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Suharto, the Model Killer,
and His Friends in High Places
John Pilger
Lew
Rockwell.com
Tuesday January 29, 2008
In my film Death of a Nation, there is a sequence
filmed on board an Australian aircraft flying over the island
of Timor. A party is in progress, and two men in suits are toasting
each other in champagne. "This is an historically unique
moment," says one of them, "that is truly uniquely historical."
This is Gareth Evans, Australia’s foreign minister. The
other man is Ali Alatas, principal mouthpiece of the Indonesian
dictator, General Suharto. It is 1989, and the two are making
a grotesquely symbolic flight to celebrate the signing of a treaty
that allowed Australia and the international oil and gas companies
to exploit the seabed off East Timor, then illegally and viciously
occupied by Suharto. The prize, according to Evans, was "zillions
of dollars."
Beneath them lay a land of crosses: great black crosses etched
against the sky, crosses on peaks, crosses in tiers on the hillsides.
Filming clandestinely in East Timor, I would walk into the scrub
and there were the crosses. They littered the earth and crowded
the eye. In 1993, the Foreign Affairs Committee of the Australian
Parliament reported that "at least 200,000" had died
under Indonesia’s occupation: almost a third of the population.
And yet East Timor’s horror, which was foretold and nurtured
by the US, Britain and Australia, was actually a sequel. "No
single American action in the period after 1945," wrote the
historian Gabriel Kolko, "was as bloodthirsty as its role
in Indonesia, for it tried to initiate the massacre." He
was referring to Suharto’s seizure of power in 1965–6,
which caused the violent deaths of up to a million people.
(Article continues below)
To understand the significance of Suharto, who died on Sunday,
is to look beneath the surface of the current world order: the
so-called global economy and the ruthless cynicism of those who
run it. Suharto was our model mass murderer – "our"
is used here advisedly. "One of our very best and most valuable
friends," Thatcher called him, speaking for the West. For
three decades, the Australian, US and British governments worked
tirelessly to minimize the crimes of Suharto’s Gestapo,
known as Kopassus, who were trained by the Australian SAS and
the British army and who gunned down people with British-supplied
Heckler and Koch machine guns from British-supplied Tactica "riot
control" vehicles. Prevented by Congress from supplying arms
direct, US administrations from Gerald Ford to Bill Clinton, provided
logistic support through the back door and commercial preferences.
In one year, the British Department of Trade provided almost a
billion pounds worth of so-called soft loans, which allowed Suharto
buy Hawk fighter-bombers. The British taxpayer paid the bill for
aircraft that dive-bombed East Timorese villages, and the arms
industry reaped the profits. However, the Australians distinguished
themselves as the most obsequious. In an infamous cable to Canberra,
Richard Woolcott, Australia’s ambassador to Jakarta, who
had been forewarned about Suharto’s invasion of East Timor,
wrote: "What Indonesia now looks to from Australia …is
some understanding of their attitude and possible action to assist
public understanding in Australia …" Covering up Suharto’s
crimes became a career for those like Woolcott, while "understanding"
the mass murderer came in buckets. This left an indelible stain
on the reformist government of Gough Whitlam following the cold-blooded
killing of two Australian TV crews by Suharto’s troops during
the invasion of East Timor. "We know your people love you,"
Bob Hawke told the dictator. His successor, Paul Keating, famously
regarded the tyrant as a father figure. When Indonesian troops
slaughtered at least 200 people in the Santa Cruz cemetery in
Dili, East Timor, and Australian mourners planted crosses outside
the Indonesian embassy in Canberra, foreign minister Gareth Evans
ordered them destroyed. To Evans, ever-effusive in his support
for the regime, the massacre was merely an "aberration."
This was the view of much of the Australian press, especially
that controlled by Rupert Murdoch, whose local retainer, Paul
Kelly, led a group of leading newspaper editors to Jakarta, fawn
before the dictator.
Here lies a clue as to why Suharto, unlike Saddam Hussein, died
not on the gallows but surrounded by the finest medical team his
secret billions could buy. Ralph McGehee, a senior CIA operations
officer in the 1960s, describes the terror of Suharto’s
takeover of Indonesia in 1965–6 as "the model operation"
for the American-backed coup that got rid of Salvador Allende
in Chile seven years later. "The CIA forged a document purporting
to reveal a leftist plot to murder Chilean military leaders,"
he wrote, "[just like] what happened in Indonesia in 1965."
The US embassy in Jakarta supplied Suharto with a "zap list"
of Indonesian Communist Party (PKI) members and crossed off the
names when they were killed or captured. Roland Challis, the BBC’s
south east Asia correspondent at the time, told me how the British
government was secretly involved in this slaughter. "British
warships escorted a ship full of Indonesian troops down the Malacca
Straits so they could take part in the terrible holocaust,"
he said. "I and other correspondents were unaware of this
at the time …. There was a deal, you see."
The deal was that Indonesia under Suharto would offer up what
Richard Nixon had called "the richest hoard of natural resources,
the greatest prize in southeast Asia." In November 1967,
the greatest prize was handed out at a remarkable three-day conference
sponsored by the Time-Life Corporation in Geneva. Led by David
Rockefeller, all the corporate giants were represented: the major
oil companies and banks, General Motors, Imperial Chemical Industries,
British American Tobacco, Siemens and US Steel and many others.
Across the table sat Suharto’s US-trained economists who
agreed to the corporate takeover of their country, sector by sector.
The Freeport company got a mountain of copper in West Papua. A
US/ European consortium got the nickel. The giant Alcoa company
got the biggest slice of Indonesia’s bauxite. America, Japanese
and French companies got the tropical forests of Sumatra. When
the plunder was complete, President Lyndon Johnson sent his congratulations
on "a magnificent story of opportunity seen and promise awakened."
Thirty years later, with the genocide in East Timor also complete,
the World Bank described the Suharto dictatorship as a "model
pupil."
Shortly before he died, I interviewed Alan Clark, who under Thatcher
was Britain’s minister responsible for supplying Suharto
with most of his weapons. I asked him, "Did it bother you
personally that you were causing such mayhem and human suffering?"
"No, not in the slightest," he replied. "It never
entered my head."
"I ask the question because I read you are a vegetarian
and are seriously concerned with the way animals are killed."
"Yeah?"
"Doesn’t that concern extend to humans?"
"Curiously not."
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INFOWARS:
BECAUSE THERE'S A WAR ON FOR YOUR MIND
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