Distant Voices (34 page)

This resolution authorised the Secretary-General, Kurt Waldheim, to send an envoy to East Timor to make an ‘assessment'. But East Timor was quickly relegated by the Permanent Five – US, the Soviet Union, France, Britain and China – which showed no interest in backing the authority of the UN envoy, Winspeare Guicciardi. Six weeks after the invasion Guicciardi was allowed by the Indonesian military to visit Dili, but was so restricted and misled that his visit was worthless.

In a document prepared for Guicciardi's visit, the Indonesian military laid down guidelines to its battalion commanders and administrative officials, which became the model for subsequent visits by delegations of foreign officials. ‘All members of the armed forces', the document read, ‘must wear civilian dress so that it should appear to the delegation that they are unarmed civilians . . . Roads must be cleaned and free of military equipment'. Answers to questions such as ‘What treatment is given to prisoners-of-war?' were to be rehearsed, with ‘sensible soldiers playing the role of prisoners-of-war who are being well-treated . . . To ensure realism rations should be improved and those playing the part of prisoners must fulfil their role scrupulously.'

The document concluded: ‘Banners of protest against UN
interference should be prepared, such as the following [in English in the original] – “United Nations hands off Timor! We are already integrated with Indonesia! United Nations we do not want your intervention here!”' (This document was held in secret for twelve years by an official in the East Timorese civil service, and was finally smuggled into West Timor under the floor carpet of a car.)
⁶¹

On February 4, 1976, the CIA reported the success of the charade: ‘Jakarta has managed, during the UN representative's visit, to conceal all signs of Indonesian military forces . . .' The Portuguese offered the Secretary-General a warship so that his envoy could be landed in Fretilin-held areas. The CIA reported, ‘The Indonesians are considering whether to sink the vessel before it reaches Darwin . . .'
⁶²
This was enough to frighten away the United Nations. In striking contrast to action taken against Iraq in 1991, neither the Secretary-General nor the Western powers uttered a word in condemnation of Indonesia for failing to comply with a Security Council resolution, and for violating almost every human rights provision in the UN Charter. On the contrary, the US Government lent diplomatic support to the invasion.

In a secret cable to Kissinger on January 23, 1976, the United States Ambassador to the UN, Daniel Patrick Moynihan, boasted about the ‘considerable progress' he had made in blocking UN action on a number of issues related to the developing world, and he mentioned East Timor. This, he explained, was part of ‘a basic foreign policy goal, that of breaking up the massive blocs of nations, mostly new nations, which for so long had been arrayed against us in international forums'.
⁶³
Later Moynihan wrote, ‘The United States wished things to turn out as they did [in East Timor], and worked to bring this about. The Department of State desired that the United Nations prove utterly ineffective in whatever measures it undertook. This task was given to me, and I carried it forward with no inconsiderable success.'
⁶⁴

Moynihan also made clear that he understood the nature of his achievement. He referred to an admission by the Indonesian puppet ‘deputy governor' of East Timor,
Francisco Lopez de Cruz, that 60,000 people had already died by February 1976 and acknowledged that this was ‘10 per cent of the population, almost the proportion of casualties experienced by the Soviet Union during the Second World War'.
⁶⁵
In 1980 Moynihan was the keynote speaker at a conference organised by the Committee for United Nations Integrity, which denounced the United Nations as ‘no longer the guardian of social justice, human rights and equality among nations' because it is ‘perverted by irrelevant political machinations' and is ‘in danger of becoming a force against peace itself'.

In the week of the Indonesian invasion, while he was carrying out his assignment to undermine UN efforts on behalf of the people of East Timor, Moynihan was awarded the highest honour of the International League for the Rights of Man (now the International League for Human Rights) for his role as ‘one of the most forthright advocates of human rights on the national and international scene'.
⁶⁶

America's support for Indonesia also had strategic Cold War motives. In August 1976, US Defence Department officials met the Australian prime minister, Malcolm Fraser, and cautioned him against straying from the position of his predecessor, Gough Whitlam. American ‘security interests', reported the Melbourne
Age,
required the continuing ‘goodwill' of the Suharto regime.
⁶⁷
The Pentagon's uppermost concern was that American nuclear submarines should retain right of passage through the Ombai-Wetar deep-water channels that pass by East Timor. This was essential if the submarines were to continue to move undetected between the Indian and Pacific Oceans.
⁶⁸

Australia's compliance was nothing short of enthusiastic. In October of that year, Fraser flew to Jakarta and, in a speech to Indonesia's parliament, gave the first public recognition of the occupation of East Timor. At a press conference, he said his government now ‘acknowledged the merger', but ‘only for purely humanitarian reasons'.
⁶⁹
Fraser was accompanied by J. B. Reid, managing director of the Broken Hill Proprietary Company (BHP), Australia's
largest corporation. BHP had recently acquired a controlling share in the Woodside-Burmah company, which had been drilling for oil on and offshore from East Timor before the invasion. It was estimated that the seabed between East Timor and Australia, the ‘Timor Gap', contained one of the richest oil and natural gas fields in the world.
⁷⁰

Ambassador Woolcott, in his cable the previous year recommending ‘a pragmatic rather than a principled stand', had written, ‘It would seem to me the Department [of Minerals and Energy] might well have an interest in closing the present gap in the agreed sea border and this could be much more readily negotiated with Indonesia . . . than with Portugal or independent Portuguese Timor'.
⁷¹

Other Western governments vied with each other to ‘sympathise with Indonesia's problems' by selling Jakarta arms – which, not surprisingly, were used in East Timor. The leading sympathiser was France, which supplied the Indonesian army with tanks and armoured cars and the air force with Alouette attack helicopters, ideal for low-flying ‘counter-insurgency' in the mountainous interior of East Timor. In announcing the arms sale, reported
Le Monde
in September 1978, the French Government declared that it would abstain from any discussion in the United Nations about East Timor so as to avoid placing ‘Indonesia in an embarrassing position'.
⁷²

At the same time, the British Labour Government signed a deal with Indonesia for four Hawk ground-attack aircraft. When asked about the implications for East Timor, the Foreign Secretary, David Owen, said that the estimates of the killings had been ‘exaggerated' and that ‘the most reliable estimates [are] at around 10,000, probably less [and] this includes the civil war . . .' He went on, ‘Such a total is, in all conscience, tragic enough, but foreign observers, whom the Indonesians have allowed to visit East Timor, have reported that the scale of fighting since then has been greatly reduced.'
⁷³

The opposite was true. Owen's ‘reliable estimates' of deaths merely reflected Indonesian propaganda, and, far from the scale of fighting being ‘greatly reduced', the genocide was
then actually reaching its height. Moreover, Western – mainly American – military equipment was now the main instrument of terror. Eye-witnesses to the onslaughts in East Timor spoke of scenes reminiscent of Dante's
Inferno
. ‘After September [1978],' wrote a priest, ‘the war intensified. Military aircraft were in action all day long. Hundreds of human beings die daily, their bodies left as food for the vultures. If bullets don't kill us, we die from epidemic disease; villages are being completely destroyed.'
⁷⁴

Canada, one of the leading Western investors in Indonesia, broke its own laws barring the export of weapons to areas of conflict simply by pretending that there was no fighting in East Timor. The Canadian Government claimed that ‘groups opposed to the Fretilin political faction requested the assistance of Indonesia [and] made a formal request for the integration of East Timor, and Timor is now an integral part of Indonesia'.
⁷⁵
Indonesia was also backed by its partners in the Association of South-East Asian Nations (ASEAN) and by most Islamic countries, by India, which had annexed Portuguese Goa in 1963, and by Japan, which looked to Indonesia for both commerce and vital oil supplies. The Soviet Union and its Eastern bloc allies split their votes in the UN over East Timor rather than upset their own burgeoning
realpolitik
with Indonesia.

As for Portugal, since the Governor's humiliating withdrawal to Atauro Island (the aptly named ‘Isle of Goats'), the ineptitude of its handling of its responsibilities might have been excused by the enduring confusion in Lisbon. But the Portuguese appear to have taken, in secret, quite deliberate steps to ‘solve the problem' of their colony.

In September 1974, the Portuguese foreign minister, Mário Soares, met his Indonesian counterpart, Adam Malik, and reportedly agreed that Portugal would not discourage support for East Timor's ‘integration' with Indonesia. This led the deputy security chief in the Jakarta regime, Ali Murtopo, to remark that ‘the problem of Portuguese Timor is now clear'.
⁷⁶
The Indonesians may have distorted Soares' ‘agreement'; certainly, in public Soares maintained that Portugal
had a moral obligation to abide by the wishes of the East Timorese. However, when Ali Murtopo made an unpublicised visit to Lisbon a few weeks later, and described to Portuguese leaders Australia's accommodating attitude, he was, according to one account, told that full independence was ‘unrealistic' and ‘nonsense'.
⁷⁷

Six years later the ghosts of East Timor returned
Hamlet
-like to Portugal. A 1,000-page secret government report on East Timor was ordered declassified by President Antonio Eanes. It described a series of clandestine meetings between Portuguese and Indonesian officials in which Lisbon's left-wing government accommodated Jakarta. At the last of these meetings, in Hong Kong in June 1975, the Portuguese told the Indonesians they had drafted East Timor's decolonisation statute in such a way that it would give them a year to try to persuade the population to accept integration with Indonesia. If this was rejected, and Indonesia chose to use force, ‘the Portuguese Government is not prepared to create problems, and could easily send a ship to Timor to evacuate all Portuguese'.
⁷⁸

David Munro and I had planned a documentary film about East Timor for more than a year. We wanted to pick up where Max Stahl's exposé had left off and to find out what had happened to those who had ‘disappeared' following the massacre in the Santa Cruz cemetery in November 1991; and we wanted to ask why other atrocities and injustices had remained unchallenged for so many years. We intended to film in Portugal, Australia, the United States, Britain and in East Timor, if that was possible. An eye-witness report was crucial; and whether we could get into East Timor with cameras, and get our film out, would determine whether or not the project went ahead. It would be a relatively expensive operation; and although Central Television was prepared to stand most of the cost, another backer was needed.

Australia seemed the most likely place to look for funding.
For geographical and historical reasons there is perhaps a greater awareness of East Timor's suffering in Australia than in any Western country, apart from Portugal. In 1992 I approached the Australian Film and Finance Corporation in Sydney for co-production money. The AFFC at first welcomed my application, while reminding me that final approval rested on a ‘pre-sale' commitment by an Australian broadcaster to air the film on Australian television. All my films have been shown in Australia. Curiously, there were no takers for this one. Cost was given as the reason. Shortly afterwards an AFFC official phoned me in London. ‘Timor', she said, ‘is too much of a political hot potato in Australia while there is a Labor Government in power.'
⁷⁹

The ‘special relationship' the Australian establishment believes it has with Jakarta involves communications and the profitable commercial sharing of satellite ‘footprints'.
⁸⁰
In 1993 the Australian Broadcasting Corporation (ABC) began transmitting programmes to Asia via an Indonesian satellite, the ‘Palapa', to broadcast programmes to Asia. This ‘packaging' venture is to include a reciprocal deal with Indonesia's TPI network, which is controlled by Suharto's eldest daughter. It has been described as a ‘showcase for Australia'. According to the
Sydney Morning Herald
, the Australian programmes will need to be ‘encoded to meet the requirements of the [Indonesian] Ministry of Information . . . Many Asian governments . . . are very concerned about unwelcome political messages raining on viewers from satellites . . . Given the Australian media's touchy relationship with Jakarta, the prospect of the ABC using an Indonesian satellite to broadcast current affairs must be questionable'.
⁸¹

Editorial guidelines for the ABC's satellite signal are laid down in a document drawn up by Radio Australia management, which is headed by a career diplomat. While insisting that journalists should not ‘distort or censor' material in order to avoid offending Asian governments, the managers say that material critical of regimes should be broadcast in ‘circumspect' language. ‘Discreet understatement', said the document, ‘is better than melodramatic embellishment' and
it warns against the portrayal of ‘fanatical separatists . . . freedom fighter terrorists'.
⁸²
How the genocide in East Timor can be reported with ‘discreet understatement' is not explained, neither is it made clear which ‘freedom fighters' the officials consider ‘fanatical' and ‘terrorist'.