Myths of appeasement
Comment by Gerry Harant
Recent developments have once again led East Timor support groups in Australia to protest against government policies in "condoning" Indonesian genocide. Invariably these analyses comment on the identical policies pursued by our Tweedledee-Tweedledum major parties, calling these sycophantic and demeaning.
The assumption behind all this comment is that Australia was an innocent bystander in the 1975 invasion and remained a free agent in deciding policies on this issue ever since. Such assumptions doesn't fit the known facts.
Indonesia's liberation from Dutch colonialism, in which Australian unions played a major part, was part of a wave of anti-colonial revolts around the globe. In the resulting Sukarno government, the Communist Party of Indonesia had an important role.
In 1965 between half a million and a million Indonesians were murdered by what later became the Suharto regime. This regime immediately started on expansionary policies, and one of its victims was East Timor, for reasons not discussed, let alone explained.
Meanwhile, the story goes, successive Australian governments stood idly by, not wanting to appear nasty in the eyes of their Indonesian allies and business partners.
Besides, they had their eyes on the oil riches of the Timor Gap, and it suited them to divide the spoils with Indonesia. This explanation also suited some of the left who are forever on the lookout for economic explanations for international power plays. Remember the "oil in the Gulf of Tonkin" explanation for the Vietnam War?
In the case of East Timor, economic explanations don't wash either. In the eyes of the international community, East Timor is still a colonial possession of Portugal, and the Timor Gap Treaty is illegal. It would clearly be in Australia's interest first to settle the matter of international recognition; regardless of potential income from oil, it would also be in Indonesia's economic interest to save the huge cost of permanent military occupation.
We also need explanations for the ongoing arms shipments from the US and Australia, the training exercises at the cost of hundreds of millions of dollars and some real idea as to why successive governments have used identically worded "reasons" for denying asylum to East Timorese.
A whiff of reality
The Portuguese government in 1975 abandoned East Timor to its fate without an established governmental system. The only credible group was the left-nationalist Fretilin.
However, as Fretilin worked its way toward establishing a legitimate government and UN representation, a tiny business-led minority group in Dili, called UDT, staged an unsuccessful coup. Luckily for them, a fleet of Australian merchant ships just happened to be in Dili harbour at the time as if waiting for them to be evacuated to Australia.
A fortnight before the "official" Indonesian invasion in December 1975, four Australian newsmen were murdered by Indonesian troops. Information available to the Australian Defence Signals Directorate, which might have saved their lives, was deliberately withheld from them.
For years afterwards, the Australian government either repeated that "it is not known how they died", or later parroted the official Indonesian furphy that they had died in "crossfire". It sounded like a cover-up, but, if the Australian government was uninvolved, why should it need to cover up? And why was Australia the first country in the world to accept Indonesia's occupation as "legal"?
Guilty as hell
To understand what really happened, we have to go back to the world situation in the early 1970s. The Vietnam War was on the point of being lost; the US was only just emerging from the McCarthy witch-hunts. The domino theory of south-east Asian politics was in full swing — gravity demanded that the dominoes would fall towards the south — a direct result of our maps being drawn with north at the top.
The world was dominated by super-power rivalry. The US State Department and secret agencies shoe-horned world politics into this simplistic mould. If the Suharto coup wasn't engineered by the US, it was certainly looked on highly favourably.
Once it had murdered hundreds of thousands of compatriots in the name of anticommunism, the Suharto regime became the darling of the US. US money and arms poured in.
The suppression of the labour movement allowed the country to become a haven for US multinationals; for acting outside the Suharto pseudo-union, dissident workers were tortured, raped and murdered. US capitalists could ask for no more.
The much complained-of nepotism of Suharto's family was shared with the multinationals; each new investment project transferred the Indonesian people's money into international corporate as well as family pockets, as did the military purchases of planes, tanks and warships in various states of disrepair.
Australia valiantly played its part in all this. Members of the internal secret police Bakin are regularly seen at conferences with ASIO; JIO (Joint Intelligence Organisation) has close relations with Indonesian army personnel. ASIS, which runs our foreign affairs, is a protagonist for the Suharto mob, as can be seen in the outrageous behaviour over the years of former ambassador Richard Woolcott, ever ready to parrot the latest Suharto lies.
Hundreds of millions of Australian taxpayers' dollars have been spent on joint military exercises. Members of Kopassus, the Indonesian equivalent of the German wartime Waffen-SS, train with Australian units.
Crushing East Timor
After the failure of UDT, it was clearly a matter of eliminating Fretilin, which had, in the CIA's simplistic scheme, been branded "communist" (it still is). This could not be openly performed by the US, which had acquired the reputation of the "ugly American".
Given the closeness of Australia, and its membership of the "intelligence club", the role of coordinating the incursion fell to Australia.
Thus, Australia was not a bystander but was heavily involved in planning the East Timor invasion. This is shown by the array of ships providing transport for the escaping UDT conspirators; it is confirmed by DSD's admitted pre-knowledge of the invasion at the time of the murder of Australia's newsmen.
It is very likely that the invasion was triggered by the visit of US President Gerald Ford to Indonesia days before Indonesian troops moved in. The same president, within a year, ordered a 79% increase in military aid to Indonesia. The war materiel supplied included counter-insurgency aircraft.
The US ambassador to the UN, Patrick Moynihan, later wrote on East Timor, "The United States wished things to turn out as they did and worked to bring this about ...".
Australia also undertook other direct actions to deliver East Timor up to its torturers. Initially, contact with Fretilin was maintained by a transmitter operated by supporters in the Darwin area. This link was shut down by ASIO rather than the Commonwealth Police, which would normally be responsible for enforcing communication laws.
The reason given was that it was an illegal transmitter. At that time, however, there were literally thousands of illegal transmitters operating in Australia; the market was flooded with "citizens' band" transceivers in contravention of our communications laws.
The masterminding of Australia's foreign policy by secret agencies also explains the "Portuguese citizen" insult against Timorese refugees by Alexander Downer weeks after he pooh-poohed its application under the previous government; it mirrors the way Gough Whitlam did the rounds of ALP branches after his election and "explained" that although he could not disclose the purpose of Pine Gap, it was not aggressive.
(Talking about Pine Gap, how many Australians know that the Pine Gap Treaty was renewed a couple of weeks back, and how much debate was there as to why we need this CIA base now that the Cold War is supposedly over?)
Our subservience to secret agencies also explains why the government is hell-bent to install a $500 million outdated reactor at Lucas Heights. The nebulous "national interest" quoted is contained in a largely secret submission by Foreign Affairs (read ASIS).
Just why ASIS thinks this technical dinosaur, which has been ably analysed by Jim Green in GLW, will enhance our international standing is hidden in the tiny minds of ASIS personnel; but then, as someone observed, "intelligence agencies" are the ultimate oxymoron.
Where to from here?
Twenty years ago, in the wake of the Whitlam sacking, politically aware Australians developed an understanding that our internal and external policies were largely imposed by forces outside our control. Today, this understanding is fading even though, as in the case of East Timor, such control forms the only credible explanation for events we witness daily.
Paradoxically, this denial of political reality is taking place at the very time it is becoming plain that our economy is dominated from outside and that "globalisation", GATT, the MAI and the machinations of the IMF are indeed conspiracies rather than natural developments.
We need to see the link between international economic, military and political strategies. While we need to keep on protesting vigorously against policies pursued by Australia against East Timor, we should bear in mind that government pretence at being in charge of foreign policy is yet another lie and that these policies are being imposed by forces over which voters have absolutely no control and which operate regardless of which puppet nominally heads our country. The least we can do is to understand the wider international picture.
[Gerry Harant is co-author of Rooted in Secrecy.]