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

The death toll was actively minimised while the second massacre was ignored. Greg Sheridan and Richard Woolcott, a former Ambassador to Indonesia, actually blamed Portugal for provoking the atrocity.

Former ANU Economics Professor Heinz Arndt lamented in The Australian, “… that the massacre was a tragedy, not because of the loss of life but because it inflamed anti-Indonesian hate campaigns in Australia”.

Such commentaries seemingly implied that the unarmed dead were an extreme anti-Indonesian stunt by Timorese, who selfishly placed themselves in the path of innocent Indonesian automatic gunfire. The entire event of course staged solely for the domestic benefit of those meddlesome Australian do gooders who sympathised with the plight of the East Timorese.

In regard to 1965, Aceh, East Timor and now West Papua, the Jakarta Lobby lack the moral courage in their ethical position to acknowledge that one must accept murder and atrocity so long as it brings about a potential climate of advantageous diplomatic relations with Jakarta.

To be unquestioning of the merits of the Jakarta Lobby approach to Indonesia is to suspend belief in logic and to obscure human suffering. To be critical of the Indonesian military for its documented and appalling human rights record is not anti-Indonesian. Its urgent reform is required as much for ordinary Indonesians, and their fledgling democracy, as is for the future of human rights in the eastern Indonesian islands.

When George Orwell noted “Political language … is designed to make lies sound truthful and murder respectable, and to give an appearance of solidity to pure wind” he highlighted the ethical blackhole of the so-called necessary or noble lies used to pursue short-term political gain.

People who support such tactics demonstrate the ongoing wisdom of Orwell’s philosophical insights.