from the Belfast Telegraph
by Eamonn McCann
FOREIGN Secretary Robin Cook complained yesterday that the
Indonesian army wasn't doing enough to curb the killing in East Timor.
If the context weren't so horrible, the proper response would be to roll o=
n
the carpet with laughter.
What's Cook going to do? Send them more guns?The forces behind the
slaughter in East Timor were put in power by the West 30 years ago
and have been sustained in power by the West ever since.
By "the West" we mean primarily the US, Australia and the UK.
Even now, the same forces' prospects of staying in power are
dependent on Western goodwill. And, even as the people of East Timor
flee pell-mell in terror from their kill-crazy tormentors, it's far from c=
ertain
that Western goodwill has run out.
That is, it's far from certain the Western elite will calculate that its
interests are better served by opposing the murderers of the East
Timorese people than by continuing to support them.
In East Timor - as in Kuwait, Kosovo, Rwanda, Iraq, Palestine, Angola,
Sierra Leone, where ever - self-interest is the West's overriding
consideration in determining whether and how and on what side to
intervene.
In the Cold War era, there was the pair of them in it, the Stalinist East
and the free enterprise West, fighting their wars by proxy over the
broken bodies of Third World peoples.
T N Suharto came to power in Indonesia in 1965 in a Western-backed
military coup which overthrew the regime of Achmed Sukarno, a corrupt
nationalist who was hated by the West for having thrown out Dutch
colonialism and later for having founded the Non-Aligned Movement.
As many as 600,000 people were butchered in the Suharto coup. The
rivers of Bali were choked with corpses. Without exception, Western
governments either sang dumb or supported the slaughter.
When Suharto seized East Timor following the withdrawal of the
Portuguese in 1975, the United Nations passed a resolution
condemning the invasion and demanding immediate withdrawal.
This resolution had the same force and legal status as, for example, the
1990 resolution demanding Iraqi withdrawal from Kuwait. Technically, it
carried greater weight than last year's UN call for Serbian forces to pull=
out of Kosovo.
What was the reaction of the Western democracies?The US
ambassador at the United Nations in 1975 was Daniel Patrick
Moynihan. The following year, Moynihan, with Ted Kennedy, Tip O'Neill
and Governor Hugh Carey, formed the "Friends of Ireland" group (aka
the "Four Horsemen"). They worked closely with John Hume to put
Ireland on the White House agenda.
More recently, Moynihan was among the key figures whose efforts
secured a US visa for Gerry Adams. He is a big suppporter of our peace
process.
Neither Hume nor Adams has ever seemed embarrassed when
reminded of their Friend's role in the on-going East Timor atrocity.
Moynihan has described with remarkable frankness how he lobbied,
manoeuvred, brow-beat and threatened other delegations at the UN to
ensure that the East Timor resolution wasn't acted on. Neither he nor
his immediate boss, Henry Kissinger, were swayed in the slightest by
the deaths of perhaps 200,000 East Timorese.
But Moynihan, when he's mentioned in our newspapers, is not projected
as an exemplar of political ugliness.
Some of us have had the experience of denouncing Moynihan for his
role in East Timor and then being denounced ourselves by nationalists
in the audience for, er, endangering peace.
The point is that while the hypocrisy of the New Labour Government with
regard to arms sales to the Jakarta regime is so blatant as to need little=
elaboration, the more important contradiction is far more deeply
embedded in our politics.
The governments of the great powers pick and chose whom they'll
support or accept support from, not according to any consistent
principle or by reference to the interests of ordinary people anywhere,
but by cold calculation of where their own interests and the interests of
their bank-rollers lie.
They are by no means alone in taking this approach.
=A9 Copyright Belfast Telegraph Newspapers Ltd.
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