Global Policy Forum

By Donald Greenlees

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Thirty years after Indonesia invaded East Timor, newly declassified diplomatic cables and memos have provided further evidence of the complicity of the United States, Britain and Australia in events that led to a brutal 24-year occupation of the former Portuguese colony. The diplomatic files, obtained and released by an independent Washington-based research institute this week, show how all three governments lied about their knowledge of Indonesian plans in East Timor and secretly abetted the invasion in December 1975.

A top secret, "eyes only" memorandum for Henry Kissinger, then the U.S. secretary of state, in March 1975 outlined the pragmatic calculation behind the acceptance of an Indonesian invasion, almost nine months before it occurred. The U.S. had "considerable interests in Indonesia and none in Timor," the memo said, noting the views of the U.S. ambassador to Jakarta at the time, David Newsom. Kissinger's attitude was to consistently turn a blind eye to the preparatios for the invasion, the documents show. After Indonesia launched covert military operations inside East Timor in October 1975, Kissinger told his staff: "I'm assuming you're really going to keep your mouth shut on this subject?"

But the Indonesian invasion of East Timor two months later was never the quick or clean exercise Washington and its allies had hoped. The Indonesian military bloodily suppressed dissent in the country and an intractable struggle against the remnants of the pro-independence faction Fretilin was a permanent thorn in the side of the Indonesian diplomatic relationship with the West. It was only brought to an end in 1999 when the East Timorese were allowed to vote in a referendum on independence supervised by the United Nations. At the time, the East Timorese paid a high price for freedom: Indonesian troops and loyalist militia looted and burned in their retreat, killing some 1,500 people.

Despite East Timor's achievement of nationhood, the bitter historical legacy has not faded. This week, an East Timorese commission of inquiry into human rights abuses that occurred between 1975 and 1999 called for reparations from foreign governments and arms suppliers that helped Indonesia. Xanana Gusmao, the East Timorese president, handed the 2,500-page report to the Timorese Parliament on Monday and advocated that it be withheld from the public. Opposition politicians in Dili, the East Timorese capital, said Thursday the report would be impossible to suppress and backed the call for reparations from the United States, Britain and Australia, in particular. "Not only for East Timor, but for other small countries around the world that may face problems in the future, these three big countries should apologize to the East Timorese for what they did," said Fernando Araujo, chairman of the Democratic Party. "Because of their negligence, I agree that reparations and compensation should be paid by them."

It is unlikely that the East Timorese government will back the recommendation of the commission, but the United States, Britain and Australia continue to face embarrassing disclosures over their support for the invasion plans of the former Indonesian president, Suharto. The extent of the U.S. implicit support for the Indonesian invasion has emerged in the release of a steady stream of documents in recent years. These have included State Department memos released in 2001 providing the details of a meeting in Jakarta between Gerald Ford, then U.S. president, Kissinger and Suharto on the eve of the Dec. 7, 1975, invasion.

But the 70 documents released by the U.S. National Security Archive, based at George Washington University, provide new details of how far Washington went to avoid any conflict with Jakarta over the takeover of East Timor. Among the greatest concerns of U.S. officials was to avoid a controversy that would prompt a congressional ban on arms sales to Indonesia. According to a U.S. National Security Council memo in early 1976, Newsom, the U.S. ambassador, had suggested contingency planning that would help Indonesia find "friendly foreign sources of compatible equipment" in the event that U.S. military aid was cut off. U.S. officials were aware that American military equipment had been used illegally in the Indonesian invasion. A week after the invasion, the security council compiled a detailed inventory of American equipment used in the operation, which included U.S.-supplied destroyer escorts that shelled East Timor and C-47 and C-130 aircraft that dropped Indonesian paratroops on Dili.

The documents also highlight the lesser-known role of a key U.S. ally, Britain, in abetting the invasion and occupation through a policy of silence and diplomatic assistance to Jakarta. The British policy was clear in a note to diplomatic missions from the Foreign Office offering "guidance" on the issue of Portuguese Timor on Dec. 5, 1975. It suggested that the primary aim of Britain was to "keep out of the controversy surrounding Timor as far as possible." "The extent to which Indonesia is able to avoid international opprobrium," it said, "will depend on her success in portraying an invasion as a restoration of law and order." Sir John Ford, the British ambassador to Indonesia, was a particularly strong advocate of the policy of giving Indonesia a free hand. He boasted that one of the contributions of Britain had been to "keep the heat out of the Timor business" in the United Nations at a time when Britain chaired the UN Security Council.

Moreover, Britain deliberately tried to cover up the killing of two British-born journalists who were caught in covert Indonesian military operations inside East Timor in October 1975. The journalists, working for Australian television, were among five killed in the incident. In one diplomatic cable, Ambassador Ford said he had discouraged Australian diplomats from pursuing the issue. "We have suggested to the Australians that, since we, in fact, know what happened to the newsmen it is pointless to go on demanding information from the Indonesians which they cannot, or are unwilling to provide," he wrote. The Australian ambassador in Jakarta at the time, Richard Woolcott, had revealed at a dinner with other diplomats that he preferred to speak to the Indonesians about their operations in East Timor as "softly" as his instructions permitted.

Oil Agreement Reached

Australia and East Timor have agreed on how to carve up billions of dollars in revenue from disputed oil and gas reserves beneath the sea that divides them, the Australian foreign minister announced Thursday, The Associated Press reported from Canberra. Foreign Minister Alexander Downer said negotiators had reached an agreement on how to share Timor Sea seabed resources in their eighth round of talks in the northern Australian city of Darwin on Wednesday evening.

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