Distant Voices (42 page)

Declared by Prime Minister Whitlam in 1975 to be too poor for a ‘viable' independence, the East Timorese were now being denied any profit from their own natural wealth. When in 1979 the Australian government gave
de jure
recognition to Indonesia's occupation, negotiations for the spoils were already under way. In 1985 Australia became the first Western country formally to recognise Indonesia's sovereignty over East Timor with a blunt statement by Prime Minister Bob Hawke that the Timor Gap Treaty ‘can in practice be concluded only with the Indonesian government'.
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Asked about the international principle of not recognising territory acquired by force, Gareth Evans said, ‘What I can say is simply that the world is a pretty unfair place.'
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According to Professor Roger Clark, the Timor Gap Treaty also has a simple analogy in law. ‘It is acquiring stuff from a thief,' he said. ‘If you acquire property from someone who stole it, you're a receiver. As far as I'm concerned, the Indonesians are in the position of someone who stole territory, and the Australians are dealing with them as though they had some kind of legitimacy. I find that is complicity. The fact is that they have neither historical, nor legal, nor moral claim to East Timor and its resources.

‘Moreover, the obligation
not
to recognise the acquisition of territory acquired illegally is reflected in a very significant 1970 resolution of the General Assembly that was co-sponsored by Australia on the twenty-fifth anniversary of the United Nations. This spelt out in detail some of the legal principles that are stated broadly in the UN Charter. Australians were members of the committee that laboured for seven years to draft the language that was adopted unanimously and is a flat prohibition.'
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On a visit to Indonesia in February 1991 to finalise the treaty, Evans said, ‘I have taken the view that Australia does have a duty as an international good citizen to go on raising [human rights] issues . . . The truth of the matter is that the human rights situation [in East Timor] has, in our judgement, conspicuously improved, particularly under the present military arrangements . . .'
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Nine months later the Indonesian military killed or wounded more than 450 people in the Santa Cruz massacre. Evans described this as ‘an aberration, not an act of state policy'.
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The Indonesians agreed. A ‘special commission of enquiry', set up by Suharto, blamed a few soldiers and said that the ultimate responsibility lay with the ‘provocations' of the unarmed victims. Evans described the Indonesian reaction as ‘positive and helpful' and ‘very encouraging'. He said he was ‘reasonably happy' with the enquiry's findings, adding that the victims unaccounted for ‘might simply have gone bush'.
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Within two months of the massacre, the joint Australian-Indonesian board overseeing exploitation of the Timor Gap awarded eleven contracts to Australian oil and gas
companies.
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On the day that Australian Resources Minister Alan Griffiths signed a further part of the treaty with his Indonesian counterpart, Amnesty International described the massacre as probably a planned military operation and the Indonesian enquiry 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'.
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An Indonesian court subsequently sentenced ten low-ranking officers mostly to a few months' prison, including one who served his time on holiday in Bali. In contrast, eight Timorese demonstrators were given sentences ranging from five years to life.

When protesters planted crosses in front of the Indonesian Embassy in Canberra, one for each of the murdered, Gareth 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 quickly changed the regulations. A spokesman for Evans explained that the Indonesians had complained that the ‘dignity of its embassy had been impaired by the crosses'.
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In September 1993, Australian Prime Minister Paul Keating arrived in Washington. It was the week following the US Senate Foreign Relations Committee's unanimous vote to propose a bill banning arms sales to Indonesia unless it improved its human rights record in East Timor. Keating objected to this, and called on the Congress and the President to take a more ‘balanced' view of human rights in Indonesia and to allow Suharto to have his say. Referring to ‘the East Timor thing' he said, ‘You want to stay positively engaged with [the Indonesians] so you can still talk about the things that worry you as well as giving both sides an incentive for co-operation in economic areas where your interests do clearly line up.'
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The Indonesians were ecstatic. ‘What he has done', said Jakarta's ambassador in Canberra, ‘is walk right into the lion's den and make our case. Keating is our comrade in arms.'
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Jakarta's weapons chief, B. J. Habibie, said, ‘This is music to my ears.'
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Keating, who is proud of his pugnacious, often abusive
style in Parliament – he has called his opponents ‘harlots', ‘sleazebags', ‘boxheads', ‘loopy crims', ‘pieces of criminal garbage', ‘scumbags' and ‘piss-ants' – ordered a video to be made of his more theatrical performances and sent it to Suharto. According to the
Sydney Morning Herald,
the Indonesian dictator ‘showed the video to his entire cabinet, who were reportedly mightily impressed'.
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Two weeks before
Death of a Nation
was due to be shown on television in Britain, its disclosures about a second massacre in Dili, in November 1991, were published in the Australian press. This caused near-panic among Indonesia's backers. Without having seen a frame of the film, Paul Keating, Jakarta's ‘comrade in arms', angrily condemned it, and me. My ‘credibility', he said, was ‘under a cloud' because of my work in Cambodia. This was a remarkable statement by the leader of a government whose ‘peace plan' in Cambodia was the direct result of public response to my film,
Cambodia Year Ten
.
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Keating's attack was inspired by Gareth Evans, whose dismissal of corroborated evidence he, too, had not seen was published under headlines such as ‘No evidence to back Pilger claims'.
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I doubt if there has been another time when an Australian prime minister and his foreign affairs minister have used their high office to vehemently deny evidence, unseen, of murderous violence carried out by a ruthless dictatorship in an illegally occupied territory. When
Death of a Nation
opened in Perth, federal police, who take their orders direct from Canberra, were sent to the Lumiere Cinema and demanded to know ‘who had told the cinema to put it on'.
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In their panic, Keating and Evans even cast doubt on the original Dili massacre. Keating said it had happened in a ‘murky period' during which ‘it isn't clear what happened'. Furthermore, said Evans, there were ‘a number of witnesses who have said nothing like what is claimed to have happened'.
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There were no such ‘witnesses'. Evans was referring to a priest presented to foreign journalists by Indonesian officials during a controlled visit to Dili – hurriedly arranged by the regime in order to pre-empt the worldwide showing of
Death of a Nation
and the UN Human Rights Commission hearings on East Timor. This was Marcus Wanandi, an Indonesian-Chinese priest installed in Dili by Suharto to ‘assist' Bishop Belo, the outspoken Timorese who heads the Catholic Church and has never accepted Indonesian rule. Wanandi and his powerful family are close to Suharto; one brother runs a multi-million-dollar business with Suharto's daughter, ‘developing' East Timor; the other runs a ‘strategic institute' in Jakarta that helped plan the invasion in 1975. Wanandi told a senior Australian bishop, Hilton Deakin, that talking to the Timorese was a waste of time because ‘they have just come out of the trees'.
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Wanandi's ‘evidence' that there was no second massacre contradicted Bishop Belo, who told Max Stahl of his trust in the statements of eye-witnesses. He said he had informed the Indonesian ‘special commission of enquiry' about the unreported killings. ‘Twice', he said, ‘I told them that not only have they to investigate the massacre in the Santa Cruz cemetery, but also in other places where people were killed . . . for example, in the [military] hospital. They showed no interest. The military authorities [wanted] to give the Timorese people these extreme lessons. We think there is no justice . . . no justice.'

Bishop Belo was silenced during the two restricted press tours in 1994. Only Wanandi was interviewed by foreign reporters, who paid little notice to his ties to the regime and the obvious set-up his ‘evidence' represented. In the meantime, the regime made much use of the Keating/Evans denials and abuse, which were quoted in press releases distributed by Indonesian embassies around the world. My film, said Ali Alatas, having not seen it, ‘is entirely fictitious'.

Rupert Murdoch's
Australian
, Australia's only national newspaper, took a keen interest in my film. The paper's foreign editor, Greg Sheridan, had previously attacked both
the Clinton administration for raising human rights with the Suharto regime, and the Foreign Affairs Committee of the Australian Parliament for its estimate that ‘at least 200,000' people had died under Indonesian rule in East Timor. Now he attacked my film, having not seen it. Referring to eye-witness accounts of a second massacre in the Santa Cruz cemetery, he wrote, ‘The sad truth is that even genuine victims frequently concoct stories . . .'. He went on to accuse me of ‘extreme tendentiousness'.
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I sent a message to the editor-in-chief, Paul Kelly, requesting the right of reply. This was eventually agreed and I submitted an article that answered Sheridan and outlined the Australian Government's complicity in the genocide. I heard nothing for more than two weeks.

In the meantime, the
Australian
sent its Jakarta correspondent, Patrick Walters, on the first shepherded press tour of Dili, accompanied by Indonesian officials. Walters produced a memorable series of disgraceful pieces. Jakarta's ‘economic achievements' in East Timor were ‘impressive', he wrote, giving official statistics of Jakarta's generous ‘development' of the territory. As for the resistance, it was ‘leaderless' and beaten. Indeed, you wondered what the fuss was all about as ‘no one was now arrested without proper legal procedures'. ‘The situation regarding human rights', the puppet governor told him, ‘is very good at the moment'.
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Walters' next dispatch, written on his return to Jakarta, made the symmetry clear. Under the headline, ‘Murdoch tunes into Indonesia', he wrote, ‘Mr. Rupert Murdoch left Jakarta yesterday after a two-day visit, optimistic about the prospects of his Hong Kong-based Star TV network for further expansion in South-East Asia.' Murdoch told his man, ‘I'm here to learn about Indonesia and learn about the market. We are looking at the prospects for Star TV.' A new Indonesian satellite, Indostar, explained Walters, ‘is of considerable interest' to Murdoch, who plans to expand Star TV's coverage of Asia.
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With Murdoch just arrived from Jakarta and Walters' reporting of Jakarta's ‘achievements' in East Timor still fresh,
editor-in-chief Kelly rescinded my right-of-reply. He said I had written the ‘wrong' article, which, anyway, did not meet ‘that standard of accuracy required by this paper'.
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Twice I asked him to substantiate this charge; I suggested that, as an editor, he had an obligation to detail my alleged inaccuracies. He failed to reply. In December 1993 Paul Kelly was appointed by Gareth Evans to the Australia-Indonesia Institute, a body funded by the Australian Government to promote Indonesia's and Australia's ‘common interests'.

In the week that Kelly rejected my article Prime Minister Keating launched an unprecedented ‘trade and cultural promotion' with Indonesia. The attacks on my film now made perfect sense. Surrounded by businessmen and representatives of the arts, Keating made an extraordinary speech in which he announced a ‘partnership' with Jakarta that would ‘stand as a model for co-operation between developed and developing countries'. He described the ‘stability' of the Suharto regime as ‘the single most beneficial development to have affected Australia and its region in the past thirty years'.
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He made not a single reference to East Timor, let alone to the fact that the Suharto regime had one of the most barbarous records of the twentieth century. All reference to the tens of thousands of deaths that had helped to pay for this great ‘benefit' to Australia was excluded from press reports of Keating's speech – in the same way that all reference to Stalin's crimes was excluded from the Soviet and East European press. Keating's speech was lauded as ‘mature'.

On the same day that Keating spoke, Dr George Aditjondro, a leading Indonesian academic, released in Australia two papers on East Timor based on twenty years' research. In so doing, he risked his livelihood, and possibly his life; a few days later his house in Central Java was attacked by stone-throwing thugs. ‘I wanted to take off the veil of secrecy around East Timor,' he told me. The Aditjondro papers describe a ‘culture of violence' imposed on the territory, with systematic atrocities, such as mass rape, amounting to an assault on the very fabric of East Timorese society. The estimate of 200,000 deaths, he said, was ‘moderate'.
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