
Issue No 33		01 October 1999

Guest Report

The Blood On Our Hands

By L D Bronstein

The history of East Timor is written in blood. And the West has been both an instigator and accomplice in the bloodshed.

East Timor was, until 1975, a Portuguese colony. In 1974 a revolution in Portugal overthrew the fascist dictatorship in that country.

Portugal's colonies began to unravel. Left-wing forces in East Timor, under the banner of Fretilin, looked as if they would come to power and form a popular Government.

Suharto was president of Indonesia. He ordered the Indonesian army to invade East Timor. It is clear he had the support of the US.

Hours before Suharto gave the go ahead he met with US President Gerald Ford and Secretary of State Henry Kissinger in Jakarta.

After the defeat in Vietnam in April that year the US establishment feared that East Asian countries would fall like dominoes to the "communists". They gave the green light to Suharto to invade.

The Indonesians occupied the country and killed around 200,000 East Timorese - about one-third of the pre-invasion population.

The invaders met strong resistance. The "humanitarian" West responded by increasing the supply of arms to the Suharto Government.

Within a year of the invasion US military aid to Indonesia had doubled. The US and Britain supplied Bronco and Hawk jets to Suharto. This gave the Indonesian military a decisive advantage over the East Timorese resistance.

No country supplied arms to the East Timorese.

British Labour foreign secretary David Owen allowed the export of the first Hawks in 1978. The latest consignment arrived a few weeks ago. The Indonesians have used these Hawks to kill East Timorese people.

Australia is no innocent in this process. After the Dili massacre in 1991 the number of Indonesian officers to get training in Australia leapt from five that year to 400 in 1997.

Australian arms exports to Indonesia increased fourfold between 1994 and 1996.

The Australian SAS has trained units of Indonesia's murderous Kopassus commandos in "hostile interrogation". These units have been active in East Timor.

Annexation was the result Western Governments wanted, even if it meant the murder of hundreds of thousands of East Timorese.

Given Suharto's history, the bloodshed in East Timor was entirely predictable. Suharto came to power in a coup in 1965 which saw him kill up to a million people, supposedly for being Communists.

Robert J Martens was an official at the US embassy in Indonesia at the time of Suharto's coup. He later said, "The Indonesian army probably killed a lot of people, and I probably have a lot of blood on my hands, but that's not all bad."

George Bush was then head of the CIA. He supplied the names of 5,000 supposed senior Communist Party leaders to the Indonesian army. This was a death sentence for those people.

One Australian Conservative Government Minister dismissed the slaughter in Indonesia at the time as being of little consequence because those being murdered were only communists.

The West has consistently supported the dictatorship in Indonesia and the invasion of East Timor because it has been in "our" interests, economic and political, to do so.

Now the rules of the game have changed. The brutality of the Indonesian army's response to the East Timorese vote for independence has provoked anger and revulsion among ordinary Australians. It was this reaction which forced the Australian Government to organise UN intervention in the country.

However it would be a mistake to think that sending in Australian and other troops under the banner of the UN will overturn the effects of thirty years of Western support for the Indonesian dictatorship.

Having been pushed into action, our Government has its own reasons for intervening. Concern for the East Timorese is not foremost among them.

Successive Australian Governments have done more than any other state to bolster Indonesia's occupation of East Timor. We are the only country to have recognised the Indonesian annexation.

We have economic interests in Indonesia which may be threatened by "instability" in the region. Australia is the fourth biggest investor in Indonesia.

There are significant deposits of oil under the sea bed between East Timor and Australia. Former Labor foreign minister Gareth Evans signed a treaty with his Indonesian counterpart Ali Alatas in 1989, dividing up the spoils.

But it is not just oil. Australian intervention under the UN banner gives our Government the opportunity to become the major power in the region. Saving the East Timorese is just an excuse for this dangerous militarist adventure.

But there is hope. The revolution last year which overthrew Suharto is far from complete. There are students now fighting the dictatorship in the streets of Jakarta.

A popular movement of the Indonesian people against the military and its puppet politicians offers the way for the East Timorese to free themselves from the yoke of all foreign occupiers.

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Issue 33 contents

Interview: The Boys
Labor Party heavyweights Eric Roozendaal and Damian O'Connor will lock horns this weekend. They fire their first shots.

Economics: Reasons to Be Cheerful
Can we change the way we look at the economy to better reflect community happiness and well-being?

Unions: Breaking the Wave
ACTU President's submission to the Senate Inquiry into the Workplace Relations Act.

International: The Wisdom of Solomon
A disturbing case from the Pacific where corporate lawyers are playing a deadly game.

History: Groundhog Day
Ghosts of Conferences past: some strangely familiar debates and decisions from previous state ALP conferences

Legal: Bad, Bad Things
Some of Australia's leading industrial lawyers argue that the Workplace Relations Act breaches basic international obligations.

Review: Tailing Out
As the BHP steelworks close in Newcastle a special book chronicles the stories of working live that have just become history.

Satire: Police Cut-Backs Lead To Drop In Organised Crime
An audit of the NSW Police has revealed that they have been seriously cutting back their operating budgets to ensure that they will be able to afford the increased security costs of the Olympics.

Work/Time/Life: It's Official: Aussies Work Harder
Australians continue to work long hours in contrast to a world-wide trend in industrialised countries that has seen hours at work remaining steady or declining in recent years.

» Station Cuts Derailed - But More Hits for the Scull

» Social Audit Backed by Community Groups

» Unions Take Common Priorities to State Conference

» Simmering Discontent Hits Boiling Point

» Public Sector Job Numbers Rubbery

» Timor Protest to be Dumped in Reith Wave

» Big Lunch Break for Stress-Free Day

» Arch Apologises for Youth Wage Debacle

» Clean Air Policy Up In Smoke

» Child Carers Stretched to the Limit

» Building Workers Won�t Settle for Half Pay

» Life, Art and Politics