Death of a Nation, the new film on East Timor narrated by Australian journalist JOHN PILGER, has had a major international impact — and has been attacked by the Australian government even before it has been shown here. Pilger, in London, was interviewed by phone for Green Left Weekly by HELEN JARVIS.
What was your intention in making the film?
What lay behind the film was a longstanding wish to draw together all the available strands of the East Timor story over 18 years and give them a worldwide airing on television. There had been some very fine documentary films about East Timor, notably Gil Scrine's Buried Alive, but none of them have had an international audience, apart from In Cold Blood, and that concentrated quite rightly on the horrific scenes in the Santa Cruz cemetery in November 1991.
Perhaps more than the Middle East, more than Indo-China even, the horrors visited on East Timor tell us very succinctly about how the world is run. One only has to look at the complicity of governments, of all stripes, in the bloody events in East Timor to gain a very clear perspective of the so-called new world order.
Did you find things that you were not expecting or did you anticipate from the work beforehand what you were going into?
I didn't anticipate the atmosphere in East Timor. I don't think I've experienced anything like it. To say it's oppressive is an understatement. People are unsmiling, clearly terrified of having contact with foreigners and of straying from an invisible line they must all walk.
There's an extraordinary landscape of crosses everywhere. David Munro and I spent some time examining the gravestones of cemeteries all over the country. We drove extensively through the mountains, across the border from West Timor right to the east of the country. There's a terrible story of extermination of families and whole communities. I've never seen anything like this.
It's a place at once fearful and menacing, but also there's a remarkable courage, and I don't say that lightly. The civilian resistance is everywhere. It seems to be able to multiply itself whenever it wants to. It seems to have people in practically any village.
The network is made up of the generations who grew up under the Indonesians and were meant to have been "resocialised" by the regime. The fact that they now form a vociferous opposition must be intensely galling for the military.
What are the possibilities for Indonesian reaction? This continuing opposition internationally is something they thought they would have thrown off by now. Do you have any feeling for the possibilities of a response on their part?
The pressure is critical, and I think there's considerable hope there. I was in Geneva last week at the UN Human Rights Commission, and more than a hundred people watched the film. A number of them were members of the commission, diplomats, Indonesians and others, and it was quite clear that East Timor is an urgent issue and there is a feeling that something must be done.
The reason is the pressure coming, however obliquely, from the United States, from Portugal and from the UN secretary-general's office. Something is moving, and with the reawakening of public opinion in Western countries and elsewhere, I think the momentum will continue.
That leads on to the question of the possibility of Australia playing some sort of a positive role.
Australia has sunk so low in the swamp of "relations" with Jakarta that how the government extricates itself is something we can only wonder at.
Portugal is taking Australia to the World Court over the Timor Gap Treaty. I interviewed Professor Roger Clarke, the expert on international law at Rutgers University, and he was confident that Australian government would certainly lose in the Hague and would have no choice but to back down.
That could be a very positive development. It's a form of outside pressure and again it will highlight the complicity of the Australian government with the Indonesians.
There seems to be real stupidity in Australia's rush to please the regime in Jakarta. Others have done it with some sophistication and so might be able to extricate themselves. But Keating and Evans have rushed headlong into an embrace with Suharto, leaving behind a trail of quite extraordinary declarations, such as Evans' description of the Dili massacre as an aberration and his recent denial of evidence of a second massacre in Dili.
I heard him on the radio — just a clip from parliament — saying that the "specific allegations" in the film had already been raised some time before, had been bought to the attention of the Australian government and had been dismissed out of hand.
For the East Timorese it's a horrific tragedy. For Australia it's a small tragedy because this was and still is one international incident that Australia could have influenced, and it failed. Its failure makes mockery of any pretensions of an independent Australian foreign policy.
This brings up the role of Australia in Cambodia.
The two are linked. There is a myth, which exists only in Australia, that something called an Australian peace plan has triumphed in Cambodia. This is simply not true.
There have been elections in Cambodia. A coalition government is in power. According to a secret United Nations assessment, the Khmer Rouge have, as a direct result of the process, doubled their strength. The fact that the media have declared Cambodia a Western triumph and decided not to report what is now happening doesn't make the extreme dangers that exist any less.
In media terms Australia is a very controlled society. When something is declared good by the government, generally the media will go along with it, and so it has gone along with the myth of an Australian success in Cambodia. The peace plan is essentially an American plan and Gareth Evans' role is regarded with some derision in Washington.
Had the Australian government in the 1970s decided to stand up to the Indonesians and defend the right of the East Timorese to self-determination, the Americans might well have gone along at a time when the American public were hostile to any new confrontations in South-East Asia. I think the Americans in the 1970s were prepared to listen and even at some times to be guided by Australian actions over East Timor. But Australian actions fell in with the ambitions of the Kissinger group in Washington.
What's been the reaction to the film where it has been shown?
Immediately after the film was shown here on network television, British Telecom reported 4000 calls a minute to the number shown at the end of the film. The Foreign Office has been inundated with letters. I was told by a Portuguese ambassador that response in Portugal was the equivalent of a football match.
In the film the president of Portugal says that the Indonesians are guilty of genocide. That's an extraordinary statement for a head of state to make. He also attacks the British government and says that the Timorese will never forgive them backing the Suharto dictatorship and supplying arms.
The Australian reaction has been almost tragicomical because the film hasn't been shown there. Keating and Evans' attack on it merely reminds us that Australia is a wonderful country run by very small machine politicians who, when the argument seems to go against them, behave like thugs.
When Evans said in parliament that the evidence is not new, he's quite right. He doesn't seem to understand that he is saying he has known about this because substantiated evidence has been available among the East Timorese community since shortly after the massacre took place in November '91.
For Evans to write a little script for Keating to go on and attack my credibility over Cambodia is extraordinary and shameful. It publicly allies the Australian government with the apologists of genocide.
I've been reading statements by [Indonesian foreign minister] Ali Alitas that use the same words as Evans in press releases put out by Indonesian embassies all over the world. They quote Evans and Keating and use their terms of abuse. So here you have an Australian government writing the script for a regime that has committed genocide at its doorstep.
[Death of a Nation will be shown at the International Green Left Conference in Sydney, March 31-April 4.]