Posted on 02/14/2017 3:50:42 AM PST by HomerBohn
UNITED NATIONS, Jan. 24 -- U.S. political and military support for Indonesia was vital to its ability to invade East Timor in December 1975 and to sustain a brutal 24-year occupation that cost the lives of at least 100,000 people, parts of a Timorese inquiry made public Tuesday show.
East Timor's Commission for Reception, Truth and Reconciliation contended that the Ford administration "turned a blind eye" to the Indonesian invasion even though it knew that U.S.-supplied arms would be used to carry it out. The report called on the United States, France, Britain and other military backers of Indonesia to pay reparations to victims of Indonesian oppression.
The commission relied on more than 4,500 pages of recently declassified documents collected by the Washington-based National Security Archive, a nonprofit research group, which posted a 119-page portion of the commission's 2,500-page report on its Web site Tuesday. The rest is expected to be made public in the coming weeks.
The commission was created in 2001 by the United Nations and East Timor to provide a comprehensive account of abuses during Indonesia's occupation, which ended in 1999. East Timor's President Xanana Gusmao delivered it last week to Secretary General Kofi Annan.
(Excerpt) Read more at washingtonpost.com ...
The idea of Indonesia taking over East Timor in and of itself was no more illogical or immoral than India’s takeover of Goa or China’s later takeover of Hong Kong and Macau.
East Timor was to all intents and purposes a part of the Indonesian archipelago, its people were pretty much identical to the Timorese Indonesians of West Timor. It was a pointless appendage of the defunct Portuguese empire and was descending into civil war and control by Marxists.
The US simply turned a blind eye to Indonesia taking over, it seemed to pretty much everyone in the world to be the logical solution.
What was not expected was the savage brutality of the Indonesians when they invaded which was utterly unnecessary and totally self defeating, something most Indonesians (who in fairness had no say in the matter at the time) would agree today.
The Indonesians certainly developed the province in a way that the Portuguese never bothered in their 300 years of colonial rule, but that counted for nothing given their appalling treatment of the Timorese which will always remain a stain on Indonesia’s record.
It is fair to say now however that Indonesia and East Timor (Timor Leste) have superb relations today and if everything is not forgotten or indeed forgiven both countries, as among the few democracies in SE Asia are moving forward together.
Before anyone starts with the Islam thing, religion was a total irrelevance in the invasion, it was a matter of territorial integrity for the Indonesians and a part of their virulent campaign against Communism, at which they were very good and supported by the US.
Like many of America’s interventions during the period of European colonial wind-down, this episode and its aftermath have been a mess. Commissions have a tendency to compare realities against imaginary ideal outcomes. If the US had not provided any sort of aid to Indonesia, would the Indonesians have seized their neighbor anyway, in the vacuum left by Portugal, from a mixture of imperialistic greed and forward defense? Would the alternative to Indonesian intervention (i.e., socialism via the Revolutionary Front for an Independent Timor inevitably easing into communist dictatorship) have worked out well for East Timor?
I remember that. It was pretty nasty. Getting over the loss of Viet Nam didn’t help. Pawns on a chess board.
The article implies a non-existent direct connection between weapons sales and the invasion of East Timor.
The US and other western powers sold (not “supplied”) weapons to Indonesia. It was a part of a Cold War strategy to keep a nation that sits astride a major trade route out of Russia or China’s orbit. No one sold weapons for the sole purpose of invading E. Timor.
That Indonesia chose to invade East Timor (and a similar but non-violent takeover of Netherlands New Guinea). They did so as blatant territory grabbing without the consent or support of the populace.
However they claimed that both actions were “anti-colonialist” which undermined Western political opposition. There was also civil unrest and a Communist element competing for power in East Timor after independence from Portugal. Regardless, no other nation had either adjacent combat power or the political will to stop them.
The Indonesian political and military leaders were solely responsible for both the invasion of E. Timor and the genocidal actions over the next two decades.
Nobody covered up anything because nobody cared. Timor didn’t fit the traditional anti-colonial narrative, so it was ignored.
I agree with much of what you say but I would quibble about including “Netherlands” New Guinea in the same category of East Timor.
East Timor had never been part of Indonesia, it was ruled by the Portuguese, although it shared an island with Indonesian Timor.
West Papua had always been part of the then Netherlands East Indies, the territory of which was included in Indonesia when the Republic of Indonesia declared independence from the Dutch.
The Indonesians were able to get the Dutch out of the heavily populated islands of the rest of Indonesia but were unable to do so in Papua. The Dutch very cynically simply lopped off West Papua (and its massive mineral resources) and declared that it wasn’t part of Indonesia.
When Indonesia was ruled by the Dutch West Papua was Dutch territory, when Indonesia was ruled by the British (briefly) West Papua was regarded as British territory, when the Japanese ruled Indonesia West Papua was Japanese territory but when Indonesians ruled West Papua suddenly it was decided that it was independent under some form of Dutch mandate.
It is hardly surprising that the Indonesians didn’t buy this and demanded their former colonial rulers give them back a substantial chunk of what they with some justification regarded as their territory.
Politically, the western portion of New Guinea was part of the Netherlands East Indies, which became Indonesia. However, ethnically and culturally, it is very different. They are Melanesian and Christian, not Javanese and Muslim.
I don’t think it was cynical on the part of the Dutch. The people of western New Guinea didn’t want to be part of Indonesia, but they and the Dutch ultimately lost the political/military conflict.
In the end, Indonesia was able to engineer a referendum in 1969 where “...a vote by 1,025 men and women selected by the Indonesian military in Western New Guinea, who were asked to vote by raising their hands or reading from prepared scripts in a display for United Nations observers.”
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Act_of_Free_Choice
Realpolitik in the Cold War era is often misunderstood but the Indonesians were heavy handed in their internal politics. A Post war kind of sentiment of were all really the same indigenous people gave way to Islamism,
mistreatment of their Chinese minority merchant class ranging from weird renaming (I knew someone whose family name “Ho” became “Hadiono”
and told me of mobs committing violence)To death. Never saw the film but THE YEAR OF LIVING DANGEROUSLY depicts some of that strife.
I may be wrong but Indonesia has one of the biggest populations of Melanesians in the world, they inhabit the many islands of Eastern Indonesia and no one has ever claimed that they shouldn’t be Indonesians.
Indonesians are a multi-ethnic bunch ranging from people of Arab, Indian, Melanesian origins to Javanese, Minang, Menadonese and Chinese with all parts in between. Indonesia has no fewer than six state-recognised religions, it has dozens of languages and literally hundreds of cultures.
It is incorrect to say that Papuans are ethnically not Indonesian, there is no such thing as an “ethnic” Indonesian any more than there is an ethnic citizen of the United States.
At the end of the day Indonesia had more of a right to West Papua than the US did to Alaska or Hawaii.
Sounds rather like the invasion of Kuwait by Saddam Hussein. Poor devil thought he had the green light lit by Bush I.
There was, however, the matter of the butchering of over 100,000 Timorese. But, Gerald Ford like all RepublicRATS was an honorable man.
“There was, however, the matter of the butchering of over 100,000 Timorese.”
I think you will find I covered that point with absolute clarity in the remainder of my post.
Indonesia killed those people in what it regarded as part of a war against Marxist guerrillas, despite the fact that most of those killed were innocent civilians.
The US killed many, many hundreds of thousands of people, hundreds of thousands of them innocent civilians, in its similar war against SE Asian Marxists at exactly the same time.
Maybe Americans should take the log out of their own eye before castigating Indonesians for the speck in their eyes. Or is it ok when America does it?
More than none at all isn't a high bar
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