Le Monde diplomatique
<http://www.monde-diplomatique.fr/en/1999/10/?c=03timor>
2 items in supplement of Chomsky piece posted previously
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October 1999
HYPOCRISY OF THE WEST
Indonesian army plc
_________________________________________________________________
It is the Indonesian armed forces who planned, organised and coordinated
the rising tide of violence since the referendum. It is they who from the
1970s onwards set up and trained the militias to intimidate the Timorese
and, in more recent times, force them to support integration with
Indonesia. Then they made them pay for choosing independence.
by ROMAIN BERTRAND
* Fondation nationale des sciences politiques (FNSP), Centre d'itudes et
de recherches internationales (Ceri), Paris
_________________________________________________________________
Seeing the collusion between some elements of the Indonesian armed forces
and the anti-independence militias in East Timor, the surprising thing is
the surprise of international observers. For the Indonesian army has never
operated in the way regular armies in the West do. Its historical
legitimacy stems from the part it played in the 1945-49 fight for
independence, and it is because it sees itself - or presents itself - as
"the people's army" that it means to defend the nation against any and
every threat, from within or without. The theory of its dual function
(dwifungsi), which was violently challenged in 1998, gives the armed
forces a domestic policing role and, in many respects, a political
intelligence role that elsewhere belongs to specialised organisations.
Born of the people, the army protects the nation from its enemies: that is
the catechism taught in the akabri (the Indonesian military academies).
The anti-communist purges that claimed nearly a million victims in 1965-66
were the kind thought of as a "surgical operation", that would drain the
abscess of an ideology seen as a foreign body within the nation. In 1983,
when the police and the army decided to put several thousand petty
criminals to death in Java and put their mutilated corpses on display on
the outskirts of villages, this too was done in the name of a social
eugenics policy that President Suharto referred to as shock therapy (1).
The military's view of the nation excludes from the community of citizens
all those who, as dissidents or marginal groups, do not settle down to a
docile acceptance of the gospel that underpins the New Order. It is a
simple gospel: the state alone is the bearer of the Truth, and
consequently it alone holds and exercises the power of life and death.
Communists, petty criminals, pro-independence militants in Aceh province
(North Sumatra) or East Timor - all these are seen as infections poisoning
the healthy body of the nation. Stamping them out offers no more of a
moral problem than exterminating a parasitic insect; after all, back in
1965-66, weren't communists called "lice"? This policy of political
eugenics means that the armed forces are seen as the nation's immune
system; and that means there can be no internal division. No high-ranking
officer would ever admit publicly to factional conflicts.
But that is only the doctrine. The facts are far from bearing out the
image of a monolithic body impervious to sector-based interests or the
dynamics of regionalism. The whole history of the Indonesian army, since
it was created by merging guerrilla movements at the end of the 1940s, has
been one of often violent conflict between a general staff in Jakarta
anxious to set up a unified apparatus for control, and regional military
commanders seeking to boost their autonomy.
In the 1950s this internal tension culminated in open revolt by several
regional commands against General Nasution. In the 1980s and early 1990s
the split between the Islamist faction (the Greens) and the republicans
(the Red-and-Whites, colours of the national flag) similarly led to
violent clashes (2). The armed forces have, besides, never been
indifferent to the limitations and opportunities offered by their
immediate environment. In the nepotist system set up in 1965 the military,
too, had their place. Via foundations and by having seats on the boards of
various big banks, insurance companies and national investment companies,
they have built up close links with the business world (3).
The Indonesian military have thus involved themselves in both politics and
the economic sector. This is not a matter of individual departures from a
norm of probity and neutrality; quite the contrary, it is the logical
consequence of the doctrines through which the armed forces perceive and
justify their historic mission.
We should also remember that collusion between regular troops and militia
is nothing new. The state's delegating a licence to kill to private groups
has a long history under the New Order (4). From 1982, for instance, a
youth organisation called Pemuda Pancasila, set up in 1959 to guard the
five pillars of the state (pancasila) pronounced by Sukarno (5), was used
by Suharto to help in "preparing" the five-year electoral "campaigns". The
Pemuda Pancasila quickly became an association of notorious petty
criminals doing strong-arm jobs for the president's office, and it was
they who orchestrated most of the street battles in May and November 1998
(6).
Hoodlums for hire
The use of private militias to ensure public security was moreover
legalised, at the highest level, by a series of decrees in 1980 that set
up a civil security system (Siskamling) placed under the Command for
Restoration of Order and Security (Kopkamtib), created in 1965 and run at
that time by Suharto. The purpose of the Siskamling was to bring under the
wing of the armed forces and police voluntary defence associations that in
most cases were no more than gangs of young criminals who hired their
services to the highest bidder (7). In other words, the Siskamling set an
official seal on making criminal gangs part of the state's security
apparatus.
The hansip and sat-pam, security units given the job of guarding public
and private buildings, recruited battalions of young hoodlums, the jago,
trained in martial arts and in extortion, who had cut their thuggery teeth
in the pay of the pimps of Surabaya's red-light district or, more
modestly, in villages that had found it hard to kick them out. Throughout
the 1980s and 1990s it was these young criminal auxiliaries, assigned to
the Pemuda Pancasila or sat-pams, who were to do the dirty work of
intimidation and denunciation on behalf of the New Order. They cooperated
with the police and army so well that the more promising among them joined
the anti-riot squads (Pasu-kan Anti Huru-Hara or PHH) given the task of
putting down rebellion in the cities.
This privatisation of the use of public violence was, however, accompanied
by an even more disturbing development: the creation of a particularly
brutal elite corps allowed to disregard all military ethics in carrying
out their mission. The soldier's code no longer applies to the special
operations commandos (Kopassus) when they are on an "anti-guerrilla"
operation. The 12,000-strong Kopassus come from the Indonesian army's
Siliwangi Division from West Java, and include an anti-terrorist
detachment based at Cijantung. In the 1980s and 1990s, under the
leadership of Suharto's son-in-law, Prabowo Subianto, they developed
professional expertise in the skills of disinformation and psychological
warfare.
Political policing
Trained by the United States, and enjoying contacts with former officers
of the British Special Action Service (SAS) and with the South African
mercenary-recruiting company Executive Outcomes (8), the Kopassus have
been involved in most of the campaigns of repression in East Timor, Irian
Jaya, and Aceh in north Sumatra. In June 1988 Subianto was sacked, but not
punished, for the part he admitted having played in a series of
kidnappings of trade union militants and student activists who were then
tortured for weeks on end. Detachment 81, which was 350 men strong in
1980, had the job of infiltrating the independence movements by fielding
small units dressed as civilians and given the task of setting up local
counter-insurgency centres. Its troops were absorbed into Kopassus Units 4
and 5 during the 1990s.
Answerable only to their immediate commanders, the Kopassus have, since
the fall of Suharto, frequently been opposed to the defence minister,
General Wiranto, whom they blame for "flexibility" in East Timor and Aceh.
Recently, the Red Berets (the hallmark of the Kopassus) paraded in front
of the presidential palace to protest at the pullout from Timor. Accused
by several human-rights organisations of mass rapes in Irian Jaya, the
Kopassus are today on the defensive; but it is far from certain that
Wiranto has full control of them.
The drama in Timor is thus highlighting a series of things that are
pathologically wrong with the Indonesian armed forces, failings that have
marked the whole history of relations between the civil power and the
military command in Indonesia. If East Timor is not to be plunged back
into terror, and most of all if similar atrocities are to be avoided in
Aceh, where a civil war is raging, the Indonesian army must give up its
political policing role. It must also regain control over its elite units:
and while it is at it, close them down so that their members can be
dispersed among the regular troops and speed up the essential task of
turning them into professionals. But knowing the degree of independence
from the general staff in Jakarta that these units enjoy, there is no
evidence that this is what will happen.
_________________________________________________________________
(1) Justus Van Der Kroef, "Petrus: patterns of prophylactic murder in
Indonesia", Asian Survey, vol. 25, Canberra, n: 7, July 1985, pp. 745-759.
(2) Andri Feillard, Islam et armie dans l'Indonisie contemporaine,
L'Harmattan/Archipel, Paris, 1995.
(3) These links are described in Richard Robison, Indonesia: the Rise of
Capital, Allen & Unwin, Sydney, 1986.
(4) Richard Banegas, "De la guerre au nouveau business mercenaire",
Critique internationale, n: 1, Paris, autumn 1998, pp. 179-184, and
Biatrice Hibou, (ed), La privatisation des Etats, Karthala, Paris, 1999,
pp. 11-67.
(5) The pancasila are: belief in one God; a just a civilised humanity; the
unity of Indonesia; democracy guided by wisdom coming from consensus; and
social justice for all.
(6) Loren Ryter, "Pemuda Pancasila: The last loyalist free men of
Suharto's Order", Indonesia, n: 66, Ithaca, October 1998, pp. 45-73.
(7) Joshua Baker, "State of fear: controlling the criminal contagion in
Suharto's New Order ", Indonesia, n: 66, October 1998, pp. 7-45.
(8) On the involvement of Executive Outcomes and former officers of the
SAS in a Kopassus operation in Irian Jaya in 1996, see Yves Goulet,
"Executive Outcomes: mixing business with bullets", Jane's Intelligence
Review (www.janes.com), September 1997, p. 429. On the links between US
services and Kopassus, see The Washington Post, 23 May 1998, and Allan
Nairn, "Indonesia's Disappeared", The Nation, New York, 8 June 1998.
Translated by Derry Cook-Radmore
_________________________________________________________________
ALL RIGHTS RESERVED ) 1999 Le Monde diplomatique
=========================
Le Monde diplomatique
<http://www.monde-diplomatique.fr/en/1999/10/?c=04timor>
-----------------------------------------------------
October 1999
HYPOCRISY OF THE WEST
Timor's trio of resistance
_________________________________________________________________
The Timorese resistance is made up of groups that are united in denouncing
the Indonesian invasion and occupation, and joined in adversity to thwart
the genocidal tendencies at large. Yet the resistance is not a single
entity. Rather, it seems woven from a thousand strands, each drawn from a
key episode in the history of East Timor.
by SYLVAIN DESMILLE
* Historian, anthropologist, and author of "JRH: the voice of Timor", a
portrait of Josi Ramos Horta for Portuguese television (September 1999).
Originator of the photographic exhibition "Torture des jeunes Timorais",
shown as part of the Rencontres internationales de photographies at Arles
in 1997.
_________________________________________________________________
Some of the groups that make up the Timorese resistance came into being
with the "red carnation revolution" and the fall of the Portuguese
dictator, General Salazar, in 1974 (1). The first grouping determined to
play a political role in the future of an East Timor freed from the
Portuguese yoke, the Timorese Democratic Union (UDT), was to become a key
feature of political life; it was composed of intellectuals who for the
most part belonged to a highly Westernised local middle class and claimed
to alone be capable of taking the country in hand as it prepared to make
crucial choices. The heads of the movement at that time included Domingos
de Oliviera, Joco Carrascalo and his brother Mario, who in 1980 betrayed
it by agreeing to become "governor" of an East Timor under the jackboot of
the Indonesian military.
The Revolutionary Front for an Independent East Timor (Fretelin) developed
as a counterpart to the UDT. Marxist in inspiration and tinged with Maoism
(Pol Pot had just driven the "American hydra" from Cambodia at the time),
it attracted a large proportion of the Maubere people, the island's
original inhabitants. Nicolau Lobato was one of its leading figures before
he was assassinated by the Indonesians. While the UDT and Fretelin may
have been in ideological disagreement about the island's future and its
relations with Jakarta, they both wanted independence (2); the Popular
Democratic Association of Timor (Apodeti), on the other hand, favoured
integration with the Indonesian republic.
With elections announced for October 1976, the break-up of the alliance
between the UDT and Fretelin, followed by the outbreak of civil war
between the two independence movements, proved to be a major strategic
mistake for the independence of East Timor. The attack launched on 11
August 1975 by the UDT ended in its defeat and the imprisonment of its
leaders. It was they who had attracted the support of the Western powers
and, in particular, of Portugal which from then on lost interest in the
fate of the island, now controlled by Fretelin. The latter, flushed with
their victory, organised an independence referendum that would set the
seal on their seizure of power. Meanwhile, Indonesia used the vote as a
pretext for raising the spectre of "another Cuba" at Australia and
Jakarta's door, and for seeking the United States' tacit approval for its
forthcoming invasion.
In this extremely tense situation the future Nobel prize-winner, Josi
Ramos Horta (3), rose to prominence. Born in Dili in 1949, he belonged to
the intellectual fringe and as such, acknowledged his friendship with
members of the UDT, which he joined for a while before switching to
Fretelin. The latter made him foreign minister during the republic's very
brief life. At the time he was only 26 (and in fact all the island's
leaders were young).
This almost juvenile look to the pro-independence resistance is being seen
again today. Since their fathers' generation was largely put to death by
the Indonesians when they invaded in 1975, the present generation still
have to grow up to carry the flame forward. In the 1990s there has been a
resurgence of demonstrations and resistance to the occupation forces. They
have often been very harshly put down by the Indonesians, as was seen in
the Santa Cruz massacre in 1991 (4), and in the beating and torturing of
children and adolescents. Rather than collaborate to some degree with the
Indonesians, the young join the underground or go into voluntary exile.
Large numbers of students in Jakarta risk their lives to cross the
security cordons surrounding the Western embassies and ask for political
asylum - which is also a way of attracting media attention and making
Western governments take notice and feel some responsibility. They end up
in one of the centres of the diaspora, in Portugal (where they can carry
on with their studies and prepare to become the managers of a new East
Timor), in Darwin (Australia), or in Mozambique and Angola (both of which
used to be Portuguese colonies). Often lacking sufficient funds and taken
under the wing of Fretelin, they remain on the edges of the host
communities, floating like so many islands, little Timors hoping for a
better tomorrow.
They all make a cult figure of Xanana Gusmco, whom they see as the one and
only leader of the Timorese cause. Rather against his will, this very
gentle man of letters and poet has taken charge of the Timorese
resistance, since the Indonesians have killed all its previous leaders. He
joined the underground in 1983 after the breakdown of negotiations between
Fretelin and the Indonesian government. Four years later he became head of
the National Council of Maubere Resistance (CNRM), which for the first
time brings together all the Timorese parties and movements in favour of
independence. As such, he symbolises a unity that had been shattered by
the civil war of 1975.
The charisma of "Xanana" brings everyone into the fold - both the UDT
supporters, whom he resembles, and those of Fretelin, whose unchallenged
leader he is; and in particular those in the West who are grateful to him
for having toned down his party's revolutionary rhetoric. For the young,
especially, he provides a role model, since he expresses a care for both
justice and clemency, and is anxious to reduce the use of arms other than
where absolutely necessary. That amounts to saying that this living myth,
this Timorese Che Guevara, was for the Indonesians someone to be got rid
of. They managed to capture him in November 1992. Sentenced to 20 years in
prison - to avoid making a martyr of him - he was visited in his cell by
the main Indonesian dissidents, trade unionists (jailed like himself) and
even the newly-elected President Mandela.
Placed under house arrest on 10 February 1999, Gusmco played a hand, from
Jakarta, in setting up the referendum. He even called - in vain - for the
guarantee of an amnesty for all Indonesians compromised by militia
extortion, before finally being freed by the Indonesia's President
Habibie. In a way, and though still solidly in credit with the Timorese,
"Xanana" has been overtaken by events - a prisoner of his own good faith
with international bodies, anxious not to get caught up in an official
armed struggle with Indonesia, while the massacres grew and grew.
Indeed, after 25 years of struggle and general indifference, the
resistance seems to have been caught out by the speed at which things have
been happening. Gusmco and Ramos Horta form its main political focus
within the CNRM. But with one of them separated from his troops and a
prisoner in Jakarta, and the other a sort of international sales rep
having to dash several times round the globe, they have both ended up, by
dint of circumstances and against their will, absent from the field. Since
he left in 1975 Ramos Horta has not set foot in East Timor, and has never
seen some members of his family again; they have disappeared, undoubtedly
killed by the Indonesians.
Setting up base first in the US, to lay siege to the United Nations (5),
and then in Lisbon and Sydney, Ramos Horta has for a quarter of a century
travelled ceaselessly round the seats of power, building up networks
everywhere and nurturing contacts with the non-governmental organisations;
often a lonely figure, he is more at home on basement restaurant benches
than in four-star hotels. And while you can criticise his taste for
ponderous politician's-speak, you have to acknowledge his formidable sense
of what is needed, and his knack of putting Timor in the spotlight,
constantly updating its story in the news. Occasionally, he has got things
wrong: locked into the routine of the organisations, he was not able to
foresee all the consequences and repercussions of Asia's economic crisis,
in terms of upheavals in national politics - to the point that when
history suddenly started happening faster, Ramos Horta had to jump onto a
moving train.
He accepts that his Nobel prize has given him access to a number of
international platforms, and in particular the recognition essential for
getting resources (since 1996 Portugal has provided him with an office in
Lisbon). But he is the first to rage against the passivity of governments.
When he was in Paris in March 1997 he visited Lionel Jospin privately at
his home before the elections; but once he became prime minister, his door
was firmly shut. A year later, when Ramos Horta addressed the foreign
affairs committee in the French National Assembly, there were just two
members in the chamber. Of course, Suharto had not yet fallen from power,
which could explain things.
Though Ramos Horta is recognised on the international scene, and drafted
the 1992 peace plan which he defended before the UN and the Indonesian
foreign minister, Ali Alatas, he remains a marginal figure for the
Timorese and their diaspora, with whom he has little contact. That cannot
be said of the resistance's third man, Bishop Carlos Belo: after he
collected his Nobel prize in Oslo, he had a triumphal welcome home in Dili
that brought almost a third of East Timor's population out onto the
streets. The harshness of the Indonesian crackdown matched the occasion.
Carlos Filipe Ximenes Belo came from a poor background and climbed all the
rungs of the social ladder the church offered in a Portuguese colony. At
the time of the invasion he was in Portugal, and returned to Dili as a
Catholic priest in March 1981. From then on, he worked untiringly on
defending the Maubere people's identity, fighting the policies of
acculturation and forced integration pursued by the Indonesians, and using
for the purpose his formidable network of churches which became bases for
the struggle against the occupation. Sometimes this was at the risk of his
life: Belo has narrowly escaped several assassination attempts. He never
sought, however, to become part of the independence movements (6). And
these do not look on him as "one of theirs". In East Timor itself, though,
the bishop is an institution.
The influence he has wielded in Timor's affairs has been considerable. To
start with, the church has - in a symbol of liberation - welcomed a great
many converts among the Timorese, who are usually animists: a red rag to
the Muslim Indonesian authorities at the very moment when there is a
fervour of integration among both the people and the army. The genocide in
Timor (and the recent massacres of Caritas monks and nuns) could indeed be
seen as a new war of religion.
It was Bishop Belo who made it possible to break the veil of silence
smothering the island by promoting the Pope's visit to East Timor in 1989
- even though the population was disappointed that Jean-Paul II ventured
no further than to exhort Christians to live in peace with their enemies.
Finally, when Suharto fell, Belo was one of the first to go and negotiate
with Alatas and Habibie.
Ramos Horta's call for UN intervention echoes, almost word for word, his
appeal in 1975 just before the Indonesian troops invaded. A report dated
18 September 1975, taken from the CIA archives, said that Indonesia was
taking a dual approach to the problem in Timor. Publicly, Jakarta was
denying any intention of intervening unilaterally. In private, it was
stepping up its military operations, including the use of special forces
(7). This, too, is strangely reminiscent of what the Indonesian
authorities are saying today. Given this background, support for the three
men who embody the hope of Timorese freedom is in some way giving them the
means of making sure that the genocide of the past is not repeated once
again in the future.
_________________________________________________________________
(1) The new Portuguese government at once recognised the right of the
inhabitants of East Timor to self-determination.
(2) An agreement to form a coalition for national independence was signed
in January 1975.
(3) The Nobel peace prize was awarded in 1996 to Josi Ramos Horta and
Bishop Carlos Belo.
(4) Following a demonstration in protest at the murder of a young
dissident, the army fired on the crowd they had surrounded in the cemetery
at Santa Cruz; 271 were killed, 382 wounded, and more than 250
disappeared.
(5) His son Loro relates how his father, after arriving in New York, had
to work as a cleaner in restaurants to earn a little money, before going
to the UN Assembly.
(6) It is strange, with the country in crisis, to hear each of the leaders
warning that he does not intend to play a major role in the new Timor:
Xanana Gusmco means only to be a counsellor, and Ramos Horta to go back to
his first profession of journalism.
(7) Quoted by Ramos Horta in La saga du Timor, Africa World Press
Incorporation, New Jersey, 1987.
Translated by Derry Cook-Radmore
_________________________________________________________________
ALL RIGHTS RESERVED ) 1999 Le Monde diplomatique
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