{"id":52579,"date":"2016-03-04T18:39:56","date_gmt":"2016-03-05T00:39:56","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.lankaweb.com\/news\/items\/?p=52579"},"modified":"2016-03-04T03:30:48","modified_gmt":"2016-03-04T10:30:48","slug":"the-rape-of-east-timor-sounds-like-fun","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.lankaweb.com\/news\/items\/2016\/03\/04\/the-rape-of-east-timor-sounds-like-fun\/","title":{"rendered":"The Rape of East Timor: “Sounds Like Fun”"},"content":{"rendered":"

Mahinda Gunasekera\u00a0Toronto, Canada<\/em><\/span><\/h2>\n

International Crisis Group
\nBrussels
\nAttn.\u00a0 Mr. Gareth Evans, President Emeritus, ICG<\/p>\n

Dear Mr. Gareth Evans,<\/p>\n

We remember you visiting Sri Lanka to deliver the keynote address at a symposium organized by the Centre for Policy Alternatives, where you threatened Sri Lanka with RTP action when\u00a0\u00a0 the Sri Lankan Government responded to a war thrust on her by the Liberation Tigers of Tamil Eelam (LTTE), aka Tamil Tigers, a group which had been designated an international terrorist movement by the UNSC and banned by 32 countries including the USA, UK, EU, and India.\u00a0 The LTTE had over a space three decades caused immense loss of life and an inestimable amount of damage to valuable property, and did not negotiate in good faith during five separate attempts to seek a peaceful resolution using foreign facilitators and in direct talks, leaving no alternative but to militarily defeat them to usher in peace and normalcy in the land.\u00a0 The LTTE forcibly took the resident population living in areas under their control as they retreated in order to exploit them for their labour, conscript them to replace fallen cadre and to finally use them as a human shield and a bargaining chip to obtain foreign intervention.\u00a0 Sri Lanka’s military succeeded in not only rescuing the vast majority of the civilian hostages numbering nearly 300,000 with minimal loss of life of civilians and defeating the LTTE’s military wing which refused to release the civilians during two 48 hour ceasefires in 2009, nor surrender when given the opportunity while being trapped and surrounded in a narrow strip, after a 30 month operation as of May 19, 2009,\u00a0 As you are no doubt aware, steps have since been taken to demine the land of 1.5 million land and anti-personal mines, infrastructure put in place,\u00a0 and the IDPs resettled with a package of aid within a democratic framework with functioning local government and provincial bodies.<\/p>\n

When you visited Sri Lanka, you made yourself out as a champion of human rights deeply concerned about the safety of civilians in the war zone, even threatening RTP action against the country.\u00a0 Your background has been clearly described by the Australian journalist John Pilger in his article annexed hereto, where you overlooked the atrocities being committed by General Suharto’s forces of Indonesia that wiped out a third of the East Timorese people, as you sought to share the vast petroleum deposits between Indonesia and Australia, where you played a key role as Australia’s Foreign Minister.\u00a0 Well ! Well ! President Emeritus of the International Crisis Group, your being selectively blind to violations depends on who will butter your bread and pay handsomely to enable you to live in luxury on Graft Street.<\/p>\n

Sincerely,<\/p>\n

Mahinda Gunasekera
\nToronto, Canada
\n—– Original Message —–<\/p>\n

\"Easttimor\"<\/p>\n

The Rape of East Timor: Sounds Like Fun\u201d<\/a><\/h2>\n

by John Pilger<\/a><\/p>\n

“The terror that followed has few parallels; not even Pol Pot succeeded in killing, proportionally, as many Cambodians as Suharto and his fellow generals killed in East Timor. Out of a population of almost a million, up to a third were extinguished.<\/strong><\/p>\n

In 1993, I interviewed C. Philip Liechty, a former senior CIA operations officer in the Jakarta embassy during the invasion of East Timor. He told me: Suharto was given the green light [by the US] to do what he did. We supplied them with everything they needed [from] M16 rifles [to] US military logistical support \u2026 maybe 200,000 people, almost all of them non-combatants died. <\/strong><\/p>\n

When the atrocities began to appear in the CIA reporting, the way they dealt with these was to cover them up as long as possible; and when they couldn\u2019t be covered up any longer, they were reported in a watered-down, very generalised way, so that even our own sourcing was sabotaged.\u201d<\/strong><\/p>\n

Secret documents found in the Australian National Archives provide a glimpse of how one of the greatest crimes of the 20th century was executed and covered up. They also help us understand how and for whom the world is run.<\/strong><\/p>\n

The documents refer to East Timor, now known as Timor-Leste, and were written by diplomats in the Australian embassy in Jakarta. The date was November 1976, less than a year after the Indonesian dictator General Suharto seized the then Portuguese colony on the island of Timor.<\/strong><\/p>\n

The terror that followed has few parallels; not even Pol Pot succeeded in killing, proportionally, as many Cambodians as Suharto and his fellow generals killed in East Timor. Out of a population of almost a million, up to a third were extinguished.<\/strong><\/p>\n

This was the second holocaust for which Suharto was responsible. A decade earlier, in 1965, Suharto wrested power in Indonesia in a bloodbath that took more than a million lives. The CIA reported: In terms of numbers killed, the massacres rank as one of the worst mass murders of the 20th century.\u201d<\/strong><\/p>\n

This was greeted in the Western press as a gleam of light in Asia\u201d (Time<\/em>).The BBC\u2019s correspondent in South East Asia, Roland Challis, later described the cover-up of the massacres as a triumph of media complicity and silence; the official line\u201d was that Suharto had saved\u201d Indonesia from a communist takeover.<\/strong><\/p>\n

Of course my British sources knew what the American plan was,\u201d he told me. There were bodies being washed up on the lawns of the British consulate in Surabaya, and British warships escorted a ship full of Indonesian troops, so that they could take part in this terrible holocaust. It was only much later that we learned that the American embassy was supplying [Suharto with] names and ticking them off as they were killed. There was a deal, you see. In establishing the Suharto regime, the involvement of the [US-dominated] International Monetary Fund and the World Bank were part of it. That was the deal.\u201d<\/strong><\/p>\n

I have interviewed many of the survivors of 1965, including the acclaimed Indonesian novelist Pramoedya Ananta Toer, who bore witness to an epic of suffering forgotten\u201d in the West because Suharto was our man\u201d.\u00a0 A second holocaust in resource-rich East Timor, an undefended colony, was almost inevitable.<\/strong><\/p>\n

In 1994, I filmed clandestinely in occupied East Timor; I found a land of crosses and unforgettable grief. In my film, Death of a Nation<\/em>, there is a sequence shot on board an Australian aircraft flying over the Timor Sea. A party is in progress. Two men in suits are toasting each other in champagne. This is a uniquely historical moment,\u201d babbles one of them, that is truly, uniquely historical.\u201d<\/u><\/strong><\/p>\n

This is Australia\u2019s foreign minister, Gareth Evans. The other man is Ali Alatas, the principal mouthpiece of Suharto. It is 1989 and they are making a symbolic flight to celebrate a piratical deal they called a treaty\u201d. This allowed Australia, the Suharto dictatorship and the international oil companies to divide the spoils of East Timor\u2019s oil and gas resources.<\/u><\/strong><\/p>\n

Thanks to Evans, Australia\u2019s then prime minister, Paul Keating \u2014 who regarded Suharto as a father figure \u2014 and a gang that ran Australia\u2019s foreign policy establishment, Australia distinguished itself as the only western country formally to recognise Suharto\u2019s genocidal conquest. The prize, said Evans, was zillions\u201d of dollars.<\/u><\/strong><\/p>\n

Members of this gang reappeared the other day in documents found in the National Archives by two researchers from Monash University in Melbourne, Sara Niner and Kim McGrath. In their own handwriting, senior officials of the Department of Foreign Affairs mock reports of the rape, torture and execution of East Timorese by Indonesian troops. In scribbled annotations on a memorandum that refers to atrocities in a concentration camp, one diplomat wrote: sounds like fun\u201d. Another wrote: sounds like the population are in raptures.\u201d<\/strong><\/p>\n

Referring to a report by the Indonesian resistance, Fretilin, that describes Indonesia as an impotent\u201d invader, another diplomat sneered: If \u2018the enemy was impotent\u2019, as stated, how come they are daily raping the captured population? Or is the former a result of the latter?\u201d<\/strong><\/p>\n

The documents, says Sarah Niner, are vivid evidence of the lack of empathy and concern for human rights abuses in East Timor\u201d in the Department of Foreign Affairs. The archives reveal that this culture of cover-up is closely tied to the DFA\u2019s need to recognise Indonesian sovereignty over East Timor so as to commence negotiations over the petroleum in the East Timor Sea.\u201d<\/strong><\/p>\n

This was a conspiracy to steal East Timor\u2019s oil and gas. In leaked diplomatic cables in August 1975, the Australian Ambassador to Jakarta, Richard Woolcott, wrote to Canberra: It would seem to me that the Department [of Minerals and Energy] might well have an interest in closing the present gap in the agreed sea border and this could be much more readily negotiated with Indonesia \u2026 than with Portugal or independent Portuguese Timor.\u201d \u00a0Woolcott revealed that he had been briefed on Indonesia\u2019s secret plans for an invasion. He cabled Canberra that the government should assist public understanding in Australia\u201d to counter criticism of Indonesia\u201d.<\/strong><\/p>\n

In 1993, I interviewed C. Philip Liechty, a former senior CIA operations officer in the Jakarta embassy during the invasion of East Timor. He told me: Suharto was given the green light [by the US] to do what he did. We supplied them with everything they needed [from] M16 rifles [to] US military logistical support \u2026 maybe 200,000 people, almost all of them non-combatants died. When the atrocities began to appear in the CIA reporting, the way they dealt with these was to cover them up as long as possible; and when they couldn\u2019t be covered up any longer, they were reported in a watered-down, very generalised way, so that even our own sourcing was sabotaged.\u201d<\/strong><\/p>\n

I asked Liechty what would have happened had someone spoken out. Your career would end,\u201d he replied. He said his interview with me was one way of making amends for how badly I feel\u201d.<\/strong><\/p>\n

The gang in the Australian embassy in Jakarta appear to suffer no such anguish.\u00a0 One of the scribblers on the documents, Cavan Hogue, told the Sydney Morning Herald:<\/em> It does look like my handwriting. If I made a comment like that, being the cynical bugger that I am, it would certainly have been in the spirit of irony and sarcasm. It\u2019s about the [Fretilin] press release, not the Timorese.\u201d Hogue said there were atrocities on all sides\u201d.<\/strong><\/p>\n

As one who reported and filmed the evidence of genocide, I find this last remark especially profane. The Fretilin propaganda\u201d he derides was accurate. The subsequent report of the United Nations on East Timor describes thousands of cases of summary execution and violence against women by Suharto\u2019s Kopassus special forces, many of whom were trained in Australia. Rape, sexual slavery and sexual violence were tools used as part of the campaign designed to inflict a deep experience of terror, powerlessness and hopelessness upon pro-independence supporters,\u201d\u00a0 says the UN.<\/strong><\/p>\n

Cavan Hogue, the joker and cynical bugger\u201d, was promoted to senior ambassador and eventually retired on a generous pension. Richard Woolcott was made head of the Department of Foreign Affairs in Canberra and, in retirement, has lectured widely as a respected diplomatic intellectual\u201d.<\/strong><\/p>\n

Journalists watered at the Australian embassy in Jakarta, notably those employed by Rupert Murdoch, who controls almost 70 per cent of Australia\u2019s capital city press.\u00a0 Murdoch\u2019s correspondent in Indonesia was Patrick Walters, who reported that Jakarta\u2019s economic achievements\u201d in East Timor were impressive\u201d, as was Jakarta\u2019s generous\u201d development of the blood-soaked territory. As for the East Timorese resistance, it was leaderless\u201d and beaten. In any case, no one was now arrested without proper legal procedures\u201d.<\/strong><\/p>\n

In December 1993, one of Murdoch\u2019s veteran retainers, Paul Kelly, then editor-in-chief of The Australian,<\/em> was appointed by Foreign Minister Evans to the Australia-Indonesia Institute, a body funded by the Australian government to promote the common interests\u201d of Canberra and the Suharto dictatorship.\u00a0 Kelly led a group of Australian newspaper editors to Jakarta for an audience with the mass murderer. There is a photograph of one of them bowing.<\/strong><\/p>\n

East Timor won its independence in 1999 with the blood and courage of its ordinary people. The tiny, fragile democracy was immediately subjected to a relentless campaign of bullying by the Australian government which sought to manoeuvre it out of its legal ownership of the sea bed\u2019s oil and gas revenue. To get its way, Australia refused to recognise the jurisdiction of the International Court of Justice and the Law of the Sea and unilaterally changed the maritime boundary in its own favour.<\/strong><\/p>\n

In 2006, a deal was finally signed, Mafia-style, largely on Australia\u2019s terms. Soon afterwards, Prime Minister Mari Alkitiri, a nationalist who had stood up to Canberra, was effectively deposed in what he called an attempted coup\u201d by outsiders\u201d. The Australian military, which had peace-keeping\u201d troops in East Timor, had trained his opponents.<\/strong><\/p>\n

In the 17 years since East Timor won its independence, the Australian government has taken nearly $5 billion in oil and gas revenue \u2014 money that belongs to its impoverished neighbour.<\/strong><\/p>\n

Australia has been called America\u2019s deputy sheriff\u201d in the South Pacific. One man with the badge is Gareth Evans, the foreign minister filmed lifting his champagne glass to toast the theft of East Timor\u2019s natural resources. Today, Evans is a lectern-trotting zealot promoting a brand of war-mongering known as RTP\u201d, or Responsibility to Protect\u201d.\u00a0 A<\/u>s co-chair of a New York-based Global Centre\u201d, he runs a US-backed lobby group that urges the international community\u201d to attack countries where the Security Council rejects a proposal or fails to deal with it in a reasonable time\u201d. The man for the job, as the East Timorese might say.<\/strong><\/p>\n

Join the debate on Facebook <\/a><\/p>\n

John Pilger\u00a0<\/em><\/strong>can be reached through his website:\u00a0www.johnpilger.com<\/a><\/em><\/p>\n

http:\/\/www.counterpunch.org\/2016\/02\/26\/the-rape-of-east-timor-sounds-like-fun\/<\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Mahinda Gunasekera\u00a0Toronto, Canada International Crisis Group Brussels Attn.\u00a0 Mr. Gareth Evans, President Emeritus, ICG Dear Mr. Gareth Evans, We remember you visiting Sri Lanka to deliver the keynote address at a symposium organized by the Centre for Policy Alternatives, where you threatened Sri Lanka with RTP action when\u00a0\u00a0 the Sri Lankan Government responded to a […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[12],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-52579","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-forum"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.lankaweb.com\/news\/items\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/52579","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.lankaweb.com\/news\/items\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.lankaweb.com\/news\/items\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.lankaweb.com\/news\/items\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.lankaweb.com\/news\/items\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=52579"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.lankaweb.com\/news\/items\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/52579\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.lankaweb.com\/news\/items\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=52579"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.lankaweb.com\/news\/items\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=52579"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.lankaweb.com\/news\/items\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=52579"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}