TERROR WAR

[furtherfield]

Blankby John Pilger
October 25, 2002




TERROR WAR
What passing bells for these who die as cattle?" wrote the great First World
War poet Wilfred Owen. His famous line might have been written for those who
perish in today's secret wars and terrorist outrages.

His generation never used the word "terrorism", but the slaughter they
suffered was terrorism on a breathtaking scale, whose perpetrators were not
shadowy zealots but governments: men who spoke up for king and country while
blowing millions of human beings to bits.

Last week's atrocity in Bali, like the September 11 attacks on America, did
not happen in isolation. They were products, like everything, of the past.
According to George W Bush, Tony Blair and now Australia's pri

The fact that the Bush posse has caught no terrorist of proven importance
since September 11 makes a grim parody of Bush's semi-literate threats and
Blair's missionary deceptions as they prepare a terrorist attack on Iraq
that will be the horror of Bali many times over. "Terrorist attack" is not
rhetorical; the Attorney General, Lord Goldsmith, has told the government it
could find itself before the International Criminal Court if it goes ahead.

State terrorism is a taboo term. Politicans never utter it. Newspapers
rarely describe it. Academic "experts" suppress it; and yet, in many cases,
it helps us understand the root causes of non-state atrocities like Bali and
September 11. It is by far the most menacing form of terrorism, for it has
the capacity to kill not 200, but hundreds of thousands. In each shower of
cluster bombs that will fall on Iraq will be countless Sari Clubs. The
dropping of the atomic bomb on the city of

State terrorism, backed by America, Britain and Australia, has scarred
Indonesia
In West Papua, the army openly supports an Islamic group, Lashkar Jihad,
which is linked to al-Qaeda.


This is the same army which the Australian government trained for decades
and publicly defended when its terrorism became too blatant.

In 1999, when the people of Australia's closest northern neighbour, East
Timor, which had been invaded and annexed by the Indonesia dictatorship of
General Suharto, finally had an opportunity to vote for independence and
freedom, it was the government of John Howard that betrayed them. Although
warned by Australia's intelligence agencies that the Indonesian army was
setting up militias to terrorise the population, Howard and his foreign
minister, Alexander Downer, claimed they knew nothing; and the massacres
went ahead. As leaked documents have since revealed, they did know.

This was only the latest in Australia's long complicity with state terrorism
in Indonesia, which makes a mockery of the self-deluding declarations last
week that Australia had "lost its innocence" in Bali. Certainly, few
Australians are aware that not far from their holiday hotels are mass graves
with the remains of some 80,000 people murdered in Bali in 1965-66 with the
connivance of the Australian government.

Recently-released files reveal that when the Indonesian tyrant General
Suharto seized power in the 1960s, he did so with the secret backing of the
American, British and Australian governments, which looked the other way or
actively encouraged the slaughter of more than half a million "communists".
This was later described by the CIA as "one of the worst mass murders of the
20th Century".

The Australian Prime Minister at the time, Harold Holt, quipped: "With
500,000 to a million communist sympathisers knocked off, I think it's safe
to assume a reorientation has taken place." Holt's remark accurately
reflected the collaboration of the Australian foreign affairs and political
establishment. The Australian embassy in Jakarta described the massacres as
a "cleansing process". In Canberra, officals in the Prime Minister's
department expressed support for "any measures to assist the Indonesian arm

Suharto's bloody rise might not have succeeded had the United States not
secretly equipped his troops. A state-of-the-art field communications
system, flown in at night by the US Air Force planes, had high frequencies
that were linked directly to the CIA and the National Security Agency
advising President Johnson. Not only did this allow Suharto's generals to
co-ordinate the killings, it meant that the highest echelons of the US
administration were listening in and t

The bloodbath was the price of Indonesia becoming, as the World Bank
described it, "a model pupil of the global economy". That meant a green
light for western corporations to exploit Indonesia's abundant natural
resources. The Freeport Company got a mountain of copper and gold in the
province
IN 1975, the violence that had brought Suharto to power was transferred to
the Portuguese colony of East Timor. Suharto's troops invaded, and over the
next 23 years more than 200,000 people, a third of the population, perished.
During much of East Timor's bloody occupation, Suharto's biggest supplier of
arms and military equipment was Britain
Today, Suharto has gone, but decades of foreign plunder, in league with one
of the greatest mass murderers, have produced fault-lines right across
Indonesian society. The "model pupil" of the global economy is more indebted
than any country; and millions of Indonesians have descended into abject
poverty. It is hardly surprising there are resentments and tensions, and
support for extreme religious groups.

Who was responsible for the Bali bombing? We do not know, but Indonesia's
generals have plenty of motives to destabilise the elected government of
President Megawati. A number of them are implicated in war crimes, and,
unlike the Balkans, there has been minimal pressure from the West for the
guilty to be tried. Democracy has ended important army privileges, including
a block of guaranteed seats in the parliament. Last month, the army appeared
to be sending a message that it is now targeting foreigners when

What is likely is that the pressure exerted by America, Australia and
Britain on the secular government in Jakarta

John Pilger's new book, The New Rulers Of The World, is published by Verso.