Although we know it’s not true, the formal position of the Indonesian government is that there is no Indonesian military intervention in East Timor. We should act in a way to minimise public impact in Australia and show private understanding to the Indonesians of their problem. Richard Woolcott, Australian ambassador, cable
Australia, ahead of any other nation on Earth, put pressure on the Indonesian government to accept a peace-keeping operation. John W Howard, former prime minister of Australia
Dear Mr President, I want to emphasise that Australia’s support for Indonesia’s sovereignty is unchanged. It has been a long-standing Australian position that the interests of Australia, Indonesia and East Timor are best served by East Timor remaining part of Indonesia. John W Howard, letter to Indonesia’s president
We were actually told from our chain of command to go soft on the massacres and soft on body disposal ... The low-level pawns, the militia, they’ll get tried ... But none of the TNI [Indonesian Military] who organised it all, they’ll walk free. Andrew Plunkett
SBS Reporter: So is Australia holding information today that could lead to the conviction of Indonesian army figures?
Captain Plunkett: Definitely. SBS Dateline 16th May 2001
In Indonesia 35 years ago, a military dictator took over, a million people were killed and a red carpet was rolled out for western capital. It was the start of globalisation in Asia, a model for the rest of the world, leaving a legacy of sweatshops and corruption.
Flying into Jakarta, it is not difficult to imagine the city below fitting the World Bank’s description of Indonesia. A ‘model pupil of globalisation’ was the last of many laurels the bank bestowed. That was almost four years ago, in the summer of 1997. Within weeks, short-term global capital had fled the country, the stock market and currency had crashed, and the number of people living in absolute poverty had reached almost 70 million. The next year, General Suharto was forced to resign after 30 years as dictator, taking with him severance pay estimated at $15 billion, the equivalent of almost 13% of his country’s foreign debt, much of it owed to the World Bank.
From the air, it is the industrial design of the model pupil that is striking. Jakarta is ringed by vast compounds, known as economic processing zones. These enclose hundreds of factories that make products for foreign companies: the clothes you buy on the high street, from the cool khakis of Gap to the Nike, Adidas and Reebok trainers that sell in the UK for up to 100 pounds a pair. In these factories are thousands of mostly young women working for the equivalent of 72 pence per day. At current exchange rates, this is the official minimum wage in Indonesia, which, says the government, is about half the living wage and here, that means subsistence. Nike workers get about 4% of the retail price of the shoes they make – not enough to buy the laces. Still, they count themselves lucky: they have jobs. The ‘booming, dynamic economic success’ (another World Bank accolade) has left more than 36 million without work. At a factory I saw, making the famous brands, the young women work, battery-style, in temperatures that climb to 40 degrees centigrade. Most have no choice about the hours they must work, including a notorious ‘long shift’: 36 hours without going home.
Clinging to the factories, like the debris of a great storm, are the labour camps: Hobbesian communities living in long dormitories made from breeze blocks, plywood packing cases and corrugated iron. Like the majority of humanity who are not touched by the delights of McDonald’s and Starbucks, the internet and mobile phones, who cannot afford to eat enough protein, these are globalisation’s unpeople. They live wit open, overflowing sewers and unsafe water for many, up to half their wages go on drinkable water. Through their homes run stinking canals dug by the former colonial masters, the Dutch, in the usual vainglorious attempt to recreate Europe in Asia. The result is an urban environmental disaster that breeds mosquitoes today, a plague of them in the camps has brought a virulent form of dengue fever, known as ‘break-back fever’.
After several visits here, I was bitten and took two months to recover. For the undernourished young children in the camps, however, dengue often means death. It is a disease of globalisation the mosquitoes domesticated as the camps grew and as the sweatshop workers migrated from rural areas, having been impoverished largely by World Bank programmes that promote export cash crops over self-sustaining agriculture.
I could just squeeze along a passageway. It was filled with people’s clothes, hanging in plastic, like the backroom of a dry cleaner’s. The cleanliness and neatness of people’s lives is astonishing. They live in cell-like rooms, mostly without windows or ventilation, in which eating and sleeping are tuned to the ruthless rhythm of shiftwork in the factories. During the monsoon season, the canals rise and flood, and more plastic materialises to protect possessions: a precious tape player, posters of the Spice Girls and Che Guevera. I almost tipped over a frying pan of sizzling tofu. There are open paraffin fires and children darting perilously close. I watched a family of five perched on a patch of green, gazing at the sunset through a polluted yellow haze tiny bats circled overhead in the distance were the skeletal silhouettes of unfinished skyscrapers. It was an apocalyptic glimpse of a ‘globalised’ world that Blair and Bush say is irreversible.
A code of conduct issued by the American company Gap says: ‘Dormitory facilities [must] meet all applicable laws and regulations related to health and safety, including fire safety, sanitation, risk protection and electrical, mechanical and structural safety.’ Because these dormitories are not on the factory site, however, Gap and the companies they contract to make their products are not liable. Consumers humming into Gap’s numerous stores in Britain might reflect on this non-liability as they pay for smart shirts made by people who, on the wages they are paid, cannot afford even the buttons, let alone a decent place to live. Ten miles from the camps, along the toll road owned by Suharto’s daughter (he distributed the national power grid among his children banks and vast tracts of forest were tossed to generals and other cronies), lies downtown Jakarta. This is the approved face of the global ‘model pupil’. Here you can find McDonald’s with sugar-plump children on Ronald’s knee, and shopping malls with Versace leather coats at ?2,000 and a showroom of Jaguar cars. One of the smartest hotels is the Shangri-la. There are four wedding receptions here every Sunday night. Last December, attended one that cost $120,000.
It was held in the grand ballroom, which is a version of the ballroom of the Waldorf Astoria in New York, complete with chandeliers and gold-leaf arches. The guests wore Armani, Versace and real diamonds, and dropped cheques in a large box. There was an eight-tier cake with the initials of the couple embossed in icing and the holiday snaps of them on a world tour were projected cinema-size. The guests included former cronies of the deposed Suharto and the chief representative of the World Bank in Indonesia, Mark Baird, a New Zealander, who looked troubled when I asked him if he was enjoying himself. The World Bank says its mission in Indonesia is ‘poverty reduction’ and ‘reaching out to the poor’. The Bank set up the $86 million loan that built the Shangri-la, which, shortly after the wedding attended by Baird, sacked most of its workers when they went on strike for decent pay.
The Gotham City skyline of downtown Jakarta is mostly banks, many of them empty, and unfinished buildings. Before 1997, there were more banks here than in any city on earth, but half of them have gone bust since the ‘dynamic’ economy collapsed beneath the weight of its corruption. During Suharto’s 30-year dictatorship, a cataract of ‘global’ capital poured into Indonesia. The World Bank lavished more than $30 billion. Some of this went to worthwhile programmes, such as literacy, billions went elsewhere – $630 million was spent on a notorious ‘transmigration’ programme that allowed Suharto to colonise the archipelago. Migrants from all over Indonesia were sent to occupied East Timor, where they controlled the economy. The recent blood-letting in Kalimantan (Borneo) was directed against Madura islanders who had been shipped in to ‘develop’ the territory. In August 1997, an internal World Bank report, written in Jakarta, confirmed arguably the greatest scandal in the history of ‘development’ – that ‘at least 20 to 30%’ of the bank’s loans ‘are diverted through informal payments to GOI [Government of Indonesia] staff and politicians’.
Seldom a month would pass when Suharto was not being congratulated by western politicians for bringing ‘stability’ to the world’s fourth most populous nation. British politicians were especially appreciative, beginning with Harold Wilson’s foreign secretary, Michael Stewart, who in 1966 lauded the dictator’s ‘sensible economic policies’. Margaret Thatcher called Suharto ‘one of our very best and most valuable friends’. John Major’s foreign secretary, Douglas Hurd, championed the Suharto regime’s ‘Asian values’ (the unctuous code for lack of democracy and abuse of human rights).
In 1997, Robin Cook’s first trip abroad included Indonesia, where he shook hands warmly with Suharto – so warmly that a colour photograph of the pair of them was chosen, bizarrely, to illustrate the Foreign Office’s report on human rights in the world.