A few days ago, the people of E. Timor voted overwhelmingly against remaining a colony of Indonesia. In that United Nations' sponsored election, 78 percent of E. Timor's people voted for independence. And Indonesia, the world's 4th largest country, did what it has always done -- it invaded.
First came the paramilitary death squads, with heavy arms and ammunition supplied by the United States and Britain. Then came the kidnappings, lootings and murder. Then came the official Indonesian military, supposedly to "keep order," with arms and helicopters supplied by the U.S. and Britain. And the bloodshed and mass looting continued. 200,000 East Timorese have now fled their homes. A senior officer at military headquarters said that nothing will be left for independent East Timor.
When the 20,000 Indonesian police and soldiers based in the territory leave, inside reports inform us, they will blow up the main roads and bridges behind them -- with explosives sent by the U.S. and Britain.
"Make no mistake, this is being directed from Jakarta," said a high-ranking Western official in the UN compound. "This is not a situation where a few gangs of rag-tag militia are out of control. As everybody here knows, it has been a military operation from start to finish."
On Wednesday, the United Nations announced that the situation was too dangerous for its personnel, and it was pulling them out by Friday. Thousands of people who had taken refuge in the UN compound are being left behind, according to independent journalist Allan Nairn, the last US-based reporter there. Reporting Wednesday morning on Democracy Now, Nairn said that these people will literally be slaughtered by Indonesia's troops and paramilitary as soon as the Australian/UN transport helicopters leave.
This is what genocide and "ethnic cleansing" really look like. Over the past generation, 1/3rd of the entire population has been murdered by the Indonesian military.
My old friend Billy Nessen had been reporting from E. Timor and Indonesia for many months earlier this year, his reports on Democracy Now and his articles appearing Z Magazine. Now at the Columbia University School of Journalism where he's just beginning his studies, I called him this morning and asked him to write a paragraph for this letter. He told me that many of his friends have already been murdered, and the sense of powerlessness we all have been feeling lately is driving him crazy. Here's what he wrote:
"My friends are being slaughtered in East Timor. Young, sweet earnest men and women I spent months with, boys and girls who had survived early years in the mountains after Indonesia invaded and then life in Dili and Baucaua in the clandestine movement. Many had already suffered electric shocks and water torture and bags of lye over their heads and metal bars shoved up the anus. Now they are falling. Executed in lines, outside burning homes and razed churches, by army and militias, their heads stuck atop stakes lining the road. Hundreds. Thousands. Tens of thousands perhaps. I sit here, sobbing, filled with guilt for having left and rage and sadness. I find it hard to go on. Martin Luther King was wrong, the universe does not bend toward justice. Sebastian, Fernao, Jocinto, Maria, my dear Maria, forgive me."
The crisis in East Timor is a product of the United States and British governments which supply 90 percent of the weaponry for the Indonesian military. It is also a product of unlimited loans from the IMF and World Bank to shore up the economy and allow western corporations full reign there. Therefore, we demand:
1) President Clinton must order a complete cessation of arms flow to Indonesia immediately. It should have been done 35 years ago, but each president, including Clinton, felt it was more important to protect US corporate investments in sweatshops in Indonesia than to protect human rights in Indonesia and East Timor.
2) The International Monetary Fund and World Bank must contact the Indonesian regime immediately and cut off all economic assistance and loans. Indonesia is the recipient of $42 billion in IMF funds. Given the precarious economic situation in Indonesia today, without that money its economy would collapse. Economic cutoff might force Indonesia to "back off" E. Timor.
3) The US and western corporations must be held accountable for their complicity and support for the Indonesia regime. This includes: Mobil, Nike, Reebok, Ford, Shell. The UN should institute economic sanctions against Indonesia. The companies should be made targets, in addition to government embassies and consulates, for political protests.
4) Henry Kissinger, Adm. Blair, Walter Mondale (is he still alive?), Jimmy Carter, George Bush, Gerald Ford, Ronald Reagan, Bill Clinton, Al Gore, Madeleine Albright, Sen. Daniel Patrick Moynihan, and other US officials must be brought to trial as war criminals for their crimes against humanity, and specifically for their involvement in the ongoing slaughter of the Timorese people by the Indonesian client-state.
Henry Kissinger and Gerald Ford actually gave the go-ahead 25 years ago. As British reporter John Pilgar writes, Air Force One, carrying President Ford and his secretary of state Henry Kissinger, climbed out of Indonesian airspace the day the bloodbath began. "They came and gave Suharto the green light," Philip Liechty, the CIA desk officer in Jakarta at the time, told Pilgar. "The invasion was delayed two days so they could get the hell out. We were ordered to give the Indonesian military everything they wanted. I saw all the hard intelligence; the place was a free-fire zone. Women and children were herded into school buildings that were set alight -- and all because we didn't want some little country being neutral or leftist at the United Nations." Ten years later, US Vice-President Walter Mondale, with the approval of President Carter, sent deadly military helicopters and ammunition to the Indonesian regime upon their request, to extirpate the Timor citizenry who had fled the soldiers and taken to the mountains.
Over the weekend, I managed to grab onto US Senator from NY, Chuck Schumer, at the Carribbean Day festival. I questioned him about cutting off US military and financial aid to Indonesia. He said, "that's a very good idea, especially with what the Indonesia government is doing in East Timor." Of course, as a Congressperson and now as Senator he's had many years to actually sponsor such a bill and hasn't done so. Nevertheless, we need to lean on him and others to do so TODAY.
What you can do:
CALL President Clinton's comment hotline: (202) 456-1414. Follow the prompts so you can talk with a live person. Email: president@whitehouse.gov
CALL your senators and representative. Urge them to call Secretary of State Madeleine Albright, President Clinton, and Secretary of Defense William Cohen directly. The Congressional switchboard number is 202-224-3121 or check www.congress.gov for contact information on individual offices.
CALL Assistant Secretary of State Stanley Roth at (202) 647-9596. Don't let the staff transfer you to the Indonesia desk. You want this message to reach Roth himself. The Indonesia desk officers are already doing what they can.
CALL US Mission to the UN. Peggy Kerry is the liasison to NGO's. Her number is (212)-415-4050 or (212)-415.4054. Also, email UN Secretary
General Kofi Annan: ecu@un.org
CALL the press. Blast them for their pathetic coverage (especially the NY Times). Explain your concern about journalists pulling out of East Timor. Without international reporting, there will be even worse atrocities against East Timorese from the Indonesia military and paramilitaries.
Reuters at 800-537-6865 Associated Press at 202-776-9400 Agence France Press (AFP) at 202-466-7890, 202-289-0700 Interpress (IPS) at 202-662-7160 CNN at 404-827-1500 BBC at 202-223-2050, 202-223-0110 New York Times at 212-556-1234 Washington Post at 202-334-7400
Mitchel Cohen Green Party of NY, & Greens / Green Party USA
Background: from: The Internet Anti-Fascist Newsletter tallpaul@nyct.net (Paul Kniessel) Sept. 8, 1999
Indonesia is carrying out an ethnic cleansing campaign in East Timor, hoping to drasctically reduce the Timorese population, possibly so that a new vote can be called sometime in the future. Tens of thousands of East Timorese have been forced across the border to West Timor.
The response of the U.S. government is very instructive. During the last year, they have accused the Yugoslav government of Slobodan Milosevic of carrying out just such a campaign in Kosovo, the province of Serbia now occupied by NATO troops.
The result of these accusations was the 72 day NATO bombing campaign of Yugoslavia, and the subsequent occupation of Kosovo by NATO troops. But the U.S. reaction to the situation in East Timor has been wholly different.
While various administration spokespersons have mouthed support for East Timor, and criticized Indonesia, not one penny of U.S. aid has been stopped. Japan and Britian are also major aid suppliers to Indonesia, and this money is still flowing.
Yugoslavia has been living under crippling sanctions for many years, supposedly because of human rights violations. Yet Indonesia, whose 24 year illegal occupation of East Timor has resulted in the deaths of one third of the population, is not under any kind of sanctions at all. In fact, it continues to trade with the developed world without any hindrance at all. Western multinationals have, of course, invested heavily in Indonesia, to exploit its cheap labor, and Indonesia is a major oil producer.
The current Indonesian government came to power in a 1965 coup against a popular, nationalist government that had made an alliance with the Indonesian Communist Party. In the aftermath of the coup, 1 million Indonesians were murdered, and many of their names and addresses were supplied by the U.S. state department. The U.S. has strongly supported Indonesia since the coup, and the Pentagon has provided training and aid to the Indonesian military.
The contrast between Indonesia and Yugoslavia is stark, and illustrative of the real U.S. position, which is to always defend its interests, and not give a damn about human rights. Whatever else Yugoslavia may have done, it is an independent country, and not willing to pay homage to Washington. This is its real crime, and not human rights violations. This concern for the lives and living standards of ordinary people is merely a cover for the avaricious appetite of US transnationals and their army in waiting, the Pentagon.
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Sydney Morning Herald Thursday, September 9, 1999
Fear and looting: life on the mean streets of Dili
By LINDSAY MURDOCH in the United Nations compound, Dili
The looting never stops. It's brazen now: soldiers, police and militia are stealing whatever they can carry.
Dozens of trucks full with televisions, refrigerators and other household goods are parked on the road outside Dili's military headquarters, ready to make the seven-hour dash across East Timor to the Indonesian province of Nusa Tenggara Timur.
United Nations officials who went under armed escort to Dili's wharf yesterday saw looted goods still wrapped waiting to be loaded aboard Indonesian ships. There were bikes, mattresses, coffee tables and countless other items.
"All the good stuff like televisions apparently went early," said one of six UN officials to venture outside the besieged UN compound. UN officials have seen soldiers on motorbikes, men driving stolen UN vehicles and military trucks loaded with goods looted from shops, offices, hotels, homes and factories.
"They intend to leave nothing behind," said one UN official.
Indonesia's armed forces and their proxy militia have embarked on a campaign to steal everything of value from Dili and destroy all major infrastructure, including electricity plants, water supplies, the telephone networks and fuel storage supplies. Power, water and telephones were cut abruptly on Tuesday night.
A senior officer at military headquarters has been overheard to say that nothing will be left for independent East Timor.
When up to 20,000 Indonesian police and soldiers based in the territory have fled, the main roads and bridges are expected to be detonated.
"Make no mistake, this is being directed from Jakarta," said a high-ranking Western official in the UN compound. "This is not a situation where a few gangs of rag-tag militia are out of control. As everybody here knows, it has been a military operation from start to finish."
UN officials estimate the damage bill will be billions of dollars. They say that it would take decades to rebuild the territory's basic infrastructure.
For 24 hours a thick pall of smoke has hung over the almost deserted town. Throughout yesterday a dozen fires could be seen at any one time. Huge explosions are heard every hour or so, indicating the Indonesians are using incendiary bombs to set buildings ablaze.
A UN storage depot less than one kilometre from the UN's headquarters was alight. UN vehicles were also burning. All commercial and many government buildings have been either looted or set alight. An entire block of central Dili is a smouldering ruin. The bakery where UN staff and journalists got the only fresh bread in town is gone. So too is the supermarket, the barber's shop, the bookshop and the clinic.
The waterfront Hotel Turismo, which had been our home for many months, has been looted and the rooms and restaurant destroyed. All my belongings have been stolen: new digital camera, mobile telephone, clothes. Most colleagues in the UN compound are in the same position.
The colonial home of East Timor's former governor apparently has been destroyed. It was a prime target because it was rented two months ago by the Herald. The militia made repeated threats to kill us.
According to the UN all of the houses rented by foreigners have been looted and either wrecked or burnt. Fifty of them had been occupied by UN staff until everybody was forced to flee.
A house rented by several Australian Federal Police officers was burnt overnight. "We've lost everything," one of them said. "I have no idea what has happened to the wonderful family that looked after us."
We knew our house was doomed when the militia came around one night and painted a silver arrow on the fence, indicating it was marked for attack.
The military commander's house next door is untouched.
For days Dili has remained deserted except for rampaging militia, police or soldiers.
A UN official described a group of dazed-looking people walking towards Dili's wharf, where more than 4,000 people waited for ships.
Residents of Becora, an independence stronghold, said the militia and military went from door to door dragging people out who were hiding inside. They were loaded onto trucks at gunpoint.
The UN has hundreds of reports of people being kidnapped and put on planes and ships against their will with nothing but the clothes they stand in. Some were even put on a ship departing for Irian Jaya.
"The entire town has been cleansed of people," an official said.
The doors of most houses have been left open by looters. Some residents who risked execution to return to their homes were seen picking through smouldering rubble yesterday.
Militia, police and soldiers have been seen roaring along streets on motorbikes and in cars, many of them stolen. An American activist, Mr Allan Nairn, who sneaked past Indonesian soldiers guarding the UN compound at dawn, returned after three hours to say nearby houses were deserted.
"One old man hiding out shared a plate of rice with me," he said. "I was just climbing over back fences and walking through people's living rooms. The doors were all open."
When the militia eventually saw Mr Nairn, he wrapped a red and white cloth across his body, the colours of Indonesia's flag, and walked down the centre of the streets back to the compound.
When the two-vehicle UN convoy arrived to check a food warehouse, militia started to gun the motors on the motorbikes they were riding shouting threats.
A shot was fired at the departing convoy. A second five-vehicle UN convoy was confronted by a gang of 50 armed militia. A tense stand-off developed. Indonesian soldiers who were supposed to be providing security did nothing.
The convoy managed to obtain a small amount of water before one of the militia smashed the rear window of a UN vehicle with a machete. The convoy dashed backed to the UN compound, where basic supplies of food and water are quickly running out.
About 100 UN staff and 2,000 refugees sheltering in the compound have only a day or two of basic supplies left.
"The warehouse is probably being looted and burnt at this moment," a UN official said.
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EMERGENCY ALERT Sept. 6, 1999
SEVERE VIOLENCE ESCALATES IN EAST TIMOR AS MOST FOREIGN REPORTERS EVACUATE MAKE 3 CALLS ... AND DEMONSTRATE!
Less than 24 hours after the UN announced that more than 78% of registered voters in East Timor voted for independence from Indonesia, Indonesian military and paramilitary forces sharply escalated their campaign of terror. Remaining International Federation for East Timor observers report widespread shooting by both paramilitary forces and TNI (Indonesian military forces), including the Kopassus Special Forces, known for its atrocious human rights abuses. The Becora neighborhood of Dili has been particularly targeted, with 77 bodies reported scattered throughout the streets. Many children are among the dead. Paramilitary forces roam the streets of Dili unimpeded, while joint militia/army roadblocks block entrance to and exit from the capitol. The paramilitaries and TNI are systematically targeting buildings which house refugees.
With the evacuation of UN staff and media from outlying towns, foreign observers are unable to confirm the extent of violence outside Dili, but it is believed to be severe. But, we do know that hundreds of houses have been burned and dozens killed in Maliana alone. Thousands more East Timorese are now refugees. The presence of foreign media is critical to report this horror to the world's governments. They must be encouraged to stay.
Time has run out! TNI must withdraw immediately from East Timor. The paramilitaries must be immediately disbanded. The U.S. must offer full support for increased UN personnel and an expanded UN mission mandate.
The UN must be granted control of administration and security in East Timor.
The U.S. should cut off all military and financial assistance immediately!
For more information, contact Karen at the New York ETAN office at 914-428-7299 or salama74@aol.com, or Brad Simpson at IFET at 773-255-7949.
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ACTION ALERT: U.S. ROLE MISSING FROM EAST TIMOR COVERAGE
September 1, 1999
The ongoing story of East Timor's referendum on independence as received a moderate amount of coverage in the mainstream media. But news outlets have frequently failed to put the Timor story in a full and accurate context.
For example, in reports from East Timor's capital, the Associated Press and some other news outlets continue to use the dateline "Dili, Indonesia," implying that Indonesia has a legitimate claim over East Timor. This formulation is comparable to a dateline of "Kuwait City, Iraq" in the months following Iraq's illegal annexation of Kuwait. The Washington Post (8/31/99) reported that Timorese were voting on "whether to remain a part of Indonesia."
More importantly, many stories fail to note two crucial facts about East Timor's nearly 25-year struggle against Indonesian occupation. First, the Indonesian occupation has been extraordinarily bloody, resulting in the deaths of more than 200,000 Timorese, out of a pre-invasion population of approximately 600,000. A recent AP story noted that an "estimated 2,000 Indonesian troops have died fighting separatist guerrillas since Indonesia invaded East Timor in 1975," but failed to note the massive numbers of Timorese who have perished.
Others seemed to confuse the deaths caused by the occupation with those caused by the resistance movement. ABC News' Charles Gibson said that "It's been an extraordinary violent independence movement there with hundreds of thousands of people killed" (Good Morning America, 8/31/99).
Secondly, news consumers are not informed that the U.S. backed Indonesia's invasion of East Timor. President Gerald Ford and Secretary of State Henry Kissinger visited the Indonesian capital of Jakarta in December 1975, just before the invasion was launched, where they were told of Suharto's plans to attack the island (Washington Post, 11/9/79).
The following month, a State Department official told a major Australian newspaper (The Australian, 1/22/76) that "in terms of the bilateral relations between the U.S. and Indonesia, we are more or less condoning the incursion into East Timor... The United States wants to keep its relations with Indonesia close and friendly. We regard Indonesia as a friendly, non-aligned nation--a nation we do a lot of business with."
Daniel Patrick Moynihan, who was then the U.S. Ambassador to the United Nations wrote in his memoirs (A Dangerous Place) that "the Department of State desired that the United Nations prove utterly ineffective in whatever measures it undertook" to reverse the invasion. "This task was given to me and I carried it forward with no inconsiderable success," Moynihan reported.
Finally, according to the State Department, 90 percent of the weapons used in the invasion came from the United States. Two years later, as the atrocities in East Timor were reaching a peak, President Jimmy Carter authorized an addition $112 million in weapons sales to Indonesia.
ACTION: Please call on local and national news outlets to stop treating East Timor as a legitimate part of Indonesia. And ask them to include the facts about the consequences of the Indonesian invasion, as well as the role the U.S. has played in supporting the illegal occupation.
To contact the Associated Press, write to:
Associated Press Thomas Kent-- International Editor (212) 621-1655 mailto:info@ap.org
Also, read FAIR's previous coverage of East Timor and Indonesia at: http://www.fair.org/international/east-timor.html
--------------------- Sept. 8
Briefly, Bishop Belo has been "removed" to "protective custody" in Comoro, Dili. His housed was torched and destroyed. Reports detailing attacks on orphanages are also coming out of Dili. Tonight, on the BBC, footage of hundreds of people fleeing militias and jumping over razor wire into the UN compound was broadcast.
There is a forced refugee flow of around 150,000 persons, with larger numbers being predicted. Houses are being burned, the International Red Cross has been attacked. Most journalists have left East Timor.
Thursday's demonstration is only the first. We hope to have simultaneous demonstrations in different cities in the US by next week at the latest. If you have any suggestions, please make them. Call Michael Ede at (212) 206-1108. Is anyone willing to engage in civil disobedience? Does anyone have any suggestions about legal representation?
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Jakarta's godfathers
by John Pilger Tuesday September 7, 1999
Having finally discovered East Timor, most of the media have now left, blaming a "descent into violence". The long, silent years mock these words. The descent began almost a quarter of a century ago when Indonesian special forces invaded the defenceless Portuguese colony. On December 7, 1975, a lone radio voice rose and fell in the static: "The soldiers are killing indiscriminately. Women and children are being shot in the streets. This is an appeal for international help. This is an SOS - please help us."
No help came, because the western democracies were secret partners in a crime as great and enduring as any this century; proportionally, not even Pol Pot matched Suharto's spree. Air Force One, carrying President Ford and his secretary of state Henry Kissinger, climbed out of Indonesian airspace the day the bloodbath began. "They came and gave Suharto the green light," Philip Liechty, the CIA desk officer in Jakarta at the time, told me. "The invasion was delayed two days so they could get the hell out. We were ordered to give the Indonesian military everything they wanted. I saw all the hard intelligence; the place was a free-fire zone. Women and children were herded into school buildings that were set alight - and all because we didn't want some little country being neutral or leftist at the United Nations." And all because western capital regarded Indonesia as a "prize".
Having been tipped off about the invasion, the British ambassador cabled the foreign office that it was in Britain's interests for Indonesia to "absorb the territory as soon and as unobtrusively as possible". Since then, the foreign office has lied incessantly about East Timor -- not misled, lied. When the film I made with David Munro and Max Stahl, Death of a Nation, disclosed the extent to which the British were involved, especially the use of British Aerospace Hawk fighter aircraft in East Timor, officials of the south-east Asian department tried to denigrate and smear East Timorese witnesses to the Hawks' bombing raids, whose relatives had been killed and maimed by British cluster bombs. When Robin Cook's predecessor, David Owen, licensed the sale of the first Hawks to Indonesia in 1978, he dismissed reports of the East Timorese death toll, then well over 60,000 or 10% of the population, as "exaggerated".
For almost 20 years, the BBC and the major western news agencies preferred to "cover" East Timor from Jakarta, which was like reporting on a Nazi-occupied country from Berlin. The coverage was minute; not offending the invader and keeping your visa became all-important. A Jakarta-based BBC correspondent told me that my film, made undercover in East Timor, had "made life very difficult for us here".
In Whitehall, a refined system of flattery worked well. Senior broadcasters and commentators popped into the foreign office without any material favours expected. For them, the flattery and "access" were enough. Thus, both Tory and Labour governments, Indonesia's biggest weapons suppliers, were able to go about their business of complicity in genocide unchallenged, bar the efforts of a few honourable exceptions.
More recently, the grotesque hypocrisy of Tony Blair weeping for the children of Dunblane, then sending machine guns that mow down children in East Timor, was ignored. So was Robin Cook's epic cynicism, allowing him to leap from telling parliament in 1994 that Hawk aircraft had been "observed on bombing runs in East Timor in most years since 1984" to denying his own words - to the public-relations stunt of an "ethical" foreign policy while his functionaries lied to journalists that no Hawks were operational in East Timor.
Now that Hawks have been visible to all over East Timor, Baroness Symonds, who has the Orwellian title of defence procurement minister, insults the intelligence and humanity of Radio 4 listeners by lecturing a deferential James Naughtie on "rights". East Timor's tormentors should have British weapons because they "have a right under the United Nations charter to defend themselves". Moreover, "they have a right" to come to next week's British government-sponsored arms fair in Surrey, the biggest ever. Last year, her government approved the sale of #625bn in arms, a record never reached by the Tories and surpassed only by the US.
Tomorrow, the East Timorese leader, Xanana Gusmao, is due to be released from house arrest in Jakarta. If he returns to his homeland, he is likely to be killed and the murder weapon is likely to be British; the Heckler and Koch rapid-firing gun, supplied to Indonesia's Kopassus gestapo by British Aerospace, is perfect for the job. All arms sales to Indonesia, by the way, are heavily subsidised by the British taxpayer.
As for getting the Indonesians out of East Timor, their western godfathers
can achieve a great deal if they want to. Blair has the power to freeze
arms shipments. The US controls $45 billion underwriting Jakarta's
collapsed economy. They always say they act in our name. So raise your
voice now.
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