Newsgroup: it.cultura.storia
Titolo: Suharto, the Model Killer, and His Friends in High Places

Suharto, the Model Killer, and His Friends in High Places 
 
by John Pilger 
In my film Death of a Nation, there is a sequence filmed on board an
Australian aircraft flying over the island of Timor. A party is in
progress, and two men in suits are toasting each other in champagne. "This
is an historically unique moment," says one of them, "that is truly
uniquely historical." This is Gareth Evans, Australia's foreign minister.
The other man is Ali Alatas, principal mouthpiece of the Indonesian
dictator, Gen. Suharto. It is 1989, and the two are making a grotesquely
symbolic flight to celebrate the signing of a treaty that allowed
Australia and the international oil and gas companies to exploit the
seabed off East Timor, then illegally and viciously occupied by Suharto.
The prize, according to Evans, was "zillions of dollars." 
Beneath them lay a land of crosses: great black crosses etched against the
sky, crosses on peaks, crosses in tiers on the hillsides. Filming
clandestinely in East Timor, I would walk into the scrub and there were
the crosses. They littered the earth and crowded the eye. In 1993, the
Foreign Affairs Committee of the Australian Parliament reported that "at
least 200,000" had died under Indonesia's occupation: almost a third of
the population. And yet East Timor's horror, which was foretold and
nurtured by the U.S., Britain, and Australia, was actually a sequel. "No
single American action in the period after 1945," wrote the historian
Gabriel Kolko, "was as bloodthirsty as its role in Indonesia, for it tried
to initiate the massacre." He was referring to Suharto's seizure of power
in 1965-1966, which caused the violent deaths of up to a million people. 
To understand the significance of Suharto, who died on Sunday, is to look
beneath the surface of the current world order: the so-called global
economy and the ruthless cynicism of those who run it. Suharto was our
model mass murderer – "our" is used here advisedly. "One of our very best
and most valuable friends," Thatcher called him, speaking for the West.
For three decades, the Australian, U.S., and British governments worked
tirelessly to minimize the crimes of Suharto's Gestapo, known as Kopassus,
who were trained by the Australian SAS and the British army and who gunned
down people with British-supplied Heckler and Koch machine guns from
British-supplied Tactica "riot control" vehicles. Prevented by Congress
from supplying arms directly, U.S. administrations from Gerald Ford to
Bill Clinton provided logistic support through the back door and
commercial preferences. In one year, the British Department of Trade
provided almost a billion pounds worth of so-called soft loans, which
allowed Suharto to buy Hawk fighter-bombers. The British taxpayer paid the
bill for aircraft that dive-bombed East Timorese villages, and the arms
industry reaped the profits. However, the Australians distinguished
themselves as the most obsequious. In an infamous cable to Canberra,
Richard Woolcott, Australia's ambassador to Jakarta, who had been
forewarned about Suharto's invasion of East Timor, wrote: "What Indonesia
now looks to from Australia … is some understanding of their attitude and
possible action to assist public understanding in Australia…." Covering up
Suharto's crimes became a career for those like Woolcott, while
"understanding" the mass murderer came in buckets. This left an indelible
stain on the reformist government of Gough Whitlam following the
cold-blooded killing of two Australian TV crews by Suharto's troops during
the invasion of East Timor. "We know your people love you," Bob Hawke told
the dictator. His successor, Paul Keating, famously regarded the tyrant as
a father figure. When Indonesian troops slaughtered at least 200 people in
the Santa Cruz cemetery in Dili, East Timor, and Australian mourners
planted crosses outside the Indonesian embassy in Canberra, foreign
minister Gareth Evans ordered them destroyed. To Evans, ever-effusive in
his support for the regime, the massacre was merely an "aberration." This
was the view of much of the Australian press, especially that controlled
by Rupert Murdoch, whose local retainer, Paul Kelly, led a group of
leading newspaper editors to Jakarta, fawn before the dictator. 
Here lies a clue as to why Suharto, unlike Saddam Hussein, died not on the
gallows but surrounded by the finest medical team his secret billions
could buy. Ralph McGehee, a senior CIA operations officer in the 1960s,
describes the terror of Suharto's takeover of Indonesia as "the model
operation" for the American-backed coup that got rid of Salvador Allende
in Chile seven years later. "The CIA forged a document purporting to
reveal a leftist plot to murder Chilean military leaders," he wrote,
"[just like] what happened in Indonesia in 1965." The U.S. embassy in
Jakarta supplied Suharto with a "zap list" of Indonesian Communist Party
(PKI) members and crossed off the names when they were killed or captured.
Roland Challis, the BBC's south east Asia correspondent at the time, told
me how the British government was secretly involved in this slaughter.
"British warships escorted a ship full of Indonesian troops down the
Malacca Straits so they could take part in the terrible holocaust," he
said. "I and other correspondents were unaware of this at the time…. There
was a deal, you see." 
The deal was that Indonesia under Suharto would offer up what Richard
Nixon had called "the richest hoard of natural resources, the greatest
prize in southeast Asia." In November 1967, the greatest prize was handed
out at a remarkable three-day conference sponsored by the Time-Life
Corporation in Geneva. Led by David Rockefeller, all the corporate giants
were represented: the major oil companies and banks, General Motors,
Imperial Chemical Industries, British American Tobacco, Siemens, U.S.
Steel, and many others. Across the table sat Suharto's U.S.-trained
economists who agreed to the corporate takeover of their country, sector
by sector. The Freeport company got a mountain of copper in West Papua. A
U.S./ European consortium got the nickel. The giant Alcoa company got the
biggest slice of Indonesia's bauxite. America, Japanese, and French
companies got the tropical forests of Sumatra. When the plunder was
complete, President Lyndon Johnson sent his congratulations on "a
magnificent story of opportunity seen and promise awakened." Thirty years
later, with the genocide in East Timor also complete, the World Bank
described the Suharto dictatorship as a "model pupil." 
Shortly before he died, I interviewed Alan Clark, who under Thatcher was
Britain's minister responsible for supplying Suharto with most of his
weapons. I asked him, "Did it bother you personally that you were causing
such mayhem and human suffering?" 
"No, not in the slightest," he replied. "It never entered my head." 
"I ask the question because I read you are a vegetarian and are seriously
concerned with the way animals are killed." 
"Yeah?" 
"Doesn't that concern extend to humans?" 
"Curiously not." 
 
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 "Curiously not."
beh, anche Hitler amava gli animali ed era vegetariano....:D

 Suharto, the Model Killer, and His Friends in High Plac
ROMA - No all'antisemitismo "anche quando esso
si travesta da antisionismo". E' l'appello lanciato da Giorgio 
Napolitano nella giornata della Memoria, (dello scorso anno ndt) 
celebrata al Quirinale, in una cerimonia solenne cui hanno partecipato 
anche il presidente del Consiglio Romano Prodi, i presidenti della 
Camera e Senato Fausto Bertinotti e Franco Marini.
"Antisionismo", ha detto il capo dello stato, "significa negazione della 
fonte ispiratrice dello stato ebraico, delle ragioni della sua nascita, 
ieri, e della sua sicurezza oggi, al di là dei governi che si alternano 
nella guida di Israele".

 ROMA - No all'antisemitismo "
ma cosa cazzo c'entra con l'articolo che ho postato, idiota in camicia
nera?
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model mass murderer - "our" is used here advisedly. "One of our very
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now looks to from Australia ... is some understanding of their attitude
and
possible action to assist public understanding in Australia...."
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said. "I and other correspondents were unaware of this at the time....
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 nera?
Qui l'unico che ha poca confidenza con l'intelligenza è solamente colui che
pubblicizza il sito dei comunisti italiani :)

Paolo Longo ha scritto:
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e se lo dici tu che con l'intelligenza sei separato dalla nascita...
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