East Timor

[XiaoDi]

This article was printed in the Revolutionary Worker (#782) on 11/20/94. Since it’s not on the website and I happen to have access to it, I though I’d post it here. I’m posting it b/c I think there’s some really important lessons to learn from the history of East Timor.

1) Imperialism is not something that can be voted on.

2) There are no limits to the viciousness of imperialism. Even after all these years, what they’ve done to East Timor still brings tears of rage and sorrow to my eyes.

3) The courage of the Timorese and their resistance is simply amazing. That they fought so resolutely and accomplished as much as they did in such circumstances shows that the masses can accomplish incredible things. There is no reason to be pessimistic or cynical about what people can do.

4) Courage, sacrifice and resistance is not enough - you also need a correct line and correct leadership. East Timor, while no longer occupied, is far from liberated. Their “leaders” have shown themselves to be self-serving opportunists and Timor is squarely under the control of the U.S imperialists. Just think what they could have accomplished with MLM leadership.


The Island Prison of East Timor
RW #782 , 11/20/94

On Nov. 12-14, President Clinton travelled to Jakarta, Indonesia, to preside over the annual meeting of the Asian-Pacific Economic Community. For the second year in a row, he intentionally ignored the issue of the bloody occupation of East Timor by the U.S.-backed Sahuaro regime of Indonesia. Despite considerable public pressure on Clinton to address the issue, the talk at the meeting focused exclusively on economic issues.

Why are Clinton and the U.S. ruling class so reluctant to talk about East Timor? The answer to this question unveils a dirty history of the blood pact between the murderous Indonesian regime and the their U.S backers - and a story of resistance in the face of vicious oppression by the people of East Timor.

The Invasion of East Timor

The history of East Timor reveals very clearly a fundamental point about US imperialism; that there is no length to which the US will not go in order to maintain and expand its imperialism. The ruling classes occasionally claim that, while there were episodes in the past such as the genocide of the Native Americans, these unfortunate “aberrations” are not a part of modern capitalism. However, the US-supported Indonesian invasion and occupation of East Timor proves that outright genocide is still well within the realms of standard operating procedure for Western imperialism.

Most people in the U.S. probably know little about East Timor - especially the role of the U.S. government in the incredibly brutal occupation. East Timor is half of a small slender island, about the size of New Jersey, located north of Australia in the south eastern portion of the East Indies. It was colonized by Portugal in the 1500’s, which held the territory until April of 1974, when a new government brought in by a coup led by a leftist military movement began the process of decolonization.

Watching closely was Indonesia, which occupied the western part of the island and surrounded it to the north and west. Indonesia was (and is) ruled by a brutal military dictatorship which had come into power through a US sponsored coup in 1965 [see accompanying box]. Though the vast majority of the Timorese wished to be independent, the Indonesians quickly drew up plans to take over the country. Like Czarist Russia, Indonesia is a “prison-house of nations,” composed of hundreds of different cultures and nations, many of whom resent the rule of the dominate Javanese people. The Indonesian regime was worried that an independent East Timor would become an inspiration for these peoples to revive their struggles for independence.

With the okay of the US, Indonesia began an extensive destabilization campaign in East Timor, eventually provoking a short civil war in August of 1975. The fighting was quickly won by Fretilin, a very nationalistic and strongly anti-imperialist party which had overwhelmingly won earlier local elections. With Portugal having abandoned the island, Fretilin set up a very popular and effective administration. The Indonesians responded by beginning military attacks along the border, which included aerial and naval bombardment and the occupation of border towns.

The CIA knew from the very beginning the intimate details of the attacks, and presented daily updates on the situation to President Ford. They also knew the ultimate aim of these attacks: ”to engage Fretilin forces and provoke incidents that would provide the Indonesians with an excuse to secret talks in Washington, the US gave its okay to Indonesia for a full-scale invasion. Privately, US officials expressed their hope that the Indonesians could invade ”effectively and quickly,” and the US doubled its military aid to Jakarta to ensure that this would happen.

The US supported the invasion because they wanted to ensure the continued existence of a government in Indonesian that opened the country to US corporate interests. As the State Department stated later, the US condoned the invasion because Indonesia “is a country we do a lot of business with.” The US also wanted to control the deep-water straits that were a part of East Timor’s territorial waters. These straits are the quickest and safest passage between the Indian and Pacific oceans for nuclear submarines, oil tankers and other ships, and the U.S. rulers felt that control over those straits were essential to defend their interests in the region - especially at a time when their Soviet imperialist rivals were trying to expand their influence in Asia and worldwide.

The imperialists have also found more direct benefits from control of East Timor. Australia had been prospecting for oil around Timor since the 1950’s and there was evidence of considerable deposits. In a secret cable before the invasion, the Australian ambassador to Indonesia specifically mentioned that it would be easier to acquire the rights to exploit the oil and gas from Indonesia than it would be from an independent East Timor. As a result, Australia was one the strongest backers of the invasion, and began negotiating with Indonesia for the rights to the oil almost immediately.

The negotiations were concluded in 1989, after which Australian Foreign Minister Gareth Evans gushed that the oil from the region could be worth “zillions.” Estimates run as high as seven million barrels, making it one of the 25 largest oil fields in the world. One Timorese student recently stated that “The Australians are thieves, stealing the wealth of the people,” with another adding that “This country and its resources belong to the people of East Timor, and are not for the added wealth of nations already exceedingly wealthy.” When a reporter asked Evans about the morality of stealing the Timorese oil, he merely replied, “The world is a pretty unfair place.” Multinationals from the US, Japan and other Western nations have also joined in to exploit the Timorese oil.

This was not the first time the Timorese became victims of an imperialist power play. During World War Two, Australia and the US used East Timor as a buffer against the Japanese, drawing the Timorese into a war they had no part of. Australia was saved from invasion, but by the end of the war, 60,000 Timorese had been killed either by the Japanese or through US bombing. Proportionately, East Timor suffered the worst tragedy of any territory during the war.

On December 7, 1975 - a week after East Timor declared independence and only hours after President Ford and Henry Kissinger left Jakarta after meeting with the Indonesian rulers - the invasion of East Timor began. One chronicler called the invasion ”one of the most brutal operations of its kind in modern warfare.” In the words of the Bishop of Dili; “The soldiers who landed started killing everyone they could find. There were many dead bodies in the streets - all we could see were the soldiers killing, killing, killing.” Within days, most of the population of Dili, East Timor’s capital, had been killed, many in mass executions. In the countryside, entire villages were brutally slaughtered. For example, in the villages of Aileu and Remexio, everyone over the age of three was killed.

Within months, the death toll was up to 60,000 - and hundreds of thousands more fled into the mountains. The US later claimed to have cut off arms sales following the invasion. But in reality, it went out of its way to supply special weaponry to the Indonesians. Philip Lietchy, the CIA station chief in Jakarta at the time, later stated that the US deliberately tried to get as many weapons out as quickly as it could - out of fear that if the public found out about what was going on, the flow of weapons might be cut off. The public, however, was kept from knowing what was going on by the corporate media, who almost totally ignored the invasion and what followed.

At the same time, the US did every thing it could to stifle international criticism of the invasion and to prevent anyone from coming to the aid of the Timorese. The then US ambassador to the UN, Daniel Moynihan, later bluntly stated that: “The United States wished things to turn out as they did [in East Timor] and worked to bring this about.“ But as bloody as the invasion was, the Indonesian military went on to commit even greater atrocities.

[XiaoDi]

[part two]
Genocide Made in the USA

The Timorese resistance was extremely strong and effective. The invasion, which was supposed to be over in a couple of weeks, soon became a stalemate. Until late 1977, Fretilin controlled 80 percent of the country, and the 40,000 Indonesian troops were confined to the major towns in the coastal areas and a few heavily guarded corridors between them. After two years of vicious attack, Indonesia actually began to deplete its military inventory - in other words, they killed so many Timorese and caused so much destruction that they were running out of ammunition and weapons.

Having determined that Indonesia would not be able to take care of the Timorese “quickly and effectively,” the US stepped in to sell massive amounts of weaponry, in particular 16 Bronco counter-insurgency aircraft. Military aid was again doubled, rising to $100 million. England (along with other Western powers) chipped in as well, supplying eight Hawk ground-attack aircraft - planes specifically designed to attack guerrillas who have popular support and no anti-aircraft weapons. If it were not for the sale of these weapons, particularly the Broncos and the Hawks, the Indonesians could very well have been pushed out by the Timorese resistance.

Fully equipped, Indonesia launched a massive offensive in September 1977. Indonesian planes, reportedly aided by US pilots and mercenaries, began daily saturation bombing of the interior. They also used defoliants, napalm, and chemical and biological weapons. This was combined with continuous large-scale ground assaults and a deliberate policy of starvation through a “scorched earth” campaign and the destruction of the agricultural system. A letter smuggled out of East Timor described the ferocity of the offensive:

The bombers did not stop all day. Hundreds of human beings died every day. The bodies of the victims become food for carnivorous birds. Villages have been completely destroyed, some tribes decimated. The barbarities, the cruelties, the pillaging, the unqualified destruction of Timor, the executions without reason have spread deep roots in Timor. Genocide will come soon. . .

The brutal offensive forced the Timorese down from the mountains. They were put into hundreds of concentration camps modeled on the “strategic hamlets” used by the U.S. in Vietnam. Famine and disease spread through the camps, and throughout the rest of the island as well. Though the U.S. knew the extent of the famine, they conspired with the Indonesians to prevent any relief aid from being delivered until after the offensive was over. As a result, tens of thousands died of starvation and disease.

By the end of the onslaught in 1979, Indonesia had control of the majority of the country. Conservative estimates put the death toll at 200,000. This was almost one-third of the Timorese, the greatest genocide relative to population since the Holocaust.

The resistance had lost the majority of their troops and were isolated in small bands. But they quickly regrouped, to the point of launching an extraordinary attack on the capital on June 10, 1980. Soon, Fretilin was again operating in most of the countryside, along with an increasingly large clandestine support network within the camps.

The US responded by again increasing military aid and selling more weapons. With this backing, the Indonesians carried out the ”fence of legs” operation in 1981: as many as 100,000 Timorese were forced to march in front of Indonesian troops in a giant moving fence across the island. The people were forced to march for days, often without food. Thousands died directly from the operations. Because the operation was done during the harvest season, people could not harvest their crops, and starvation and malnutrition again spread among the general population. The horrific culmination of the offensive was the deliberate massacre of many thousands of people caught within the closing net. A Timorese forced to take part in clean-up operations described the scene:

It was a ghastly sight. There were a great many bodies, men, women, little children, strewn everywhere, unburied, along the river banks, on the mountain slopes. I would estimate about ten thousand people had been killed in the operation. There were so many decomposing bodies that the stench was unbearable and we couldn’t stay in the area. The Indonesian soldiers showed no mercy to anyone.

Despite the brutality of the occupiers, the people helped the resistance slip through the fence, and Fretilin remained largely intact. Soon, they actually gained the offensive, retaking territory from the Indonesians. By early 1983, the Indonesian military was on the defensive so much and its troops so demoralized that they signed a nation-wide cease-fire.

This time the U.S. stepped in with more than a $1 billion worth of military equipment, and yet another offensive was launched. The general in charge announced: “this time, no fooling around; we are going to hit them without mercy.” Massacres were again commonplace - as in the village of Malim Luro, where the entire population was crushed alive under bulldozers. This pattern of resistance by the Timorese followed by an Indonesian offensive with U.S.-supplied weapons was to continue throughout the 1980’s.

The US has hardly been alone in supporting the genocide - there are plenty of other imperialists with their claws in Indonesia. For example, England has sold scores more Hawks since 1978, along with over 600 tanks and huge amount of other weaponry. When asked how the Hawks and the other military equipment would impact the people of East Timor, the British Defense Minister (who authorized a $1 billion sale of Hawks in 1993) answered, “I don’t really fill my mind with what one set of foreigners is doing to another.” The British Foreign Office has commented that the fact that 200,000 Timorese have been killed is unimportant because, “it didn’t happen in one year.”

Imperialist “Aid” Creates Living Hell

In addition to the continuing weapons sales (over $200 million in 1990, with 250 separate weapon sales since then), the US has assisted the Indonesians in many other ways as well. The U.S. has trained officers in the Indonesian army, most of whom have gone on to see duty in East Timor. One US-trained elite unit, called Karpassus, has become known in East Timor as the nangalla, or “knife-wielding killers.”

The US Agency for International Development has provided significant amounts of aid to help the occupation. They financed the change in the agricultural system from one of subsistence growing of food crops to a cash crop plantation economy monopolized by the Indonesians. This has left East Timor dependent on food imports for the first time in its history. The USAID also helped to build the concentration camps and the new Indonesian schools, whose officially stated purpose is to “wash the brains” of the Timorese.

The US-controlled World Bank significantly increased its aid to Indonesia following the invasion, and aid continued to rise in the following years. By 1992, this amounted to $5 billion, making Indonesia one of the World Bank’s largest clients. Indonesia has also been the biggest borrower from the Asian Development Bank, as in 1993, when it received a total of $1.3 billion in loans. Besides serving the interests of imperialism in other ways, these huge loans allowed the Indonesians to divert their resources to the war against East Timor.

The result of all of this is a country which bears all the worst hallmarks of a colonized nation. One visitor to East Timor has said that the atmosphere in the capital is like Warzaw under Nazi occupation. As one Timorese put it in 1994; “We the people in East Timor call it the biggest prison island in the world, You must understand that. For us who live here, it’s hell.”

Torture, rape, “disappearances,” and massacres are daily facts of life for the Timorese. The Indonesians have around 60,000 soldiers, policemen and paid informers in East Timor - one for every ten East Timorese - and all areas of society are controlled. An Indonesian commander’s comment in 1990 revealed the attitude of the occupiers: “We Indonesian soldiers do not need Timorese. We deal with the Timorese as we deal with pigs - we slaughter them whenever possible.” To cite just one recent example, an elderly farmer was shot for not showing the proper subservience to the military. His body was then dismembered and the parts hung from a tree as a warning to others.

The Indonesian military has almost total monopoly over the country’s economy, controlling the principle industries such as coffee production and marble quarrying. Virtually no Timorese owns a business, even so much as a fruit stand. A Timorese recently commented on this by saying, “The Indonesians take coffee from Timor and with the money from that they pay back the Americans. So we Timorese pay for the bullets that kill us!”

A program funded by the World Bank has moved tens of thousands of Indonesians from the island of Java to East Timor, where they take over the best farmland from the Timorese. The World Band also funds a program of involuntary sterilization of the Timorese. Combined with the fact that the Timorese suffer from the highest infant mortality rate in the world and that 70% of the children under five malnourished, the Timorese are becoming a minority in their own land

[XiaoDi]

[part three]
Where There is Oppression, There is Resistance

Though the scale of the fighting has diminished, the genocide continues in other ways. In every way - politically, economically, socially and culturally - the Timorese are marginalized and dominated. And the Indonesian regime, with continuing U.S. support, continues to try to destroy East Timor as a nation and a people.

But the armed resistance also continues, a remarkable fact considering they have never received any outside aid and are isolated on an island which is at its widest only 60 miles across. Organized in small, mobile group linked with extensive clandestine networks in the towns, the resistance has managed to kill 20,000 Indonesian troops over the years. Though the Indonesians and their supporters continue to deny it, independent observers are almost unanimous in stressing the overwhelming public support for independence and those who actively resist the Indonesians.

As a result of this support, the armed resistance is still able to operate freely in areas of the mountainous interior, particularly at night. The leader of the Indonesian military has lamented that the Indonesians soldiers hunting Fretilin are “shooting at shadows.” According to Fretilin leaders, the size of the guerrilla force is limited only by the availability of weapons, which are scarce. In addition to the armed resistance, there are large networks of clandestine resistance which fight against the occupation in other ways, such as holding demonstrations. One such demonstration in 1991 led to the massacre of hundreds of unarmed students by the Indonesian troops.

The following account by a guerrilla who has fought in the mountains since 1983 demonstrates the continuing determination of the Timorese to fight for their independence:

My wife was tortured and burned with cigarettes. She was also raped many times. In September [1993], the Indonesians sent the population of her village to find us. My wife came to me and said, ’I don’t want to see your face because I have been suffering too much.’ At first I thought she was rejecting me, but it was the opposite; she was asking me to fight on, to stay out of the village and not to be captured and never to surrender. She said to me, ‘You get yourself killed and I shall grieve for you, but I don’t want to see you in their hands. I’ll never accept you giving up!’ I looked at her, and she was sad. I asked her if we could live together after the war, and she said softly, ‘Yes, we can.’ She then walked away.

The tradition of resistance has been passed down intact to the generation which has known nothing but Indonesian occupation. Timorese youth have kept up a low-level Intifada type resistance for years, stoning cars, harassing soldiers and burning down Indonesian markets. A group of visiting Indonesian sociologists reported that the Timorese youth have lost all fear of the army, and “though they know even mild acts of resistance will result in arrest and torture, they regard such physical torture as a lesser evil than imprisonment of the spirit.” As one youth has said; “If we resist, they kill us. If we don’t resist they still kill us. So we might as well resist.”

An expanding international network of solidarity for the Timorese struggle has developed and has become particularly strong and effective in recent years - in many cases forcing their governments to change their policies of support for the occupation. Even the US has been forced by public outrage to qualify its past total support for the genocide in East Timor. The international solidarity has also affected the Indonesian regime; for example, it played an important role in preventing Jakarta from executing the leader of the resistance, Xanana Gusmao, who was captured in 1992.

Cold-Blooded U.S. Hypocrisy

What has gone down in East Timor demonstrates clearly: It is a mistake to think that a change in which political party occupies the White House means a fundamental change in the policies of U.S. imperialism. The Republican Ford administration approved the invasion. Democratic President Carter oversaw and supported the change from aggression to genocide. This support carried on through the Reagan and Bush years, and now continues under the Clinton administration.

Because of the U.S., there is not a Timorese in the world who has not lost at least a parent or a child or a sibling - most have lost far more. Many families have been totally destroyed. Philip Lietchy, the CIA agent mentioned earlier, has recently stated that:

Without the continued heavy US logistical military support the Indonesians might not have been able to pull it off. They were able to stay there at no real cost to them; it didn’t put any pressure on their economy and on their military forces because American taxpayers were footing the bill for the killing of all those people and for the acquisition of that territory, to which they had no right whatsoever. We were providing most of the weaponry, helicopters, logistical support . . all of the expendables the Indonesians needed to conduct this war.

The U.S. and its allies have continually lied about the situation in East Timor. They have repeatedly claimed- even in the middle of Indonesian military offensives - that there was no fighting going on or that the guerillas were no more than ”desperate terrorists” responsible for “pillaging villages [and] murdering people.” The US even claimed that Fretilin was responsible for the famines and that they had ”turned the country into a wasteland.”

The U.S. has also continually claimed that the situation in East Timor is “improving” - a statement made most recently by Secretary of State Warren Christopher. The reality is the exact opposite. The conservative Bishop of East Timor, Carlos Belo, who is virtually the only Timorese who can speak freely, said recently, “It has never been worse here. East Timor is an island of total fear and terror. We live here like in a prison, everyone is in prison. We ask the people of the world to understand this, and not to forget that we are here, struggling for life every day.”

Despite their lies and hypocrisy, the U.S. has known all along the extent of the genocide in East Timor. Lietchy has said:

I saw my own government very much involved in what was going on in East Timor. And what was going on was not good. I saw the intelligence that came from firm sources. There were people being herded into school buildings by Indonesian soldiers and the buildings set on fire; anyone trying to get out was shot. There were people herded into fields and machine-gunned. We knew the place was a free-fire zone. None of that got out.

The reason why “none of that got out” is simple. As one US congressman put it a couple years after the invasion, “it is in all our interests to bury the Timor issue quickly and completely.” The U.S. ruling class has tried to ensure that this is the case - because to know about East Timor is to understand how far they will go to protect their imperialist interests. The history of East Timor shows that the U.S imperialists will not shrink from using genocide to protect and expand their empire - even as they scream about “human rights abuses” to justify imperialist wars and interventions in other parts of the world.

In a letter smuggled out of East Timor in 1978, a Timorese wrote; “Tell my son that for nothing on this earth should he return to Timor. I would rather die without seeing him again than to know he had returned to this hell.” The letter ended with a plea; “Is the world going to continue to pretend to ignore the drama of Timor? Let there be at least a little respect for the suffering of so many innocent people!”

Traveling to Jakarta and shaking hands with the butchers of the Suharto regime who were carrying out yet another offensive against the Timor, Bill Clinton tried - as four U.S. presidents before him have done - to “bury the issue of East Timor.” But for the oppressed people worldwide, the drama of East Timor is a deep and powerful indictment of the crimes of U.S. imperialism.