And the US mothered those mothers, with such deep thinkers as
Reagen lauding their outstanding democracy.
wcm
>
> Le Monde diplomatique
> <http://www.monde-diplomatique.fr/en/1999/10/?c=03timor>
>
> 2 items in supplement of Chomsky piece posted previously
> -----------------------------------------------------
>
> 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
>
> =================================
>
>
> *** NOTICE: In accordance with Title 17 U.S.C. Section 107, this material
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>