[R-G] PIlger: Suharto, The Model Killer, And His Friends In High Places

[Anthony Fenton]

ZNet Commentary
Suharto, The Model Killer, And His Friends In High Places January 28,  
2008
By John Pilger
http://www.zmag.org/sustainers/content/2008-01/28pilger.cfm

In my film Death of a Nation, there is a sequence filmed on board an  
Australian aircraft flying over the island of Timor. A party is in  
progress, and two men in suits are toasting each other in champagne.  
"This is an historically unique moment," says one of them, "that is  
truly uniquely historical." This is Gareth Evans, Australia's foreign  
minister. The other man is Ali Alatas, principal mouthpiece of the  
Indonesian dictator, General Suharto. It is 1989, and the two are  
making a grotesquely symbolic flight to celebrate the signing of a  
treaty that allowed Australia and the international oil and gas  
companies to exploit the seabed off East Timor, then illegally and  
viciously occupied by Suharto. The prize, according to Evans, was  
"zillions of dollars".

Beneath them lay a land of crosses: great black crosses etched  
against the sky, crosses on peaks, crosses in tiers on the  
hillsides.  Filming clandestinely in East Timor, I would walk into  
the scrub and there were the crosses. They littered the earth and  
crowded the eye. In 1993, the Foreign Affairs Committee of the  
Australian Parliament reported that "at least 200,000" had died under  
Indonesia's occupation: almost a third of the population. And yet  
East Timor's horror, which was foretold and nurtured by the US,  
Britain and Australia, was actually a sequel. "No single American  
action in the period after 1945," wrote the historian Gabriel Kolko,  
"was as bloodthirsty as its role in Indonesia, for it tried to  
initiate the massacre." He was referring to Suharto's seizure of  
power in 1965-6, which caused the violent deaths of up to a million  
people.

To understand the significance of Suharto, who died on Sunday, is to  
look beneath the surface of the current world order: the so-called  
global economy and the ruthless cynicism of those who run it. Suharto  
was our model mass murderer - "our" is used here advisedly. "One of  
our very best and most valuable friends," Thatcher called him,  
speaking for the West. For three decades, the Australian, US and  
British governments worked tirelessly to minimise the crimes of  
Suharto's gestapo, known as Kopassus, who were trained by the  
Australian SAS and the British army and who gunned down people with  
British-supplied Heckler and Koch machine guns from British-supplied  
Tactica "riot control" vehicles. Prevented by Congress from supplying  
arms direct, US administrations from Gerald Ford to Bill Clinton,  
provided logistic support through the back door and commercial  
preferences.

In one year, the British Department of Trade provided almost a  
billion pounds worth of so-called soft loans, which allowed Suharto  
buy Hawk fighter-bombers. The British taxpayer paid the bill for  
aircraft that dive-bombed East Timorese villages, and the arms  
industry reaped the profits. However, the Australians distinguished  
themselves as the most obsequious. In an infamous cable to Canberra,  
Richard Woolcott, Australia's ambassador to Jakarta, who had been  
forewarned about Suharto's invasion of East Timor, wrote: "What  
Indonesia now looks to from Australia
is some understanding of their attitude and possible action to assist  
public understanding in Australia
"

Covering up Suharto's crimes became a career for those like Woolcott,  
while "understanding" the mass murderer came in buckets. This left an  
indelible stain on the reformist government of Gough Whitlam  
following the cold-blooded killing of two Australian TV crews by  
Suharto's troops during the invasion of East Timor.  "We know your  
people love you," Bob Hawke told the dictator. His successor, Paul  
Keating, famously regarded the tyrant as a father figure. When  
Indonesian troops slaughtered at least 200 people in the Santa Cruz  
cemetery in Dili, East Timor, and Australian mourners planted crosses  
outside the Indonesian embassy in Canberra, foreign minister Gareth  
Evans ordered them destroyed. To Evans, ever-effusive in his support  
for the regime, the massacre was merely an "aberration".  This was  
the view of much of the Australian press, especially that controlled  
by Rupert Murdoch, whose local retainer, Paul Kelly, led a group of  
leading newspaper editors to Jakarta, fawn before the dictator.

Here lies a clue as to why Suharto, unlike Saddam Hussein, died not  
on the gallows but surrounded by the finest medical team his secret  
billions could buy. Ralph McGehee, a senior CIA operations officer in  
the 1960s, describes the terror of Suharto's takeover of Indonesia in  
1965-6 as "the model operation" for the American-backed coup that got  
rid of Salvador Allende in Chile seven years later. "The CIA forged a  
document purporting to reveal a leftist plot to murder Chilean  
military leaders," he wrote, "[just like] what happened in Indonesia  
in 1965." The US embassy in Jakarta supplied Suharto with a "zap  
list" of Indonesian Communist Party (PKI) members and crossed off the  
names when they were killed or captured. Roland Challis, the BBC's  
south east Asia correspondent at the time, told me how the British  
government was secretly involved in this slaughter.  "British  
warships escorted a ship full of Indonesian troops down the Malacca  
Straits so they could take part in the terrible holocaust," he said.  
"I and other correspondents were unaware of this at the time
. There was a deal, you see."

The deal was that Indonesia under Suharto would offer up what Richard  
Nixon had called "the richest hoard of natural resources, the  
greatest prize in south-east Asia". In November 1967, the greatest  
prize was handed out at a remarkable three-day conference sponsored  
by the Time-Life Corporation in Geneva. Led by David Rockefeller, all  
the corporate giants were represented: the major oil companies and  
banks, General Motors, Imperial Chemical Industries, British American  
Tobacco, Siemens and US Steel and many others.  Across the table sat  
Suharto's US-trained economists who agreed to the corporate takeover  
of their country, sector by sector. The Freeport company got a  
mountain of copper in West Papua. A US/ European consortium got the  
nickel. The giant Alcoa company got the biggest slice of Indonesia's  
bauxite. America, Japanese and French companies got the tropical  
forests of Sumatra. When the plunder was complete, President Lyndon  
Johnson sent his congratulations on "a magnificent story of  
opportunity seen and promise awakened". Thirty years later, with the  
genocide in East Timor also complete, the World Bank described  the  
Suharto dictatorship as a "model pupil".

Shortly before he died, I interviewed Alan Clark, who under Thatcher  
was Britain's minister responsible for supplying Suharto with most of  
his weapons.  I asked him, "Did it bother you personally that you  
were causing such mayhem and human suffering?"

"No, not in the slightest," he replied. "It never entered my head."    
"I ask the question because I read you are a vegetarian and are  
seriously concerned with the way animals are killed."

"Yeah?"

"Doesn't that concern extend to humans?"

"Curiously not."