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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