Seldom a day passes when Howard and his inept foreign minister, Alexander Downer, do not utter vacuitiesabout "the war on terror". The truth is that, for almost 40 years, Australian governments haveplayed a significant role in colluding with state terrorism in neighbouring Indonesia. In 1965, the then primeminister Harold Holt joked about the mass murder that accompanied the seizure of power by General Suharto, thewest's man. "With 500,000 to a million communist sympathisers knocked off," he said, "I thinkit's safe to assume a reorientation has taken place. " During the long years of Suharto's dictatorship,which was shored up by western capital, governments and the World Bank, state terrorism on a breathtakingscale was ignored. Australian prime ministers were far too busy lauding the "investment partnership"in resource-rich Indonesia. Suharto's annexation of East Timor, which cost the lives of a third of thepopulation, was described by the foreign minister Gareth Evans as "irreversible". As Evanssuccinctly put it, there were "zillions" of dollars to be made from the oil and gas reserves in theTimor Sea.