-Caveat Lector- ----Original Message Follows---- From: [EMAIL PROTECTED] (Rich Winkel) To: undisclosed-recipients:; Subject: U.S. can't plead innocent in East Timor repression Date: Sat, 18 Sep 1999 01:24:05 -0500 (CDT) /** reg.easttimor: 3819.0 **/ ** Topic: RMN-U.S. can't plead innocent in East Timor repression ** ** Written 8:06 AM Sep 16, 1999 by [EMAIL PROTECTED] in cdp:reg.easttimor ** From: Donald L Ferry <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> Subject: RMN-U.S. can't plead innocent in East Timor repression http://insidedenver.com/jensen/0916holge.shtml Holger Jensen U.S. can't plead innocent in East Timor repression 9/16/99 The U.N. Security Council has finally authorized a multinational force to end the military-backed wave of butchery and destruction that followed East Timor's vote for independence two weeks ago. Troops from Australia, New Zealand, Portugal, Britain and a number of Asian nations will be airlifted in by American planes as early as this weekend. This does not atone for the council's inexcusable delay in waiting for Indonesian permission to deploy such a force -- a delay that East Timor's Catholic leader, Bishop Carlos Belo, believes may have cost more than 10,000 lives. Nor does it excuse the Clinton administration's asinine insistence that the Indonesian army help contain the violence, while at the same time acknowledging it to be one of the principal perpetrators. That folly will be compounded if Indonesian troops are allowed to remain on the island in "an advisory and liaison role." The Indonesian army has had a long and bloody reign, helping two dictators -- Sukarno and Suharto -- keep the vast archipelago of 17,508 islands, 210 million people and 27 ethnic groups stitched together. An anti-communist witchhunt in 1965 left 500,000 dead, not all of them communists. The 1975 invasion of East Timor and its subsequent annexation killed 200,000 more, many of them in internment camps. Indonesian generals, who lost thousands of their own men in a war to control the former Portuguese colony, opposed President Jusuf Habibie's sudden offer of independence to East Timor last January. They armed and funded the militias that tried to intimidate islanders into voting for continued rule by Jakarta. And when that failed, Indonesian troops participated in the militia rampages that followed the Aug. 30 vote. Damien Kingsbury, an Australian academic who helped monitor the referendum, said the United Nations knew well in advance that a vote for independence would be followed by brutal and organized retribution. U.N. monitors had documents proving the militias were acting on orders from the Indonesian military. They even had letter exchanges between militia commanders and Indonesia's armed forces chief, Gen. Wiranto. "We knew about this weeks ago. We had information that it was going to happen, at the beginning of August," Kingsbury told Reuters. "Prior to the ballot we were actually getting leaked documents outlining the strategies, the funding processes and everything." But nothing was done about it. The U.S. role in all this is less than heroic. Although the White House tried to portray itself as an innocent bystander to the Timor crisis, with little or no leverage over the Indonesian military, William Hartung of the World Policy Institute says: "Nothing could be further from the truth." "Since Indonesia illegally occupied East Timor in 1975," he points out, "the U.S. government has approved sales of over $1 billion in U.S. weaponry to the regime in Jakarta, including everything from F-16 fighter planes to military helicopters to M-16 combat rifles." Those selfsame rifles are now being used by the militias in East Timor to slaughter those who voted for independence. Hartung notes that under the Clinton administration, Indonesia received $148 million worth of weapons, ammunition and spare parts. Commercial sales of U.S. military equipment licensed by the State Department increased substantially over the past three years, from $3.3 million in 1997 to $16.3 million last year. "To make matters worse," he says, "as recently as 1997 the Pentagon violated the spirit of a Congressional prohibition on U.S. military training to Indonesia by providing assistance to the notorious Kopassus counterinsurgency units under the Joint Combined Exercise and Training program. Kopassus has long been implicated in acts of repression within East Timor, and its members are suspected of involvement in the recent campaign of murder and harassment of pro-independence figures." President Clinton halted all arms sales to Indonesia last week. The International Monetary Fund and World Bank also stopped disbursing loans that were part of a bailout package granted Indonesia after its economy crashed last year. It still smacks of doing too little too late. Holger Jensen is international editor of the Rocky Mountain News (e-mail: [EMAIL PROTECTED]). His column also appears on the Internet at http://InsideDenver.com/jensen/ ** End of text from cdp:reg.easttimor ** *************************************************************************** This material came from the Institute for Global Communications (IGC), a non-profit, unionized, politically progressive Internet services provider. For more information, send a message to [EMAIL PROTECTED] (you will get back an automatic reply), or visit their web site at http://www.igc.org/ . 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