ON OUR RETURN to London I tried to make an appointment to see Ali Alatas, the Indonesian foreign minister of whom former Ambassador Woolcott had spoken admiringly and who has a reputation as a ‘diplomatic intellectual’ willing to discuss the ‘human rights issue’ in East Timor. At the World Conference on Human Rights in Vienna in June 1993, Alatas’s ‘collected speeches on human rights’ were distributed in a glossy white folder, including four pages of ‘principles of human rights in Indonesian law’. He quoted Hobbes, Locke, Montesquieu, Rousseau and Mill to show that human rights were largely of Western origin and that the West should understand the ‘cultural differences’ and seek ‘balance’ and ‘co-operation’. He got away with this; no delegate confronted him with evidence of his regime’s well-documented genocide.
It is on this theme that Alatas’s skill as a propagandist is amply demonstrated. He constantly implies that Suharto’s Indonesia, like the rest of the developing world, is a victim of the Western media’s colonial mentality and that any criticism of Jakarta’s brutality in East Timor is ‘condescending’. For this he is often rewarded, not with derision or even scepticism, but with legitimising headlines such as: ‘East Timor groups cause image problem, says Alatas’ and ‘Alatas scorns Timor death toll claim’.120
For years the Suharto regime paid America’s largest public relations firm, Hill and Knowlton, to promote a respectable image in economic and trade matters, especially on Capitol Hill. This was a Hill and Knowlton speciality, having turned out expensive propaganda for the governments of Kuwait, China, Turkey, Peru and Israel. However, in the aftermath of the 1991 Dili massacre, the Indonesian regime turned to Burson-Marsteller, which had overtaken Hill and Knowlton as the giant of American public relations. According to officials in Jakarta, Indonesia would now take ‘a more aggressive line in defending its East Timor policies’ and there would be ‘a change from a passive posture to a more forceful, sophisticated approach’.121 The Far Eastern Economic Review reported that the Burson-Marsteller contract was worth $5 million.122
I telephoned the executive vice-president of Burson-Marsteller, Michael Claes, whose signature appears on the contract with Indonesia. He denied all knowledge of an East Timor account. I asked if he was being secretive because the government retaining his firm’s services was responsible for genocide. He laughed. ‘Look,’ he said, ‘if you’re going to ask me a serious question . . . then why don’t we just keep it at that level, okay? I mean, those amateur techniques are not going to work with me, okay?’ He asked me for my sources for the genocide. I said, ‘The President of Portugal, the Roman Catholic Church . . .’ He interrupted. ‘The Roman Catholic Church, eh? You mean, you talked to a building?’123
If this was an example of its new ‘sophisticated approach’, the Suharto regime was in difficulty. Of course, my conversation with Claes merely reflected the nervousness of those who pick up Jakarta’s chalice. Under the Foreign Agents Registration Act, Burson-Marsteller must lodge all documents relating to a foreign client with the Justice Department. Copies of these documents show intense lobbying by the public relations firm on behalf of the Suharto regime. In one letter to Congress, Burson-Marsteller’s ‘vice president, government relations’ described the Indonesian response to the Dili massacre, in which more than 400 people were murdered or wounded, as ‘that unfortunate incident’.124
Foreign Minister Alatas had left the United Nations in New York by the time I arrived. However, Indonesia’s Ambassador to the UN, Nugroho Wisnumurti, agreed to see me. In the mould of Alatas and other senior Jakarta diplomats who can claim much success in explaining away the bloody record of the regime, Wisnumurti is an urbane man whose unctuous fluency reminded me, for a brief moment, of Douglas Hurd. Indeed, I began by asking him if the regime valued the support of those like Hurd who had praised Indonesia for its ‘recognition of basic freedom’ and said that Western countries could not ‘export Western values [on human rights] to developing nations’.125
‘We welcome that kind of approach on human rights,’ said the ambassador. ‘Britain’s position towards Indonesia has been quite consistent . . . Of course, Indonesia does not claim to be the angel of the international community. We have made some mistakes . . .’
I asked what these mistakes were. ‘Oh, it happens everywhere, including Western countries,’ he replied. ‘You know what I am referring to. There are sometimes abuses of military authority . . . some personalities use firearms without authority . . .’
I said the President of Portugal and numerous others had accused his government of genocide.126 He denied this, saying that Indonesia had promoted only ‘development and human rights’. To prove his point, he said, the East Timorese had actually voted in a referendum to join Indonesia. Moreover it was ‘completely untrue’ that the survivors of the Santa Cruz cemetery ‘incident’ had been murdered.
‘Why are you asking these questions?’ he admonished me. ‘I only appreciate those who really want to get some information in order to promote a better understanding of the situation . . .’
It seemed that the ambassador had never been really challenged about East Timor. As I left he handed me a dossier of papers entitled East Timor: Building for the Future. These claimed that ‘the East Timorese people had rightly assumed their inherent right to decolonise themselves . . . by choosing independence through integration with Indonesia’, and that this had been achieved within ‘the letter and spirit of the United Nations’.127 I showed the documents to Professor Roger Clark, a world authority in international law at Rutgers University in New Jersey. ‘A total distortion,’ he said. ‘The Indonesian invasion and occupation were and are illegal, brutal and can be compared to Iraq’s invasion of Kuwait. Only the world’s reaction was different.’
However, in the United States, where East Timor is little known, Indonesian propaganda has entered the canon of mainstream reporting. The New York Times has referred to ‘the former Portuguese colony’ that is ‘now Indonesia’s 27th province’. It has used the dateline, ‘Dili, Indonesia’ – which is comparable to ‘Kuwait City, Iraq’. In 1988 the long New York Times report, headlined ‘Jakarta’s Human Rights Record Is Said to Improve’, made no mention of the genocide in East Timor.128 However, these distortions are in contrast with New York Times editorials on East Timor that have appeared since 1979, many of them reasonably good responses to Indonesian propaganda.
In January 1992 the Washington Post published an article by C. Philip Liechty, a former senior CIA operations officer based in Jakarta at the time of the invasion. Liechty accused the Indonesians of lying to the world and getting away with it. ‘There is not a shred of truth in the Indonesian version of events,’ he wrote. ‘East Timor was an undefended sitting duck for the expansionist Indonesian generals. A slaughter of tens of thousands followed, but little factual reporting on the bloodiest atrocities left the island; the Indonesians made sure of that, effectively blockading East Timor, cutting off communications, turning back journalists and Western observers, terrorising the population and lying to the world about it, as now.’129
When I met Philip Liechty in Washington, he reminded me of other former CIA officers I have known, who joined during the early 1960s with a sense of idealism, based on ‘service to my country’, and subsequently spent much of their careers disenchanted.130 He told me, ‘Suharto was given the green light [by the US] to do what he did. There was discussion in the Embassy and in traffic with the State Department about the problems that would be created for us if the public and Congress became aware of the level and type of military assistance that was going to Indonesia at that time. It was covered under the justification that it was “for training purposes”; but there was concern that this might wear thin after a while, so the decision was taken to get the stuff flowing from San Francisco as fast as possible, to get it on the high seas before someone pulled the chain. As long as the Indonesians continued to certify that they were only using the equipment “for training”, then we could get it through the bureaucracy.’131
I asked him what kind of equipment was sent. ‘Everything’, he replied, ‘that you need to fight a major war against somebody who doesn’t have any guns . . . M16 rifles, ammunition, mortars, grenades, food, helicopters. You name it; they got it. And they got it direct. The normal course would have been for the stuff to be distributed through the Indonesian supply system in Java. But most of the equipment was now going straight into Timor.
‘Without continued heavy US logistical military support the Indonesians might not have been able to pull it off. [Instead] they were able to stay there at no real cost to them; it didn’t put any pressure on their economy and on their military forces because American taxpayers were footing the bill for the killing of all those people and for the acquisition of that territory to which they had no right whatsoever. It is something that I will be forever ashamed of . . . The only interest that I ever saw expressed, the only justification I ever heard for what we were doing there was concern that East Timor was on the verge of being accepted as a new member of the United Nations and that there was an excellent chance that the country was going to be either leftist or neutralist and not likely to vote [with the United States] at the United Nations.
‘For extinguishing that one vote, maybe 200,000 people, almost all of them non-combatants, died. President Ford was very much aware of what was happening; it was brought to his attention in official reports. He can never make the case that he was misled.’
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 scrutinise 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.
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 Treaty 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 Affairs 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’.
In the week that Kelly rejected my article Prime Minister Keating launched an unprecedented ‘trade and cultural promotion’ with Indonesia. The attacks on my film now made perfect sense. Surrounded by businessmen and representatives of the arts, Keating made an extraordinary speech in which he announced a ‘partnership’ with Jakarta that would ‘stand as a model for co-operation between developed and developing countries’. He described the ‘stability’ of the Suharto regime as ‘the single most beneficial development to have affected Australia and its region in the past thirty years’.181 He made not a single reference to East Timor, let alone to the fact that the Suharto regime had one of the most barbarous records of the twentieth century. All reference to the tens of thousands of deaths that had helped to pay for this great ‘benefit’ to Australia was excluded from press reports of Keating’s speech – in the same way that all reference to Stalin’s crimes was excluded from the Soviet and East European press. Keating’s speech was lauded as ‘mature’.
On the same day that Keating spoke, Dr George Aditjondro, a leading Indonesian academic, released in Australia two papers on East Timor based on twenty years’ research. In so doing, he risked his livelihood, and possibly his life; a few days later his house in Central Java was attacked by stone-throwing thugs. ‘I wanted to take off the veil of secrecy around East Timor,’ he told me. The Aditjondro papers describe a ‘culture of violence’ imposed on the territory, with systematic atrocities, such as mass rape, amounting to an assault on the very fabric of East Timorese society. The estimate of 200,000 deaths, he said, was ‘moderate’.182
This was ignored by Keating and other Western leaders and by most of the media. Paul Kelly’s Australian published only Jakarta’s denials. The Jakarta regime, said an editorial in the Australian, ‘can be declared moderate’.183
Amnesty International has said of the Indonesian regime: ‘If those who violate human rights can do so with impunity, they come to believe they are beyond the reach of the law.’184 Western politicians who speak of a ‘pragmatism’ and ‘realism’ in relation to East Timor not only give support to a lawless bully, but condemn an entire nation to a slow cultural and physical death. They may not yet have their way.
The United States has, as ever, pivotal power. Even if the proposed congressional action to ban arms sales is not quite ‘historic’, as its supporters claim, it represents a perceptible change in American outlook and understanding, and the emergence of the East Timorese, and the great crime committed against them, from the shadows of imperial geo-politics. In 1993 the UN Human Rights Commission called on Indonesia to allow international experts on torture, executions and disappearances to investigate freely in East Timor. At the time of writing, the UN Commission has again summoned Indonesia into its dock. In 1994, in an action brought by Portugal against Australia, the World Court will decide whether the Timor Gap Treaty is legal or not. (Indonesia does not recognise the World Court.) According to Roger Clark, the Australian government will probably comply with the decision. In a parallel case brought by the Timorese themselves, the Australian High Court will also decide on the treaty’s legality. There is every likelihood that both courts will find against it.
It is one of recent history’s more melancholy ironies that the Timorese place most hope in the actions of their former colonial masters, the Portuguese, who so ignominiously abandoned them. Public opinion in Portugal feels strongly about East Timor. People constantly write to the government and to newspapers, demanding justice for the Timorese. There is a sense of guilt, as if the nation’s honour was sullied in the retreat to Atauro Island in 1975. The politicians are acutely aware of this, especially the President, Mário Soares, who has also been prime minister and foreign secretary since the revolution in 1974. Under the constitution, he has personal responsibility for the remaining overseas territories: Macau and East Timor.
I flew to Lisbon and interviewed President Soares in the magnificent eighteenth-century Palacio Belém (the ‘Pink Palace’) overlooking the Tagus River. He is an interesting anti-fascist; during the Salazarist years he was an outspoken opponent in exile. For a head of state, he spoke with undiplomatic passion about the Timorese. ‘They have never submitted to the power of Indonesia,’ he said. ‘Even isolated in the mountains, they make sure we never forget; one feels a wind of silence that heroically accuses . . . There has been a real genocide, a cold destruction of a people, their complete identity, destroying their habits, their traditions, language and religion . . . over 200,000.’
I asked him how much blame should lie with Portugal. ‘After our own dictator fell on April 25, 1974,’ he said, ‘there was a revolutionary period in which the state was practically in the street. We had a million Portuguese from the former colonies returned to Portugal without work, without money, with nothing. Perhaps this explains a bit of what happened over East Timor. I don’t exclude there was guilt, and incompetence and lies over our role there.’
I said, ‘Your EC partner, Britain, is now the biggest arms supplier to Indonesia. What’s your view of this, in the light of evidence that British Hawk aircraft are being used in East Timor?’
He replied, ‘I was in England recently and spoke to John Major and Douglas Hurd about Timor. The Foreign Secretary said that dictators could usefully provide certain guarantees. He defended what he called the “realistic policy” that England often follows in defending its own interests, while forgetting a bit about international law and moral values. I replied that the English had thought like this at the end of the Second World War in relation to the dictators of Portugal and Spain. And because of this so-called “realistic policy” we Portuguese were held back for more than thirty years. I said, “We can never forgive you for this. It’s also possible the Timorese will never forgive you, either.”’
I asked Soares if he could give an unambiguous assurance that Portugal would stand by the Timorese until they won independence. ‘I give it’, he said, ‘without a doubt. We are very proud of them.’
By all accounts the Timorese resistance should have been wiped out years ago; but it lives on, as I found, in the hearts and eyes of almost everyone: eyes that reflect a defiance and courage of a kind I have not experienced anywhere else.
Recent opposition has come most vociferously from the young generation, raised during Indonesian rule. This has particularly angered the generals, who had anticipated that the second generation would have been ‘resocialised’, to use a favourite word of the regime. It is the young who keep alive the nationalism minted in the early 1970s and its union with a spiritual, traditional love of country and language, in spite of the ban on all Timorese languages; it is they who bury the flags and maps and draw the subtle graffiti of a sleeping face resembling the tranquil figure in Matisse’s The Dream, reminding the Indonesians that, whatever they do, they must one day reckon with a Timorese reawakening.
When Amelia Gusmao, wife of the resistance leader, Xanana, was forced into exile, young people materialised along her route to the airport and stood in tribute to her, then slipped away. And when Xanana himself was brought before a kangaroo court in 1993, he gave the regime a glimpse of its ‘problem’.
Although he was prevented from speaking from the dock, his statement of defiance was released all over the world. ‘The Indonesian generals’, he wrote, ‘should be made to realise that they have been defeated politically in East Timor. I acknowledge military defeat on the ground. I am not ashamed to say so. On the contrary, I am proud of the fact that a small guerrilla army was able to resist a large nation like Indonesia, a regional power which in a cowardly fashion invaded us and sought to dominate us by the law of terror and crime. As a political prisoner in the hands of the occupiers of my country, it is of no consequence at all to me if they pass a death sentence here today. They are killing my people and I am not worth more than their heroic struggle . . .’185
Among the Timorese in exile and their supporters all over the world those who have not allowed the world to forget about East Timor are Constancio Pinto, Abel Guterres, José and Fatima Gusmao, Ines Almeida, José Amorin Dias, Agio Pereira, George Aditjondro, Carmel Budiardjo, Arnold Kohen, Shirley Shackleton, Gil Scrine, Noam Chomsky, Jim Dunn, John Taylor, Pat Walsh, Peter Carey, Michele Turner, Jill Jolliffe, Max Lane, Robert Domm, Mark Aarons, Steve Cox, Margherita Tracanelli, Mark Curtis, Steve Alton, Will McMahon, Jonathan Humphreys and Tom Hyland.
José Ramos Horta’s personal struggle stands out. Sometimes without the money to pay his telephone bill in New York, he has helped keep the name of his people alive in the corridors of the United Nations, and of governments in Washington, Brussels, London, Tokyo and Canberra. ‘I am their biggest embarrassment,’ he told me. ‘They are often patronising to me, sometimes hostile; but they are never allowed to forget.’ His two brothers and sister were killed by the Indonesians; he is often desperately homesick for a country he has not seen since he escaped in 1975. He once put to me a plan to hire a small aircraft and fly home. I helped to talk him out of it, as ‘home’ would have been an Indonesian cell.
I asked José if he ever felt defeated. ‘Yes,’ he replied, ‘but then I think about those in the mountains, the women, the old people, the kids as young as seven years old, who have the courage to smuggle information out, to travel from one resistance group to another, to monitor the international radio, to pass on hope and encouragement to the villages. My mother kept going this way; I remember receiving a message from her asking me not to give up. “Your comrades”, she wrote, “are still fighting.” My mother’s name is Natalina.’
José Ramos Horta has met the Indonesians abroad and put forward, with Xanana Gusmao, a three-phased peace plan. In phase one, lasting about two years, the Timorese, Portuguese and Indonesians would work under the auspices of the United Nations to implement a range of ‘confidence building measures’ that would include ‘a drastic reduction in Indonesian troops and weaponry in East Timor and a significant UN presence’. Phase two would last five to ten years, with political autonomy and a democratically elected People’s Assembly. Finally, a referendum would determine the sovereign status of the territory. ‘Indonesia should seize the olive branch we are now offering,’ said José. ‘Only withdrawal from East Timor will help it regain its international reputation.’
Perhaps East Timor’s greatest hope lies in public opinion around the world. When Death of a Nation went to air in Britain, British Telecom registered 4,000 calls a minute to the number displayed at the end. When I showed the film in the Palais des Nations in Geneva, where the UN Human Rights Commission was sitting, the positive response, I was told by several members of the Commission, was unprecedented and led directly to a majority vote by the Commission authorising a Special Rapporteur on Extrajudicial Executions to go to East Timor to investigate the Santa Cruz massacre and others.
There is also hope in the waning power of Suharto and his generals. For all the West’s promotion of Indonesia as the ‘next Tiger’ about to emulate the ‘market take-off’ of Singapore and Taiwan, Suharto’s dictatorship is stagnant. Like Marcos and Somoza, the tentacles of his family, cronies and loyalists reach into almost every corner of economic life. In a list compiled by an Indonesian business magazine, the richest man in Indonesia is named as the former head of the state oil monopoly. Three of Suharto’s six offspring are among the ten wealthiest, including a son with a fortune of more than $220 million; and most of them control monopolies.186
For Indonesia, the result is a sapped, indebted economy and disparities of wealth that are quite unacceptable to a society once proud of its political energy and vision. Discontent is growing. ‘Since the beginning of the twentieth century’, wrote the Indonesia specialist Max Lane, ‘a fundamental aspect of Indonesian history has been the struggle for freedom and human rights. At first the struggle was against colonial oppression . . . Thousands of Indonesians, especially workers, entered colonial prisons as payment for the assertion of their rights. Their movements had visions of what Indonesia might be like after independence, none of which accord with the political system that prevails in Indonesia today.’187
The Indonesian mass movements fought for and expected political democracy and social justice, regardless of whether they were Islamic or communist. Between 1945 and 1959 Indonesia had one of the freest parliamentary democracies in the world. In 1955 there were general elections with more than thirty parties competing. The oppression at home and in East Timor is unworthy of such a nation; and a great many Indonesians understand this. They are silent out of necessity; but for how long? Who would have imagined, a few years ago, that Eritrea and Namibia would be independent, and that South Africa would have majority rule?
The enduring heroism of the people of East Timor, who continue to resist the invaders even as the crosses multiply on the hillsides, is a reminder of the fallibility of brute power and of the cynicism of others.