Distant Voices (41 page)

In 1992 a spokesman for the East Timorese independence movement described Britain as ‘the single worst obstructionist of any industrialised country' in promoting international action on East Timor.
¹⁴⁹
The British Foreign Office has played a leading, some would say traditional, role in this process.

Following the murder of the two television crews by the Indonesian army in October 1975, the Foreign Office refused to give out details of the two Britons killed, Malcolm Rennie and Brian Peters. An official said that the families did not wish to be ‘disturbed by the media'. This was a lie. Brian Peters' sister, Maureen Tolfree, told me she had had no contact with the Foreign Office and had not even been notified that Brian had been killed, and that all their mother knew was what she had read in the press. ‘It was as if he never existed,' she said. Certainly, no public protest was made to the Jakarta regime. When she flew to Jakarta to attempt to collect Brian's remains she was taken to a room in the airport where a British or Australian embassy official – she
cannot say which – telephoned her and told her it would be unwise for her to stay in Indonesia.

When
The Times
published a report in 1977, headlined ‘Indonesia Accused of Mass Murder in East Timor',
¹⁵⁰
the journalist responsible was called to the Foreign Office and asked to explain his interest in East Timor. ‘It was obvious', said David Watts, a South East Asia specialist, ‘that I was being warned off the story. It had the opposite effect.'
¹⁵¹

When people write to the government or their MP about East Timor, they receive replies that not only deny any British complicity, but attempt to devalue the scale of suffering of the East Timorese. J. L. Wilkins of the South East Asia Department of the Foreign Office is the author of a number of these replies. ‘No one really knows the truth' about the death toll is his message, because some estimates ‘are sometimes so dramatically different' from the British government's that they ‘cannot help but suspect them to be exaggerated'.
¹⁵²
The same devotion to historical accuracy was shown by a Foreign Office official who, when asked about the large death toll, said, ‘Yes, but it didn't happen in one year.'
¹⁵³

When the United Nations Human Rights Commission met in Geneva in April 1993, a posse of Foreign Office officials allied themselves with representatives of the Jakarta regime in an attempt to divide the European Community vote and prevent a resolution condemning Indonesia. Only when this ‘disgraceful bullying role', as one observer called it, was clearly failing did Britain fall in with its EC partners and vote for the resolution.
¹⁵⁴

Two months later the same officials, reported the
Guardian
, ‘deliberately misled critics of Indonesia into thinking that the British government was pushing for International Red Cross access to political prisoners in East Timor'. A ‘restricted access' Telex from the British Embassy in Jakarta said, ‘Pont [Pierre Pont, the ICRC delegate to East Timor] judges, and I agree, that for the moment the military and civilian authorities will be fighting this out behind the scenes and that pressure from outside would contribute little.'
¹⁵⁵

The Telex was dated June 24. On June 30 a Foreign Office
minister, Alastair Goodlad, wrote to Labour MP Greg Pope saying that Britain was urging Indonesia to allow access to the resistance leader, Xanana Gusmao, and other political prisoners. A later version of the same letter, signed by the head of the Indonesia section at the Foreign Office, Richard Sands, emphasised that ‘we are currently pressing the Indonesians to allow resumed ICRC access to Xanana Gusmao and others'. This was entirely false. An internal Foreign Office memorandum, which accompanied both the Telex and the second letter, read, ‘Attached for infn/edification. The letter is for stonewalling.'
¹⁵⁶

British closeness to the Indonesian tyranny was nurtured by Margaret Thatcher. As with arms deals she personally promoted in the Gulf and elsewhere, it was Thatcher who pushed the most recent sale of Hawks when she visited Jakarta in 1985. In 1992 she became the first foreigner to receive the annual award from the Association of Indonesian Engineers: a reward for ‘a decade of enhancing UK-Indonesian cooperation in technology'. She told the assembled chiefs of Indonesia's weapons industry, ‘I am proud to be one of you.'
¹⁵⁷

One of Thatcher's staunchest admirers is Alan Clark, the Tory multi-millionaire MP who lives in a castle in Kent and has a reputation for speaking his mind. As ‘defence procurement minister' under Thatcher, Clark was responsible for the sale of the latest batch of Hawk aircraft to Indonesia for£500 million. I interviewed him in November 1993, in his London
pied à terre
in Albany, off Piccadilly. The following has been slightly abridged:

J.P. When the sale of Hawk aircraft was being finalised with Indonesia you told Parliament, ‘We do not allow the export of arms and equipment lightly to be used for oppressive purposes against civilians'. How does that work? How does the government not allow that?

A.C. Well, you scrutinise every military report. [The] equipment we're talking about is police-type equipment. I mean, riot guns, CS gas, anti-personnel stuff and obviously instruments of torture, gallows, that kind of thing [and]
perhaps a water cannon, armoured cars, sort of heavy-riot control kit. But once you get into military equipment, you're into a different category of decision.

J.P. But can't military equipment be used as police equipment?

A.C. Oh yes.

J.P. I mean, Hawk low-flying attack aircraft are very effective at policing people on the ground, I would have thought.

A.C. No, they're not, because policing means one thing. In this case it means repression by an authoritarian regime of domestic incidents . . . riots, protests, that sort of thing. I mean, aircraft are used in the context of a civil war.

J.P. But East Timor isn't a civil war. The civil war has been over for eighteen years. This is an illegal occupation, which the British government acknowledges to be an illegal occupation.

A.C. I'm not into that. I don't know anything about that.

J.P. Well, you were the minister.

A.C. Yeah, but I'm not interested in illegal occupations or anything like that . . . I mean
you
call it illegal . . .

J.P. No, the United Nations does.

A.C. Okay, well, anyway, there is this distinction between police equipment which covers riot control, the instruments of torture, the low-grade stuff, the military equipment which is also subject to very high-level scrutiny.

J.P. Your colleagues in government have talked about getting guarantees from the Indonesians so that the Hawks won't be used for oppressive purposes in East Timor. What exactly are these guarantees?

A.C. Well, I never asked for a guarantee. That must have been something that the Foreign Office did . . . a guarantee is worthless from any government as far as I'm concerned.

J.P. Shouldn't the public be cynical about all this after what happened over Iraq? Shouldn't the public be cynical about assurances, guidelines and denials from government about the sale of arms?

A.C. Well, I don't know what you mean by the public, but I don't think the majority of people give a damn about it . . .
unless those weapons are going to be used against our own troops.

J.P. But it's the assumption that the public doesn't give a damn that allows ministers and officials to deceive; isn't that correct?

A.C. Why should they want to deceive if the public doesn't give a damn?

J.P. You say they don't give a damn, but that's an assumption that has yet to be tested scientifically . . . I would have thought that ministers are public servants, are they not?

A.C. Certainly, but you measure public opinion by dining-rooms in Hampstead.

J.P. I've never been in a dining-room in Hampstead.

A.C. Haven't you?

J.P. No.

A.C. Well, I'll accept your assurance. You see, there's a concept known as the chattering classes, and they get tearful about different issues, and talk to each other about them. I hold them in complete contempt. They tend to regard themselves in some way as being ‘the public'. They get a lot of coverage in the
Guardian
and the
Independent
.

J.P. Should a government lie to its people?

A.C. No, certainly not . . . One must take very great care not to.

J.P. Mislead its people, deceive?

A.C. Well, deceive is the same thing. But misleading . . . you get into a very grey area of definition here. Misleading gets you into the territory of both semantics and gullibility. People often don't want to believe things. They feel more comfortable if they don't focus their attention on things . . .

J.P. The fact remains that British aircraft kill and maim people in East Timor, and the government allows the sale of these aircraft on flimsy assurances that they won't be used there.

A.C. Flimsy, no. I mean, they are given in a proper diplomatic context. I attach very little value to such assurances.

J.P. Isn't all this, in broad terms, about the right of a small country not to be invaded by a large neighbour?

A.C. Yeah, but they weren't British, were they?

J.P. That makes a difference?

A.C. Of course it makes a difference.

J.P. So if they're not British, you can then sell them aircraft to help a powerful neighbour get on with occupying the territory that it's invaded?

A.C. I must caution you. In the way you express things [you] are constantly foreshortening these arguments and giving them a particular colouring . . .

J.P. This is a regime that has perhaps one of the bloodiest records of the twentieth century.

A.C. Well, that's a very competitive sphere.

J.P. This regime has competed well in that league.

A.C. Has it? There's Stalin, Pol Pot and others.

J.P. In East Timor it has killed more people proportionately than Pol Pot killed in Cambodia. By all credible accounts it's killed a third of the population. Isn't that ever a consideration for the British government?

A.C. It's not something that often enters my . . . thinking, I must admit.

J.P. Why is that?

A.C. My responsibility is to my own people. I don't really fill my mind much with what one set of foreigners is doing to another.

J.P. Did it bother you personally when you were the minister responsible [and] that British equipment was causing such mayhem and human suffering, albeit to a set of foreigners?

A.C. No, not in the slightest. It never entered my head.

J.P. You don't lose sleep over it?

A.C. No.

J.P. I ask the question because I read that you were a vegetarian and you are seriously concerned about the way animals are killed.

A.C. Yeah.

J.P. Doesn't that concern extend to the way humans, albeit foreigners, are killed?

A.C. Curiously not.

J.P. Why not?

A.C. Well, it's a philosophic field. I suppose there is a relationship with the doctrine of original sin and innocence and so on . . .

J.P. In your view, are there categories of arms that should never be sold?

A.C. Yes. Nuclear, ballistic missile technology, chemical biological precursors, things like that. But in the conventional arms marketplace, as far as I'm concerned, it's open season.

J.P. You have said that where a regime is oppressively outrageous, as the gassing of children is, an army supplier should back off. Do you consider the mass slaughter of children in East Timor oppressively outrageous?

A.C. Do you mean, lined up in front of a ditch?

J.P. Yes. One of the examples used is of children and their mothers being burnt alive in a house, trapped there and burnt by the Indonesians. What's the difference?

A.C. I think gassing is dreadful. It's one of those techniques that actually breaks through one's protective indifference and is upsetting. But the other things that you mentioned . . . they just occur in combat or violent occupation situations.

J.P. I'm still not sure of the difference. Why is gassing any worse than shooting, burning, torturing?

A.C. I can't tell. There's something about it that deeply offends one's natural instinct, I suppose. It's a different threshold of violence. The other things, the examples you've given . . . I'm not familiar with the situation in East Timor . . .

J.P. You once asked a television audience, ‘Does anyone know where East Timor is?' Am I right in taking from that rather contemptuous dismissal, that [East Timor] is simply expendable?

A.C. I don't understand the use of the word expendable.

J.P. Of no consequence?

A.C. If you want to get worked up about something I can steer you in all sorts of directions, if that's your hobby, bleeding . . .

J.P. Well, no, the bleeding has been done in East Timor . . . often because of British military equipment.

A.C. I mean you can look anywhere, so what's all this
about East Timor suddenly? . . . I mean, how many people are there in the world? A billion or something? I mean, if you want to rush round and say gosh, look how dreadful this is, whatever it is, you won't have any problems. British military equipment is being used in Kashmir, and British military equipment is being used in Sri Lanka. We don't live in an ideal world.

In my film
Death of a Nation
there is a sequence filmed on board an aircraft flying between northern Australia and Timor. A party is in progress; bottles of champagne are being uncorked. There is much false laughter as two men in suits toast each other. The larger man is uneasy and deferential as he raises his glass. ‘This is an historically unique moment', he says, ‘ . . . that is truly uniquely historical.' This is Gareth Evans, Australia's foreign affairs minister since 1988. The other man is Ali Alatas, the Indonesian foreign minister. It is 1989 and the two are making a symbolic flight to celebrate the signing of the Timor Gap Treaty, which will allow Australian and international oil companies to exploit the seabed off East Timor. The ultimate prize could amount to seven billion barrels of oil or, as Gareth Evans put it, ‘zillions' of dollars.
¹⁵⁸