Post-Suharto regime still oppresses East Timorese

As you read this, the people of "a faraway country of whom we know nothing", as the British prime minister Neville Chamberlain remarked of Czechoslovakia under the Nazis, are once again fighting for their lives.

The country is East Timor. During the summer, following the fall of the dictator Suharto, the Indonesian oppressors of East Timor staged the pretence of a military withdrawal while B.J. Habibie, Suharto's successor, has offered the East Timorese "autonomy".

Most of this was an illusion. Indeed, the lies of one of the world's oldest fascist regimes have had a particular virulence since Indonesian special forces landed secretly at the port of Balibo in East Timor in the early hours of October 16th, 1975, and murdered five newsmen working for Australian television, including two Britons.

Had the journalists lived, their reports would have alerted the rest of us to a full-scale invasion that came seven weeks later. The supply of American weapons to the invaders, which Secretary of State Henry Kissinger secretly oversaw against the wishes of Congress, might have been blocked; and the lives of many of the 200,000 who have died during the occupation, proportionally more than were killed in Cambodia by Pol Pot, might have been spared.

It is Kafkaesque that the special forces officer whose men murdered the journalists, Yunus Yosfiah, subsequently undertook a British government-sponsored war studies course at London University and is now Indonesia's minister of information. Britain remains Indonesia's biggest supplier of weapons.

Two weeks ago, 25,000 East Timorese audaciously filled the streets of the capital, Dili, in an attempt to draw the world's attention to the regime's lying about its troop withdrawals. In fact, five battalions landed at night north of Los Palos in August. They included units trained by Kopassus, Indonesia's Waffen-SS, and armed with Heckler and Koch machineguns supplied by British Aerospace.

Travelling in blackened vehicles, they have attacked and intimidated large sections of the population; Los Palos, with a population of 3,000, is occupied by 5,000 troops. Far from "reducing our military presence significantly", as Habibie put it, the number of troops in East Timor is the highest for five years; and the war against the population has returned.

While the popular resistance has endured remarkably, with fewer than 1,000 guerrillas holding down up to 20 enemy battalions, one wonders how much strain the fabric of that society can take.

When I travelled clandestinely in the hinterland of East Timor in 1993, I seldom met a family that had lost fewer than six or seven members. My indelible memory is of a land of large white crosses: on the roadside, silhouetted on the slopes of the Matabean, crosses that tell of whole families and communities massacred.

IN many respects East Timor's tragedy is the touchstone for understanding how the outside world works. Two UN Security Council resolutions have ordered the Indonesians to leave a country to which they have no historical claim. Eight General Assembly resolutions have said the East Timorese have an inalienable right to independence.

The parallel is with Saddam Hussein's invasion of Kuwait. In that case, the "UN" (read the United States, Britain and their bribed allies) threw their arsenals at Iraq. In contrast, the genocidal attack on East Timor by their friend Suharto was rewarded by more and more largesse, notably several billion pounds of export credit from Britain, most of it spent on Hawk ground-attack aircraft which have bombed and strafed unopposed.

Robin Cook, when Labour frontbench spokesman on foreign affairs, said in the House of Commons: "Hawk aircraft have been observed on bombing runs in East Timor since 1994." Under Cook as Foreign Secretary, Britain continues to supply Indonesia with Hawks. Since New Labour came to power, it has secretly approved 64 licences for the export of weapons, including small arms and machineguns, mortars, flame-throwers, ammunition, bombs, rockets, missiles, riot control agents and more. This is Cook's "ethical foreign policy".

Since the fall of Suharto, his placeman Habibie has tried to create an illusion of new respectability, so desperate is the Javanese elite for a continuation of the West's economic sponsorship as the Indonesian "tiger" disintegrates. Appearing to let East Timor slip the leash has been promoted as "a show of good faith". Habibie has offered the East Timorese "special status", a Vichy arrangement run by quislings.

This has found support in the West among those eager to return Indonesia to its previous "stability". While the UN Secretary-General, Kofi Annan, has expressed more sympathy for the East Timorese than his predecessors, his special envoy, Jamsheed Marker, has privately discussed several "models" for East Timor that bear no likeness to independence: for example, Hong Kong and Macau, territories whose "independence" remains the gift of China.

The recent brave demonstrations of mostly young people in the streets of Dili leave no doubt, however, that the vast majority will accept nothing less than independence; a show of feeling and purpose that their exiled leaders, who support "a transitional autonomy", must take into account. At the same time, East Timor's Mandela, Xanana Gusmao, remains in prison in Jakarta, a hostage to the post-Suharto manipulators.

A letter which he wrote recently to the Indonesian Foreign Minister, Ali Alatas, gives a hint of his spirit. His irony is typically dry and dark. "I would like you to know," he wrote, "that my patience for continuing to accept mental and political pressure from you, the secretary-general of a colonialist and expansionist country which killed over 200,000 East Timorese, is fast running out.

"You should think a little like an adult and a human being at this moment of reformation by avoiding being heroes of the crimes of the corrupt murderer Suharto. As for me, I am very happy to be punished by you. In 1997 I was given three months remission, and this year four months. Please, take these seven months back for yourselves. I really don't need them. One day, you will."