Cameron Duodu
Letter from the North
Sometimes I wish ordinary people could address the United Nations. I would be there like a shot, asking the Western powers – who rule the UN – why they have allowed such a terrible tragedy to unfold in East Timor.
That country has endured a quarter of a century of oppression from Indonesia, which invaded East Timor in December 1975. This invasion occurred shortly after Portugal had abandoned East Timor, which had been a Portuguese colony since the 16th century.
It is estimated that 100 000 East Timorese, from a total population of a mere 650 000, were killed by the Indonesians in 1975 alone. Since then, Indonesia has carried out a policy of serial brutal repression against the East Timorese people. Yet Indonesia continues to receive Western aid: the International Monetary Fund and the World Bank have lent Indonesia $43-billion since its currency, the rupiah, faced meltdown in 1997. Other Western aid is equally enormous in size.
Why is Indonesia so anxious to occupy East Timor? The answer lies in one word: oil. There is oil in the waters around East Timor, and Indonesia’s neighbours, particularly Australia, are involved in trying to exploit it.
But over and above that, Indonesia has been given carte blanche to carry out genocide there because the West wants to reward it for being a “bastion of defence against communism in Asia”.
Thus in 1975, United States President Gerald Ford and his Secretary of State, Henry Kissinger, paid a visit to Indonesia, which ended, interestingly enough, on the very day the massacre in East Timor began – December 7, 1975.
The CIA desk officer in Jakarta at the time, Philip Leichty, told journalist John Pilger: “They [Ford and Kissinger] came and gave [former president] Suharto the green light [for the blood-bath in East Timor].The invasion was delayed for two days so that they could get the hell out.”
Leichty continued: “We were ordered to give the Indonesian military everything they wanted. I saw all the hard intelligence; the place was a free-fire zone. Women and children were herded into school buildings that were set alight. And all because we didn’t want some little country being neutral or leftist at the UN.”
The West also supports Indonesia because Indonesia is one of the West’s largest customers for arms. Right now, British Foreign Secretary Robin Cook is having a difficult time explaining how his “ethical foreign policy” can be squared with current British arms sales to Indonesia, amounting to 800-million. This is at a record level, surpassing even the amounts sold by the Conservatives, whose arms sales to Indonesia were criticised by Cook and other Labour leaders when they were in opposition.
How then did the US and the other Western powers support the proposal that the UN should hold a referendum in East Timor, to ascertain whether the people wanted to go their separate way as an independent state?
It is one of the ways in which the Western powers have been trapping the UN into initiating farces aimed at saving the face of the West. For the West knew very well that Indonesia did not want East Timor to go its separate way. Yet it agreed that the UN should go and organise the referendum, that eventually took place on August 30.
The farcical nature of the referendum campaign was not disguised, for the leader of the East Timorese people, Xanana Gusmao, who had been placed under house arrest by the Indonesians, was not released to take part in the campaign. Can you imagine what a great example of political unfairness it would have been if Nelson Mandela had been kept under lock and key while the 1994 election campaign took place in South Africa? Yet the West thought this was acceptable in East Timor.
Not only that – even the East Timorese nationalist leaders who were still at liberty were not allowed a free rein to campaign. Armed Indonesian militias were unleashed on them and their supporters, who were hunted to death off the streets and even in their own homes. It was as if the Afrikaner Weerstandsbeweging had been allowed to go into the townships and shoot African National Congress supporters and burn down their houses, in the 1994 election campaign, while the apartheid defence force and police looked on!
Despite the intimidation, however, the people of East Timor returned a resounding 80% in favour of independence. The UN and its Western paymasters knew this would trigger the Indonesians into starting another pogrom. Yet they relied on mere “assurances” from the very Indonesian government that had given arms to the militias, to prevent further bloodshed.
Think for a moment about the poor UN international staff who have been besieged at UN offices throughout the land, watching helplessly as employees they have recruited locally are dragged out and butchered before their eyes; as women and children who have sought refuge under the UN flag are equally brutalised; even of the hapless ambassadors of the Security Council members, whose duty it has been to go and parley with the Indonesian authorities, while their governments shy away from military intervention.
It is criminal for the UN to be dragged into such absolutely hopeless situations. The West smeared the face of the UN with excreta when it didn’t allow the UN to beef up its force in Rwanda in order to avert the massacre of one million Tutsis in 1994.
The West compromised the UN over Kosovo; first by ignoring the UN and bombing Yugoslavia, and then by handing over the refugee crisis created by the bombing to the UN – without adequate resources.
And now East Timor. It is time the world told the West that its behaviour is disgusting.