By John Pilger
For Australians, the genocide in East Timor, one of the century's great crimes, is especially disturbing. In the Sydney street where I grew up in the years following the second world war were several "diggers" who had fought the Japanese in Asia. One of them would display a ceremonial sword he had taken from a Japanese he had killed during an ambush on the "Portuguese island".
It was common then to describe Australia's neighbours in racist terms; and, to him, the Timorese were "boongs" and "fuzzy wuzzies". But he also spoke of them with unusual affection and admiration, and would point in a school atlas to where he had served as a commando and tell of the people he had "left behind". He had regrets.
In December 1941, Australian commandos invaded the neutral Portuguese colony of East Timor in an attempt to prevent the Japanese building airfields from which they could launch an invasion of northern Australia. The arrival of the Australians drew the Japanese to island communities they might otherwise have spared.
The Australians fought a classic guerilla campaign, disrupting a numerically superior Japanese force, and their exploits passed into popular legend. They were able to achieve this only because of a remarkably close relationship forged with the Timorese, who supplied and protected them, and who themselves fought like lions.
As a result of this succour, the Australians lost only 40 men. The Timorese, however, paid a dreadful price. More than 40,000 were killed, many of them under torture after the Australians hurriedly withdrew, having promised to take people with them. They took no one.
"We shared their homes", recalled John (Paddy) Kenneally, then a young commando private. "You found Australian soldiers sleeping on one side, the fire in the middle, and on the other side would be a grandad and grandmother and all the children and a spare dog or two ... The night on the beach when we left was heartbreaking. The Timorese were crying their eyes out ... We went to Timor and brought nothing but misery on those poor people."
In 1943, Royal Australian Air Force planes dropped leaflets saying: "Your friends will never forget you". When the war ended, the Australian government sent the Timorese a wreath of roses, then forgot about them for 20 years until the then foreign minister described their country as "an anachronism, not capable of independence".
In 1987, I interviewed Steve Stevenson, a former commando. He told me about a Timorese called Celestino dos Anjos, who had saved his and other Australian lives behind Japanese lines. Stevenson returned to Timor in 1970, found Celestino and arranged for the Portuguese governor to present him with a medal, while he stood proudly at his side. "I owed the man the debt of life", he said. "Australia owed his people everything."
After the Indonesians invaded East Timor in 1975, Stevenson heard that Celestino had survived. Eleven years later he received a letter from Celestino's son, Virgilio. It told of Celestino's murder.
The son wrote that, in 1983, Indonesian forces entered their village of Kraras: "They looted, burned and devastated everything and massacred over 200 people inside their huts, including old people, the sick and babies ... on 27/9/83 they called my father and my wife, and told my father to dig his own grave, they machine-gunned him. They next told my pregnant wife to dig her own grave but she insisted that she preferred to share my father's grave. They then pushed her into the grave and killed her."
I found Celestino's name and the names of several members of his family on an extraordinary list complied by priests in meticulous handwritten Portuguese. It listed the names, ages and method of murder of 287 people from the village of Kraras. It includes the names of babies as young as three months. In the last column, the Indonesian battalion responsible is identified. The priest wrote: "The international community continues to miss the point in the case of East Timor. To the capitalist governors, Timor's petroleum smells better than Timorese blood and tears."
In 1974, Australia's prime minister, Gough Whitlam, met General Suharto in Java and told him that he believed East Timor should be part of Indonesia — despite the fact that Indonesia had neither legal nor moral claim to the Portuguese territory. East Timor, he made clear, was too "economically unviable" to be independent.
In 1975, in a secret cable to Canberra, the Australian ambassador in Jakarta, Richard Woolcott, also made clear that it would be more convenient for Australia to acquire the rights to exploit the oil and gas reserves off the coast of East Timor from Indonesia than from an independent East Timor.
Woolcott cabled that the Indonesians had promised to forewarn him of the invasion. Indeed, from Indonesian intelligence intercepted at a top-secret Australian defence signals base near Darwin, it is clear that the Australian government knew exactly what the Jakarta regime was planning.
In 1989, in a private aircraft high above Timor, bottles of champagne were uncorked, and there was much false laughter as two men in suits toasted each other. The larger man was uneasy and deferential, and spoke in the inanities for which he is renowned. He spoke about the moment as "historically unique" and "uniquely historical". This was Gareth Evans, Australia's foreign affairs minister. The other man was Ali Alatas, the Indonesian foreign minister.
The two were celebrating the signing of the Timor Gap treaty, and a division of spoils that allowed Australian and other foreign oil companies to steal East Timor's natural resources. They celebrated above the mass graves of the East Timorese people of whom, according to a recent report by the Australian parliament, "at least 200,000" have died under Indonesia's rule — a third of the population.
The ultimate prize could amount to seven billion barrels of oil or, as Gareth Evans put it, "zillions" of dollars. Asked about the international principle of not recognising territory acquired by force, Evans said: "The world is a pretty unfair place."
According to Professor Roger Clark, a world authority on international law, the treaty has a simple analogy in law: "It is acquiring stuff from a thief. If you acquire property from someone who stole it, you're a receiver."
On a visit to Indonesia in February 1991 to finalise the treaty, Evans said that the "human rights situation" in East Timor had "conspicuously improved, particularly under the present military arrangements". Nine months later, the Indonesian military killed or wounded more than 400 people in the Santa Cruz cemetery. Evans described this as "an aberration".
The Indonesians agreed. A "special inquiry" was set up by Jakarta. It blamed a few soldiers, saying that the ultimate responsibility lay with the "provocations" of the unarmed victims. An Indonesian tribunal subsequently gave 10 low-ranking officers short prison sentences; one was given a holiday in Bali. In contrast, eight Timorese demonstrators were sent to prison by a kangaroo court for terms ranging from five years to life.
Evans described the Indonesian reaction to the massacre as "positive and helpful" and "very encouraging". He said more than 200 victims unaccounted for "might simply have gone bush". Within two months of the killings, 11 more contracts under the Timor Gap treaty were awarded to Australian oil and gas companies. On the same day, Amnesty International described the Indonesian inquiry as "totally lacking in credibility and principally directed at the appeasement of domestic and international critics and the suppression of further political dissent in the territory".
When Australian protesters planted crosses in front of the Indonesian embassy in Canberra, one for each of the murdered, Evans had them removed. When a federal court ruled that Australia's diplomatic regulations did not give him this power and ordered the crosses restored, Evans changed the law.
In September last year, Prime Minister Paul Keating flew to Washington and shocked members of Congress who were pressing President Clinton to take action against Indonesia by calling on the US to go softer on Jakarta on human rights. The Indonesians were ecstatic. "He has made our case", said the ambassador in Canberra. "Keating is our comrade in arms." Indonesia's weapons chief B.J. Habibie described Keating's support as "music to my ears".
As Bob Hawke's treasurer, Keating is responsible for what is arguably the world's first Thatcherite Labor government. Almost all principle has been bled from a party that once boasted a tradition of genuine social reform and internationalism.
Under Keating, the Labor government has underpinned a new establishment known as the "Order of the Mates". Wealth was redistributed largely in the favour of rich mates, and unemployment and poverty soared. The mates were notably Australia's corporate raiders, such as the discredited Alan Bond, whose companies' debts once accounted for 10% of the national debt, and Rupert Murdoch. Under Keating, Murdoch was able to gain control of 70% of the Australian press.
Gareth Evans, before he became foreign minister, was known as "the minister for mates". (This is a permanent unofficial cabinet post.) Keating's and Evans' most valued international mate is General Suharto, to whom relentless deference is paid, apologies are offered for the merest media slight and with whom big deals are done.
Apart from East Timor's oil, the Australian government has recently signed an agreement to commercially share an Indonesian satellite. Murdoch has his eye on another Indonesian satellite. The Australian deal, according to the Sydney Morning Herald, means that Australian TV programs on the new satellite service will need to be "encoded to meet the requirements of the [Indonesian] Ministry of Information ..."
Editorial guidelines to the Australian Broadcasting Corporation for its use of the satellite signal urge "discreet understatement" about certain regimes and warn against the portrayal of "fanatical separatists". How East Timor will be reported as "discreet understatement" is not explained.
Like the ghost in Hamlet, the issue of Australia's betrayal of the Timorese and continued complicity in the great crime of their suffering keeps coming back. Two weeks before my film Death of a Nation was shown on ITV, its disclosures about a second massacre in Dili in November 1991 were published in the Australian press.
This caused near panic among Jakarta's backers. Without having seen a frame of the film, Keating and Evans condemned it. Indonesian and Australian officials collaborated in producing press releases condemning it. Alatas, the foreign minister, used words virtually scripted for him by Australian officials. Murdoch's Australian obliged with headlines such as "No evidence to support Pilger claims". Murdoch himself was then on his way to Jakarta to try to do a deal with the Indonesians for a place on their new satellite for his Star TV.
Evans went further and announced that there were "a number of witnesses who have said nothing like what is claimed to have happened happened". He was referring to a "witness" presented to foreign journalists by Indonesian officials during a controlled visit to Dili hurriedly arranged by the regime to pre-empt the worldwide showing of Death of a Nation and the UN Human Rights Commission hearings in Geneva.
Evans' "witness" is Marcus Wannandi, an Indonesian-Chinese priest installed in Dili to "assist" Bishop Carlos Belo, the outspoken Timorese who heads the Catholic Church and has never accepted Indonesian rule. Wannandi and his powerful family are close to Suharto: one brother runs a multi-million-dollar business "developing" East Timor in partnership with Suharto's daughter; the other runs a "strategic institute" in Jakarta that helped to plan the invasion in 1975. Wannandi told an Australian bishop that talking to the Timorese was a waste of time because "they have just come out of the trees".
Bishop Belo, on the other hand, was silenced during the journalists' guided tour. This was not surprising. In an interview for Death of a Nation, he had emphasised his trust in the statements of eyewitnesses. He said he had informed the Indonesian "special commission of inquiry" about the second massacre. "They showed no interest", he said. "The military authorities [wanted] to give the Timorese people these extreme lessons. I think there is no justice ... no justice."
Paul Keating has made a name for himself by promoting "republicanism" for Australia, which is very different from true independence. He does this mostly with easy anti-British gestures and by sounding tough, if inarticulate, like a minor Rambo. Indeed, he is proud of his pugnacious, abusive style; in parliament he has called his opponents "harlots", "sleazebags", "loopy crims", "pieces of criminal garbage" and "piss-ants". Recently, he ordered a video to be made of his more theatrical performances and had it sent to his friend General Suharto. According to the Sydney Morning Herald, the Indonesian dictator "showed the video to his entire cabinet, who were reportedly mightily impressed".
[This article first appeared in New Statesman & Society.]