REVIEWS:
“NEGLIGENT NEIGHBOUR” by Maire Leadbeater, Craig Potton Publishing, 2006 review by Jeremy Agar
Peace Researcher 34 – July 2007
In President Roosevelt’s famous words, December
7th, 1941, is a date that will live in infamy. At dawn the Japanese bombed Pearl Harbour.
When it comes to notorious dates, December 6th, 1975 is anonymous. President
Ford and the Secretary of State, Henry Kissinger, flew home that day after
talks with Indonesian President Suharto. It might not have made the evening
news. But on December 7th the Indonesian army invaded East
Timor. Maire Leadbeater
points out that anti-imperialist groups in NZ had been on the streets in Wellington on December 5th, raising the issue of the
rights of East Timor, but few noticed. One
reason is that East Timor is a small place
which no-one could place on a map, and at the time there were plenty of more
pressing claims on our attention.
Post-colonial ennui would have played a role.
When East Timor claimed the right to independence from the disintegrating
Portuguese empire, after several hundred years as a neglected colony, it was
rejected by Indonesia.
Of course it was. When did a big country ever go along with minorities breaking
away? Foreign policy mandarins in Western capitals noted that Indonesia was
very populous and very diverse. Its hundreds of islands had little in common
beyond the accident of having recently been a Dutch colony. The instinct of
diplomats was to fear instability. If East Timor left, others might want to
follow, most obviously West Papua and
Aceh.
Fretilin, the sovereignty movement, argued that
it represented a people who were ethnically, linguistically and religiously
distinct from others in the archipelago. In the eyes of the United Nations,
Fretilin’s more compelling case might have been that it was colonised not by Holland but by Portugal. Indonesian nationalists
had made the case that post-independence boundaries should follow colonial
boundaries. That meant that if an island had been Dutch it must now become part
of Indonesia.
That was the rationale for lumping together all sorts of diverse people. So as East Timor had not been Dutch, it belonged outside the
new nation. Its claim for self-determination had numerous precedents.
US Aided & Abetted
Suharto’s Genocide And Invasion
More important to Henry Kissinger was Indonesia’s
strategic position. Vietnam
and its war was close, both in time and space (having just finished earlier in
1975, in a resounding American defeat, and the reunification of Vietnam
as an independent socialist nation. Ed.). Suharto had commended himself to the
great guru of Realpolitik by killing off half a million progressive opponents,
communists, he said, and therefore deserving of their fate. Without the toxic
excuses of the Cold War, East Timor might have
been given a fair go. For an extremely detailed account of Suharto’s genocide
of his own people in the 1960s, with very active US complicity, see Peace
Researcher 25, Special Issue, March 2002, “Ghosts Of A Genocide: The CIA,
Suharto And Terrorist Culture”, entirely written by Dennis Small, which can be
read online at http://www.converge.org.nz/abc/pr25intr.htm
Ed.
Over the decades since 1975 it had come to be
assumed by those who think about such things that Kissinger gave the
Indonesians the green light to attack East Timor,
a claim that had always been derided by the followers of Realpolitik.
Leadbeater has checked the archives, and we now know that the invasion went
down pretty much exactly as the peaceniks and troublemakers had assumed.
Kissinger gave more than tacit support, more than a nudge and a wink. More like
a direction. “It is important”, the good doctor lectured his host that December
6th, “that whatever you do succeeds quickly. We would be able to influence the
reaction if whatever happens, happens after our return... We understand your
problem and the need to move quickly but I am only saying that it would be
better if it were done after we returned”. When Gerald Ford died in 2006, the
global media had basically only nice things to say about his brief Presidency
(1974-76), which came about when Richard Nixon resigned as a result of the
Watergate scandal. Little or nothing was said about Ford’s murderous role in
the invasion and subsequent Indonesian genocide in East
Timor. Ed.
So Henry and Gerald got on the plane and next
day the general sent in the troops. The local US Central Intelligence Agency (CIA)
man recalled: “We sent the Indonesian Generals everything that you need to
fight a major war against somebody who doesn’t have guns... Without US military
support, the Indonesians might not have been able to pull it off”. The US Ambassador
to the United Nations, Daniel Moynihan, an old hand at Realpolitik, was proud
of his contribution: “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”. By
December 2nd the word had been passed to the NZ Embassy in Washington. Leadbeater quotes a cable
advising Wellington that the State Department
expected Indonesia to go
into East Timor “after Ford leaves”.
NZ Did Its Shabby Bit
To Betray The Timorese
So there was a conspiracy to aid and abet Indonesia.
Leadbeater has shown that there are smoking guns all over the place. Insight
into the thinking of the foreign policy Establishment was provided by the NZ
Ambassador to Indonesia.
Roger Peters reported that Fretilin were a “hard-core Communist” insurgency. He
didn’t care for the East Timorese either:
“Considered as human stock they are not at all impressive”. In reality
Fretilin were not Communist at all, not even of the softest core, but if a
bunch of reds of unimpressive human stock get up the nose of Ford and Kissinger
then they deserve whatever they get. Best to see no evil and hear no evil.
Indonesian troops executed an Australian journalist, the only person who might have
reported on events. His government - other western governments - didn’t want to
know about it.
Neither was this was an isolated aberration
that could be explained away. On October 16th, 1975, that is seven weeks before
open warfare broke out, five Australian-based television journalists - one a
New Zealander - had been killed as they surrendered to a provocative gang of
Indonesians. It was mass murder. Australian and UK officials pretended ignorance.
Alas, there’s nothing we can do. Relatives were pressured into not bringing
home the bodies for burial so that there would be no incriminating post
mortems. An official noted that the fuss created by the bleeding hearts over
the murdered victims was one of several “irritants” that prevented totally tranquillity
between the governments involved.
Where else have we seen these symptoms of
decadence? A big country taking over a small country, justifying itself by
bleating about the international Communist conspiracy and the threat of falling
dominoes. Notions of racial superiority justifying a superior race to dispose
of an inferior race. Big powers who could preserve the peace preferring to
first appease and then aid the aggressor. Yes, the malaise that encouraged
first Mussolini and Hitler, and then Tojo, the policy of appeasement, eased the
way for both those December 6th betrayals. As well as the rape of Czechoslovakia in 1938, of Poland in 1939, of Russia in 1941...
The optimist might hope that the Britain of
veteran Labour Prime Minister, Harold Wilson, had forgotten the lessons they
might have picked up from Chamberlain’s Britain, or that Kissinger was only
accidentally reminiscent of the pro-Nazi elites in pre-war America who had no
quarrel at all with that pro-family law and order man, that bulwark against
degenerate races, that force for regional stability, the reliable Herr Hitler.
The optimist might hope that the United Nations, surely the UN, had learned
from the 1930s’ League of Nations’ refusal to
confront the bullies. No, the Western powers had no quarrel with Suharto (and
would have had no quarrel with Hitler had he not got over-excited and marched
into France)
and the UN was content to be shunted aside by Kissinger. Leadbeater assesses
that of a pre-war population of 800,000, East Timor “lost” 200,000 between 1975
and 1999, when at last Indonesia
consented to withdraw.
Leadbeater identifies a group of five whom she
charges with co-ordinating the big sell out. They were the US, UK,
Australia, New Zealand and Japan. East Timor attracted only derisory
diplomatic support, from Cyprus,
Greece, Iceland, Portugal and some former Portuguese
colonies. Were these brave defenders of truth and justice? Or did they too have
their own agendas? Throughout that sad period Western diplomacy claimed that
only an unrepresentative faction backed Fretilin. There were indeed, Leadbeater
shows, straggling bands of pro-Indonesians, mainly in the west. She denies the
easy claim that they were ethnically different. No, their motivation has been
that they stood to lose power from the petty fiefdoms that the Indonesians had
granted. In this analysis, the guerrillas mounting raids on the
post-independent East Timorese state are the moral descendants of France’s Petain or Norway’s Quisling (the local puppet
leaders installed by the Nazis in World War 2. Ed).
In neither Australia nor NZ did attitudes
change with the party stripe of the government, but it was in 1978, at the high
tide of Muldoonism, that the main East Timorese spokesperson, Jose Ramos Horta,
was invited to tour NZ. Well, OK, the National government conceded, you can
come, but bear in mind that we don’t care for foreigners “politicking”. It’s
not the Kiwi way. Muldoon applied conditions that the putative leader of a
sovereign state could not have accepted. His visit must be private, it must
last no longer than seven days, it must be in the distracting month of December
- and the media could not report Horta! That was laid-back NZ’s way of
championing freedom and democracy. In the event, other business intruded, and
Horta cancelled.
Belated Conversion To
The Right Side Of History
East Timor won its independence in 1999, when
the big players reluctantly took up its case at the Asia Pacific Economic
Cooperation (APEC) meeting in NZ, with the then Foreign Affairs Minister, Don
McKinnon, conceding at first that its claims merited discussion only “at the
margins”. Why did Indonesia
eventually relent? Rather, why did the Gang of Five? Leadbeater suggests that
the 1990s’ end of the Cold War was a factor. Perhaps the examples of the newly
independent Baltic states played a part, or it might have been Kuwait (where Iraq, the 1990 invading big bully
was, for once, everyone’s bad guy). However history judges, the agitation by
the, at first, small band of East Timor’s
champions was significant. It might have been crucial.
According to media reports Gerald Hensley, the
former long serving Secretary of Defence, was the epitome of NZ career
diplomats. Certainly he summed up its ethos when, commenting on East Timor, he remarked that his aim had been to “work
with the grain of other societies and not against it”. This may be translated
as glide time; she’ll be right; don’t rock the boat; que sera, sera. Or, in the
words of Dennis Glover: “And Quardle oodle ardle wardle doodle/ The magpies
said”.
This business-as-usual outlook is preferable to
its alternative, the attempt to rationalise cynical inaction. An Aussie
counterpart of Hensley’s, a safe pair of hands in and around Indonesia throughout the debacle, spoke at Victoria University in 2000. Despite the changing
times, he was happy to reflect that his government’s 1975 response had been a
“pragmatic and realistic acceptance of the longer term inevitability” - of an
integration that had been reversed. He spoke of having been guided by a
“Kissingerian realism”. Which is? It’s seeing that world politics is not a
“moral” matter. It’s seeing that public accountability is a nuisance, an
irritant perhaps. He explained that his career had been hampered by “the
problem of Western democracy, namely that good politics often make bad policy”.
That’s what’s wrong with basing it on “domestic support”. The conclusion we
have to draw is that some people are resolved not to learn from their mistakes
because they do not think they have made mistakes, but when arrogance,
ignorance, and cowardice motivate our elites we can expect more bad policy.
December 6th, 1975: the events that it
triggered in Timor Leste (as the country is now called) were at first covert,
oblique, and the subsequent excesses inspired few champions, so it might never
be deemed an infamous date. But, as much as any outsider, Maire Leadbeater has
shown us that it should live in our contempt. Although Leadbeater is a
background presence in this honest, modest, and thoroughly documented account,
her role in insisting that we pay attention - and then act - has been
inspiring. Leadbeater has helped set our moral compass. We can be grateful that
the present “domestic support” for East Timor
is based on our simple understanding that morality and policy need not be
strangers. The small band of protestors who urged us to heed East
Timor’s plight have turned out to be on the right side of
history.