16 January 2006. A World to Win News Service. New revelations about US, British and Australian complicity in the 1975 Indonesian invasion of East Timor have emerged after 30 years. Recently declassified memorandums and cables lay bare the dark and ugly secrets of the imperialist powers’ involvement in that colossal crime against a nation and its people – and the extent to which they connive, collude and seek to hide what they are doing from their own people and the world.

In December 1975, the so-called New Order fascist military regime headed by General Suharto launched an all-out air, naval and ground assault on the former Portuguese colony of East Timor, which shares an island with the Indonesian territory of Tenggara Timor. While this open invasion seemed to come out of nowhere, in fact it followed a month of covert Indonesian military operations inside East Timor.

Following a soldiers’ uprising in Portugal in 1974, Portugal had given up its claims to its overseas colonies in Africa and Asia, including East Timor. An agreement was reached for a referendum on its independence to be held in 1976. Many political organizations and parties mushroomed in the wake of this announcement, including the Revolutionary Front for Independent East Timor (Fretilin). Fretilin was poised for electoral victory when armed forces chiefs in Jakarta struck. The invasion, however, did not go as smoothly as the Indonesian military had hoped. Fretilin and its supporters put up stiff resistance.

After the initial clashes, Fretilin was forced to retreat deep into the countryside and the highlands of the interior from where it carried out a long guerrilla campaign for independence. The Indonesian armed forces followed the invasion with a bloodbath, killing about 250,000 people, a third of East Timor’s population. The Indonesian military ruled over East Timor from 1975-99. Those years were some of the bloodiest and most brutal in South East Asia since the US was defeated and driven out of Vietnam, Cambodia and Laos in 1975. Key Indonesia commanders such as General Tri Sutrisno and Benny Burdani earned the name of the “butchers of East Timor�?. But others close to the Suharto clan, such as his son-in-law Major General Prabowo, who headed the KOPASSUS, the most notorious killer unit of the army, as well as units led by Lieutenant-General Zacky Anwar Makarim and General Tyasno Sudarso also carried out systematic massacres of young and adult male Timorese. In their book War Against East Timor, Carmel Budiardjo and Liem Swie Liong graphically described some of these massacres, calling them genocide.

In 1999, a year after a popular uprising of youth, workers and students in Indonesia succeeded in toppling the Suharto family from near-absolute power, a new political climate emerged, making possession of East Timor unpopular in the country. The so-called international community, made up of the imperialist powers, which had all along aided and abetted Indonesia’s invasion and occupation, did an about-face on East Timor. Gushing with pious sentiments about “human rights,�? “self-determination�? and “freedom�? all of a sudden, they called for a UN referendum on independence for East Timor in 1999. But the UN initially put the Indonesian army in charge of security there, and this signalled a new round of carnage soon afterwards. Indonesian troops and pro-Indonesia militia exacted a very high price from the East Timorese people for the country’s formal independence: 1,500 dead, numerous homes burnt and extensive looting. General Wiranto, who became a presidential candidate in 2004, figured prominently in these killings.

The UN-sponsored referendum eventually materialized when the armies of Australia and other countries operating under the signboard of a UN “peace-keeping mission�? occupied the country and oversaw the referendum victory of pro-independence Fretilin forces, by then renamed the National Council for the Resistance of the Maubere People. The leaders who emerged as victors in the referendum have been quite willing to accommodate themselves to the global capitalist market economy. They are willing to place East Timor and its people squarely within the world imperialist system, and hence domination. Despite the sacrifices by the Timorese people, the country remains subjugated, albeit in a new form, as a neocolony.

For instance, in economic terms, on 12 January the East Timor government signed an agreement with Australia that allows it to continue controlling the Greater Sunrise Field, the biggest deposits of oil and natural gas in the Timor Sea, for at least another half century. When Indonesia occupied East Timor, the generals had given these fields to Australia, recognising Australia’s claims that its sea boundary extends to 150 kilometres off East Timor’s coastline even though the two countries are separated by 600 kilometres of water. East Timor’s Foreign Minister, the Fretilin leader José Ramos Horta, called this agreement to allow Australia to enjoy the same privileges it had when Indonesia ran East Timor “a fair and just deal for both sides�?. Not surprisingly, British, Australian, Dutch and Japanese oil companies are coming to dominate East Timor’s economy. The country’s subjugation to imperialism in political terms was illustrated in early December, about the same time as the U.S. diplomatic materials were released. An East Timorese commission of inquiry into human rights abuses committed during the Indonesian occupation called for reparations from the foreign governments and arms suppliers that helped Indonesia. Xanana Gusmao, the main Fretilin leader and now the country’s president, asked that this proposal and the commission’s whole 2,500-page report be kept secret from the public. The International Herald Tribune wrote 3 December that while “opposition politicians in Dili, the East Timorese capital, said Thursday that the report would be impossible to suppress and backed the call for reparations from the United States, Britain and Australia in particular, [i]t is unlikely that the East Timorese government will back the recommendation of the commission.�?

Instead of punishing these countries for their support for Indonesia’s invasion of East Timor, the Fretilin-led government is rewarding them in an attempt to prove themselves at least as friendly to imperialist interests as Indonesia’s generals. This is one big reason why the US and its partners switched over and allowed Fretilin to come to power.

In recent years there has been a steady stream of other exposures that the US and Britain had received advance information of the Indonesian state’s intentions on East Timor, and provided practical help for the invasion. The US and other imperialist powers have continued to deny this. Now fresh details in 70 diplomatic files obtained and released by the independent U.S. National Security Archive at George Washington University in Washington have proven that the US, Britain and Australia not only lied about their prior knowledge of what Indonesia’s military had in store for East Timor, but in fact urged them on.

A March 1975 “eyes only�? top-secret memorandum meant for then Secretary of State Henry Kissinger reveals the cold cynicism in the calculations behind the approval of an invasion of East Timor by the Indonesian armed forces nine months before the first wave of assaults on the fledgling ex-colony. The United States has “considerable interests in Indonesia and none in Timor,�? opined American ambassador David Newsom in the memo.

“I’m assuming that you’re really going to keep your mouths shut on this subject?�? Kissinger himself told his staff after Indonesia started its covert military activities in East Timor in October 1975. While disavowing any knowledge of Indonesia’s designs in public, the US and Australia never wavered in military and economic support to the Indonesian generals, admirals and air marshals. The released diplomatic materials reveal that ambassador Newsome promised them that if his government were forced to officially cut off military aid to pacify American and international public opinion, it would secretly arrange for the Indonesian armed forces to keep receiving all the supplies they needed “from friendly sources of compatible equipment.�? As it turned out, they were given huge quantities of some of the most sophisticated, high-calibre military equipment available for sale in the imperialist arsenal. This continues today.

Britain’s policy, according to the previously secret documents, was to offer “guidance�? to Indonesia on East Timor – a note to UK diplomatic missions from the Foreign Office made clear its main aim was to “keep out of the controversy surrounding Timor as far as possible.�? But throughout the years of Indonesian occupation of East Timor and even a decade before the invasion of the country, the power elite in Jakarta was one of London’s main clients for all sorts of arms exports. British imperialism, a giant merchant of death in its own right, profited handsomely from this arms trade.

A decade before this invasion, the armed might of Suharto and his generals had been let loose on the Indonesian people themselves when they staged a military coup against a coalition government led by President Sukarno. The head of the state security system under the new fascist junta, Admiral Sudomo, later said that in 1965 more than half a million members and sympathizers of the Communist Party of Indonesia (PKI) were slaughtered and another half million people were made to “disappear�?. Several hundred thousand others were imprisoned in dungeons and concentration camps on the various islands of the archipelago. The exact number of people killed may never be known. Amnesty International has quoted a source that put the figure at 700,000, while others say well over a million people lost their lives in anti-communist pogroms, which lasted more than six months.

US imperialism and its junior partners in crime Britain and the Netherlands were even more deeply involved in the 1965 military coup than they were when the military junta invaded East Timor ten years later. The CIA supplied the Indonesian military with lists of PKI members and supporters. The US State Department communicated back and forth intensely through its embassy in Jakarta with the Indonesian army intelligence and security apparatus, giving information as to PKI membership of arrested persons and issuing what amounted to death lists. Money and hardware were despatched as well, along with military advisors. The CIA built networks of agents and informants in Indonesia well before and after the coup. These were all utilized by the fascist junta to carry out what was at that time the biggest holocaust since Hitler.
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