[News] US & British Genocide - The Rape of East Timor

[Anti-Imperialist News]

*http://www.counterpunch.org/2016/02/26/the-rape-of-east-timor-sounds-like-fun/* 



  The Rape of East Timor: “Sounds Like Fun”

by John Pilger <http://www.counterpunch.org/author/john-pilger/> 
February 26, 2016

Secret documents found in the Australian National Archives provide a 
glimpse of how one of the greatest crimes of the 20th century was 
executed and covered up. They also help us understand how and for whom 
the world is run.

The documents refer to East Timor, now known as Timor-Leste, and were 
written by diplomats in the Australian embassy in Jakarta. The date was 
November 1976, less than a year after the Indonesian dictator General 
Suharto seized the then Portuguese colony on the island of Timor.

The terror that followed has few parallels; not even Pol Pot succeeded 
in killing, proportionally, as many Cambodians as Suharto and his fellow 
generals killed in East Timor. Out of a population of almost a million, 
up to a third were extinguished.

This was the second holocaust for which Suharto was responsible. A 
decade earlier, in 1965, Suharto wrested power in Indonesia in a 
bloodbath that took more than a million lives. The CIA reported: “In 
terms of numbers killed, the massacres rank as one of the worst mass 
murders of the 20th century.”

This was greeted in the Western press as “a gleam of light in Asia” 
(/Time/).The BBC’s correspondent in South East Asia, Roland Challis, 
later described the cover-up of the massacres as a triumph of media 
complicity and silence; the “official line” was that Suharto had “saved” 
Indonesia from a communist takeover.

“Of course my British sources knew what the American plan was,” he told 
me. “There were bodies being washed up on the lawns of the British 
consulate in Surabaya, and British warships escorted a ship full of 
Indonesian troops, so that they could take part in this terrible 
holocaust. It was only much later that we learned that the American 
embassy was supplying [Suharto with] names and ticking them off as they 
were killed. There was a deal, you see. In establishing the Suharto 
regime, the involvement of the [US-dominated] International Monetary 
Fund and the World Bank were part of it. That was the deal.”

I have interviewed many of the survivors of 1965, including the 
acclaimed Indonesian novelist Pramoedya Ananta Toer, who bore witness to 
an epic of suffering “forgotten” in the West because Suharto was “our 
man”.  A second holocaust in resource-rich East Timor, an undefended 
colony, was almost inevitable.

In 1994, I filmed clandestinely in occupied East Timor; I found a land 
of crosses and unforgettable grief. In my film, /Death of a Nation/, 
there is a sequence shot on board an Australian aircraft flying over the 
Timor Sea. A party is in progress. Two men in suits are toasting each 
other in champagne. “This is a uniquely historical moment,” babbles one 
of them, “that is truly, uniquely historical.”

This is Australia’s foreign minister, Gareth Evans. The other man is Ali 
Alatas, the principal mouthpiece of Suharto. It is 1989 and they are 
making a symbolic flight to celebrate a piratical deal they called a 
“treaty”. This allowed Australia, the Suharto dictatorship and the 
international oil companies to divide the spoils of East Timor’s oil and 
gas resources.

Thanks to Evans, Australia’s then prime minister, Paul Keating — who 
regarded Suharto as a father figure — and a gang that ran Australia’s 
foreign policy establishment, Australia distinguished itself as the only 
western country formally to recognise Suharto’s genocidal conquest. The 
prize, said Evans, was “zillions” of dollars.

Members of this gang reappeared the other day in documents found in the 
National Archives by two researchers from Monash University in 
Melbourne, Sara Niner and Kim McGrath. In their own handwriting, senior 
officials of the Department of Foreign Affairs mock reports of the rape, 
torture and execution of East Timorese by Indonesian troops. In 
scribbled annotations on a memorandum that refers to atrocities in a 
concentration camp, one diplomat wrote: “sounds like fun”. Another 
wrote: “sounds like the population are in raptures.”

Referring to a report by the Indonesian resistance, Fretilin, that 
describes Indonesia as an “impotent” invader, another diplomat sneered: 
“If ‘the enemy was impotent’, as stated, how come they are daily raping 
the captured population? Or is the former a result of the latter?”

The documents, says Sarah Niner, are “vivid evidence of the lack of 
empathy and concern for human rights abuses in East Timor” in the 
Department of Foreign Affairs. “The archives reveal that this culture of 
cover-up is closely tied to the DFA’s need to recognise Indonesian 
sovereignty over East Timor so as to commence negotiations over the 
petroleum in the East Timor Sea.”

This was a conspiracy to steal East Timor’s oil and gas. In leaked 
diplomatic cables in August 1975, the Australian Ambassador to Jakarta, 
Richard Woolcott, wrote to Canberra: “It would seem to me that the 
Department [of Minerals and Energy] might well have an interest in 
closing the present gap in the agreed sea border and this could be much 
more readily negotiated with Indonesia … than with Portugal or 
independent Portuguese Timor.”  Woolcott revealed that he had been 
briefed on Indonesia’s secret plans for an invasion. He cabled Canberra 
that the government should “assist public understanding in Australia” to 
counter “criticism of Indonesia”.

In 1993, I interviewed C. Philip Liechty, a former senior CIA operations 
officer in the Jakarta embassy during the invasion of East Timor. He 
told me: “Suharto was given the green light [by the US] to do what he 
did. We supplied them with everything they needed [from] M16 rifles [to] 
US military logistical support … maybe 200,000 people, almost all of 
them non-combatants died. When the atrocities began to appear in the CIA 
reporting, 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 our own 
sourcing was sabotaged.”

I asked Liechty what would have happened had someone spoken out. “Your 
career would end,” he replied. He said his interview with me was one way 
of making amends for “how badly I feel”.

The gang in the Australian embassy in Jakarta appear to suffer no such 
anguish.  One of the scribblers on the documents, Cavan Hogue, told the 
/Sydney Morning Herald:/ “It does look like my handwriting. If I made a 
comment like that, being the cynical bugger that I am, it would 
certainly have been in the spirit of irony and sarcasm. It’s about the 
[Fretilin] press release, not the Timorese.” Hogue said there were 
“atrocities on all sides”.

As one who reported and filmed the evidence of genocide, I find this 
last remark especially profane. The Fretilin “propaganda” he derides was 
accurate. The subsequent report of the United Nations on East Timor 
describes thousands of cases of summary execution and violence against 
women by Suharto’s Kopassus special forces, many of whom were trained in 
Australia. “Rape, sexual slavery and sexual violence were tools used as 
part of the campaign designed to inflict a deep experience of terror, 
powerlessness and hopelessness upon pro-independence supporters,”  says 
the UN.

Cavan Hogue, the joker and “cynical bugger”, was promoted to senior 
ambassador and eventually retired on a generous pension. Richard 
Woolcott was made head of the Department of Foreign Affairs in Canberra 
and, in retirement, has lectured widely as a “respected diplomatic 
intellectual”.

Journalists watered at the Australian embassy in Jakarta, notably those 
employed by Rupert Murdoch, who controls almost 70 per cent of 
Australia’s capital city press.  Murdoch’s correspondent in Indonesia 
was Patrick Walters, who reported that Jakarta’s “economic achievements” 
in East Timor were “impressive”, as was Jakarta’s “generous” development 
of the blood-soaked territory. As for the East Timorese resistance, it 
was “leaderless” and beaten. In any case, “no one was now arrested 
without proper legal procedures”.

In December 1993, one of Murdoch’s veteran retainers, Paul Kelly, then 
editor-in-chief of /The Australian,/ was appointed by Foreign Minister 
Evans to the Australia-Indonesia Institute, a body funded by the 
Australian government to promote the “common interests” of Canberra and 
the Suharto dictatorship.  Kelly led a group of Australian newspaper 
editors to Jakarta for an audience with the mass murderer. There is a 
photograph of one of them bowing.

East Timor won its independence in 1999 with the blood and courage of 
its ordinary people. The tiny, fragile democracy was immediately 
subjected to a relentless campaign of bullying by the Australian 
government which sought to manoeuvre it out of its legal ownership of 
the sea bed’s oil and gas revenue. To get its way, Australia refused to 
recognise the jurisdiction of the International Court of Justice and the 
Law of the Sea and unilaterally changed the maritime boundary in its own 
favour.

In 2006, a deal was finally signed, Mafia-style, largely on Australia’s 
terms. Soon afterwards, Prime Minister Mari Alkitiri, a nationalist who 
had stood up to Canberra, was effectively deposed in what he called an 
“attempted coup” by “outsiders”. The Australian military, which had 
“peace-keeping” troops in East Timor, had trained his opponents.

In the 17 years since East Timor won its independence, the Australian 
government has taken nearly $5 billion in oil and gas revenue — money 
that belongs to its impoverished neighbour.

Australia has been called America’s “deputy sheriff” in the South 
Pacific. One man with the badge is Gareth Evans, the foreign minister 
filmed lifting his champagne glass to toast the theft of East Timor’s 
natural resources. Today, Evans is a lectern-trotting zealot promoting a 
brand of war-mongering known as “RTP”, or “Responsibility to Protect”.  
As co-chair of a New York-based “Global Centre”, he runs a US-backed 
lobby group that urges the “international community” to attack countries 
where “the Security Council rejects a proposal or fails to deal with it 
in a reasonable time”. The man for the job, as the East Timorese might say.

-- 
Freedom Archives 522 Valencia Street San Francisco, CA 94110 415 
863.9977 www.freedomarchives.org
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