-Caveat Lector- forwarded.. Dave Hartley http://www.Asheville-Computer.com http://www.ioa.com/~davehart THE NATION http://www.TheNation.com/ US Complicity in Timor While the Indonesian military's thugs continue their rampage in East Timor, most foreign reporters have fled the country. As of September 7, frequent Nation contributor and award-winning journalist Allan Nairn was believed to be the only US reporter still there. Nairn left the besieged UN compound and walked the streets of Dili, where he hid in abandoned houses as he observed troops and militia burning and looting. Nairn has been writing about the troubles there for years. In 1991, after being badly beaten by Indonesian troops while witnessing the massacre of several hundred East Timorese, he was declared a "threat to national security" and banned from the country. He has entered several times illegally since then. In his most recent Nation dispatch from East Timor, on March 30, 1998, Nairn disclosed the continuing US military training of Indonesian troops implicated in the torture and killing of civilians. He filed this report by satellite telephone to The Nation through Amy Goodman, host of Pacifica Radio's Democracy Now! --The Editors ______________________________________________________________ Dili, East Timor ALLAN NAIRN It is by now clear to most East Timorese and a few Westerners still left here that the militias are a wing of the TNI/ABRI, the Indonesian armed forces. Recently, for example, I was picked up by militiamen who turned out to be working for a uniformed colonel of the National Police. [Editors' note: The Indonesian government has denied any connection between the militias and either the police or the military.] But there is another important political fact that is not known here or in the international community. Although the US government has publicly reprimanded the Indonesian Army for the militias, the US military has, behind the scenes and contrary to Congressional intent, been backing the TNI. US officials say that this past April, as militia terror escalated, a top US officer was dispatched to give a message to Jakarta. Adm. Dennis Blair, the US Commander in Chief of the Pacific, leader of all US military forces in the Pacific region, was sent to meet with General Wiranto, the Indonesian armed forces commander, on April 8. Blair's mission, as one senior US official told me, was to tell Wiranto that the time had come to shut the militia operation down. The gravity of the meeting was heightened by the fact that two days before, the militias had committed a horrific machete massacre at the Catholic church in Liqui^Ma, Timor. YAYASAN HAK, a Timorese human rights group, estimated that many dozens of civilians were murdered. Some of the victims' flesh was reportedly stuck to the walls of the church and a pastor's house. But Admiral Blair, fully briefed on Liqui ^Ma, quickly made clear at the meeting with Wiranto that he was there to reassure the TNI chief. According to a classified cable on the meeting, circulating at Pacific Command headquarters in Hawaii, Blair, rather than telling Wiranto to shut the militias down, instead offered him a series of promises of new US assistance. According to the cable, which was drafted by Col. Joseph Daves, US military attache in Jakarta, Admiral Blair "told the armed forces chief that he looks forward to the time when [the army will] resume its proper role as a leader in the region. He invited General Wiranto to come to Hawaii as his guest in conjunction with the next round of bilateral defense discussions in the July-August '99 time frame. He said Pacific command is prepared to support a subject matter expert exchange for doctrinal development. He expects that approval will be granted to send a small team to provide technical assistance to police and...selected TNI personnel on crowd control measures." Admiral Blair at no point told Wiranto to stop the militia operation, going the other way by inviting him to be his personal guest in Hawaii. Blair told Wiranto that the United States would initiate this new riot-control training for the Indonesian armed forces. This was quite significant, because it would be the first new US training program for the Indonesian military since 1992. Although State Department officials had been assured in writing that only police and no soldiers would be part of this training, Blair told Wiranto that, yes, soldiers could be included. So although Blair was sent in with the mission of telling Wiranto to shut the militias down, he did the opposite. Indonesian officers I spoke to said Wiranto was delighted by the meeting. They took this as a green light to proceed with the militia operation. The only reference in the classified cable to the militias was the following: "Wiranto was emphatic: as long as East Timor is an integral part of the territory of Indonesia, Armed Forces have responsibility to maintain peace and stability in the region. Wiranto said the military will take steps to disarm FALINTIL pro-independence group concurrently with the WANRA militia force. Admiral Blair reminded Wiranto that fairly or unfairly the international community looks at East Timor as a barometer of progress for Indonesian reform. Most importantly, the process of change in East Timor could proceed peacefully, he said." So that was it. No admonition. When Wiranto referred to disarming the WANRA force, he was talking about another militia force, different from the one that was staging attacks on Timorese civilians. When word got back to the State Department that Blair had said these things in a meeting, an "eyes only" cable was dispatched from the State Department to Ambassador Stapleton Roy at the embassy in Jakarta. The thrust of this cable was that what Blair had done was unacceptable and that it must be reversed. As a result of that cable from Washington to Roy, a corrective phone call was arranged between General Wiranto and Admiral Blair. That call took place on April 18. I have the official report on that phone call, which was written by Blair's aide, Lieut. Col. Tom Sidwell. According to the account of the call and according to US military officials I spoke to, once again Blair failed to tell Wiranto to shut the militias down. In fact, Blair instead permitted Wiranto to make, in essence, a political speech saying the same thing he had said before. Here is one passage from the account: "General Wiranto denies that TNI and the police supported any one group during the incidents"--meaning during the military attacks. "General Wiranto will go to East Timor tomorrow to emphasize three things:...Timorese, especially the two disputing groups, to solve the problem peacefully with dialogue; 2) encourage the militia to disarm; 3) make the situation peaceful and solve the problem." At no point did Blair demand that the militias be shut down, and in fact this call was followed by escalating militia violence and increases in concrete, new US military assistance to Indonesia, including the sending in of a US Air Force trainer just weeks ago to train the Indonesian Air Force. ----------------------------------------------------------------- Allan Nairn has reported frequently on Indonesia. Allan Nairn has covered U.S. foreign policy and operations since 1980. His articles have appeared in The New Yorker, The Washington Post, The New York Times, The New Republic, Harper's, The Nation, The Progressive, NACLA Report on the Americas, Der Spiegel, the London Guardian, Reader's Digest and USA Today, among others. He is contributing author to four books on U.S. policy and Central America. Nairn's special investigations have included reports on the U.S. role in the creation of the Salvadoran death squads, Guatemala's G-2 military intelligence service and U.S. military strategy in Central America. In 1994 The Nation published his expose of U.S. military intelligence plans for the occupation of Haiti, including the revelation of ties between U.S. intelligence and the notorious paramilitary group FRAPH. His coverage of the November 1991 East Timor massacre by Indonesian troops (for The New Yorker, USA Today and public radio) won an RFK Journalism Award, a Du Pont-Columbia Broadcast Journalism Award and a Corporation for Public Broadcasting Silver Medallion. His Nation articles on Haiti earned him the 1994 George Polk Award for magazine reporting and the James Aronson Award for Social Justice Journalism (First Prize). Nairn was threatened with imprisonment and ordered to leave the country by the Guatemalan military in 1986, formally banned from Indonesia as a "threat to national security" in 1991 and arrested by Indonesian military intelligence for trying to enter East Timor in 1994. He later succeeded in entering the country without their ----------------------------------------------------------------- Background and Related Information East Timor Action Network The East Timor Action Network/United States supports self-determination and human rights for the people of East Timor. Its primary focus is to change US foreign policy and raise public awareness to support self-determination for East Timor. ETAN's site provides information about East Timor and about how to join the struggle to help the East Timorese people. http://www.etan.org Slate Magazine Slate's "International Papers," which offers brief descriptions of what newspapers around the world are writing about the main stories being covered internationally, is following the crisis in its daily coverage. http://www.slate.com Radio Australia Radio Australia World News offers coverage of East Timor through ABC News online. http://www.abc.net.au/news/etimor/default.htm ZNet Z magazine's coverage of East Timor includes a piece by Ed Herman on "inhumanitarian nonintervention," a history of the conflict in East Timor from Noam Chomsky, and assistance for activists in finding ways to respond to the unfolding crisis. http://www.zmag.org/weluser.htm The Jakarta Post The Jakarta Post, the "journal of Indonesia today," a daily paper in Indonesia, joined papers around the world in assigning most of the blame for the crisis to the Indonesian government. In an editorial, the paper accused President Habibie of perpetuating the errors of his predecessor, Suharto. http://www.thejakartapost.com:8890/iscp_render?menu_name=frontp age Democracy Now Democracy Now, a daily Pacifica Radio program hosted by Amy Goodman, is in contact with Allan Nairn in East Timor and will be reporting on the unfolding crisis. http://www.pacifica.org ============================ Our Men in Jakarta By Allan Nairn ----------------------------------------------------------------- As the Suharto dictatorship collapsed, suddenly, on May 21, the Indonesian Armed Forces (ABRI), scrambled to safeguard their police state. Rather than have Suharto quit as a scheduled mass protest surged through the streets, the ABRI commander, General Wiranto, threatened the students with a "Tiananmen," and then persuaded Suharto to resign quietly. Although many students did not seem to realize it, the ABRI leaders were frightened. They knew that if millions took to the streets and the army lost control, the question would become not just Suharto's rule but their own political survival. As it happened, ABRI dodged the bullet: Suharto left, and so did the students, pushed out of the parliament building they had held for five days. Afterward, General Wiranto, consulting nonstop with the U.S. Embassy, moved to cover some of ABRI's bloody tracks. He demoted Lieut. Gen. Prabowo, Suharto's hated son-in-law, and moved boldly to blame him for all ABRI offenses of recent months. The U.S. government, through The Washington Post, announced on May 23 that it had discovered that Prabowo was behind recent "disappearances" of Indonesian activists. Two days earlier, on May 21, The Nation had released an article that named the ABRI units involved in the abductions--some of them under Prabowo's control but all of them under Wiranto's [see Nairn, "Indonesia's 'Disappeared,'" June 8 cover date]. In the Post piece, U.S. officials professed shock and "anger" at Prabowo, and said the embassy had been working "to gain the activists' release." This was in contrast to the actual U.S. position. As one embassy official described it for me at the height of the disappearances: "Prabowo is our fair-haired boy; he's the one who can do no wrong." In fact, Prabowo's units that participated in the disappearances--particularly KOPASSUS Group 4, which U.S. officials singled out for blame in the Post--were, from the start of the abductions, in close and friendly liaison with U.S. intelligence. Reached at his Jakarta home the night after Prabowo was replaced, Colonel Chaiwaran, the Group 4 commander, confirmed to me that he deals with Col. Charles McFetridge, the Defense Intelligence Agency (D.I.A.) attache at the U.S. Embassy, with whom, he said, he speaks in Indonesian. Although Chaiwaran denied it to me, other ABRI people say he has said that Group 4's men have been trained by U.S. intelligence, a claim that U.S. officials privately confirm. Last year, during the run-up to the staged elections, KOPASSUS, with U.S. support, was expanded from 3,000 to 4,800 combat troops. According to an article by Col. John Haseman, formerly D.I.A. attache in Jakarta, this was done "with an eye on potential domestic instability." The Pentagon built up KOPASSUS with more than twenty-four JCET training exercises and backed Prabowo's plan to obtain U.S. helicopters. The United States openly lauded Prabowo after a 1996 hostage-rescue raid in West Papua in which, a knowledgeable official says, his men murdered eight civilians after alighting in a helicopter falsely (and illegally) marked with the Red Cross sign. Although Prabowo's personal relish for atrocity is legendary (a Timorese man told me of having his leg and teeth broken by Prabowo), high-level U.S. officials paraded him this year as the political crisis gathered steam. In January, Defense Secretary William Cohen praised the "very impressive...discipline" of KOPASSUS. Assistant Secretary of State Stanley Roth took Prabowo along twice when he went to prison meetings with Xanana Gusmao, the leader of the resistance in occupied East Timor, where Prabowo has done his most extensive killings. No less consistent has been U.S. support for Prabowo's professional rival, General Wiranto, whose units were also JCET trained and who has been hailed as "a man of integrity and a true Indonesian patriot" by Adm. Joseph Prueher, chief of the U.S. Pacifc Command. On March 4 Admiral Prueher told Congress that the U.S. military was on alert for "early signs of instability" in East Asia, including "labor disputes." Five days later, the ABRI intelligence unit, BIA, which is under Wiranto's daily control, picked up nine labor activists who had called for an increase in the minimum wage. One U.S. official told me some of the activists were tortured and noted that in previous weeks BIA had staged a series of break-ins and ransackings at the offices of labor, student and women's organizations. He added that in East Timor, BIA was using a new tactic: breaking the hips of prisoners. On March 8 Lieut. Gen. Yunus Yosfiah, one of the key men of the Wiranto faction, told students that ABRI would not "tolerate any campaigns for drastic political reform." (Yosfiah, now Information Minister in the new government, has been implicated in the 1975 murder of five foreign journalists in East Timor.) The following night, a U.S. official, speaking off the record in Jakarta, told me that ABRI was about to launch a thorough crackdown. Even as we spoke, Haryanto Taslam, Megawati Sukarno's chief field organizer, had already been run off the road and taken to a torture center under the control of BIA, with participation from KOPASSUS Group 4. As abductions continued and as Wiranto's spokesman, Brig. Gen. Wahab Mokodongan, mocked the victims--"perhaps the people who are said to have disappeared are wandering around in the jungle"--knowledgeable officials told me that the activists' situation was thoroughly known to Colonel McFetridge of the D.I.A. and to the embassy C.I.A. station. Yet it was not until mid-April, after a crisis caused by public protest, that the State Department went to Prabowo and pushed for the release of some activists. Even after that, the Pentagon continued to provide new JCET training, and State kept pressing the democracy movement to back a new government formed around ABRI. Today, as Prabowo has been thrown over and the United States has thrown in with Wiranto, ABRI remains wary of the potential for mass upheaval and has started releasing some formally arrested political prisoners. But many dozens of "disappeared" remain missing in East Timor, as do at least five of the abducted Indonesian activists (Sonny, Rian, Herman, Bimo Petrus and Suyat). The Cipto Mangunkusumo Hospital in Jakarta reported this spring that unknown and mutilated bodies were turning up along railroad tracks. It is perhaps ominous for some of the missing that when Megawati--searching for Taslam--went to a top ABRI commander she was told an absurd but chilling tale. Some of the "disappeared," the general claimed, were actually BIA infiltrators who had penetrated the democracy movement and had now returned to base. The implication: Their associates should not expect to see them again. ----------------------------------------------------------------- Allan Nairn has reported frequently on Indonesia. Research support was provided by the Investigative Fund of The Nation Institute. ----------------------------------------------------------------- DECLARATION & DISCLAIMER ========== CTRL is a discussion and informational exchange list. Proselyzting propagandic screeds are not allowed. Substance—not soapboxing! These are sordid matters and 'conspiracy theory', with its many half-truths, misdirections and outright frauds is used politically by different groups with major and minor effects spread throughout the spectrum of time and thought. That being said, CTRL gives no endorsement to the validity of posts, and always suggests to readers; be wary of what you read. CTRL gives no credeence to Holocaust denial and nazi's need not apply. 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