They all knew, of course. Amnesty filled cabinets with evidence of Suharto’s grisly record. Milosevic and Saddam Hussein were wimps by comparison. Shortly before Cook flew in, an exhaustive investigation by the foreign affairs committee of the Australian parliament concluded that Suharto’s troops had caused the deaths of ‘at least’ 200,000 East Timorese, a third of the population. In New Labour’s first year in office, Britain was the biggest weapons supplier to Indonesia.
This made sense – the arms trade is one of globalisation’s great successes an Indonesia, the model pupil, has played a vital role. When the ‘global economy’ (i.e. unfettered capitalism) took hold in Britain in the early ’80s, Margaret Thatcher set about dismantling much of Britain’s manufacturing, while restoring the country’s arms industry to a world leader, second only to the US. This was done with veiled subsidies, of the kind that underwrite and rig the ‘free market’ in the West. Almost half of all research and development funds went on ‘defence’ and the export credit guarantee department (ECGD) of the Department of Trade and Industry offered ‘soft loans’ to third world regimes shopping for hi-tech sabres to rattle. That many had appalling human rights records and internal conflicts and/or were on the verge of war with a neighbour (India, Pakistan, Iran, Iraq, Israel) was not a barrier. Indonesia was a major recipient of these virtual giveaways. During one 12-month period, almost pounds 1 billion of ECGD money financed the sale of Hawk fighter-bombers to Indonesia. The British taxpayer paid up the arms industry reaped its profits. The Hawks were used to bomb villages in the mountains of East Timor – and the Foreign Office lied about for years, until Cook was forced to admit it. Since then, the Hawks have bombed the West Papuans as they have struggled to free themselves.
I drove into the Krawang region of Java, where I met a rice farmer called Sarkom. It is fair to describe Sarkom as representative of the 80% of humanity whose livelihoods depend on agriculture. He is not among the poorest, he lives with his wife and three daughters in a small, bamboo-walled house and there are tiles on the floor. At the front, under the eave, is a bamboo bed, a chair and a table where his wife, Cucuk, supplements their income with sewing. Last year, the International Monetary Fund offered the post-Suharto government a ‘rescue package’ of multi-million-dollar loans. The conditions included the elimination of tariffs on staple foods.
‘Trade in all qualities of rice has been opened to general importers and exporters,’ decreed the IMF’s letter of intent. Fertilisers and pesticides also lost their 70% subsidy. This means that farmers such as Sarkom are likely to go bankrupt and their children forced to find work in the cities. Moreover, it gives the green light to the giant US foodgrains corporations to move into Indonesia.
The double standard embodied in these conditions is breathtaking. Agribusiness in the west, especially in the US and Europe, has been able to produce its infamous surpluses and develop its export power only because of high tariff walls and massive domestic subsidies. The result has been the soaring power of the west over humanity's staples. The chief executive of the Cargill Corporation, which dominates the world trade in foodgrains, once boasted, ‘When we get up from the breakfast table each morning, much of what we have eaten – cereals, bread, coffee, sugar and so on – has passed through the hands of my company.’ Cargill’s goal is to double in size every five to seven years. This is known as ‘free trade’. ‘I went to prison for 14 years so that this would not happen,’ said Sarkom. ‘All my friends, those who were not killed, went to prison so that the power of big money would not take us over. I don’t care what they call it now – global this or that. It’s the same force, the same threat to our lives.’
That remark refers to a chapter in Indonesia’s recent past that western politicians and businessmen would prefer to forget, although they have been among the chief beneficiaries. Sarkom was one of tens of thousands imprisoned when General Suharto seized power in Indonesia in 1965-66 – the ‘year of living dangerously’ – deposing the nationalist president Sukarno, who had led Indonesia since the end of Dutch colonial rule. Scholars now estimate that as many as a million people died in a pogrom that was directed primarily at Indonesia’s communist party, the PKI. Sarkom was 19 when he was taken away. He is trying to write down in an exercise book his memories of the horrors he experienced. He was for many years on Buru island, where thousands were dumped, at first without housing, food and water. On the day I went to see him, he had gathered a group of friends for me to meet, men in their ’60s and ’70s, who had also been tapols – political prisoners released since the fall of Suharto in 1998.
Two were teachers, one a civil servant, another a member of parliament. One man was imprisoned because he refused to vote for Suharto’s front party, Golkar. Several were PKI members. Adon Sutrisna, a teacher, told me, ‘We are the people, the nation, that the world forgot. If you know the truth about what happened in Indonesia, you can understand clearly where the world is being led today.’
A few miles from Sarkom’s farm is a hump of earth overgrown with mustard flowers. It is a mass grave, but it has no markings – 35 years after the murders, the families of the victims, believed to be a dozen, are still too frightened to place a headstone. However, in the post-Suharto era, many Indonesians are slowly overcoming the fear that has blighted a generation throughout the countryside, families have begun to excavate the remains of their loved ones. They are furtive figures of the night, occasionally glimpsed on the rim of a paddy or a riverbank. The older witnesses recall rivers ‘jammed with bodies like logs’ in village after village, young men were slaughtered for no reason, their murder marked by rows of severed penises.
I have a friend in Jakarta whose name is Roy. Others call him Daniel. These are just two of many aliases that have helped keep him alive since 1965. He is one of a group of remarkable revolutionaries who went underground during the long years of Suharto’s repression – the years when the World Bank was tutoring its ‘model pupil’ – emerging at critical moments to lead spears of a clandestine opposition movement. On several occasions, this led to his arrest and torture. ‘I survived because they never knew it was me,’ he said. ‘Once, a torturer yelled at me, ‘Tell us where Daniel is!’’ In 1998, he helped bring on to the streets the students whose courageous confrontations with troops using British-supplied anti-riot vehicles played a critical role in finally bringing down the dictator.
Roy took me back to his primary school where, for him, the nightmare of Suharto’s rule began. As we sat in an empty classroom, he recalled the day in October 1965 when he watched a gang burst in, drag the headmaster into the playground, and beat him to death. ‘He was a wonderful man: gentle and kind,’ Roy said. ‘He would sing to the class, and read to me. He was the person that I, as a boy, looked up to … I can hear his screams now, but for a long time, years in fact, all I could remember was running from the classroom, and running and running through the streets, not stopping. When they found me that evening, I was dumbstruck. For a whole year I couldn’t speak.’
The headmaster was suspected of being a communist, and his murder that day was typical of the systematic executions of teachers, students, civil servants, peasant farmers. ‘In terms of the numbers killed’, reported the Central Intelligence Agency, ‘the massacres rank as one of the worst mass murders of the 20th century’. The historian Gabriel Kolko wrote that ‘the 'final solution’ to the communist problem in Indonesia ranks as a crime of the same type as the Nazis perpetrated’.
According to the Asia specialist Peter Dale Scott, western politicians, diplomats, journalists and scholars, some with prominent western intelligence connections, propagated the myth that Suharto and the military had saved the nation's honour from an attempted coup by the Indonesian communist party, the PKI. Until then, Sukarno had relied on the communists as a counterweight to the army. When six army generals were murdered on September 30, 1965, Suharto blamed the PKI. Since the dictator’s fall in 1998, witnesses have spoken for the first time and documents have come to light strongly suggesting that Suharto, who had military control of Jakarta, opportunistically exploited an internecine struggle within the army in order to seize power.
What is also no longer in doubt is the collaboration of Western governments and the subsequent role of western big business. Indeed, globalisation in Asia was conceived in this bloodbath. For Britain, the goal at the time was to protect its post-colonial interests in Malaysia, then threatened by ‘confrontation’ with an ‘unstable’ Sukarno – a 1964 Foreign Office file called for the ‘defence’ of Western interests in Southeast Asia, ‘a major producer of essential commodities. The region produces nearly 85% of the world’s natural rubber, over 45% of the tin, 65% of the copra and 23% of the chromium ore.’ Of Indonesia, Richard Nixon wrote, ‘With its 100 million people and its 300-mile arc of islands containing the region’s richest hoard of natural resources, Indonesia is the greatest prize in Southeast Asia.’
Sukarno was a populist as well as a nationalist, the founder of modern Indonesia and of the nonaligned movement of developing countries, which he hoped would forge a genuine ‘third way’ between the spheres of the two superpowers. He could be a democrat and a demagogue. He encouraged mass trade unions and peasant, women’s and cultural movements. Between 1959 and 1965, more than 15 million joined political parties or affiliated mass organisations that were encouraged to challenge British and US influence in the region. With three million members, the PKI was the largest communist party in the world outside the Soviet Union and China. According to the Australian historian Harold Crouch, ‘the PKI had won widespread support not as a revolutionary party but as an organisation defending the interests of the poor within the existing system’. It was this popularity, rather than any armed insurgency, that alarmed the Americans. Indonesia, like Vietnam to the north, could ‘go communist’.
In 1990, the American investigative journalist Kathy Kadane revealed the extent of secret US collaboration in the massacres of 1965/66 that toppled Sukarno and brought to power Suharto, who at the time was little known outside western intelligence circles. In a series of interviews with former US officials, she concluded, ‘They systematically compiled comprehensive lists of communist operatives. As many as 5,000 names were furnished to the Indonesian army, and the Americans later checked off the names of those who had been killed or captured.’