East Timor. (photo: JohnPilger.com)
The
Universal Lesson of the Courage of East Timor
By John Pilger, John
Pilger's Website
14 May 17
On
May 5, John Pilger was presented with the Order of Timor-Leste by East Timor's
Ambassador to Australia, Abel Gutteras, in recognition of his reporting on East
Timor under Indonesia's brutal occupation, especially his landmark documentary
film, Death of a Nation: the Timor Conspiracy. The following was Pilger's
response...
Filming
undercover in East Timor in 1993 I followed a landscape of crosses: great black
crosses etched against the sky, crosses on peaks, crosses marching down the
hillsides, crosses beside the road. They littered the earth and crowded the
eye.
The
inscriptions on the crosses revealed the extinction of whole families, wiped
out in the space of a year, a month, a day. Village after village stood as
memorials.
Kraras
is one such village. Known as the "village of the widows", the
population of 287 people was murdered by Indonesian troops.
Using
a typewriter with a faded ribbon, a local priest had recorded the name, age, cause
of death and date of the killing of every victim. In the last column, he
identified the Indonesian battalion responsible for each murder. It was
evidence of genocide.
I
still have this document, which I find difficult to put down, as if the blood
of East Timor is fresh on its pages.
On the
list is the dos Anjos family.
In
1987, I interviewed Arthur Stevenson, known as Steve, a former Australian
commando who had fought the Japanese in the Portuguese colony of East Timor in
1942. He told me the story of Celestino dos Anjos, whose ingenuity and bravery
had saved his life, and the lives of other Australian soldiers fighting behind
Japanese lines.
Steve
described the day leaflets fluttered down from a Royal Australian Air Force
plane; "We shall never forget you," the leaflets said. Soon
afterwards, the Australians were ordered to abandon the island of Timor,
leaving the people to their fate.
When I
met Steve, he had just received a letter from Celestino's son, Virgillo, who
was the same age as his own son. Virgillo wrote that his father had survived
the Indonesian invasion of East Timor in 1975, but he went on: "In August
1983, Indonesian forces entered our village, Kraras. They looted, burned and
massacred, with fighter aircraft overhead. On 27 September 1983, they made my
father and my wife dig their own graves and they machine-gunned them. My wife
was pregnant."
The
Kraras list is an extraordinary political document that shames Indonesia's
Faustian partners in the West and teaches us how much of the world is run. The
fighter aircraft that attacked Kraras came from the United States; the machine
guns and surface-to-air missiles came from Britain; the silence and betrayal
came from Australia.
The
priest of Kraras wrote on the final page: "To the capitalist governors of
the world, Timor's petroleum smells better than Timorese blood and tears. Who
will take this truth to the world? ... It is evident that Indonesia would never
have committed such a crime if it had not received favourable guarantees from
[Western] governments."
As the
Indonesian dictator General Suharto was about to invade East Timor (the
Portuguese had abandoned their colony), he tipped off the ambassadors of
Australia, the United States and Britain. In secret cables subsequently leaked,
the Australian ambassador, Richard Woolcott, urged his government to "act in
a way which would be designed to minimise the public impact in Australia and
show private understanding to Indonesia." He alluded to the beckoning
spoils of oil and gas in the Timor Sea that separated the island from northern
Australia.
There
was no word of concern for the Timorese.
In my
experience as a reporter, East Timor was the greatest crime of the late 20th
century. I had much to do with Cambodia, yet not even Pol Pot put to death as
many people - proportionally -- as Suharto killed and starved in East Timor.
In
1993, the Foreign Affairs Committee of the Australian Parliament estimated that
"at least 200,000" East Timorese, a third of the population, had
perished under Suharto.
Australia
was the only western country formally to recognise Indonesia's genocidal
conquest. The murderous Indonesian special forces known as Kopassus were
trained by Australian special forces at a base near Perth. The prize in
resources, said Foreign Minister Gareth Evans, was worth "zillions"
of dollars.
In my
1994 film, Death of a Nation: the Timor Conspiracy, a gloating Evans is filmed
lifting a champagne glass as he and Ali Alatas, Suharto's foreign minister, fly
over the Timor Sea, having signed a piratical treaty that divided the oil and
gas riches of the Timor Sea.
I also
filmed witnesses such as Abel Gutteras, now the Ambassador of Timor-Leste (East
Timor's post independence name) to Australia. He told me, "We believe we
can win and we can count on all those people in the world to listen -- that
nothing is impossible, and peace and freedom are always worth fighting
for."
Remarkably,
they did win. Many people all over the world did hear them, and a tireless
movement added to the pressure on Suharto's backers in Washington, London and
Canberra to abandon the dictator.
But
there was also a silence. For years, the free press of the complicit countries
all but ignored East Timor. There were honourable exceptions, such as the
courageous Max Stahl, who filmed the 1991 massacre in the Santa Cruz cemetery.
Leading journalists almost literally fell at the feet of Suharto. In a
photograph of a group of Australian editors visiting Jakarta, led by the
Murdoch editor Paul Kelly, one of them is bowing to Suharto, the genocidist.
From
1999 to 2002, the Australian Government took an estimated $1.2 billion in
revenue from one oil and gas field in the Timor Sea. During the same period,
Australia gave less than $200 million in so-called aid to East Timor.
In
2002, two months before East Timor won its independence, as Ben Doherty
reported in January, "Australia secretly withdrew from the maritime
boundary dispute resolution procedures of the UN convention the Law of the Sea,
and the equivalent jurisdiction of the International Court of Justice, so that
it could not be compelled into legally binding international arbitration".
The
former Prime Minister John Howard has described his government's role in East
Timor's independence as "noble". Howard's foreign minister, Alexander
Downer, once burst into the cabinet room in Dili, East Timor, and told Prime Minister
Mari Alkatiri, "We are very tough ... Let me give you a tutorial in
politics ..."
Today,
it is Timor-Leste that is giving the tutorial in politics. After years of
trickery and bullying by Canberra, the people of Timor-Leste have demanded and
won the right to negotiate before the Permanent Court of Arbitration (PCA) a
legal maritime boundary and a proper share of the oil and gas.
Australia
owes Timor Leste a huge debt -- some would say, billions of dollars in
reparations. Australia should hand over, unconditionally, all royalties
collected since Gareth Evans toasted Suharto's dictatorship while flying over
the graves of its victims.
The
Economist lauds Timor-Leste as the most democratic country in southeast Asia
today. Is that an accolade? Or does it mean approval of a small and vulnerable
country joining the great game of globalisation?
For
the weakest, globalisation is an insidious colonialism that enables
transnational finance and its camp-followers to penetrate deeper, as Edward
Said wrote, than the old imperialists in their gun boats.
It can
mean a model of development that gave Indonesia, under Suharto, gross
inequality and corruption; that drove people off their land and into slums,
then boasted about a growth rate.
The
people of Timor-Leste deserve better than faint praise from the
"capitalist governors of the world", as the priest of Kraras wrote.
They did not fight and die and vote for entrenched poverty and a growth rate.
They deserve the right to sustain themselves when the oil and gas run out as it
will. At the very least, their courage ought to be a beacon in our memory: a
universal political lesson.
Bravo,
Timor-Leste. Bravo and beware.
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has always declared the wars; the subject class has always fought the battles.
The master class has had all to gain and nothing to lose, while the subject
class has had nothing to gain and everything to lose--especially their
lives." Eugene Victor Debs
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