Beneath them lay a land of crosses: great black crosses etched against the sky, crosses on peaks, crosses in tiers on the hillsides. Filming clandestinely in East Timor, I would walk into the scrub and there were the crosses. They littered the earth and crowded the eye. In 1993, the Foreign Affairs Committee of the Australian Parliament reported that at least 200,000 had died under Indonesia’s occupation: almost a third of the population. And yet East Timor’s horror, which was foretold and nurtured by the US, Britain and Australia, was actually a sequel. No single American action in the period after 1945, wrote the historian Gabriel Kolko, was as bloodthirsty as its role in Indonesia, for it tried to initiate the massacre. He was referring to Suharto’s seizure of power in 1965-6, which caused the violent deaths of up to a million people.
To understand the significance of Suharto, who died on Sunday, is to look beneath the surface of the current world order: the so-called global economy and the ruthless cynicism of those who run it. Suharto was our model mass murderer ... One of our very best and most valuable friends, Thatcher called him, speaking for the West. For three decades, the Australian, US and British governments worked tirelessly to minimise the crimes of Suharto’s gestapo, known as Kopassus, who were trained by the Australian SAS and the British army and who gunned down people with British-supplied Heckler and Koch machine guns from British-supplied Tactica riot-control vehicles. Prevented by Congress from supplying arms direct, US administrations from Gerald Ford to Bill Clinton, provided logistic support through the back door and commercial preferences.
In one year, the British Department of Trade provided almost a billion pounds worth of so-called soft loans, which allowed Suharto buy Hawk fighter-bombers. The British taxpayer paid the bill for aircraft that dive-bombed East Timorese villages, and the arms industry reaped the profits. However, the Australians distinguished themselves as the most obsequious. In an infamous cable to Canberra, Richard Woolcott, Australia’s ambassador to Jakarta, who had been forewarned about Suharto’s invasion of East Timor, wrote: What Indonesia now looks to from Australia is some understanding of their attitude and possible action to assist public understanding in Australia ...
Covering up Suharto’s crimes became a career for those like Woolcott, while understanding the mass murderer came in buckets. This left an indelible stain on the reformist government of Gough Whitlam following the cold-blooded killing of two Australian TV crews by Suharto’s troops during the invasion of East Timor. We know your people love you, Bob Hawke told the dictator. His successor, Paul Keating, famously regarded the tyrant as a father figure. When Indonesian troops slaughtered at least 200 people in the Santa Cruz cemetery in Dili, East Timor, and Australian mourners planted crosses outside the Indonesian embassy in Canberra, foreign minister Gareth Evans ordered them destroyed. To Evans, ever-effusive in his support for the regime, the massacre was merely an aberration. This was the view of much of the Australian press, especially that controlled by Rupert Murdoch, whose local retainer, Paul Kelly, led a group of leading newspaper editors to Jakarta, fawn before the dictator.
Here lies a clue as to why Suharto, unlike Saddam Hussein, died not on the gallows but surrounded by the finest medical team his secret billions could buy. Ralph McGehee, a senior CIA operations officer in the 1960s, describes the terror of Suharto’s takeover of Indonesia in 1965-6 as the model operation for the American-backed 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. The US embassy in Jakarta supplied Suharto with a zap list of Indonesian Communist Party (PKI) members and crossed off the names when they were killed or captured. Roland Challis, the BBC’s south-east Asia correspondent at the time, told me how the British government was secretly involved in this slaughter. British warships escorted a ship full of Indonesian troops down the Malacca Straits so they could take part in the terrible holocaust, he said. I and other correspondents were unaware of this at the time ... There was a deal, you see.
The deal was that Indonesia under Suharto would offer up what Richard Nixon had called the richest hoard of natural resources, the greatest prize in south-east Asia. In November 1967, the greatest prize was handed out at a remarkable three-day conference sponsored by the Time-Life Corporation in Geneva. Led by David Rockefeller, all the corporate giants were represented: the major oil companies and banks, General Motors, Imperial Chemical Industries, British American Tobacco, Siemens and US Steel and many others. Across the table sat Suharto’s US-trained economists who agreed to the corporate takeover of their country, sector by sector. The Freeport company got a mountain of copper in West Papua. A US/ European consortium got the nickel. The giant Alcoa company got the biggest slice of Indonesia’s bauxite. America, Japanese and French companies got the tropical forests of Sumatra. When the plunder was complete, President Lyndon Johnson sent his congratulations on a magnificent story of opportunity seen and promise awakened. Thirty years later, with the genocide in East Timor also complete, the World Bank described the Suharto dictatorship as a model pupil.
Shortly before he died, I interviewed Alan Clark, who under Thatcher was Britain’s minister responsible for supplying Suharto with most of his weapons. I asked him, Did it bother you personally that you were causing such mayhem and human suffering?
No, not in the slightest, he replied. It never entered my head.
I ask the question because I read you are a vegetarian and are seriously concerned about the way animals are killed.
Yeah?
Doesn’t that concern extend to humans?
Curiously not. John Pilger, article January 2008, ‘Suharto, the Model Killer, and His Friends in High Places’
When General Suharto, the West’s man, seized power in Indonesia in the mid-1960s, he offered ‘a gleam of light in Asia’, rejoiced Time magazine. That he had killed up to a million ‘communists’ was of no account in the acquisition of what Richard Nixon called ‘the richest hoard of natural resources, the Greatest Prize in south-east Asia’.
In November 1967, the booty was handed out at an extraordinary conference in a lakeside hotel in Geneva. The participants included the most powerful capitalists in the world, the likes of David Rockefeller, and senior executives of the major oil companies and banks, General Motors, British American Tobacco, Imperial Chemical Industries, American Express, Siemens, Goodyear, US Steel. John Pilger, article The New Statesman, ‘Free the Forgotten Bird of Paradise’
For the Indonesian elite, enrichment was assured. From 1992 to 2004, Freeport provided $33bn in direct and indirect ‘benefits’, much of it finding its way to the Indonesian military, the real power in the land, which ‘protects’ foreign investments in the manner of a mafia. The reward for the people of West Papua has been a rate of impoverishment double that of the rest of Indonesia, says a World Bank report. At Bintuni Bay, where BP is exploiting natural gas, 56% of the people live in abject poverty. ‘More than 90 per cent of villages in Papua do not have basic health facilities’, the report noted. In 2005, famine swept the district of Yahukimo, where virgin forests and gas deposits deliver unerring profit. The suffering of West Papuans is seldom reported; the Indonesian government bans foreign journalists and human rights organisations such as Amnesty from the hauntingly beautiful territory known by its indigenous people as ‘the forgotten bird of paradise’. ibid.
Three months before Indonesia invaded East Timor in December 1975, Gough Whitlam dismissed an Indonesian proposal to send a joint international military force to restore peace to the civil-war-torn colony.
WikiLeaks’ declassified US diplomatic cables questions the perception of Indonesia as a premeditated invader, after Mr Whitlam rejected a proposed joint peacekeeping army involving Australia, Indonesia, Malaysia, Portugal and New Zealand.
The cables infer the indifference of Mr Whitlam, as prime minister, paved the way for Indonesia’s 24-year occupation of East Timor. News.com.au online report 11th April 2013
We would do absolutely nothing. Now that’s a blunt, truthful answer. Gough Whitlam
For hundreds of years Indonesia was sucked dry by the rich countries of the West ... In this way, the West became strong and prosperous, controlling finance and commerce. Now we are dictated to by the IMF and the World Bank. A country as rich as Indonesia has been turned into a country of beggars because the Indonesian elite is spineless. Pramoedaya Ananto Toer, author & former political prisoner
A dynamic economic success. A model pupil of the global economy. World Bank, 1997
Indonesia was strategically important. It had a huge population. And the CIA believed their prime minister, Sukarno, was going to open up the country to communism. The CIA made a bizarre decision. They tried to blacken Prime Minister Sukarno’s name by making the world’s first celebrity porn film. They hired a Sukarno lookalike and filmed him enjoying the company of a young lady who wasn’t his wife. But the CIA failed to realise that Sukarno was already a famed womaniser, and this movie had no impact at all on his popularity. So when this amusing attempt to get rid of him failed, the CIA turned to something a lot less funny – black operations. Secrets of the CIA
Sukarno was driven from power. After the coup the CIA worked together with the generals to ensure every single communist in Indonesia was killed. ibid.
Well it’s a question we look at very carefully. But I promise you we put under the most searching analysis the use to which equipment that we sell be put. And we are quite confident the Indonesians will put our Hawks for jet training, for advanced jet training, which is why they were needed in the first place. Sir Alan Thomas, head of Defense sales Ferranti Defense Systems
The planes will be used not only to train pilots but also for ground attacks. General Bacharuddin Jusuf Habibie
If those who violate human rights can do so with impunity, they come to believe they are beyond the reach of the law. Amnesty International