BY
ALLEN MYERS
Dear Jose,
I am proud to have participated in conferences and solidarity demonstrations with East Timor from the Indonesian invasion in December 1975 until the withdrawal of Indonesian troops. Twelve years ago, when I edited the first issue of Green Left Weekly, I invited you to contribute a column explaining why Australians should support East Timor's struggle for independence.
This background made me all the more saddened to read your recent defence
of the US government's preparations to invade Iraq. I thought it particularly
inappropriate that you used the deaths of your brothers and sisters under
Indonesian occupation as a justification for supporting the position 
of
the US, which bears particular responsibility for their deaths.
Your article says, The US and other Western nations contributed to this tragedy, but adds, but all redeemed themselves. Both statements are false.
The US and the West did not merely contribute to the sufferings of East Timor under Indonesian occupation; without them, the occupation would never have happened. The Suharto dictatorship came about because of Western pressures on Indonesia and assistance to the most authoritarian layers of the Indonesian military; US and British assistance to the bloodbath that consolidated Suharto's power has been well documented for more than 30 years.
Suharto's invasion of East Timor was prepared by, among other things, the diplomatic attentions of Australian Labor Prime Minister Gough Whitlam and US President Gerald Ford. Indeed, the invasion was launched within a few hours of Ford's departure from Indonesian air space.
Throughout the long East Timorese resistance, most Western governments either supported the occupation or, at best, remained silent. Most competed to sell arms to the Suharto dictatorship, which were used, among other things, to kill East Timorese.
Many ordinary people in the West opposed their governments' support for East Timor's oppressors. In England in the 1990s, four women who destroyed a jet bomber that had been sold to the Indonesian government were acquitted by a jury which accepted their defence that their action was taken to prevent a greater crime, the mass murder of East Timorese civilians. The public consciousness that made such a verdict possible was created by a movement that opposed both Indonesia's occupation and Western governments' responsibility for the Suharto dictatorship.
These governments did not, in 1999, suddenly see the light and redeem themselves. After the disintegrating Indonesian dictatorship lost its gamble that it could intimidate East Timorese into voting for autonomy, they were confronted by massive political opposition to the Indonesian military's bloodbath in East Timor, and they reacted as best they could to contain the damage to themselves and their Indonesian flunkeys.
The main impetus for the international troops who stopped the bloodbath in East Timor came from Australia, not because the reactionary government of the day spontaneously changed its mind, but because of the biggest demonstrations in years.
I am delighted by the knowledge that many of the organisers and participants of those demonstrations were readers of this newspaper, which began its continuous reporting on East Timor with your column in 1991.
Your two false statements regarding the West and East Timor are used in your article to identify the US government with freedom for Iraq and anti-war demonstrators with opposition to that aim. This is grotesque.
I agree with your statement that force is often the necessary price of liberation. But, obviously, not every force aids liberation (Suharto's troops used considerable force against East Timor). Your argument that the US government with or without the UN should be called on to liberate Iraq from Saddam Hussein ignores the fact that the US government and the corporations that employ it are not the answer to the world's problems, but the cause of most of them.
This includes Hussein himself, who was backed by the US throughout the 1980s, when he was waging an unprovoked war against Iran, and who was supplied by Western governments with large quantities of weapons that a link those governments are still doing their best to conceal. The US record regarding Hussein is hardly a secret; in the US, a joke is circulating: Question: How does the US government know Saddam Hussein had weapons of mass destruction? Answer: It still has the receipts.
The US government has admitted that it plans to replace Hussein's dictatorship with a dictatorship of the US military temporarily, of course. Eventually, no doubt, US military rule will be replaced by a democracy patterned on the one the US has installed in Afghanistan.
(By the way, if you find it hard to tell the difference between a US-supported democracy and a Muslim fundamentalist terrorist dictatorship, just check the regime's response to the US oil corporations' proposals to put a pipeline through its territory.)
Very shortly, the Iraqi people, who have already suffered losses greater than the entire population of East Timor, will be attacked again. The movement you accuse of blocking freedom for Iraqis seeks to prevent their destruction. It, unlike you, has not forgotten who makes the weapons of mass destruction.
From Green Left Weekly, March 19, 2003.
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