Truth, West Papua and Indonesia: 2 + 2 really can = 5

Kelly rightly points out there are differences between East Timor and West Papua that deserve analysis, but again fails to analyse his conclusions correctly.

Due to the presence of the Freeport Mine the scale of TNI corruption and business interests in the forestry sector is much greater than in East Timor. The two nationalist movements also differ in structure, unity and cohesiveness. The ethnic and linguistic diversity of Papuans is a factor. In common though is the reality of human rights violations. This commonality is not due to the loud and unsympathetic critics, but in my view to the inability of the TNI to not kill reluctant Indonesian citizens in large numbers.

Rewriting the past - the need to forget

The Jakarta Lobby argued for 25 years of the unending benefits of an Indonesian East Timor. Human rights concerns were dismissed as exaggerations or just ignored. When Paul Keating visited Jakarta in 1991 he praised the rise of Suharto’s “New Order” government as the most beneficial event to Australian security since World War II.The 1965 massacres that established the New Order were then presumably beneficial in much the same way as Kokoda.

In 1965 American embassy officials, with the help of the CIA, compiled lists of suspected high-ranking communists within Indonesia that were handed to the Indonesian army. According to the CIA, 1965 was one of greatest massacres and significant events of the second half of the 20th century to be compared with Stalin’s purges, the mass murder of the Nazis during World War II and the Maoists in the early 1950’s.

Such was the carnage that the US Embassy advised Washington that it did “… not know whether the real figure is closer to 100,000 or 1 million (dead) but believed it wiser to err on the side of lower estimates, especially when questioned by the press”.

The US attitude toward the mass killings was indifferent. Howard Federspiel formerly of the Bureau of Intelligence & Research (US State Department) remembered that: “No one cared, as long as they were communists … No one was getting very worked up about it”.

Hundreds and thousands of political prisoners (Tapols) were also jailed in the years after 1965-66. Historian Gabriel Kolko compared 1965 with the Nazis during World War II, and historian Peter Dale Scott has argued that the communist coup myth rests on many sources with “… prominent CIA connections”.

At the end of the bloodletting the Australian Prime Minister Harold Holt stated, “With 500,000 to a million Communist sympathisers knocked off … I think it is safe to assume a reorientation has taken place.” At least this truthfully expressed the scale of death required to create the preferred western political climate of stability in Indonesia.

Keating’s speech made no reference to the historical realities of 1965, but it may be speculated that Suharto understood clearly. Journalist Glen Milne (The Australian, April 25, 1992) saw that “… Keating had passed the first test of his leadership, successfully driving Australian-Indonesian relations beyond the policy straight jacket of East Timor”.

Australian journalists continued to be supportive of the regime but a year later Suharto was overthrown by a widespread citizen reform movement.

Political language - it’s logic Jim, but not as we know it

Critics of the Jakarta Lobby were labelled anti-Indonesian, ignorant or just garden-variety racists. Such is the Lobby group’s mentality that NGO’s, human rights activists, the Catholic Church, critical media reportage and even Portugal were roundly condemned by the group for the violence perpetrated by the Indonesian military throughout the 80’s and 90’s in Timor.

Two Dili massacres occurred in November 1991 and the commentaries of Pro-Jakarta advocates just demonstrated their extreme political language and mentality.