Distant Voices (33 page)

Whitlam wanted to lead Australia away from its Eurocentricity and give it a new, vital role in its own region. He wanted the great nations of Asia – China and Indonesia – to take white Australia seriously; and he was impatient to achieve this in what he must have known would be only a relatively brief period in office. ‘Perhaps he perceived', wrote James Dunn who, like me, admired Whitlam, ‘that [Australia] would have become bogged down in an acrimonious and confrontational dispute with Indonesia, which may have
revived all the “yellow peril” fears of the past, forcing us back, as it were, into our isolationist and racist shell'.
³⁸

Whatever his motives, tiny East Timor became, to paraphrase a remark by the present Indonesian foreign minister, ‘grit in his shoe'. What makes Whitlam even more of an enigma to his admirers is that, as the evidence of his misjudgement has mounted year upon year, he has taken a combative line, even flying to the United Nations in an attempt to get it to drop East Timor as an issue. In an article in the
Sydney Morning Herald
in 1991 he accused the Australian media of conducting a ‘vendetta against Indonesia since the deaths of two television teams' and Fretilin of ‘massacres' and general ‘brutality' while not once referring to Indonesia's genocide. On the contrary, he heaped praise upon the Indonesian dictator. ‘President Suharto is a reasonable and honourable man', he wrote. ‘Every Australian ambassador will confirm that. It is outrageous what Australian newspapers and persons in public positions say about him and his Government . . . In due course our correspondence and the records of our conversations will reveal the range and depth of our relationship'.
³⁹
Did this ‘range and depth' include discussion of Australia's responsibility towards a small and vulnerable neighbour and the predictable consequences of Indonesian aggression?

Within weeks of the Whitlam/Suharto meeting in Java, a clutch of generals close to Suharto launched a secret intelligence operation, code-named
Operasi Komodo,
aimed at destroying the East Timorese independence movement, which, far from being ‘unviable', was then making significant progress.

In January 1975 Fretilin and its main opponent, UDT, established a united front to demand independence. This was short-lived. Agents of
Operasi Komodo
influenced UDT, creating divisions, distrust and eventually conflict. The UDT leaders were told independence was only possible if the ‘communists' of Fretilin were ‘neutralised'. Backed by Jakarta, UDT mounted a coup attempt with the Portuguese stepping aside and creating a political vacuum. This led to
civil war and between 1,500 and 2,000 deaths. (When Indonesian officials and their foreign supporters attempt to explain the years of slaughter that followed the Indonesian invasion, they often blame the ‘civil war' that lasted less than a month.)

During the coup attempt the Portuguese governor and administration left Dili for the nearby Atauro Island, to avoid being directly involved in the fighting. Fretilin had recently won a victory in local elections and was now firmly in control. Its popularity was confirmed by two Australian delegations that travelled widely in East Timor following the civil war. James Dunn was a member of a group from the Australian Council for Overseas Aid (ACOA). ‘Whatever the shortcomings of the Fretilin administration', he reported, ‘it clearly enjoyed widespread support from the population, including many hitherto UDT supporters . . . Australian relief workers visited most parts of Timor and, without exception, they reported that there was no evidence of any insecurity or any hostility towards Fretilin. Indeed, Fretilin leaders were welcomed warmly and spontaneously in all main centres by crowds of Timorese. In my long association with Portuguese Timor, which goes back fourteen years, I had never before witnessed such demonstrations of spontaneous warmth and support from the indigenous population.'
⁴⁰

With Portugal distracted by political upheaval at home and Fretilin the
de facto
government in East Timor, Western governments became alarmed. In July, the British Ambassador in Jakarta, Sir John Archibald Ford, sent his Head of Chancery to East Timor. ‘The people of Portuguese Timor are in no condition to exercise the right of self-determination,' he reported. ‘If it comes to the crunch and there is a row in the United Nations we should keep our heads down and avoid siding against the Indonesian Government.'
⁴¹
Ford recommended to the Foreign Office that it was in Britain's interests that Indonesia should ‘absorb the territory as soon as and as unobtrusively as possible'.
⁴²

The US Secretary of State, Henry Kissinger, having recently watched American power and his own ambitions humiliated
in the ‘fall' of Saigon, signalled to Jakarta that the United States would not object if Indonesia invaded East Timor.
⁴³
Within weeks a clandestine invasion began. On September 4, the CIA reported that ‘two Indonesian special forces groups entered Portuguese Timor'. On September 17 the CIA reported, ‘Jakarta is now sending guerrilla units into the Portuguese half of the island in order to engage Fretilin forces, encourage pro-Indonesian elements, and provoke incidents that would provide the Indonesians with an excuse to invade . . .'
⁴⁴

The CIA and other American intelligence agencies intercepted much of Indonesia's military and intelligence communications at a secret base run by the Australian Defence Signals Directorate (DSD) near Darwin. The information gathered was shared under treaty arrangements with Canberra and London and summarised in the
National Intelligence Daily,
published by the CIA, which was on President Ford's desk early each morning in 1975. Thus, Western governments knew well in advance Indonesia's intentions and the day-by-day detail of its covert operations. Moreover, leaked diplomatic cables from Jakarta, notably those sent by the Australian Ambassador Richard Woolcott, confirmed this.

Ambassador Woolcott reported that two of the principal conspirators, including Suharto's crony General Benny Murdani, had ‘assured' him that when Indonesia decided to launch a full-scale invasion, Australia would get ‘not less than two hours' notice'.
⁴⁵
In one remarkable cable sent to Canberra in August 1975, Woolcott argued Indonesia's case and how Australian public opinion might be ‘assisted'. ‘What Indonesia now looks to from Australia, in the present situation,' he wrote, ‘is some understanding of their attitude and possible action to assist public understanding in Australia rather than action on our part which could contribute to criticism of Indonesia'. The government could say publicly, Woolcott advised, that ‘Australia cannot condone the use of force in Timor, nor could we accept the principle that a country can intervene in a neighbouring territory because of concern,
however well based that concern might be, over the situation there. At the same time [we] could concede that Indonesia has had a prolonged struggle for national unity and could not be expected to take lightly a breakdown in law and order in Portuguese Timor . . .'

Woolcott proposed that ‘[we] leave events to take their course . . . and act in a way which would be designed to minimise the public impact in Australia and show private understanding to Indonesia of their problems . . . although', he added, ‘we do not want to become apologists for Indonesia'. He concluded, ‘I know I am recommending a pragmatic rather than a principled stand but that is what national interest and foreign policy is all about . . .'
⁴⁶
There was not a word of concern for the interests or the fate of the East Timorese, who were, it was apparent, expendable.

On November 28, 1975, Fretilin leaders unilaterally declared independence, establishing the Democratic Republic of East Timor. Ministers were sworn in before a cheering crowd in Dili, the Portuguese flag was lowered after 450 years, and a new flag, red, black and yellow with a white star, was raised. Across the border in Indonesian West Timor, foreign minister Adam Malik, the author of ‘whole-hearted' assurances that Indonesia had no designs on East Timor, said, ‘Diplomacy is finished. The solution to the East Timor problem is now at the front line of battle.'
⁴⁷
There had, of course, been no diplomacy; Indonesian troops were already inside East Timor.

By December 4, foreign aid workers, journalists and some Fretilin members and their families had been evacuated from Dili; the invasion was expected the following day. But that was also the day President Ford and Henry Kissinger were due to arrive in Jakarta on a visit described by a State Department official as ‘the big wink'.
⁴⁸
The Americans demanded that the Indonesians wait to invade until after the President had left; and on December 7, as Air Force One climbed out of Indonesian airspace, the bloodbath began.

^fn1
José Ramos Horta is today the Special Representative of the National Council of Maubere Resistance, an umbrella organisation based inside East Timor. It represents the political organisations, guerrilla army and civilian resistance. It describes itself as ‘non-ideological, the equivalent of a coalition government'.

THE INVASION FORCE
was led by Ambassador Woolcott's confidant, General Benny Murdani. The inhabitants of Dili were subjected to what the historian John Taylor has described as ‘systematic killing, gratuitous violence and primitive plunder'.
⁴⁹
The former Bishop of Dili, Costa Lopez, said, ‘The soldiers who landed started killing everyone they could find. There were many dead bodies in the street – all we could see were the soldiers killing, killing, killing.'
⁵⁰
At 2 pm on December 9, fifty-nine men were brought on to the wharf at Dili harbour and shot one by one, with the crowd ordered to count. The victims were forced to stand on the edge of the pier facing the sea, so that when they were shot their bodies fell into the water. Earlier in the day, women and children had been executed in a similar way. An eye-witness reported, ‘The Indonesians tore the crying children from their mothers and passed them back to the crowd. The women were shot one by one, with the onlookers being ordered by the Indonesians to count.'
⁵¹

As in Pol Pot's Cambodia, the first to die were often minorities. The Chinese population was singled out. Five hundred were reportedly killed on the first day of the attack.
⁵²
An eye-witness described how he and others were ordered to ‘tie the bodies to iron poles, attach bricks and throw the bodies in the sea'.
⁵³
In Maubara and Luiquica, on the north-west coast, the Chinese population was decimated.
⁵⁴
The killing of whole families, and especially children, appeared to be systematic. Soldiers were described swinging infants in the air and smashing their heads on rocks, with an officer
explaining, ‘When you clean the field, don't you kill all the snakes, the small and large alike?'
⁵⁵
‘Indonesian troops', wrote John Taylor, ‘had been given orders to crush all opposition ruthlessly, and were told they were fighting communists in the cause of
Jihad
[Holy War], just as they had done in Indonesia in 1965.'
⁵⁶

When President Ford's plane touched down in Hawaii from Jakarta, he was asked for a reaction to the Indonesian invasion. He smiled and said, ‘We'll talk about that later.' His press secretary added, ‘The President always deplores violence, wherever it occurs.'
⁵⁷
Returning to Washington, Kissinger summoned his senior staff to an emergency meeting at the State Department. According to the minutes of that meeting (marked ‘Secret/Sensitive'), Kissinger was furious that he had been sent two cables reminding him that the Indonesians were breaking American law by using American weapons in the invasion. His fear was that the cables would be leaked and that Congress and the public would find out about his ‘big wink' to the Suharto regime.

KISSINGER
: On the Timor thing, that will leak in three months and it will come out that Kissinger overruled his pristine bureaucrats and violated the law. How many people . . . know about this?

STAFF MEMBER
: Three.

KISSINGER
: Plus everybody in this meeting, so you're talking about not less than 15 or 20. You have a responsibility to recognise that we are living in a revolutionary situation. Everything on paper will be used against me.
⁵⁸

Although clearly aware that the use of American arms was illegal, Kissinger sought to justify continuing to supply them by making the victim the aggressor. ‘Can't we construe a Communist government in the middle of Indonesia as self-defence?' he asked. Told that this would not work, Kissinger gave orders that he wanted arms shipments ‘stopped quietly',
but secretly ‘start[ed] again in January'.
⁵⁹
In fact, as the killings increased, American arms shipments doubled.

Five days after the invasion, the United Nations General Assembly passed a resolution that ‘strongly deplore[d]' Indonesia's aggression and called on it to withdraw its troops ‘without delay'. The governments of the US, Britain, Australia, Germany and France abstained. Japan, the biggest investor in Indonesia, voted against the resolution. Ten days later, as Western intelligence agencies informed their governments of the scale of the massacres in East Timor, the Security Council unanimously called on ‘all States to respect the territorial integrity of East Timor'. Again, Indonesia was ordered to withdraw its troops ‘without delay'. This time the US, Britain and France voted in favour, not wanting to side publicly with the aggressor in such a public forum.
⁶⁰