NOAM CHOMSKY
East Timor on the Brink
Interviewed by David Barsamian
KGNU, Boulder, September 8, 1999
DB: Noam Chomsky, long-time political activist, writer and professor of
linguistics at MIT, is the author of numerous books and articles on
U.S. foreign policy, international affairs and human rights. Among his
many books are Year 501, Keeping the Rabble in Line, World Orders Old
and New, Class Warfare and The Common Good. His new book is The New
Military Humanism.
This special edition of Alternative Radio will focus on East Timor,
which is once again a killing field with mass murders, expulsionsaand
ethnic cleansing. According to a story in this today's New York Times,
East Timorese are being rounded up and forcibly moved across the border
to Indonesian West Timor. Joining us from his home in Massachusetts is
MIT professor Noam Chomsky, who was, along with his colleague Ed
Herman, probably the first to write about East Timor in their book
Washington Connection and Third World Fascism.
Noam, the situation in East Timor has gone from bad to worse. You have
written an article for the MoJo Wire on why Americans should care
about East Timor.
NC: The primary reason is that there's a lot that we can do about it.
The second
reason is it's a huge catastrophe. Actually, it's considerably worse
than when I wrote a couple of weeks ago. And there is a bit of history
involved. The U.S. has been directly and crucially involved in
supporting the Indonesian invasion, arming it, carrying it through the
worst atrocities, which were in the late 1970s under the Carter
Administration and pretty much right up till today. But putting aside
history, we can do a lot. This is a place where the U.S. has plenty of
leverage, can act to stop something which, if the U.S. doesn't act,
might turn into a Rwanda, and that's not an exaggeration.
DB: In your essay you say that "President Clinton needs no instructions
on how to proceed." Then you go on to describe some events that
happened in late 1997 and in the spring of 1998. What exactly went on?
NC: What went on is that General Suharto, who had been the darling of
the U.S. and the West generally ever since he took power in 1965,
carrying out a huge mass murder, the CIA compared it to the slaughters
of Hitler and Stalin and Mao, described it as one of the great mass
murders of the twentieth century, it was very much applauded here. He
wiped out the main, the only popular-based political movement, a party
of the left, killed hundreds of thousands of peasants, opened the place
up to Western investment, virtual robbery, and that was greeted very
warmly. And so it remained, through atrocity after atrocity, including
the invasion of East Timor, which was supported very decisively by the
U.S. and up until 1997. In 1997 he made his first mistake. One thing
was he was beginning to lose control. If your friendly dictator loses
control, he's not much use. The other was, he developed an unsuspected
soft spot. The International Monetary Fund (IMF), meaning the U.S., was
imposing quite harsh economic programs which were punishing the general
population for the robbery carried out by a tiny Indonesian elite, and
Suharto, for whatever reason, maybe fearing internal turmoil, was
dragging his feet on implementing these. Then came a series of rather
dramatic events. They weren't much reported here, but they were noticed
in Indonesia, widely, in fact. In February 1998, the head of the IMF,
Michel Camdessus, flew into Jakarta and effectively ordered Suharto to
sign onto the IMF rules. There was a picture taken which was widely
circulated in Jakarta and Australia showing a kind of humble Suharto
sitting at a table with a pen and an imperious-looking Camdessus
standing over him with his arms folded and some kind of caption saying,
Typical colonial stance. Shortly after that, in May 1998, Madeleine
Albright telephoned Suharto and told him that Washington had decided
that the time had come for what she called a "democratic transition,"
meaning, Step down. Four hours later, he stepped down. This isn't just
cause and effect. There are many other factors. It's not just pushing
buttons. But it does symbolize the nature of the relationship.
There's very good reason to believe that if the Clinton Administration
took a strong stand, made it very clear to the Indonesian generals that
this particular game is over, it would be over. I doubt very much,
though there is talk about an intervention force, which the U.S. is
refusing to make any commitment to, and about sanctions, which the U.S.
is also dragging its feet on, and there are other, even weaker measures
that could be considered that could be very effective, such as, for
example, threatening the Indonesian generals with war crimes trials,
which is a serious threat for them. It means they're locked up in their
own countries for a long time. One of the Indonesian generals, the
architect of the massacre in Dili, it's already happened to him. He was
driven out of the U.S. by a court case which he lost and had to flee.
But those are things that the generals care about. They're easy. But I
frankly don't think that any of these things are necessary. We don't
know that they're necessary, and we won't know until the Clinton
Administration does something simpler, namely, take a strong stand,
saying approximately what they said to Suharto in May 1998. I rather
suspect that that would work. Although by now it may be too late. The
time to do this was February or March, certainly not later than April,
when the killings were already picking up substantially, serious
massacres, like killing sixty people hiding in a church in Liquica, for
example.
DB: That happened in April.
NC: There were a lot more. This is one particularly awful one. The
Clinton Administration again dragged its feet on even allowing unarmed
U.N. observers. They finally let in a couple of hundred observers, the
UNAMET observer team that was there. I should say that the remnants of
that team is now, as of a couple hours ago, locked up in a compound
being attacked by Indonesian troops and Indonesian militia and running
out of food and water. One of the people holed up in there apparently
is Allan Nairn, a friend of ours, who escaped. Dili, the capital city,
is apparently wiped out, according to the few people who are left. A
lot of it is burned down. The population is driven out. Allan was
trying to keep looking in to see what was going on in the city and was
finally trapped by Indonesian soldiers. He somehow made it to the U.N.
compound and is at least alive. That's what's happening right now.
After the referendum, which of course was an overwhelming victory for
independence and a remarkably courageous act on the part of the
Timorese, to vote for independence in the midst of terrible terror with
an occupying army organizing it, that takes a lot of guts.
DB: Almost 99% of eligible voters turned out, and close to 80% voted
for independence.
NC: There were tens of thousands of people who came out of hiding to
vote and fled back into hiding. Right after that started, the rampage
which is devastating the country. This morning the U.N. reported
200,000 refugees. Church courses in Dili, very reliable ones, I presume
this goes back to the Bishop, who's now in exile, driven out of the
country, have reported about 3,000-5,000 people killed in the last few
months, mostly in the last couple of days. Those numbers are going up.
Those numbers alone are approximately twice as bad as Kosovo in the
entire year before the bombing. That was at a time when there was a big
guerilla movement going on which had occupied forty percent of the
country. Here it's just plain massacre in a country of less than half
the size of Kosovo. So the scale is huge, and it's going up. We don't
know how bad it is because the first thing that the Indonesians did was
to drive all observers out of the country. So virtually all the
journalists were forced to flee. Some, like Allan and a couple of
Australians, stayed. The U.N. has been compelled to withdraw virtually
everyone. If they can get those people out of the compound in Dili, I
presume they'll get them out, too. That means that terror can go on
unobserved. In the countryside nobody has any idea what's going on.
Telephone service has been cut off. The university has been burned
down. The Bishop's residence has been burned down. He had to flee. He
was taken out by the Australian military. What's going on there nobody
knows. The descriptions that are coming through, mainly from Australia
by Australian reporters and diplomats, are pretty horrendous. Dili, the
one place anybody knows anything about, has been virtually cleansed,
apparently. That's the term used by a few U.N. officials. Also
tremendous looting, robbery, apparently they're trying to destroy the
place.
DB: The Indonesian apologetic for what they're doing in East Timor is
that if East Timor becomes independent it will set a precedent for
Ambon, Irian Jaya and Aceh.
NC: Let's remember that East Timor is not part of Indonesia. East Timor
was invaded and conquered by Indonesia. That has never been recognized
by the U.N., never even been recognized by the U.S. It's been
recognized by the U.S. press for a long time. Up until very recently,
the reports used to be "Dili, Indonesia." But it's no more a part of
Indonesia than occupied France was part of Germany during the Second
World War.
DB: So when Seth Mydans, who writes for the New York Times, describes
pro-independence advocates as "separatists," is he off the mark?
NC: That's like saying the French resistance were separatists under the
Nazis. Indonesia has been ordered to withdraw instantly, back in 1975,
by the Security Council. The U.S. didn't even veto it, though it
undermined it. The World Court has declared that the population retains
the right of self-determination. Australia did grant de jure
recognition, but they've essentially withdrawn it. That's it. The
Indonesians have no right whatsoever to be there except for the right
of force and the fact that the U.S. has supported their presence.
Otherwise they'd be out.
What happened has been very graphically and lucidly described by the
U.S. U.N. Ambassador, Daniel Patrick Moynihan. He was the U.N.
Ambassador at the time of the Indonesian invasion. He wrote his memoirs
a couple of years later and was very frank about it. He said, The State
Department wanted things to turn out as they did. It was my
responsibility to render the U.N. "utterly ineffective" in anything it
might do, "and I carried it forward with no inconsiderable success."
Then he goes on to say what happened afterwards. The next couple of
weeks about 60,000 people were killed, roughly the proportion of the
population of Russia killed by the Germans. That's him, not me. Then he
turned to some other subject. That's pretty accurate, and it continued.
It got worse under the Carter Administration.
Richard Holbrooke, who just presented his credentials to the U.N. as
Ambassador yesterday. The press, in reporting this, did talk about his
diplomatic successes at Dayton. They didn't look at his diplomatic
career in connection with another item that's on the front pages,
namely East Timor. He was Undersecretary of State for Asian Affairs for
the Carter
Administration, and he was the leading apologist for the Indonesian
invasion.
DB: Will Seaman (International Federation for East Timor Observer
Project), who has just returned from six weeks in East Timor, wants me
to ask you about the U.S. military ties with Wironto and the Indonesian
military. There is not an overt green light, but there is a yellow
light for the Indonesian military to carry out operations in
coordination with the militias in East Timor. Do you have any
information on that?
NC: The Indonesian military was for a long period essentially a U.S.-
run military force. The officers were trained here. They had joint
exercises. They had mostly U.S. arms. That's changed. By now I think
Australia is probably much more involved in training and joint
exercises. In fact, they had joint exercises very recently, including
with Kopassus, the commando forces that have a horrible record and are
modeled on the Green Berets. They have been implicated in most of the
current massacres. Britain has been a major arms supplier. The U.S.
government, the White House, has been blocked by Congress from sending
most arms and carrying out direct training. The Clinton Administration
has evaded those restrictions in the past, found ways around them and
continued under another hat. Whether that's still continuing is very
hard to say, because nobody is looking at it, as far as I know. These
things usually come out a couple of years later. But whatever the
arrangements may be, there is no doubt that the U.S. military has
plenty of leverage, and the White House, too, if they want to use it.
The Indonesians care quite a lot about what stand the U.S. takes with
regard to what they do.
I should say that they are not powerless, however. One of the reasons
why the U.S. is maybe hanging back, apart from the fact that Indonesia
is a loyal, rich client and there are plenty of U.S. corporations
operating there and they don't care one way or another about the
Timorese, quite apart from all of those things, which have been
operative for quite a long time, there's another problem looming right
now. It doesn't get reported much. A couple of days ago the Chinese
President Ziang Zemin was in Thailand. He made a very strong speech
which got a lot of attention in Southeast Asia in which he condemned
U.S. "gunboat diplomacy" and economic neocolonialism. He talked, not
in detail, but he discussed security arrangements between China and
ASEAN, the Southeast Asian countries. According to the limited press
coverage from Southeast Asia, the Thai elites welcomed this because
they are glad to see a counterforce to the U.S., which much of the
world is very much afraid of now. China is clearly offering some kind
of security arrangement in which it will be the center. That means also
an economic bloc with the Southeast Asian countries or part of them,
maybe Japan ultimately brought in, and North Asia, that would exclude
or at least marginalize the U.S.
You have to remember that the major concern of the U.S. in that region
of the world since the Second World War has been to prevent that from
happening. That has been the driving concern behind the
remilitarization of U.S. allies, including Japan, the Indochina war,
the U.S. clandestine operations in 1958 which tried to break up
Indonesia, which at that time was neutralist and right on to the
present. They didn't care much about Russia. They didn't have a Cold
War connection. But it was a concern that the countries of the region
might accommodate to China, as it was put in internal documents, and
create a kind of an Asian bloc in which the U.S. would not have
privileged access and control. I can't imagine that Washington
policymakers aren't aware of this. Indonesian generals may be thinking
of it, too, thinking that it offers them a certain degree of leverage
against even mild U.S. pressures.
DB: What suggestions would you make to ordinary Americans, listeners to
this broadcast or readers of this interview, what can they do?
NC: There is one last chance to save the Timorese from utter disaster.
I stress "utter." They've already suffered enormous disaster. In a very
short time span, in the next couple of days, probably, unless the U.S.
government takes a decisive, open stand, this thing may be past rescue.
It's only going to happen in one way, if there's a lot of public
pressure on the White House. Otherwise it won't happen. This has been a
horror story for twenty-five years. It's now very likely culminating,
and there isn't much time to do anything about it.
DB: Thanks very much.
The number for the White House comment line is (202) 456-1414.
For information about obtaining cassette copies or transcripts of this
or other programs, please contact:
David Barsamian
Alternative Radio
P.O. Box 551
Boulder, CO 80306
(800) 444-1977
E-mail: ar@orci.com
¨1999
END
(
geocities.com/CapitolHill)