The New York Times, August 17, 2006
A Book About East Timor Jabs Indonesia's Conscience
By JANE PERLEZ
JAKARTA, Indonesia, Aug. 14 — For more than two decades, the brutal military
occupation of East Timor, a distant, impoverished territory, brought Indonesia little but
disdain and dishonor on the world stage.
The ending, a bloody rampage by Indonesian-backed militias after a vote for
independence in 1999, further curdled the nation's reputation and left a bitter mood at
home, where the loss of East Timor was treated as a subject best left untouched.
The seemingly closed chapter was reopened this month with a new book by Ali
Alatas, the former longtime foreign minister and ambassador to the United Nations. It
is the first account by an Indonesian insider who tried to steer some of the events —
which at critical moments involved the United States, the United Nations and, at all
times, the heavy hand of the Indonesian Army.
Mr. Alatas, always amicable, always accessible, was respected in New York as a
quintessential diplomat handed the tricky task of representing his country during the
rule of a secretive and authoritarian leader, President Suharto.
In "The Pebble in the Shoe: The Diplomatic Struggle for East Timor," Mr. Alatas
traces events from the Indonesian invasion in 1975 to the army's exit in September
1999, and the transfer of control to a United Nations peacekeeping force.
For the most part, he sticks to the narrow diplomatic history, rarely veering into what
the army was doing on the ground, and mostly hinting rather than asserting that the
army's actions made the diplomatic track so tortuous.
"I decided I would try to open up a debate and leave it to the reader to draw his
conclusions," Mr. Alatas said in a recent interview.
The debate came immediately. A ceremony to celebrate the book's publication —
fashioned as a public seminar in the stately courtyard of the National Archives and
attended by former army generals, Indonesian officials and foreign diplomats — turned
into an initial round of soul-searching, even catharsis.
Dino Patti Djalal, who served under Mr. Alatas and is now President Susilo Bambang
Yudhoyono's most senior foreign policy adviser, told the audience that Indonesia had
many stark lessons to learn from East Timor, describing the period leading up to the
United Nations-administered referendum of Aug. 30, 1999, when the East Timorese
voted overwhelmingly for independence.
Mr. Djalal said he had been sent by Mr. Alatas to visit the East Timorese leader,
Xanana Gusmão, when Mr. Gusmão was still being held in a Jakarta prison.
Mr. Djalal had passed along a warning from Mr. Gusmão that the militias backed by
the Indonesian Army would create mayhem after the vote, but Indonesia did nothing to
prevent it, he said.
"He said, ‘Dino, this thing about the militias is going to be a cancer,' " Mr. Djalal
said.
"We never had the heart or the will to rein in the militia,'' he said, and added, "We paid
very dearly." The United Nations estimates that about 1,000 people died in the
violence that many say was turned on and off like a spigot by the military.
In his book, Mr. Alatas says the looting, burning and killing after the voting was so
bad that a delegation of Indonesian officials, including Mr. Alatas, was unable to leave
the airport when the group flew to East Timor for a firsthand look.
He goes on to say, "I began to have serious doubts whether, even under martial law,''
the Indonesian troops "could control the situation, not because of technical
incapability but because of wavering and indecisiveness to act strongly against the
militias."
Mr. Djalal said Indonesia fooled itself during its rule of East Timor. "We spoke of
winning the hearts and minds, but we didn't know what we were doing," he said. "East
Timor became a police state. We were bribing people we thought were loyal to us,
and doing horrible things to people we thought were not loyal to us."
At another point in the seminar, a former Indonesian ambassador to Australia, Sabam
Siagian, said Secretary of State Henry A. Kissinger had visited Jakarta just before the
invasion of East Timor and had told President Suharto that the plans for East Timor
were acceptable as long as the operation was done "quickly and cleanly." But, Mr.
Siagian said, "it was neither quick nor clean."
In his account, Mr. Alatas says that the shootings of East Timorese protesters in
November 1991 by the Indonesian military at a cemetery in Santa Cruz district was a
"turning point" from which Indonesia never recovered.
The massacre was captured on videotape by a British filmmaker and shown
worldwide. "Since that date, international support for Indonesia's position inexorably
declined while that for the independence movement in East Timor markedly
increased," he writes. Soon afterward, the United States cut military assistance to the
Suharto government.
With Indonesia's image suffering so much in the international arena, Mr. Alatas writes,
he tried in 1994 to persuade President Suharto of the wisdom of granting East Timor
autonomy, a status that Mr. Alatas had long favored. He was listened to patiently, he
records, but turned down.
If autonomy had been granted in the 1980's or 1990's, independence would not have
been necessary, Mr. Alatas suggests. To the astonishment of many, including Mr.
Alatas, after President Suharto's downfall the new president, B. J. Habibie, quickly set
the path for independence.
The title of his book comes from a remark Mr. Alatas once made to a Portuguese
journalist who had asked him how he felt about the international stigma over East
Timor.
Yes, he had answered, it was a problem for Indonesia, "but only as bothersome as a
pebble in a shoe," Mr. Alatas says. "In retrospect, however, I have to admit that in its
final years, the East Timor problem was no longer a mere pebble in the shoe but had
become a veritable boulder, dragging down Indonesia's international reputation to one
of its lowest points."
The troubles of East Timor came at a personal cost to Mr. Alatas. In the 1990's, he
was a serious candidate for secretary general of the United Nations.
But, he has said, President Suharto did not want him to pursue his candidacy. And
friends of Mr. Alatas have said that the president did not want the exposure on East
Timor that a campaign for Mr. Alatas would have attracted.
Copyright © 2006 The New York Times Company.
|
