.176
Wanandi’s ‘evidence’ that there was no second massacre contradicted Bishop Belo, who told Max Stahl of his trust in the statements of eye-witnesses. He said he had informed the Indonesian ‘special commission of enquiry’ about the unreported killings. ‘Twice’, he said, ‘I told them that not only have they to investigate the massacre in the Santa Cruz cemetery, but also in other places where people were killed . . . for example, in the [military] hospital. They showed no interest. The military authorities [wanted] to give the Timorese people these extreme lessons. We think there is no justice . . . no justice.’
Bishop Belo was silenced during the two restricted press tours in 1994. Only Wanandi was interviewed by foreign reporters, who paid little notice to his ties to the regime and the obvious set-up his ‘evidence’ represented. In the meantime, the regime made much use of the Keating/Evans denials and abuse, which were quoted in press releases distributed by Indonesian embassies around the world. My film, said Ali Alatas, having not seen it, ‘is entirely fictitious’.
Rupert Murdoch’s Australian, Australia’s only national newspaper, took a keen interest in my film. The paper’s foreign editor, Greg Sheridan, had previously attacked both the Clinton administration for raising human rights with the Suharto regime, and the Foreign A
ffairs Committee of the Australian Parliament for its estimate that ‘at least 200,000’ people had died under Indonesian rule in East Timor. Now he attacked my film, having not seen it. Referring to eye-witness accounts of a second massacre in the Santa Cruz cemetery, he wrote, ‘The sad truth is that even genuine victims frequently concoct stories . . .’. He went on to accuse me of ‘extreme tendentiousness’.177 I sent a message to the editor-in-chief, Paul Kelly, requesting the right of reply. This was eventually agreed and I submitted an article that answered Sheridan and outlined the Australian Government’s complicity in the genocide. I heard nothing for more than two weeks.
In the meantime, the Australian sent its Jakarta correspondent, Patrick Walters, on the first shepherded press tour of Dili, accompanied by Indonesian officials. Walters produced a memorable series of disgraceful pieces. Jakarta’s ‘economic achievements’ in East Timor were ‘impressive’, he wrote, giving official statistics of Jakarta’s generous ‘development’ of the territory. As for the resistance, it was ‘leaderless’ and beaten. Indeed, you wondered what the fuss was all about as ‘no one was now arrested without proper legal procedures’. ‘The situation regarding human rights’, the puppet governor told him, ‘is very good at the moment’.178
Walters’ next dispatch, written on his return to Jakarta, made the symmetry clear. Under the headline, ‘Murdoch tunes into Indonesia’, he wrote, ‘Mr. Rupert Murdoch left Jakarta yesterday after a two-day visit, optimistic about the prospects of his Hong Kong-based Star TV network for further expansion in South-East Asia.’ Murdoch told his man, ‘I’m here to learn about Indonesia and learn about the market. We are looking at the prospects for Star TV.’ A new Indonesian satellite, Indostar, explained Walters, ‘is of considerable interest’ to Murdoch, who plans to expand Star TV’s coverage of Asia.179
With Murdoch just arrived from Jakarta and Walters’ reporting of Jakarta’s ‘achievements’ in East Timor still fresh, editor-in-chief Kelly rescinded my right-of-reply. He said I had written the ‘wrong’ article, which, anyway, did not meet ‘that standard of accuracy required by this paper’.180 Twice I asked him to substantiate this charge; I suggested that, as an editor, he had an obligation to detail my alleged inaccuracies. He failed to reply. In December 1993 Paul Kelly was appointed by Gareth Evans to the Australia-Indonesia Institute, a body funded by the Australian Government to promote Indonesia’s and Australia’s ‘common interests’.