In 1966, the US ambassador in Jakarta assured Suharto that the ‘US is generally sympathetic with and admiring of what the army is doing’. The British ambassador, Sir Andrew Gilchrist, reported to the Foreign Office: ‘I have never concealed from you my belief that a little shooting in Indonesia would be an essential preliminary to effective change.’ Having already armed and equipped much of the army, Washington secretly supplied Suharto’s troops with a field communications network. Flown in at night by US Air Force planes from the Philippines, this was state-of-the-art equipment, whose high frequencies were known to the CIA and the National Security Agency. Not only did this technology allow Suharto’s generals to coordinate the killings, it also meant that the highest echelons of the US administration were listening in. Suharto was able to seal off large areas of the country. Archive film of people being herded into trucks and driven away exists but that is all. To my knowledge, the fuzzy photograph published here is the only pictorial record of the actual killings in this Asian holocaust. It ought to be salutary for journalists these days to heed the important role that western propaganda played then, as it does now. British intelligence manipulated the press so expertly that Norman Reddaway, head of the Foreign Office’s Information Research Department (IRD), boasted to Ambassador Gilchrist, in a letter marked ‘secret and personal’, that the spin he and his colleagues had orchestrated – that Sukarno’s continued rule would lead to a communist takeover – ‘went all over the world and back again’. He describes an experienced Fleet Street journalist agreeing ‘to give your angle on events in his article … i.e. that this was a kid-glove coup without butchery’. Roland Challis, who was the BBC’s Southeast Asia correspondent at the time, believes that the cover-up of the massacres was a triumph for western propaganda. ‘My British sources purported not to know what was going on,’ he told me, ‘but they knew what the American plan was.
There were bodies being washed up on the lawns of the British consulate in Surabayo, and British warships escorted a ship full of Indonesian troops down the Malacca Straits, so that they could take part in this terrible holocaust. It was only much later that we learned the American embassy was supplying names and ticking them off as they were killed. There was a deal, you see.
In establishing the Suharto regime, the involvement of the IMF and the World Bank was part of it. Sukarno had kicked them out now Suharto would bring them back. That was the deal.’
With an ailing Sukarno powerless and Suharto about to appoint himself president, the US press reported the Washington-backed coup not as a great human catastrophe but in terms of the new economic advantages. The military takeover, notwithstanding the massacres, was described by Time magazine as ‘The West’s Best News in Asia’. A headline in US News and World Report read: ‘Indonesia: Hope … where there was once none.’ The renowned New York Times columnist James Reston celebrated ‘A gleam of light in Asia’ and wrote a kid-glove version he had clearly been given. The Australian prime minister, Harold Holt, who was visiting the US, offered a striking example of his sense of humour: ‘With 500,000 to a million communist sympathisers knocked off,’ he said, ‘I think it’s safe to assume a reorientation has taken place.’
Ralph McGehee, a senior CIA operations officer at the time, whom I first interviewed almost 20 years ago, described the ousting of Sukarno in Indonesia as a ‘model operation’ for the US-run coup that got rid of Salvador Allende in Chile seven years later. ‘The CIA forged a document purporting to reveal a leftist plot to murder Chilean military leaders’, he wrote, ‘[just like] what happened in Indonesia in 1965’. He says the Indonesian massacres were also the model for Operation Phoenix in Vietnam, where US-directed death squads assassinated up to 50,000 people.
In November 1967, following the capture of the ‘greatest prize’, the booty was handed out. The Time-Life Corporation sponsored an extraordinary conference in Geneva which, in the course of a week, designed the corporate takeover of Indonesia. It was attended by the most important businessmen in the world, the likes of David Rockefeller, and all the giants of western capitalism were represented. They included the major oil companies and banks, General Motors, Imperial Chemical Industries, British Leyland, British-American Tobacco, American Express, Siemens, Goodyear, the International Paper Corporation, US Steel. Across the table were Suharto’s men, whom Rockefeller called ‘Indonesia’s top economic team’. Several were economists trained at the University of California in Berkeley. All sang for their supper, offering the principal selling points of their country and their people: ‘Abundance of cheap labour … a treasure house of resources … a captive market.’ Recently, I asked one of them, Dr Emile Salim, if anyone at the conference had even mentioned that a million people had died in bringing this new business-friendly government to power. ‘No, that was not on the agenda,’ he replied. ‘I didn’t know about it till later. Remember, we didn’t have television and the telephones were not working well.’
The Indonesian economy was carved up, sector by sector, at the conference. In one room, forests in another, minerals. The Freeport Company got a mountain of copper in West Papua (Henry Kissinger is currently on the board). A US/European consortium got West Papua’s nickel. The giant Alcoa company got the biggest slice of Indonesia’s bauxite. A group of US, Japanese and French got the tropical forests of Sumatra, West Papua and Kalimantan.
A Foreign Investment Law, hurried on to the statutes by Suharto, made this plunder tax-free for at least five years. Real, and secret, control of the Indonesian economy passed to the IMF and the World Bank through the Inter-Governmental Group on Indonesia (IGGI), whose principal members were the US, Canada, Europe and Australia. Under Sukarno, Indonesia had few debts. Now the really big loans rolled in, often straight into pockets, as the treasurehouse of resources rolled out. Shortly before the Asian financial crash in 1997, the IGGI godfathers congratulated their favourite mass murderer for having ‘created a miracle economy’. John Pilger, article July 2001, ‘Spoils of a Massacre’
That’s the same argument put forward by the Indonesian dictator General Suharto, whose regime is responsible for the deaths of 200,000 people in East Timor. General Suharto has given large amounts of money to the ANC, and President Mandela has given him South Africa’s highest honour. John Pilger, Apartheid Did Not Die
This was Indonesia in the mid-1960s. Books were burned and popular democracy crushed when General Suharto came to power. In the West, Indonesia was seen as an investor’s paradise. A huge market, rich in oil and other natural resources. Richard Nixon called Indonesia, ‘The Greatest Prize in south-east Asia’. Suharto and his generals were welcome to the free world. John Pilger, Death of a Nation – The Timor Conspiracy, 1998
It should be remembered that oppression was never part of the vision of those who fought and died to free Indonesia from European imperialism. Their struggle for independence from the Dutch produced great popular movements for democracy and social justice. For fourteen years Indonesia had one of the freest parliamentary democracies in the world. Today many Indonesians understand this. The slaughter of East Timor is unworthy of such a nation. ibid.
East Timor is a tiny country just four hundred miles to the north of Australia. A Portuguese colony for more than four hundred years, East Timor was invaded in 1975 by Indonesia, the fifth largest nation in the world and led by a military dictatorship. Indonesia has no historical or legal claim to East Timor, yet its brutal occupation has met with mostly silence from the world’s governments and international agencies ... As a result of the Indonesian invasion and occupation some 200,000 died here. That’s a third of the population. ibid.
There are also documents showing torture was officially sanctioned with established procedures for the torturer. One such manual is entitled, Guiding the Village Comprehensively, and lists the dos and don’ts of torture. And here they are: avoid taking photographs showing torture in progress; and when people are being subjected to electric current, and when they have been stripped naked etc. Remember not to have photographs developed outside East Timor which could then be made available to public by irresponsible elements. Interrogation should be repeated over and over again until the correct conclusion is drawn. ibid.
There is also a wider question: are international relations at the close of the twentieth century to be dominated by euphemisms and lies that override justice and make small nations expendable? The fate of the people of East Timor is pivotal to this. For if we allow our governments to arm their oppressors and steal their resources and to do so in our name, how can we claim the universal rights that are denied them? ibid.
In 1975 Indonesia invaded East Timor. Like Saddam’s attack on Kuwait, the occupation was declared by the UN to be illegal. But no action ever followed. In the last 18 years a third of the East Timorese population has been killed, while Western governments have remained silent, or, like Britain, have sold arms worth hundreds of millions to Indonesia. John Pilger, The West’s Dirty Wink, article 12th February 1994
Indonesia: As many as seventy million people live in extreme poverty ... Young people living here who make the famous brands are paid on average seventy-two pence a day, about a dollar ... You feel the claustrophobia of the workers, the sheer frenzy of their production and you see their fatigue. John Pilger, New Rulers of the World
In my film Death of a Nation, there is a sequence filmed on board an Australian aircraft flying over the island of Timor. A party is in progress, and two men in suits are toasting each other in champagne. This is an historically unique moment, says one of them, that is truly uniquely historical. This is Gareth Evans, Australia’s foreign minister. The other man is Ali Alatas, principal mouthpiece of the Indonesian dictator, General Suharto. It is 1989, and the two are making a grotesquely symbolic flight to celebrate the signing of a treaty that allowed Australia and the international oil and gas companies to exploit the seabed off East Timor, then illegally and viciously occupied by Suharto. The prize, according to Evans, was zillions of dollars.