Bali And Imperialism

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

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

Therecent atrocity in Bali, like the September 11 attacks on America, did not happen in isolation. Theywere products, like everything, of the past. According to George W Bush, Tony Blair and now Australia's prime minister, John Howard, wehave no right to understand them. We must simply get the criminals, dead or alive.

Thefact that the Bush posse has caught no terrorist of proven importance since September 11 makes a grim parodyof 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. "Terroristattack" is not rhetorical; the Attorney General, Lord Goldsmith, has told the government it could finditself before the International Criminal Court if it goes ahead.

Stateterrorism is a taboo term. Politicians 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-stateatrocities like Bali and September 11. It is by far themost menacing form of terrorism, for it has the capacity to kill not 200, but hundreds of thousands. In eachshower of cluster bombs that will fall on Iraq will be countless Sari Clubs. Thedropping of the atomic bomb on the city of Hiroshima was the equivalent of the horror ofthe Twin Towers 100 times over.

Stateterrorism, backed by America, Britainand Australia, has scarred Indonesia for the past 40 years. For example,the source of the worst violence is the Indonesian army, which the West has supported and armed. Today, troopscontinue to terrorise the provinces of Aceh and West Papua, where they are"protecting" the American Exxon oil company's holdings and the Freeport mine.

InWest Papua, the army openly supports an Islamicgroup, Lashkar Jihad, which is linked to al-Qaeda. Thisis the same army which the Australian government trained for decades and publicly defended when its terrorismbecame too blatant.

In1999, when the people of Australia's closest northern neighbour, East Timor, which had been invaded andannexed by the Indonesia dictatorship of General Suharto, finally had an opportunity to vote for independenceand freedom, it was the government of John Howard that betrayed them. Although warned by Australia's intelligence agencies that theIndonesian 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 sincerevealed, they did know.

Thiswas only the latest in Australia's long complicity with state terrorism in Indonesia, which makes a mockery ofthe 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 some80,000 people murdered in Bali in 1965-66 with the connivance of theAustralian government.

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

TheAustralian Prime Minister at the time, Harold Holt, quipped: "With 500,000 to a million communistsympathisers knocked off, I think it's safe to assume a reorientation has taken place." Holt's remarkaccurately reflected the collaboration of the Australian foreign affairs and political establishment. TheAustralian embassy in Jakarta described the massacres as a"cleansing process". In Canberra,officials in the Prime Minister'sdepartment expressed support for "any measures to assist the Indonesian army cope with the internalsituation".

Suharto'sbloody rise might not have succeeded had the United States not secretly equipped his troops. Astate-of-the-art field communications system, flown in at night by the US Air Force planes, had highfrequencies 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 ofthe US administration were listening in andthat Suharto could seal off large areas of the country. In the American embassy, a senior official drew upassassination lists for Suharto, then ticked off the names when each was murdered.

Thebloodbath was the price of Indonesia becoming, as the World Bank describedit, "a model pupil of the global economy". That meant a green light for western corporations toexploit Indonesia's abundant natural resources. TheFreeport Company got a mountain of copper and gold in the province of West Papua. An American and European consortiumgot the nickel. The giant Alcoa company got the biggest slice of Indonesia's bauxite. Other companies took thetropical forests of Sumatra and Kalimantan; and Suharto and his cronies got acut that made them millionaires and billionaires.

IN1975, the violence that had brought Suharto to power was transferred to the Portuguese colony of East Timor. Suharto's troops invaded, and overthe next 23 years more than 200,000 people, a third of the population, perished. During much of East Timor's bloody occupation, Suharto'sbiggest supplier of arms and military equipment was Britain. In one year, a billion pounds' worthof Export Credit Guarantee loans went to Indonesia so that Suharto could buy British Aerospace Hawk jets.

Today,Suharto has gone, but decades of foreign plunder, in league with one of the greatest mass murderers, haveproduced fault-lines right across Indonesian society. The "model pupil" of the global economy ismore indebted than any country; and millions of Indonesians have descended into abject poverty. It is hardlysurprising there are resentments and tensions, and support for extreme religious groups.

Whowas responsible for the Bali bombing? We do not know, but Indonesia's generals have plenty of motives todestabilise 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 hasended important army privileges, including a block of guaranteed seats in the parliament. Last month, the armyappeared to be sending a message that it is now targeting foreigners when troops in West Papua staged an "ambush" theyclaimed was the work of local guerrillas and two Americans were murdered.

Whatis likely is that the pressure exerted by America, Australia and Britain on the secular government in Jakarta to "crack down" onIslamicist groups, in a mostly Islamic country, will polarise communities. To some, this will seem a familiargame of the powerful. In the 1960s, the West backed the Islamicist groups when they thought Indonesia would "go communist". Theywere expendable. When Bush, Blair and Howard are next shedding their crocodile tears and grinding the languageinto a paean of clichés about the "war on terror", those in Indonesia with long memories might be forgivenfor thinking nothing has changed.

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