“No one cared as long as they were Communists, that they were being butchered,” said Howard Federspiel, then Indonesia expert for State Department intelligence; “No one was getting very worked up about it.” “It really was a big help to the army,” Martens said. “They probably killed a lot of people, and I probably have a lot of blood on my hands, but that's not all bad.”“There's a time when you have to strike hard at a decisive moment.”
The story was picked up by a few newspapers, though no one got worked up about it. Just more business as usual; after all, the US Embassy had done much the same in Guatemala a decade earlier, as another useful slaughter was getting underway.
21
While ruffling some feathers briefly, the report was soon consigned to oblivion. The Newspaper of Record (the
New York Times
) waited almost two months to take notice, long enough to marshal the required denials. Reporter Michael Wines repeats every government propaganda cliché about the events themselves, however tenuous, as unquestioned fact. Ambassador Green dismisses the Kadane report as “garbage.” He and others claim that the US had nothing to do with the list of names, which were of no significance anyway. Wines cites a Martens letter to the
Washington Post
saying that the names were publicly available in the Indonesian press, but not his amplification of this remark, in which he stressed the importance of handing over the list of names; Martens wrote that he “saw nothing wrong with helping out,” and still doesn't, because “the pro-Communist terror leading to the final coup...against the non-Communist army leaders...had prevented systematic collection of data on the Communists” (a fanciful tale, but no matter). Wines says nothing about the
Times
celebration of the slaughter, or the pride of their leading political commentator on the US role in expediting it.
22
Stephen Rosenfeld of the
Washington Post
was one of the few in the national press to be troubled by the Kadane revelations. His reaction too is instructive.
After the Kadane story appeared, the
Post
carried a letter by Indonesian human rights activist Carmel Budiardjo, who pointed out that direct US complicity in the massacre was already known from the cable traffic between the US Embassy in Jakarta and the State Department published by Gabriel Kolko, specifically, the Green-Rusk interchange cited earlier. A month later, Rosenfeld expressed some concern, adding that “in the one account I read”ânamely, Kolko's bookâsome doubts are raised about Communist complicity in the alleged coup attempt that served as the pretext for the massacres (note the evasion of the crucial issues, a deft stroke). But, Rosenfeld continued, Kolko's “typical revisionist blame-America-first point of view makes me distrust his conclusions.” He expressed the hope that “someone whose politics are more mainstream would sift through the material and provide an independent account.” His plea for rescue appears under the heading, “Indonesia 1965: Year of Living Cynically?”
Fortunately, relief was soon on its way. A week later, under the heading “Indonesia 1965: Year of U.S. Irrelevance,” Rosenfeld wrote that he had received in the mail an “independent account” by a historian “without political bias”âthat is, one who could assure him that the state he loves had done no wrong. This antidote was “full of delights and surprises,” concluding that the US had no responsibility for the deaths or the overthrow of Sukarno. It “clears Americans of the damaging lingering suspicion of responsibility for the Indonesian coup and massacre,” Rosenfeld concludes happily: “For me, the question of the American role in Indonesia is closed.”
23
How easy is the life of the true believer.
The article that closed the books, to Rosenfeld's immense relief, was the Brands study reviewed earlier. That Brands is an “independent” commentator “without political bias” is demonstrated throughout: The US war in Vietnam was an attempt “to rescue South Vietnam”; the information reaching Washington that “The army has virtually destroyed the PKI” in a huge massacre was “good news”; “the most serious deficiency of covert warfare” is “its inevitable tendency to poison the well of public opinion,” that is, to tar the US with “bum raps” elsewhere; etc. Much more significant are the “delights and surprises” that put any lingering doubts to rest. Since the study closes all questions for good, we may now rest easy in the knowledge that Washington did all it could to encourage the greatest massacre since the days of Hitler and Stalin, welcomed the outcome with enthusiasm, and immediately turned to the task of supporting Suharto's aptly named “New Order.” Thankfully, there is nothing to trouble the liberal conscience.
One interesting non-reaction to the Kadane report appeared in the lead article in the
New York Review of Books
by Senator Daniel Moynihan. He fears that “we are poisoning the wells of our historical memory,” suppressing unpleasant features of our past. He contrasts these failures with the “extraordinary period of exhuming the worst crimes of its hideous history” now underway in the Soviet Union. Of course, “the United States has no such history. To the contrary.” Our history is quite pure. There are no crimes to “exhume” against the indigenous population or Africans in the 70 years following
our
revolution, or against Filipinos, Central Americans, Indochinese, and others later on. Still, even we are not perfect: “not everything we have done in this country has been done in the open,” Moynihan observes, though “not everything could be. Or should have been.” But we conceal too much, the gravest crime of our history.
24
It is hard to believe that as he was writing these words, the Senator did not have the recent revelations about Indonesia in mind. He, after all, has a special personal relation to Indonesian atrocities. He was UN Ambassador at the time of the Indonesian invasion of East Timor, and takes pride, in his memoirs, in having forestalled any international reaction to the aggression and massacre. “The United States wished things to turn out as they did,” he writes, “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.” Moynihan was well aware of how things turned out, noting that within a few weeks some 60,000 people had been killed, “10 percent of the population, almost the proportion of casualties experienced by the Soviet Union during the Second World War.” Thus he took credit for achievements that he compares to those of the Nazis. And he is surely familiar with the subsequent US government role in escalating the slaughter, and the contribution of the media and political class in concealing it. But the newly released information about the US role in mass slaughter did not stir his historical memory, or suggest some reflections on our practices, apart from our single blemish: insufficient candor.
Moynihan's successes at the UN have entered history in the conventional manner. Measures taken against Iraq and Libya “show again how the collapse of Communism has given the Security Council the cohesion needed to enforce its orders,”
Times
UN correspondent Paul Lewis explains in a front-page story: “That was impossible in earlier cases like...Indonesia's annexation of East Timor.”
25
There was also a flicker of concern about Indonesia after Iraq invaded Kuwait in August 1990. It was hard not to notice the similarity to Indonesia's (vastly more murderous) aggression and annexation. A decade earlier, when glimmerings of what had happened finally began to break through, there had been occasional notice of the comparison between Suharto's exploits in Timor and the simultaneous Pol Pot slaughters. As in 1990, the US and its allies were charged at most with “ignoring” Indonesian atrocities. The truth was well concealed throughout: Indonesia was given critical military and diplomatic support for its monstrous war crimes; and crucially, unlike the case of Pol Pot and Saddam, these could readily have been halted, simply by withdrawal of Western aid and breaking the silence.
Ingenious efforts have been made to explain away the radically different response to Suharto, on the one hand, and Pol Pot and Saddam, on the other, and to avoid the obvious explanation in terms of interest, which of course covers a vastly wider range. William Shawcross offered a “more structurally serious explanation” for the Timor-Cambodia case: “a comparative lack of sources” and lack of access to refugees, Lisbon and Australia being so inaccessible in comparison with the Thai-Cambodian border. Gérard Chaliand dismissed France's active support for the Indonesian slaughter in the midst of a great show of anguish about Pol Pot on grounds that the Timorese are “geographically and historically marginal.” The difference between Kuwait and Timor, according to Fred Halliday, is that Kuwait “has been up and running as an independent state since 1961”; to evaluate the proposal, recall that the US prevented the UN from interfering with Israel's invasion of Lebanon or following through on its condemnation of Israel's (virtual) annexation of the Syrian Golan Heights, and that, unlike Suharto in Timor, Saddam had offered to withdraw from Kuwait, how seriously we do not know, since the US rejected the offers instantly out of fear that they might “defuse the crisis.” A common stance is that “American influence on [Indonesia's decision to invade] may easily be exaggerated,” though the US “averted its eyes from East Timor” and “could have done far more than it did to distance itself from the carnage” (James Fallows). The fault, then, is failure to act, not the decisive contribution to the ongoing carnage by increasing the flow of arms as atrocities mounted and by rendering the UN “utterly ineffective” because “The United States wished things to turn out as they did” (Ambassador Moynihan), while the intellectual community preferred to denounce the crimes of official enemies. Others tried different techniques to evade the obvious, adding footnotes to the inglorious story.
26
The Australian government was more forthright. “There is no binding legal obligation not to recognize the acquisition of territory that was acquired by force,” Foreign Minister Gareth Evans explained, adding that “The world is a pretty unfair place, littered with examples of acquisition by force...” (in the same breath, following the US-UK lead, he banned all official contacts with the PLO with proper indignation because of its “consistently defending and associating itself with Iraq's invasion of Kuwait”). Prime Minister Hawke declared that “big countries cannot invade small neighbors and get away with it” (referring to Iraq and Kuwait), proclaiming that in the “new order” established by the virtuous Anglo-Americans, “would-be aggressors will think twice before invading smaller neighbours.” The weak will “feel more secure because they know that they will not stand alone if they are threatened,” now that, at last, “all nations should know that the rule of law must prevail over the rule of force in international relations.”
Australia has a special relation to Timor; tens of thousands of Timorese were killed during World War II protecting a few Australian guerrillas fighting in Timor to deter an impending Japanese invasion of Australia. Australia has been the most outspoken defender of the Indonesian invasion. One reason, known early on, is the rich natural gas and oil reserves in the Timor Gap, “a cold, hard, sobering reality that must be addressed,” Foreign Minister Bill Hayden explained frankly in April 1984. In December 1989, Evans signed a treaty with the Indonesian conquerors dividing up Timor's wealth; through 1990, Australia received $Aus. 31 million from sales of permits to oil companies for exploration. Evans's remarks, quoted above, were made in explanation of Australia's rejection of a protest against the treaty brought to the World Court by Portugal, generally regarded as the responsible authority.
27
While British political figures and intellectuals lectured with due gravity on the values of their traditional culture, now at last to be imposed by the righteous in the “new world order” (referring to Iraq-Kuwait), British Aerospace entered into new arrangements to sell Indonesia jet fighters and enter into co-production arrangements, “what could turn out to be one of the largest arms packages any company has sold to an Asian country,” the
Far Eastern Economic Review
reported. Britain had become “one of Indonesia's major arms suppliers, selling £290 million worth of equipment in the 1986-1990 period alone,” Oxford historian Peter Carey writes.
28
The public has been protected from such undesirable facts, kept in the shadows along with a Fall 1990 Indonesian military offensive in Timor under the cover of the Gulf crisis, and the Western-backed Indonesian operations that may wipe out a million tribal people in West Papua, with thousands of victims of chemical weapons among the dead according to human rights activists and the few observers. Solemn discourse on international law, the crime of aggression, and our perhaps too-fervent idealism can therefore proceed, untroubled. The attention of the civilized West is to be focused, laser-like, on the crimes of official enemies, not on those it could readily mitigate or bring to an end.
29
The Timor-Kuwait embarrassment, such as it was, quickly subsided; reasonably, since it is only one of a host of similar examples that demonstrate the utter cynicism of the posturing during the Gulf War. But problems arose again in November 1991, when Indonesia made a foolish error, carrying out a massacre in the capital city of Dili in front of TV cameras and severely beating two US reporters, Alan Nairn and Amy Goodman. That is bad form, and requires the conventional remedy: an inquiry to whitewash the atrocity, a tap on the wrist for the authorities, mild punishment of subordinates, and applause from the rich men's club over this impressive proof that our moderate client is making still further progress. The script, familiar to the point of boredom, was followed routinely. Meanwhile Timorese were harshly punished and the atmosphere of terror deepened.