America’s Sordid Past in East Timor

As the U.N. peacekeepers take control of East Timor, the unfortunate inhabitants gratefully salute relief from the savage attacks of the Indonesian militias.

Thankful though we should be at any stay to their suffering, we should not for one moment forget the utterly shameful role of successive governments of the United States in this bloody tale.

It was obvious months ago to those familiar with East Timor that Indonesia was contriving mayhem around the long-awaited referendum on independence. If Indonesia’s leaders and military had been warned months ago to behave themselves or expect serious sanctions, many lives might have been saved.

Yet no such admonitions were made. And so the militias were unleashed by the Indonesian military, itself furious at the prospective nullification of its invasion, which began Dec. 7, 1975, a few days after President Ford and Secretary of State Henry Kissinger visited Jakarta.

The obvious inference that the itinerant American plenipotentiaries gave the go-ahead for Indonesia’s onslaught was buttressed by publication of secret cables from the secretary of State instructing the U.S. Embassy in Jakarta not to involve itself and “to cut down its reporting on Timor.” Ninety percent of Indonesia’s military equipment derived at that time from the U.S.

We may assume that the U.S. Embassy obeyed Kissinger’s commands. Possibly owing to kindred secret briefings, or more likely out of basic instinct, the U.S. press followed suit.

As Noam Chomsky puts it in one of his excellent essays on East Timor: “In the New York Times . . . coverage of Timorese issues had been substantial in 1975 but declined as Indonesia invaded and reduced to zero as atrocities reached their peak with the new equipment provided by the Human Rights Administration [i.e. Jimmy Carter] in 1978. The occasional reports carefully avoided the many Timorese refugees in Portugal and Australia, choosing to rely instead on Indonesian generals, who assured the reader, via the free press, that the Timorese who had been ‘forced’ into the mountains by Fretilin [i.e. the Timorese independence movement] were fleeing from its ‘control’ to Indonesian protection.”

One man particularly involved in this terrible affair was the darling of New York’s liberals, Daniel Patrick Moynihan, then U.S. ambassador to the United Nations. Moynihan’s job was to snuff out any organized protest in the U.N. against the invasion. In a secret cable to Kissinger on Jan. 23, 1976, Moynihan cited “considerable progress” in his tactics and crowed that the “United States wished things to turn out as they did and worked to bring this about. The Department of State desired that the United Nations prove utterly ineffective in whatever measures it undertook. This task was given to me, and I carried it forward with no inconsiderable success.”

Moynihan certainly knew what was happening on the ground, pointing out that the level of East Timorese deaths--estimated at 200,000--at the hands of the invaders amounted to “10% of the population, almost the proportion of casualties experienced by the Soviet Union during the Second World War.” As Chomsky notes, “Moynihan is taking credit for an achievement that he proudly compares to Hitler’s in Eastern Europe.”

Moynihan had no shame, of course. Three years later he was the main speaker at a conference of the Committee for U.N. Integrity, where he deplored the fact that the organization was “no longer the guardian of social justice, human rights and equality among the nations” because it is “perverted by irrelevant political machinations.”

At about the same moment as Moynihan first came to prominence in the 1960s, his ultimate boss, Lyndon Baines Johnson, was giving expression to the realities of international power in terms both pithy and shorn of the pretensions. The leftish regime of Georgios Papandreou in Greece was protesting the U.S. decision to establish NATO bases on Cyprus. The Greek ambassador in Washington invoked the Greek parliament as unlikely to accept the U.S. plan. Johnson exploded at the uppity diplomat:

“F--- your parliament and your constitution. America is an elephant, Cyprus is a flea. Greece is a flea. If these two fellows continue itching the elephant, they may get whacked by the elephant’s trunk, whacked good. . . . If your prime minister gives me talk about democracy, parliament and constitution, he, his parliament and his constitution may not last very long.” As the ambassador left the room, Johnson shouted after him: “Don’t forget to tell old Papawhatshisname what I told you . . . you hear?” It was not long before the Greek generals took over.

It was during this same Johnson era that the CIA abetted the coup that brought the Indonesian army to power, killing at least 800,000 leftists and setting the stage for the invasion of East Timor a decade later.