Web Of Deceit: Britain's Real Foreign Policy

by Mark Curtis

  There is no mention in any of the files – that I could find – of the morality of engaging with the new regime. The slaughter was simply an irrelevance.

  Michael Stewart recalled in his autobiography that he visited Indonesia a year after the killings and was able to ‘reach a good understanding with the Foreign Minister, Adam Malik’, a ‘remarkable man’ who was ‘evidently resolved to keep his country at peace’. Suharto’s regime is ‘like Sukarno’s, harsh and tyrannical; but it is not aggressive’, Stewart stated. Malik later acted as a primary apologist for Indonesian atrocities in East Timor. In 1977, for example, he was reported as saying: ‘50,000 or 80,000 people might have been killed during the war in East Timor … It was war … Then what is the big fuss?’43

  A combination of Western advice, aid and investment helped transform the Indonesian economy into one that, although retaining some nationalist orientation, provided substantial opportunities and profits for Western investors. President Suharto’s increasingly corrupt authoritarian regime kept economic order. Japan and the United States, working through consortia and the multilateral banks, used aid as a lever to rewrite Indonesia’s basic economic legislation to favour foreign investors. Western businesses moved in. By the mid 1970s, a British CBI report noted that Indonesia presented ‘enormous potential for the foreign investor’. The press reported that the country enjoyed a ‘favourable political climate’ and the ‘encouragement of foreign investment by the country’s authorities’. RTZ, BP, British Gas and Britoil were some of the companies that took advantage.45 One consequence was that landlessness increased as land ownership became more concentrated; the peasants were afraid to organise, and the prospects of fundamental economic changes to primarily benefit the poor were successfully eradicated even though poverty levels were reduced.44

  With Suharto gone after May 1998, one British minister at least was able to talk frankly of the regime Britain had supported. It could now be admitted that under Suharto there was ‘severe political repression’, the ‘concentration of economic and political power in a few, extremely corrupt hands’, and the ‘involvement of the security forces in every tier of social and political life’, for example.46 All these things had been miraculously discovered.

  21

  EAST TIMOR: SMOTHERING THE BIRTH OF A NATION

  READERS SHOULD HAVE a look at press cuttings for August 2001, when East Timor held its first elections, and for May 2002, when it achieved independence after a long, heroic struggle. They should look for any mentions of the reality that for the previous twenty-five years successive British governments had helped prevent the right of the East Timorese to self-determination – both by supporting the horrific 1975 invasion as well as generally helping to prop up the Suharto regime. There is barely mention of this fact in the entire mainstream media.

  Interestingly, one mention I have found is from then Foreign Office minister Peter Hain, who told a parliamentary inquiry of the importance of ‘giving the people of East Timor the right to determine their own destiny, which they were denied for over a quarter of a century, often with Western complicity including British complicity’.1

  This is an important fact, an unusual admission, which has been buried in the propaganda system. Only a small number of critical journalists, such as John Pilger with his outstanding documentaries and writing, have revealed the reality of British policy towards East Timor, and have kept the story alive in the face of silence from the mainstream. Let us try to throw some further light on this policy here.

  Another 200,000

  The brief background to the invasion of East Timor is that the majority of Timorese had long sought independence while a small political faction backed by Jakarta was calling for integration into Indonesia. An armed conflict broke out between the pro-Jakarta UDT and the party of the left, Fretilin, in August 1975. This was essentially engineered by Indonesian generals to bring about the integration of East Timor – then a Portuguese colony – into Indonesia. The generals informed UDT leaders that Fretilin was secretly training a communist force and was about to launch a coup. This was a pure fabrication but UDT heeded it and attempted a coup. The coup failed and within weeks Fretilin forces overwhelmed the UDT.

  The Indonesian regime under Suharto had constantly feared that an East Timor controlled by Fretilin, which commanded widespread popular support in the territory, would win international recognition. It subsequently invaded and proceeded to enact one of the most brutal invasions by any country in the postwar period.

  The population was for years subjected to aerial bombing, campaigns of deliberate starvation and the wholesale destruction of villages. By 1985, up to half a million people had been killed or displaced. Disappearances, or deaths in custody, the killing of prisoners who surrendered after being promised amnesty, the torture and imprisonment of people suspected of being disloyal to the Suharto regime were all common. One East Timorese catholic priest stated that ‘a barbarous genocide of innocent people goes on, apparently with complete peace of conscience’. East Timor was being ‘wiped out by an invasion, a brutal conquest that produces heaps of dead, maimed and orphaned’. Bishop Carlos Belo, who later won the Nobel Prize, said: ‘We are dying as a people and as a nation.’2

  When filing their reports on East Timor’s elections and independence, all journalists should have been aware of Britain’s support for the invasion. The following secret document has been publicly available for some time and has been cited in various studies. It shows the British ambassador in Jakarta informing the Foreign Office in July 1975 that:

  The people of Portuguese Timor are in no condition to exercise the right to self-determination … The arguments in favour of its integration into Indonesia are all the stronger … Developments in Lisbon now seem to argue in favour of greater sympathy towards Indonesia should the Indonesian government feel forced to take strong action by the deteriorating situation in Portuguese Timor.

  He continued:

  Certainly, as seen from here, it is in Britain’s interest that Indonesia should absorb the territory as soon and as unobtrusively as possible, and that if it should come to the crunch and there is a row in the United Nations, we should keep our heads down and avoid taking sides against the Indonesian government.3

  Other formerly secret documents from the mid 1960s show that British planners believed that East Timor was not ‘sufficiently viable to have an independent existence’. The files that I have seen contain debates among planners on whether it would be in Britain’s interest to offer aid to Portugal to defend East Timor in the event of an Indonesian attack; the conclusion was no. One file mentions that Britain would take recourse to the UN in the event of an Indonesian attack (which did not happen, as the cable cited above shows).4

  In none of the files that I have seen are the wishes of the East Timorese mentioned; they simply figure nowhere in British planning.

  US declassified files show that Washington gave Suharto the green light for the invasion. President Ford told Suharto in their meeting the day before the invasion that if Indonesia were to take action in East Timor ‘we will understand and will not press you on the issue. We understand the problem and the intentions that you have.’ Secretary of State Kissinger added: ‘it is important that whatever you do succeeds quickly’. The invasion was delayed until President Ford had returned home.5

  A few days after the beginning of the intervention the US ambassador to Indonesia noted that the US had ‘not disapproved’ of the invasion; within a month, a US State Department official stated: ‘We are more or less condoning the incursion into East Timor’ since ‘we regard Indonesia as a friendly, non-aligned state – a nation we do a lot of business with’.6

  Britain, along with the US, also helped prevent UN action against Indonesia consistent with the view outlined in the secret cable noted above. London abstained on the first UN resolution condemning the invasion, supported two others (though these were widely acknowledged to be weakly worded and watered down) and abstained on
all subsequent ones. The US representative to the UN, Daniel Moynihan, explained that in steering the international community away from effective action against Indonesia:

  The United States wished things to turn out as they did and worked to bring this about. The Department of State desired that the United Nations prove utterly ineffective in whatever measures it undertook. This task was given to me and I carried it forward with no inconsiderable success.7

  The US dramatically increased arms supplies to Jakarta following the invasion, providing counter-insurgency and transport aircraft as well as an array of rifles, mortars, machine guns and communications equipment. All these directly aided Indonesia in the conduct of the campaign.

  Britain later followed suit. In 1978 the Callaghan government permitted the export to Indonesia of eight Hawk aircraft, Rolls Royce engines, spares and the training of pilots and engineers. In November 1978, by which time near-genocide had taken place in East Timor, Labour Foreign Secretary David Owen stated that ‘we believe that such fighting as still continues is on a very small scale’.8 Britain had refused to give assurances that the aircraft would not be used by Indonesia in a combat role.

  Much evidence suggests that the Hawks significantly helped the Indonesian military’s campaign. Konis Santana, the leader of East Timor’s resistance army, claims that British aircraft killed hundreds of civilians in raids against villages supporting the resistance in the late 1970s and early 1980s. He believes that:

  The war in East Timor would have taken another course if the Indonesians had not received military support from abroad, including the Hawks that Great Britain offered during the crucial period after the invasion.

  Santana said in an interview in 1997 that the Indonesian air force no longer used British jets on raiding missions, but for intimidation, because the ‘Hawks killed so many people in bombing attacks in 1978 and 1979 that today, whenever people hear the noise of the Hawks flying, they are scared and the authorities know they will not dare leave their homes.’9

  By the early 1990s, a spokesman for East Timor’s independence movement termed Britain ‘the single worst obstructionist of any industrialised country’ concerning Indonesian violence in East Timor.10 The reason was that until independence, British military, political, economic and diplomatic relations all gave effective support to the Suharto regime and, in effect, its brutal occupation of East Timor.

  Britain became a major regular supplier of an array of military equipment to the Indonesian armed forces, a relationship that continues to thrive today. As now, some of these past deals were made at the same time as major human rights violations in Indonesia and in East Timor. In 1983–85, as contracts for the British export of an air defence system were being signed, up to 4,500 people were murdered by army death squads in Indonesia. On the same day in 1991 that a co-production agreement between British Aerospace and Indonesia for the Hawk fighter-trainer and a light attack fighter was reported, the US press reported up to 5,000 people had been killed in Aceh province over recent months. Most were killed by the Indonesian army in its attempts to brutally suppress the independence movement.11

  British officials and arms salesmen could have had no doubt of the brutality of those they were supplying. The Indonesian military commander in Aceh province was quoted as saying in November 1990: ‘I have told the community, if you find a terrorist, kill him. There’s no need to investigate him … If they don’t do as you order them, shoot them on the spot, or butcher them.’ Chief of the armed forces and later Indonesian Vice President, General Try Sutrisno, promised to ‘wipe out all separatist elements’ in East Timor.12

  As a major arms supplier and trainer of the armed forces, Britain had consistently cordial personal dealings with those ordering the violence. British officials dealt with Benny Murdani, for example, who became Defence minister, and who had also ordered and commanded the invasion of East Timor. In 1983 he issued a message to then resistance leader Xanana Gusmao (who was elected as East Timor’s president in 2001) saying: ‘there is no country on the globe that can help you. Our own army is prepared to destroy you if you are not willing to cooperate with our republic’, before declaring that he would show ‘no mercy’ to resistance forces in East Timor.

  Close relations throughout the 1990s were undisturbed by the massacre in Dili, East Timor’s capital, in November 1991, when Indonesian troops killed hundreds of people demonstrating against the occupation. Britain simply delayed announcing the sale of a navy support ship to Indonesia because of the international outcry over the massacre, and the sale went ahead the following month. Military relations continued as normal.

  1999: A few thousand more

  New Labour has also had its chance to help prevent major violence in East Timor. It failed, and remains complicit in further massive human rights atrocities, though you wouldn’t know so from mainstream media coverage.

  Indonesian president Habibie announced in January 1999 that a referendum would be allowed in East Timor, enabling the population to choose between autonomy within Indonesia or full independence. The Indonesian military then secretly proceeded to create and arm pro-Jakarta militia groups in East Timor to intimidate people through a terror campaign to vote against independence. Between 3,000 and 5,000 people were killed in the run-up to the vote, with widespread rape, torture and maiming. Despite this, 78 per cent voted in favour of independence on 30 August 1999. The response to this vote by the army and militia was to continue such a ruthless campaign that around 1,000 more were killed, thousands of others shot, stabbed or raped and 500,000 (more than half the entire population) forced to flee for their lives, mainly into Indonesian West Timor.

  These expulsions were the result of ‘a planned, systematic campaign coordinated by the Indonesian military’, according to Human Rights Watch:

  The tiny half-island had become what one diplomat described as a ‘living hell’. Army-backed militia members, armed with automatic weapons, launched a scorched earth policy, targeting independence supporters for death; looting and burning homes, clinics, churches and stores; and forcing hundreds of thousands of people from their homes.13

  The Blair government has consistently claimed it did all it could to stop the violence. It also tries to take credit for helping to bring about the UN peace enforcement mission in East Timor that the Indonesian government eventually agreed to. Foreign Secretary Robin Cook claimed in 2000 that East Timor ‘would not now be independent without the help of an international coalition of which Britain was a prominent member’.14

  In fact, Britain did little to help stop the violence and de facto aided it.

  In the run-up to the referendum the Blair government (and the US) was insisting that security in East Timor be provided by the Indonesian army, despite the widespread knowledge that the same army was creating the insecurity, by arming and directing the militias’ terror campaign. According to Tapol, the Indonesian human rights campaign, ‘the government’s willingness to rely on Indonesian assurances regarding security was an appalling disregard for the human rights of the East Timorese people’. With security handed to the occupying power, the Indonesian army and militias were effectively given a blank cheque to promote violence and intimidation.

  In July, on the day before the start of registration for the vote, a British-supplied Hawk aircraft made two low passes over Dili, the capital of East Timor. This was a clear act of intimidation by the Indonesian military ahead of the referendum. Yet, instead of acting immediately to halt deliveries of Hawks, the British government ‘chose to seek yet more meaningless assurances from the Indonesian government’, according to Tapol. ‘It preferred to wait until East Timor was in ruins’ before imposing an arms ban.15

  In this pre-vote period of atrocities committed by Indonesian forces, Britain continued business, including military business, as normal. Hawk aircraft continued to be supplied: two in April, two in May and three in August. Three Hawk aircraft were in fact delivered to Indonesia on 23 September, during the post-vote terror. Th
ey were from a 1996 deal; the government argued that it was powerless to stop the delivery since the aircraft were already the legal property of Indonesia.16

  Western intelligence agencies were surely aware that the Indonesian army and allied militias were planning a terror campaign if the East Timorese voted for independence. The military commander in Dili had already declared before the referendum that if the vote went the wrong way ‘all will be destroyed’. The Australian press had reported the stockpiling of arms and warned of a takeover of the territory by the militias. When the terror began, Britain, along with the US, preferred ambiguous reactions that could easily have been identified in Jakarta as a de facto nod and a wink to continue.17

  Indeed, it appears likely that the US had – once again regarding East Timor – given the Indonesian army a green light to violence. The chief of US military forces in the Pacific region, Admiral Dennis Blair, had been sent to meet Indonesian armed forces commander, General Wiranto, in April. Meeting two days after the massacre at Liquica, Admiral Blair, rather than telling Wiranto to close the militias down, offered him promises of new US military assistance. Wiranto and other officers were reportedly delighted by the meeting and, according to Allan Nairn, the American journalist who broke this story, ‘they took this as a green light to proceed with the militia operation’.18