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class="header"> <b><small><small><small><a
href="http://www.counterpunch.org/2016/02/26/the-rape-of-east-timor-sounds-like-fun/"
id="reader-domain" class="domain"><a class="moz-txt-link-freetext" href="http://www.counterpunch.org/2016/02/26/the-rape-of-east-timor-sounds-like-fun/">http://www.counterpunch.org/2016/02/26/the-rape-of-east-timor-sounds-like-fun/</a></a></small></small></small></b>
<h1 id="reader-title">The Rape of East Timor: “Sounds Like Fun”</h1>
<div id="reader-credits" class="credits">by <span
class="post_author" itemprop="author"><a
href="http://www.counterpunch.org/author/john-pilger/"
rel="nofollow">John Pilger</a> February 26, 2016<br>
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<p>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.</p>
<p>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.</p>
<p>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.</p>
<p>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.”</p>
<p>This was greeted in the Western press as “a gleam of
light in Asia” (<em>Time</em>).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.</p>
<p>“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.”</p>
<p>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.</p>
<p>In 1994, I filmed clandestinely in occupied East Timor;
I found a land of crosses and unforgettable grief. In my
film, <em>Death of a Nation</em>, 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.”</p>
<p>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.</p>
<p>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.</p>
<p>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.”</p>
<p>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?”</p>
<p>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.”</p>
<p>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”.</p>
<p>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.”</p>
<p>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”.</p>
<p>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 <em>Sydney Morning
Herald:</em> “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”.</p>
<p>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.</p>
<p>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”.</p>
<p>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”.</p>
<p>In December 1993, one of Murdoch’s veteran retainers,
Paul Kelly, then editor-in-chief of <em>The Australian,</em>
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.</p>
<p>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.</p>
<p>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.</p>
<p>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.</p>
<p>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.</p>
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<div class="moz-signature">-- <br>
Freedom Archives
522 Valencia Street
San Francisco, CA 94110
415 863.9977
<a class="moz-txt-link-abbreviated" href="http://www.freedomarchives.org">www.freedomarchives.org</a>
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