In my film Death of a Nation, there is a sequence filmed
on board an Australian aircraft flying over the island of Timor. A
party is in progress, and two men in suits are toasting each other in
champagne. “This is an historically unique moment,” says one of them,
“that is truly uniquely historical.” This is Gareth Evans, Australia’s
foreign minister. The other man is Ali Alatas, principal mouthpiece of
the Indonesian dictator, General Suharto. It is 1989, and the two are
making a grotesquely symbolic flight to celebrate the signing of a
treaty that allowed Australia and the international oil and gas
companies to exploit the seabed off East Timor, then illegally and
viciously occupied by Suharto. The prize, according to Evans, was
“zillions of dollars.”
Beneath them lay a land of crosses: great black crosses etched
against the sky, crosses on peaks, crosses in tiers on the hillsides.
Filming clandestinely in East Timor, I would walk into the scrub and
there were the crosses. They littered the earth and crowded the eye. In
1993, the Foreign Affairs Committee of the Australian Parliament
reported that “at least 200,000” had died under Indonesia’s occupation:
almost a third of the population. And yet East Timor’s horror, which was
foretold and nurtured by the US, Britain and Australia, was actually a
sequel. “No single American action in the period after 1945,” wrote the
historian Gabriel Kolko, “was as bloodthirsty as its role in Indonesia,
for it tried to initiate the massacre.” He was referring to Suharto’s
seizure of power in 1965-6, which caused the violent deaths of up to a
million people.
To understand the significance of Suharto, who died on Sunday, is to
look beneath the surface of the current world order: the so-called
global economy and the ruthless cynicism of those who run it. Suharto
was our model mass murderer — “our” is used here advisedly. “One of our
very best and most valuable friends,” Thatcher called him, speaking for
the West. For three decades, the Australian, US and British governments
worked tirelessly to minimise the crimes of Suharto’s gestapo, known as
Kopassus, who were trained by the Australian SAS and the British army
and who gunned down people with British-supplied Heckler and Koch
machine guns from British-supplied Tactica “riot control” vehicles.
Prevented by Congress from supplying arms direct, US administrations
from Gerald Ford to Bill Clinton, provided logistic support through the
back door and commercial preferences.
In one year, the British Department of Trade provided almost a
billion pounds worth of so-called soft loans, which allowed Suharto buy
Hawk fighter bombers. The British taxpayer paid the bill for aircraft
that dive-bombed East Timorese villages, and the arms industry reaped
the profits. However, the Australians distinguished themselves as the
most obsequious. In an infamous cable to Canberra, Richard Woolcott,
Australia’s ambassador to Jakarta, who had been forewarned about
Suharto’s invasion of East Timor, wrote: “What Indonesia now looks to
from Australia . . . is some understanding of their attitude and
possible action to assist public understanding in Australia. . . ”
Covering up Suharto’s crimes became a career for those like Woolcott,
while “understanding” the mass murderer came in buckets. This left an
indelible stain on the reformist government of Gough Whitlam following
the cold-blooded killing of two Australian TV crews by Suharto’s troops
during the invasion of East Timor. “We know your people love you,” Bob
Hawke told the dictator. His successor, Paul Keating, famously regarded
the tyrant as a father figure. When Indonesian troops slaughtered at
least 200 people in the Santa Cruz cemetery in Dili, East Timor, and
Australian mourners planted crosses outside the Indonesian embassy in
Canberra, foreign minister Gareth Evans ordered them destroyed. To
Evans, ever-effusive in his support for the regime, the massacre was
merely an “aberration”. This was the view of much of the Australian
press, especially that controlled by Rupert Murdoch, whose local
retainer, Paul Kelly, led a group of leading newspaper editors to
Jakarta, fawn before the dictator.
Here lies a clue as to why Suharto, unlike Saddam Hussein, died not
on the gallows but surrounded by the finest medical team his secret
billions could buy. Ralph McGehee, a senior CIA operations officer in
the 1960s, describes the terror of Suharto’s takeover of Indonesia in
1965-6 as “the model operation” for the American-backed coup that got
rid of Salvador Allende in Chile seven years later. “The CIA forged a
document purporting to reveal a leftist plot to murder Chilean military
leaders,” he wrote, “[just like] what happened in Indonesia in 1965.”
The US embassy in Jakarta supplied Suharto with a “zap list” of
Indonesian Communist Party (PKI) members and crossed off the names when
they were killed or captured. Roland Challis, the BBC’s south east Asia
correspondent at the time, told me how the British government was
secretly involved in this slaughter. “British warships escorted a ship
full of Indonesian troops down the Malacca Straits so they could take
part in the terrible holocaust,” he said. “I and other correspondents
were unaware of this at the time . . . There was a deal, you see.”
The deal was that Indonesia under Suharto would offer up what Richard
Nixon had called “the richest hoard of natural resources, the greatest
prize in south-east Asia.” In November 1967, the greatest prize was
handed out at a remarkable three-day conference sponsored by the
Time-Life Corporation in Geneva. Led by David Rockefeller, all the
corporate giants were represented: the major oil companies and banks,
General Motors, Imperial Chemical Industries, British American Tobacco,
Siemens and US Steel and many others. Across the table sat Suharto’s
US-trained economists who agreed to the corporate takeover of their
country, sector by sector. The Freeport company got a mountain of copper
in West Papua. A US/European consortium got the nickel. The giant Alcoa
company got the biggest slice of Indonesia’s bauxite. America, Japanese
and French companies got the tropical forests of Sumatra. When the
plunder was complete, President Lyndon Johnson sent his congratulations
on “a magnificent story of opportunity seen and promise awakened.”
Thirty years later, with the genocide in East Timor also complete, the
World Bank described the Suharto dictatorship as a “model pupil.”
Shortly before he died, I interviewed Alan Clark, who under Thatcher
was Britain’s minister responsible for supplying Suharto with most of
his weapons. I asked him, “Did it bother you personally that you were
causing such mayhem and human suffering?”
“No, not in the slightest,” he replied. “It never entered my head.”
“I ask the question because I read you are a vegetarian and are seriously concerned about the way animals are killed.”
“Yeah?”
“Doesn’t that concern extend to humans?”
“Curiously not.”
Source: Suharto, the Model Killer, and His Friends in High Places
Note:
I don't agree with this title: "Suharto, the Model Killer, and His Friends in High Places".
Because
A Model killer has NO POWER without SUPPORT BEHIND them, of course the power is who have bad plan for ROBBING our mining resource: Gold, Oil, Gas or even Sand beach...
Source: Suharto, the Model Killer, and His Friends in High Places
Also read:
STORIES ABOUT TIMOR TIMUR
Note:
I don't agree with this title: "Suharto, the Model Killer, and His Friends in High Places".
Because
A Model killer has NO POWER without SUPPORT BEHIND them, of course the power is who have bad plan for ROBBING our mining resource: Gold, Oil, Gas or even Sand beach...
"The Council on Foreign
Relations (CFR) took control of the ideological foundations of
the American empire, encompassing the corporate, banking, political,
foreign policy, military, media, and academic elite of the nation
into a generally cohesive overall world view. By altering one's
ideology to that of promoting such an internationalist agenda,
the big money that was behind it would ensure one's rise through
government, industry, academia and media. There are divisions
within the elite, predicated on the basis of how to use American
imperial power, where to use it, on what basis to justify it,
and other various methodological differences. The divide amongst
elites was never on the questions of: should we use American imperial
power, why has America become an Empire, or should there even
be an empire? If one takes such considerations to heart and questions
these concepts, be it within the foreign policy establishment,
intelligence, military, academia, finance, corporate world, or
media; chances are, such a person is not a member of the CFR."
Andrew Gavin Marshal
Source: Suharto, the Model Killer, and His Friends in High Places
Also read:
STORIES ABOUT TIMOR TIMUR