---------------------------------------------------------- Visit Indonesia Daily News Online HomePage: http://www.indo-news.com/ Please Visit Our Sponsor http://www.indo-news.com/cgi-bin/ads1 ---------------------------------------------------------- Sunday Observer [UK] Sunday July 25, 1999=20 Observer Comment At least Indonesia loves us=20 Nick Cohen=20 To many in what used to be called the Establishment, Britain's decline in the twentieth century has left an open psychological wound. What we do no longer seems to matter. If you want to play the great game and know that the peoples of the world are dependent on your whims, you have to be in Washington, not London. Our cultural cringe alone explains why so many at the top give the impression that their greatest regret in life was not being born American.=20 In the interests of cheering up the mighty - this notebook's primary purpose - I'd like to point out there is scarcely a conflict on the planet where British influence is negligible.=20 Take East Timor, which the Indonesian military occupied in 1975 at a cost of 200,000 Timorese lives. The troops are now trying to stop the natives voting for independence by driving 60,000 from their homes. A sorry state of affairs, you might think, but no concern of ours. The Timorese would disagree. Britain has been Indonesia's quartermaster. Our arms industry was the kindest of friends to President Suharto, the genocidal dictator. The generous British taxpayer is owed =A31,541 million by Indonesia after the Ol= d Conservatives and New Labour agreed to guarantee weapons sales.=20 Last week, an Australian reporter in Dili, the capital of East Timor, saw a British-made Hawk fighter flying low over the island to remind the inhabitants who was boss. Ann Clwyd, the magnificent Labour backbencher, said that successive governments had promised that Hawks would never be used in occupied Timor. Shouldn't Robin Cook make a robust protest to the Indonesian government?=20 Cook agreed to raise his voice, to the astonishment of your correspondent. Until last week, his record on Indonesia has turned the strongest stomachs. His 'ethical' Foreign Office's first report on human rights emphasised Britain's commitment to justice by printing entirely without irony a picture of Cook warmly shaking hands with Suharto. New Labour has approved 92 weapons deliveries to Jakarta since coming to power. By bringing this up again, Clwyd risked seeming a dinosaur. A spankingly new foreign policy think-tank was launched this year by a young man called Mark Leonard, who defended Cook and criticised Lefties like Clwyd for having shrunken minds that worried about arms sales and 'little else'.=20 I feel guilty about having a go at Leonard. It was he who came up with the gloriously asinine rebranding of Britain as Cool Britannia, the mockery of which kept me in work for months. But when we are the world's second biggest arms exporter, when the Government's Defence Export Services Organisation has set itself the target of winning =A325 billions' worth of arms orders in the next five years and when a study from York University shows that flogging weapons cost =A3431m in subsidies (while bringing just =A3203m to the UK economy), then tiny minds cannot help thinking that we are punishing cruel foreigners who no longer care about us by supplying them with the instruments of their destruction.=20 =A0 ++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++ Didistribusikan tgl. 26 Jul 1999 jam 11:12:15 GMT+1 oleh: Indonesia Daily News Online <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> http://www.Indo-News.com/ ++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++
