Distant Voices (32 page)

However, within a month of the revolution in Lisbon, three political groups had formed in East Timor. The Timorese Democratic Union (UDT), led by members of the colonial administrative elite and coffee plantation owners, called for federation with Portugal and eventually independence. The
Timorese Social Democratic Association (ASDT), which later became the Revolutionary Front for an Independent East Timor, or Fretilin, comprised most of the younger nationalist opposition who wanted genuine economic reforms. A third party, the Timorese Popular Democratic Association (Apodeti) drew its tiny membership from the border with West Timor and wanted integration with Indonesia.

During the campaign, ‘We criss-crossed the country,' wrote José Ramos Horta,
^fn1
who is today Fretilin's foreign minister in exile. ‘Our theme was simple. We spoke the language of the people: “Are we human beings or a sack of potatoes to be sold to another country?” The Timorese, proud and independent, responded enthusiastically to the cry for independence. A literacy campaign was launched; student brigades taught children and adults to read and write in their own language for the first time ever. They helped the people build schools and health centres, where they taught nutrition and hygiene; paramedics were mobilised for a vaccination campaign . . . Nicolau Lobato [a Fretilin leader who was later killed] inaugurated the co-operative schemes that became so popular . . .'
²⁰

In June 1974, José Ramos Horta travelled to Jakarta, where he met the Indonesian foreign minister, Adam Malik. ‘He told me he sympathised “whole-heartedly” with the East Timorese desire for independence,' said Ramos Horta. ‘He said that Indonesia respected “the right of every nation [to independence] with no exception for the people of Timor”. The Government of Indonesia had “no intention to increase or expand their territory, or to occupy territories other than what is stipulated in the Constitution . . . Whoever will govern East Timor in the future after independence can be assured that the Government of Indonesia will always strive
to maintain good relations for the benefit of both countries”.'
²¹

As a piece of deception this has few equals. As James Dunn has pointed out, the conspiracy to integrate East Timor forcibly had already begun when Malik was issuing his reassurances. The Indonesian military dictatorship believed that Fretilin would turn East Timor into a base for communist insurgency, ‘another Cuba', which was absurd. Although Fretilin included students recently returned from Lisbon with Marxist views, most of the leaders were Catholic socialists who looked to the Cape Verde philosopher Amical Cabral and the Brazilian priest and educator Paulo Friere; or, like José Ramos Horta, they took Swedish social democracy as their model. Above all, they were nationalists who wanted their people to control their own destinies, trade and resources. This was no more than the Indonesian nationalists had demanded for themselves when they threw the Dutch out of their country. The Fretilin leaders had also made clear that they wanted to live at peace with their huge neighbour, the fifth largest nation on earth.

Like all small nations living in the shadow of a regional power, the East Timorese looked to another likely guarantor of their right to independence. Many of Fretilin's leaders were the sons of Timorese who had fought for the Australians against the Japanese in the Second World War and were confident that their former allies would discharge their moral debt, especially now that the inspiring anti-colonialist Gough Whitlam was prime minister. His government would surely support the rights of the people of East Timor, as it had supported those of other colonised or subjugated nations. The Whitlam government had been among the first to recognise the former Portuguese colony of Guinea-Bisseau; and Whitlam's personal relationship with Suharto suggested that his views would be taken seriously in Jakarta.

What Fretilin's leaders could not possibly measure was the depth and complexity of the Australian establishment's obsession with Indonesia. In recent years deference to Jakarta has become an article of faith second only in importance
to a veiled obedience to Washington among the makers of Australian foreign policy. By calling into question the latter Whitlam eventually hastened his own political demise; by acquiescing in a ‘special relationship' with Jakarta, he appeared to obey the instincts that have dominated Australia's post-Second World War view of the world, which – and it is a great irony – he had pledged to change.
²²

Since the Japanese bombed Darwin in 1942 and terrified those of us clinging to the southern seaboard, there has been a fear of Asia: that one day the brown and yellow ‘hordes' to the north will fall down on under-populated white Australia as if by the force of gravity. This is seldom admitted, of course, and perhaps these days it is no longer widely believed. Strategic studies regularly assure the Australian people that they have nothing to fear from anyone. Yet ‘Asia' lies deep within the political psyche; and ‘living with Asia' is often the excuse for some astonishing acts of appeasement, known as
realpolitik
.

Long before he became prime minister, Gough Whitlam, already an outspoken champion of the rights of small nations, made it clear that the Indonesian archipelago was an exception. In 1963 he said that, although the East Timorese had the right to self-determination, ‘we must not get bogged down in another futile argument over sovereignty'.
²³
He was referring to West New Guinea, which Indonesia had swallowed in the early 1960s, after a long dispute with Australia and the United Nations. But there were no grounds for a dispute over East Timor. This was a Portuguese colony whose people had the same rights, under the UN Charter, as any other colonial people. Yet, wrote James Dunn, ‘No thought was given to what the East Timorese might want . . . The attitude that this ugly relic of old-world colonialism should not be allowed to get in the way of the urgent task of improving Australia–Indonesian relations came to dominate.'
²⁴

By 1966, after the populist Indonesian president Sukarno had been effectively deposed by Suharto, Australian politicians rushed to reward the new regime with their support
for a consortium of Western aid. An influential Australian Indonesia specialist, Professor J. A. C. Mackie, expressed this enthusiasm in a eulogy for the Suharto regime's ‘moderate' character. The new government, he declared, was ‘clearly anti-communist and committed to a low-key, unassertive foreign policy, with a new stress on regionalism and “good neighbourly” relations with nearby countries. The stage was set for the working out of a new and more constructive, enduring set of links.'
²⁵

The fact that Suharto and his generals had, in seizing power, killed between 300,000 and a million Indonesians was not mentioned, as if this was irrelevant to the ‘new and constructive set of links'; and indeed it was.

The United States, to which Australia deferred in strategic matters in its region, had no time for Suharto's predecessor, ‘Bung' Sukarno. Under the non-aligned Sukarno, mass trade union, peasant, women's and cultural movements had flourished. Between 1959 and 1965, more than 15 million people joined political parties or affiliated mass organisations that were encouraged to challenge British and American influence in South East Asia.
²⁶
Indonesia had one of the largest communist parties in the world.

None of this was acceptable to Washington which, in 1949, had declared that the ‘major function of the region was as a source of raw materials and a market for Japan and Western Europe', in an emerging global system managed by the United States and ultimately subordinated to American interests.
²⁷
In 1967 Richard Nixon wrote, ‘With its 100 million people and its 300-mile arc of islands containing the region's richest hoard of natural resources, Indonesia is the greatest prize in South East Asia.'
²⁸

A ‘new and constructive set of links' between the United States and the Indonesian military had long been forged, allowing the generals to receive US equipment in spite of Sukarno's hostility. In 1965, following rumours of a coup against Sukarno, six generals were murdered in what is often described as a ‘communist coup'. If it was that, it had unique features. None of the middle-ranking military officers who
took part was a communist; and the US embassy denied that the Indonesian Communist Party (PKI) had any reason to take part.
²⁹

As Noam Chomsky has pointed out, the coup ‘miraculously spared the pro-US Suharto, while targeting elements of the military considered anti-American' and allowing Suharto to carry out ‘an actual military coup which led to the slaughter of half a million people in a few months, mostly landless peasants, and crushed the popular-based Communist Party; at the same time, incidentally, turning Indonesia into a “paradise for investors”.'
³⁰

Declassified American documents have since revealed that the United States not only supported the slaughter but helped the generals to plan and execute it. The CIA gave them a ‘hit list' of 5,000 Communist Party supporters including party leaders, regional committee members and heads of trade unions and women's and youth groups, who were hunted down and killed.

In 1990 a former US embassy official in Jakarta disclosed that he had spent two years drawing up the hit list, which was ‘a big help to the army'. ‘I probably have a lot of blood on my hands,' he said, ‘but that's not all bad. There's a time when you have to strike hard at a decisive moment.' The list had been approved by the US Ambassador, who stated that the US had ‘a lot more information' on the PKI than the Indonesian army. As people on the list were murdered, their names were crossed off by American officials.
³¹

With the slaughter under way, US Secretary of State Dean Rusk cabled the Jakarta embassy that the ‘campaign against [the] PKI' must continue and that the military ‘are [the] only force capable of creating order in Indonesia.' The United States, he said, was prepared to back a ‘major military campaign against [the] PKI'. The US Ambassador passed this on to the generals, making it clear ‘that the Embassy and the US Government are generally sympathetic with and admiring of what the army is doing'. When the military replied that they needed more American weapons to sustain the slaughter,
they were told that ‘carefully placed assistance' – covert aid – would ‘help the army cope . . .'

‘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, and it did everything in its power to encourage Suharto.'
³²

The Congress and the mainstream American press welcomed the bloody events as the ‘gleam of light in Asia' . . . ‘the West's best news for years in Asia' . . . ‘hope where there once was none'. The American land invasion of Vietnam in March of that year, 1965, was now justified as providing a ‘shield' behind which the Indonesian generals were encouraged to carry out their important anti-communist work.
³³

The British Labour government did not stand in their way. A year after the extermination campaign, Foreign Secretary Michael Stewart visited Indonesia and reported ‘reach[ing] a good understanding' with the Foreign Secretary, Adam Malik, a ‘remarkable man' who was ‘resolved to keep his country at peace'.
³⁴
This remarkable man was to play a key role in the events that led to the second great slaughter, in East Timor.

In September 1974 Australia's prime minister, Gough Whitlam, met President Suharto at the village of Wonosobo in Java. According to well-informed journalists travelling with him, Whitlam's clear signal to Suharto was that East Timor was his for the taking. Under the headline, ‘Canberra aim for Timor: go Indonesian', Hugh Armfield of the Melbourne
Age
conveyed the background briefing he was given by Australian officials. ‘Australia is expected to take a significant step in the next few weeks', he wrote, ‘towards ensuring that the tiny enclave on Timor becomes part of Indonesia. Australia and Indonesia are likely to make a joint approach to Portugal, urging that this is the only practical solution for its 450-year-old colony . . . Mr. Whitlam and President Suharto agreed last weekend that the best and most realistic future for Timor was association with Indonesia'.
³⁵

Peter Hastings of the
Sydney Morning Herald,
who was close to the Whitlam entourage, reported, ‘Mr. Whitlam went
much further, one suspects, than his Indonesian hosts required in publicly announcing, by means of a Foreign Affairs official press briefing, that “an independent Timor would be an unviable state and a potential threat to the area”, even though the AAP report added that the Prime Minister is thought to have made clear that the people of the colony should have the ultimate decision on their future'.
³⁶

Some have argued that Whitlam's extraordinary, contradictory statements stemmed from disinterest, even ignorance. Certainly, applying his reasoning, it could be said that the small independent Pacific states of Nauru, Tonga, Samoa and Papua New Guinea were also ‘unviable'. Peter Hastings later blamed Whitlam's advisers who, he wrote, ‘furnished the Prime Minister with such an unsophisticated briefing before he left for Central Java to give away, without being asked, what was not his to give away.'
³⁷

Yet Gough Whitlam had built a reputation as a politician who did not rely on advisers. His actions remain a puzzle. Here was a man who defended even the right of the Baltic states to independence from the Soviet Union. He was the champion of the weak against the strong: of the Vietnamese against Nixon and Kissinger, of draft resisters at home, of the Palestinians and Cubans, and Polynesians suffering under France's nuclear tests. He was the first Australian prime minister to give land back to the Aborigines. His breadth of vision and determination to open up new horizons to the Australian people were, to my generation, without precedent; and perhaps here lies part of the explanation.