BY JOHN PILGER
LONDON — For
40 years, Australian governments have colluded with state terrorism in
Indonesia. Now, the Bali outrage allows Australian Prime Minister John
Howard to distract attention from his hypocrisy.
Howard says the atrocity on the island of Bali is “proof” that “the
war against terrorism must go on with unrelenting vigour and with an unconditional
commitment”. What he means is that he will continue to perform his holier-than-Blair
role as George Bush's most devoted, if not universally recognised, foreign
gang member.
The Australian military is, in effect, an extension of the Pentagon.
Australian ships operate with the US fleet in the Persian Gulf, enforcing
an embargo against Iraq which, according to the United Nations Childrens
Fund, has led to the unnecessary deaths of more than 600,000 Iraqi children.
In Indonesia, Australians, together with their American counterparts, have
secretly resumed training the Indonesian military, which, in the world
cup of terrorism, is the undisputed champion.
Al Qaeda has been fingered in Washington for the Bali outrage. The script
is unchanged. To Bush, Blair and Howard, the Bali bombing will be simply
further justification for attacking Iraq.
How truly bizarre the American enterprise of world conquest has become.
First, there was the bombing of Afghanistan, the equivalent of bombing
Sicily in order to eradicate the Mafia.
“Terrorism” is the enemy; or as Monty Python's Terry Jones remarked,
“They're bombing an abstract noun!”
What is clear is that the more bellicose Bush and Blair and Howard become,
the more they place the citizens of their own countries at risk.
Like a mouse perpetually roaring, Howard's warmongering has endangered
every young Australian backpacking in those countries where his and Bush's
provocations are welcomed by extreme groups.
Since he became prime minister in 1996, Howard has renewed Australia's
reputation in Asia for European exclusivity.
A return to racist foreign policy
This is tragic, for it is not long since Australia emerged from the cultural
isolation of its notorious “white Australia policy” and appeared to express
the confidence of the ethnically diverse society it had become. Embracing
Asia became politically fashionable, and the old colonial fear of the Asian
hordes falling down on Australia, as if by the force of gravity, was rejected
by many Australians, especially the young.
Howard's openly racist policies have again begun to isolate Australia.
He has deployed Australian troops against helpless, mostly Muslim, asylum
seekers on the high seas — more than 350 people went to their deaths in
a leaking boat last year even though, as it has now been revealed, Australian
military intelligence knew they were in great peril.
He has imprisoned many of those who have reached Australia (mostly from
Iraq and Afghanistan, the countries he claims to be “liberating”) in desert
concentration camps in conditions which, reported a United Nations inspector,
were among the worst he had seen in more than 40 inspections around the
world.
Seldom a day passes when Howard and his inept foreign minister, Alexander
Downer, do not utter vacuities about the War on Terror. The truth is that,
for almost 40 years, Australian governments have played a significant role
in colluding with state terrorism in neighbouring Indonesia. In 1965, the
then-prime minister, Harold Holt, joked about the mass murder that accompanied
the seizure of power by General Suharto, the West's man. “With 500,000
to a million communist sympathisers knocked off”, Holt said, “I think it's
safe to assume a reorientation has taken place.”
During the long years of Suharto's dictatorship, which was shored up
by Western capital and governments and the World Bank, state terrorism
on a breathtaking scale was ignored. Australian prime ministers were far
too busy lauding the “investment partnership” in resource-rich Indonesia.
Ignoring atrocities
Suharto's annexation of East Timor, which cost the lives of a third of
the population, was described by then foreign minister Gareth Evans as
“irreversible”. As Evans succinctly put it, there were “zillions” of dollars
to be made from the oil and gas reserves in the Timor Sea.
Such lethal hypocrisy was acknowledged by Australia's political and
media elite only in the final spasms of the Suharto dictatorship.
In 1998, the World Bank's “model pupil” finally collapsed beneath the
weight of its corruption after short-term capital fled Indonesia, leaving
70 million people in abject poverty. Given the pressures on this sprawling,
ethnically complex country, it is hardly surprising that extreme groups
have found fertile ground, whatever their aims. To lump them in with the
“global terror” of al Qaeda serves to suppress, once again, the part that
rapacious Western interests have played.
Today, largely unreported, the Indonesian military, with the tacit approval
of the United States, Britain and Australia, is terrorising the populations
of Aceh and West Papua. Most of the “human rights violations” in these
provinces — the euphemism for state terrorism — have been part and parcel
of “protecting” the US Exxon oil holdings in Aceh as well as the vast Freeport
copper and gold mines and BP holdings in West Papua. Those who need a link
between the march of multinational capital and state terrorism need look
no further.
One of the sacred taboos for Western journalists and broadcasters is
the terrorism of their own governments. Only when they recognise this and
its pivotal role in the fate of much of humanity will they be able to report
honestly the lesser terrorism of non-state groups.
Violence of state terrorism
Research by Edward Herman and Gerry O'Sullivan covering the period since
1965 points to the killing of several thousand people by non-state terrorists,
such as al Qaeda, compared with 2.5 million civilians killed by state-sponsored
terrorism. These include the violence of the South African apartheid regime,
the Suharto regime in Indonesia, the “contras” in Nicaragua and other US-backed
terrorist states.
This is a conservative figure, for it predates the deaths caused by
the Anglo-American-driven sanctions against civilians in Iraq. As Neil
Sammonds has pointed out: “When US Secretary of State Madeleine Albright
said in May 1996 that the killing of half a million Iraqi children was
`a price worth paying' to keep pressure on Baghdad, she was acting well
within any reasonable definition of terrorism.”
Those who committed the disgusting mass murder in Bali need to be caught
and their organisation broken. But this is unlikely to happen while state
terrorism is in the ascendancy, and goes unacknowledged as the most virulent
menace of all — and as, in many cases, the root of non-state atrocities.
A piratical assault on Iraq will be an act of terrorism by state extremists
in Washington. It will also be the catalyst for years of recruitment of
those willing to murder Westerners in skyscrapers and nightclubs.
St Augustine tells the story of a conversation between Alexander the
Great and a pirate he captured. “How dare you molest the seas?” asks Alexander.
“How dare you molest the whole world?” the pirate replies. “Because I do
it with a little ship only, I am called a thief. You, doing it with a great
navy, are called an emperor.”
[From <http://www.johnpilger.com>.]
From Green Left Weekly, October 30, 2002.
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