Suharto
29 Jan 2008
A Model Dictator
Waiting for political prisoners to be released after the fall of Suharto. David Dare Parker
During the Suharto era many in the West made a career out of covering up his crimes and "understanding" the mass murderer, writes John Pilger
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 was Gareth Evans, Australia's then Foreign Minister. The other man was Ali Alatas, the principal mouthpiece of the Indonesian dictator General Suharto, who died on the weekend.
The year was 1989, and the two were making a grotesquely symbolic flight to celebrate the signing of a treaty that would allow 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, a Foreign Affairs parliamentary committee reported that "at least 200,000" had died under Indonesia's occupation: almost a third of the population. Yet East Timor's horror, foretold and nurtured by the US, Britain and Australia, was 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.
To understand the significance of Suharto 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. "One of our very best and most valuable friends," Margaret Thatcher called him. For three decades the South East Asian department of the British Foreign Office worked tirelessly to minimise the crimes of Suharto's gestapo, known as Kopassus, who gunned down people with British-supplied Heckler & Koch machine guns from British-supplied Tactica ‘riot control' vehicles.
A Foreign Office specialty was smearing witnesses to the bombing of East Timorese villages by British-supplied Hawk aircraft - until Robin Cook was forced to admit it was true. Almost a billion pounds in export credit guarantees financed the sale of the Hawks, paid for by the British taxpayer while the arms industry reaped the profit.
However, the Australians distinguished themselves as the most obsequious. In an infamous cable to Canberra, Richard Woolcott, then 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 and "understanding" the mass murderer became a career for many. 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 and Australian mourners planted crosses outside the Indonesian embassy in Canberra, 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, to 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 in 1965-6 as "the model operation" for the US-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 members and crossed off the names when they were killed or captured. Roland Challis, BBC 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 South East 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, 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 Suharto as a "model pupil".
Shortly before the death of Alan Clark, who under Thatcher was the minister responsible for supplying Suharto with most of his weapons, I interviewed him, and asked: "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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The crushing of the progressive potential in Indonesia, the mrduer of a million Communists and locally-born Chinese, was absolutely pivotal in the history of revolution and progressive activity in eastern Asia and one of the most terrible tragedies of the twentieth century, a century loaded with tragedies. Trash like Suharto dreadfully soiled the image of the amazing and wonderful Indonesian people. Any young readers are especially exhorted to read ‘The Year of the Red Banteng’, or anything written by Benedict Anderson. If anybody is interested in reading something a bit more semi-fictional, the works of the late writer, Pramoedja Ananta Toer, especially his ‘Buru Quartet’, should get your blood boiling.
For their policies on Indonesia especially n relation to East Timor, I would personally put Gareth Evans and Paul Keating up against a wall, no problems. Along with Whitlam’s sell-out of Timor to scum like Suharto, the Labor Party has a hell of a lot to answer for: let no-one ever call that bunch progressive or left-wing. But in spite of them, East Timor is now free of that oppression, at least for the time being. So the bastards do not win every round.
Joe
Great insight Joe. Standard knee jerk ‘aren’t they terrible stuff’. Anyone else in the queue to ‘line up’?
How do you know what Sukarno would have been like, another 10 years as President?
Do you think the archipelago (‘those amazing and wonderful Indonesian people’)would have quietly played happy families with a shitty economy and hundreds of different ethnic groups?
Yes, Suharto was terrible and yes, Australia was complicit but please save us from the hysterics. Pilger owns that mantle and you can’t out do him.
Well mrgordon save us from the apologetics.
A spade is a spade and not hysterics . Australia chooses to participate in the manipulations of the American empire , resulting in the death of innocent people who left to determine their own fututre would do quite well.
Nothing erases personal responsibility , whether you are a government minister or working on the production line at BAE , atrocities happen as an agregate of human actions.
So I will stand with Joe and line the likes of Gareth up against a wall.
Defending human rights via capital punishment….ok!?!?!
Mr Morgan: using the excuse that they would have been worse if we gave them a chance has an incredibly hollow ring - even if you had a specific point about Sukarno (which you don’t) it wouldn’t justify crimes against humanity. It is the Bush and Blair defence in Iraq and Afghanistan when their war crimes (torture, rape, massacres, political prisoners etc) sneak through the ranks of embedded journalists. A defence that will never be accepted by the victims of the war crimes and should never be accepted by us.
Australia’s relationship with oppressive regimes like Suharto’s is a source of incredible shame for me. Up there with the stolen generation and our recent involvement in the war of terror.
I think Mr Gordon is writing tongue-in-cheek: ‘Defending human rights by capital punishment’ has that ‘destroying a village in order to save it’ ring about it.
Sukarno had already been in power for sixteen years (twenty, if you count the years of war against the Dutch), so how brutal or how incompetent he might have been in the next ten years after he was overthrown by the pro-US military was already pretty obvious. He was no angel: like Suharto he loyally served the Japanese during the War, and given his brutal repression of the people of Papua. But having to choose one dictator rather than another is a false choice: a pox on both of them, and on all dictators. And their lickspittles like Evans and Keating.
Joe