The Guardian [UK]
Tuesday September 7, 1999
Jakarta's godfathers
It is grotesque hypocrisy for Tony Blair to weep for the children of
Dunblane.
John Pilger
Having finally discovered East Timor, most of the media have now left,
blaming a "descent into violence". The long, silent years mock these
words . The descent began almost a quarter of a century ago when
Indonesian special forces invaded the defenceless Portuguese colony.
On December 7, 19 75, a lone radio voice rose and fell in the static:
"The soldiers are killing indiscriminately. Women and children are being
shot in the streets. Th s is an appeal for international help. This is an
SOS - please help us."
No help came, because the western democracies were secret partners
in a crime as great and enduring as any this century; proportionally,
not even Pol Pot matched Suharto's spree. Air Force One, carrying
President Ford and his secretary of state Henry Kissinger, climbed out
of Indonesian airspace the day the bloodbath began. "They came and
gave Suharto the green light," hilip Liechty, the CIA desk officer in
Jakarta at the time, told me. "The invasion was delayed two days so
they could get the hell out. We were ordered to give the Indonesian
military everything they wanted. I saw all the hard intelligence; the
place was a free-fire zone. Women and childre n were herded into
school buildings that were set alight - and all because we didn't want
some little country being neutral or leftist at the United Nations."
And all because western capital regarded Indonesia as a "prize".
Having been tipped off about the invasion, the British ambassador
cabled the foreign office that it was in Britain's interests for Indone sia
to "absorb the territory as soon and as unobtrusively as possible".
Since t hen, the foreign office has lied incessantly about East Timor -
not misled, lied. When the film I made with David Munro and Max
Stahl, Death of a Nation, disclosed the extent to which the British
were involved, especially the use of British Aerospace Hawk fighter
aircraft in East Timor, officials of the south-east Asian department tried
to denigrate and smear East Timorese witnesses to the Hawks'
bombing raids, whose relatives had been killed an d maimed by British
cluster bombs. When Robin Cook's predecessor, David Owen, licensed
the sale of the first Hawks to Indonesia in 1978, he dismissed reports
of the Ea t Timorese death toll, then well over 60,000 or 10% of the
population, as "exaggerated".
For almost 20 years, the BBC and the major western news agencies
preferred to "cover" East Timor from Jakarta, which was like reporting
on a Nazi -occupied country from Berlin. The coverage was minute; not
offending the invader and keeping your visa became all-important. A
Jakarta-based BBC correspondent told me that my film, made
undercover in East Timor, had " made life very difficult for us here". In
Whitehall, a refined system of flattery worked well. Senior broadcasters
and commentators popped into the foreign office without any material
favours expected. For them, the flattery and "access" were eno ugh.
Thus, both Tory and Labour governments, Indonesia's biggest weapons
suppliers, were able to go about their business of complicity in
genocide unchallenged, bar the efforts of a few honourable exceptions.
More recently, the grotesque hypocrisy of Tony Blair weeping for the
chi ldren of Dunblane, then sending machine guns that mow down
children in Ea st Timor, was ignored. So was Robin Cook's epic
cynicism, allowing him t o leap from telling parliament in 1994 that
Hawk aircraft had been "obse rved on bombing runs in East Timor in
most years since 1984" to denying his own words - to the public-
relations stunt of an "ethical" foreign policy whil e his functionaries lied
to journalists that no Hawks were operational in East Timor. Now that
Hawks have been visible to all over East Timor, Baroness Symond s,
who has the Orwellian title of defence procurement minister, insults the
intelligence and humanity of Radio 4 listeners by lecturing a defere
ntial James Naughtie on "rights". East Timor's tormentors should have
Bri tish weapons because they "have a right under the United Nations
charter to d efend themselves". Moreover, "they have a right" to come
to next week's British government-sponsored arms fair in Surrey, the
biggest ever. Last year, her government approved the sale of A3625bn
in arms, a record nev er reached by the Tories and surpassed only by
the US. Tomorrow, the East Timorese leader, Xanana Gusmao, is due
to be released from house arrest in Jakarta. If he returns to his
homeland, he is likel y to be killed and the murder weapon is likely to
be British; the Heckle r and Koch rapid-firing gun, supplied to
Indonesia's Kopassus gestapo by British Aerospace, is perfect for the
job. All arms sales to Indonesia, by the way, are heavily subsidised by
the British taxpayer. As for getting the Indonesians out of East Timor,
their western godfathers can achieve a great deal if they want to. Blair
has the power to freeze arms shipments. The US controls $45bn
underwriting Jakarta's collapsed economy. They always say they act
in our name. So raise your v oice now.
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