Understanding Power: the indispensable Chomsky (63 page)

Around that same time, the Carter administration moved to send new supplies of armaments to Indonesia, because their army was running out of weapons in the course of the slaughter. By then they’d killed maybe a hundred thousand people.
  ⁴¹
The press did its job by shutting up about what was really going on—when they did have coverage, it was just repetition of grotesque lies by the State Department and Indonesian generals, a complete whitewash. In fact, media coverage
to this day
has always completely wiped out the U.S. record: the strongest criticism you’ll ever find is, “We didn’t pay enough attention to Timor,” or “The U.S. didn’t try hard enough to get Indonesia to stop its atrocities” or something like that.
  ⁴²
It’s kind of like saying the Soviet Union didn’t try hard enough to bring freedom to Eastern Europe, or they didn’t pay enough attention to it—that was their problem.

And remember, the U.S. role in all of this has never been a secret—it’s in fact been acknowledged very frankly. For instance, if you read the memoirs of our U.N. ambassador at the time of the invasion, Daniel Patrick Moynihan—who’s greatly praised for his defense of international law, incidentally—he says: “The Department of State desired that the U.N. prove utterly ineffective in whatever measures it undertook. This task was given to me, and I carried it forward with no inconsiderable success.” Okay, then he goes on to describe the effects of the invasion, which he was fully aware of: he says, in the first couple of months it seemed “some 60,000 persons had been killed … almost the proportion of casualties experienced by the Soviet Union during the Second World War.” Alright, that’s the Nazis, and that’s Moynihan, the great advocate of international law.
  ⁴³
And he’s right, that’s how it happened: the State Department wanted things to turn out as they did, and he ensured that they did. Moynihan’s at least being honest, let’s give him credit for it.

Another thing that’s never reported, though it’s completely public and was perfectly well known at the time, is that one of the main reasons why the Western powers supported the invasion was that there’s a huge offshore oil field in Timor’s territorial waters, and before 1975 the Australians and the Western oil companies had been trying unsuccessfully to make a deal with Portugal to exploit it. Well, they hadn’t had any luck with Portugal, and they figured an independent East Timor would be even harder to deal with—but they knew that Indonesia would be easy: that’s one of our boys, we’ve been running it ever since the huge massacre there in 1965 that the West applauded, when they wiped out the Communist Party and killed maybe 600,000 people.
  ⁴⁴
So for instance, leaked diplomatic records in Australia show that right around the time of the invasion, top Australian officials said that they would do better with an Indonesian takeover, and that Indonesia should be supported.
  ⁴⁵
Again, I have yet to see a word about any of this in the U.S. media.

And actually that exploitation has been proceeding rather nicely: Australia and Indonesia signed a big treaty to start extracting Timorese oil [in December 1989], and right after the Dili massacre in 1991 [in which Indonesians killed hundreds of unarmed Timorese protesters at a funeral], the big Western reaction—apart from sending additional arms to Indonesia—was that fifteen major oil companies started exploration in the Timor Sea oil fields. Happily for Chevron, there are apparently some very promising strikes.

Well, to get back to your question: even though this virtually genocidal massacre has received almost no coverage from the U.S. press, a very small number of people started working on the issue—literally it was a tiny group of activists, probably not more than a dozen.
  ⁴⁶
And finally, after a few years, they’ve gotten somewhere: around the early 1980s, just through constant pressure and organizing, they managed to get the media to start reporting on Timor very occasionally. The coverage has been highly selective, and it still always excludes the crucial role that the United States has played, both in providing arms and in giving Indonesia the diplomatic support they’ve needed to maintain the occupation over the years—but there has been some.
  ⁴⁷
And they’ve gotten some Congressmen interested, mostly conservative Congressmen, incidentally. Wider public pressure began to develop; the East Timor Action Network was started—and there has been a real change, just thanks to this small, indeed growing, number of activists.

In 1992, the pressure actually got to the point that Congress passed legislation banning U.S. military training for Indonesian officers because of their “human rights violations,” which is putting it pretty mildly. That put the Clinton administration in kind of an embarrassing position, but they got out of it alright: they announced that the law didn’t mean what it said, it only meant that the United States couldn’t train Indonesian military officers
with money from the United States itself
, but if the Indonesians paid for the training themselves—say, with money we gave them from some other pocket—that would be fine. With rare delicacy, the State Department picked the anniversary of the invasion to announce this interpretation, and although Congress protested, it went through.
  ⁴⁸

Nevertheless, the legislation was a very important development, and I think it’s a sign of a real change that could take place, as you suggest. I mean, with enough popular pressure, this is one of those issues that could turn around: the Indonesians could pull out, they may well be close to it.

In fact, if we’re talking about activism, this is a very revealing case—because if you can organize successfully on an issue like East Timor, you can do it on almost anything. It’s a pretty hard topic to get people interested in, you’d think, yet popular pressure here has forced things to the point of at least symbolic gestures by the U.S. government—and symbolic gestures on the part of the United States are very important. Remember, everyone in the world is scared shitless of us: we’re a brutal terrorist power of enormous strength, and if you get in our way, you’re in trouble. Nobody steps on Uncle Sam’s toes. So when the United States Congress makes a symbolic gesture like banning military-training aid or banning small-arms sales, the Indonesian generals hear it, even if they can get whatever they want from some other country, or even from Bill Clinton in the end.

Mass Murderers at Harvard

Actually, let me give you another example of the kinds of things that have been happening on this—this one is really relevant, it shows you can really do things. In Boston recently there was a court case, in which an Indonesian general was sued by the mother of a boy who was killed in the Dili massacre in 1991. Her name is Helen Todd, which explains why the suit went through, if you can figure that part out. …

What happened is, in November 1991, some Indonesian troops in East Timor opened fire on a funeral march with their U.S.-supplied M-16s, and killed about 250 people. That’s fairly routine there, actually, but this time the Indonesians made a mistake: a couple of Western reporters were there filming it all, and they managed to bury the videotape in an open grave and have it smuggled out of the country a couple days later. The Indonesian soldiers also nearly beat two American journalists to death, so this one became pretty difficult for the international media to ignore.
  ⁴⁹

Well, as Indonesia was carrying out its cover-up after this with the help of some big public relations firm they hired in the U.S. [Burson-Marsteller, Inc.], one of the things they did was to get the generals out of the way so nobody would see them, and one of them was sent off to Harvard, to study.
  ⁵⁰
Alright, some local people in Boston found out about this, and they checked with Harvard: Harvard claimed they’d never heard of him. But he was there, he was studying at the Kennedy School of Government at Harvard—so people started to protest his presence there. The protests began to build up, there was more and more pressure, then on the first anniversary of the Dili massacre came my favorite
Boston Globe
headline in history. It said, “Indonesian General, Facing Suit, Flees Boston.” And indeed, that’s what happened—he fled Boston, and hasn’t been seen there since.
  ⁵¹

Meanwhile, the suit continued on without him. There’s a law in the United States which says that you can bring civil suits for damages against torturers and murderers and human rights abusers and so on.
  ⁵²
So the judge heard the testimony of Helen Todd, journalist Allan Nairn and others, and was impressed—and the General now has a $14 million fine to pay in case he ever decides to show up here again.
  ⁵³

The same thing happened the next year with one of Guatemala’s leading killers, incidentally, General Gramajo—whom the U.S. State Department was grooming to become the next Guatemalan President. He was one of the big mass murderers from the early 1980s, and he was also shipped off to Harvard to refine his skills. Well, people in Boston found out about it by reading the Central American press, so they approached Harvard. Again, “Never heard of him.” But he was there. Alright, then Allan Nairn, who’s a very enterprising journalist, and imaginative—one of the few journalists in the country, actually—waited until the Harvard commencement ceremonies to move in. Harvard graduations are televised locally, and as the murderer General Gramajo was walking up to the platform to receive his degree, Nairn raced in front of the television cameras and served him with a subpoena. That one, he fled Boston too. The case came to court and he was fined $47 million.
  ⁵⁴

Well, you know, that just shows you can do things. Indonesia is getting worried about their image here, very worried. And it’s starting to get to the point where they might actually allow a referendum or something on self-determination for East Timor—it’s a possibility. Alatas, their Foreign Minister, in fact made a speech a little while ago in which he described East Timor as “a piece of gravel in our shoe”: you know, we have to get rid of this thing.
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But of course, it’s going to take a lot more sustained pressure and activism here to ever achieve anything like that. And in fact, if it’s going to be successful, that pressure will have to be international and coordinated around the world—because Britain and Australia and places like that will be perfectly happy to take up the slack and make as much money as they can selling arms to Indonesia if the United States ever were to seriously back off.
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Changes in Indonesia

But there are definitely things going on in Indonesia which are quite encouraging—and which make your sense of optimism seem justified, I think. For example, did you follow the case of this Indonesian academic, Aditjondro? There’s a well-known Indonesian professor who teaches at a fairly major university there, who recently went public about his opposition to the annexation of East Timor during a visit to Australia—and it turns out that for about twenty years he’s been doing research on East Timor in secret, and he released a lot of extremely interesting and detailed documentation. For instance, he had the names of about 270 people killed in the Dili massacre, and they checked out; he had done studies of other atrocities, he gave very strong statements.

Well, the Australian press silenced it. Anybody from Australia here? The only place it got published was West Perth, wherever the hell that is—probably some kind of cow-town in Australia. But it did get published there, and then it kind of seeped out into the international media, pushed on by things like the Internet. And finally it got to be kind of an international affair—though of course, as usual there was never a word about it in the U.S. media.
  ⁵⁷

Anyway, this guy Aditjondro went back to Indonesia—and to everybody’s amazement, nothing’s happened to him. I was just talking to John Pilger [an Australian political activist and filmmaker] two days ago, and he’d just seen him and been in touch with him—he’s still traveling around the country, and so far they’ve left him alone.
  ⁵⁸
Alright, that’s a sign, you know. And there are others.

In fact, I just saw one in this morning’s newspaper. This week, authorities in Indonesia arrested a bunch of labor leaders, which is not good. But what
is
good is that they arrested them for a reason—namely, they had been organizing, and carrying out strikes. See, the labor movement in Indonesia is in some ferment, and as a matter of fact, the Indonesian government recently was compelled just by internal pressures to acknowledge the existence of an independent labor union in the country. Now, I don’t know how far these things will go, but they’re the sign of a change.
  ⁵⁹

Another sign is that if you talk to students from Indonesia, it’s clear that they know more than they used to. It used to be like total fascism—they didn’t know anything about politics or the world. But it’s become much less controlled in recent years: now they’ve kind of heard about things, they’re more aware, they’re more concerned to try to change things a bit.
  ⁶⁰
And one could go on like this—but these are all indications of internal changes in Indonesia, and they are in part a reaction to Western pressure. And Indonesia reacts very quickly to Western pressure. In fact, if there was ever any serious pressure from the West, the occupation of East Timor would be over tomorrow.

This point was just illustrated very clearly, actually. Look: the United States, Canada, England, France, Holland, Sweden, Germany, Japan, any country that can make a buck off it, are all involved in this—so it’s really not a question of us laying economic sanctions on Indonesia to pressure “them,” the only real question is, can
we
stop killing Timorese? However, there
was
a case recently where the major Western powers did threaten economic sanctions against Indonesia—it’s not too well known, but it’s extremely instructive.