@Advocate,
US support for Indonesia
from the book
East Timor: Genocide in Paradise
by Matthew Jardine
America stands as it always has, against aggression, against those who would use force to replace the rule of law.
US President George Bush, 1990, referring to the Iraqi invasion of Kuwait
When I think of Indonesia -- a country on the equator with 180 million people, a median age of 18, and a Muslim ban on alcohol -- I feel like I know what heaven looks like.
Coca-Cola President Donald R. Keough, c. 1992
It's clear that the US knew about the upcoming invasion [of East Timor by Indonesia in 1975] and avoided taking any action that might have stopped it. In August 1975, Australia's ambassador to Indonesia cabled the Department of Foreign Affairs in Canberra (Australia's capital), as follows: The United States might have some influence on Indonesia at the present as Indonesia really wants and needs US assistance in its military re-equipment program.... But [US] Ambassador Newsom told me last night that he is under instructions from [US Secretary of State Henry] Kissinger personally not to involve himself in discussions on Timor with the Indonesians on the ground that the US is involved in enough problems of greater importance overseas at present....His present attitude is that the US should keep out of the Portuguese Timor situation and allow events to take their course.
US President Gerald Ford and Secretary of State Henry Kissinger were in Jakarta visiting Indonesian President Suharto the two days before the invasion. There's little doubt that Ford gave Suharto the green light to invade. Kissinger told reporters in Jakarta that "the US understands Indonesia's position on the question" of East Timor, and Ford said that, given a choice between East Timor and Indonesia, the US "had to be on the side of Indonesia." (US support for the invasion was important to Suharto because ABRI (the Indonesian military) relied heavily on US weaponry, which US law states can only be used for defensive purposes.)
In early 1976, the US voiced its defacto recognition of Jakarta's annexation of East Timor. An unnamed US State Department official explained: "In terms of the bilateral relations between the US and Indonesia, we are more or less condoning the incursion into East Timor."
These US actions weren't surprising, given the history of business relations between the two countries. By the end of World War I, the US and Japan supplied almost a third of the Dutch East Indies' imports. In turn, US-based corporations located there supplied the US with tin, rubber and oil. By 1939, the Dutch East Indies were supplying the US with over half of its needs for "no less than fifteen distinct commodities."
W.W.II radically changed the map of the Pacific, with the US emerging as the region's dominant power. US policymakers recognized that the region held great promise:
These areas not only offer many markets for American products but are substantial producers of raw materials useful to our economy....Our merchant marine and commercial firms should be given the opportunity to take over a large portion of that trade formerly handled by the Japanese and their vessels.
George Kennan, Director of the Policy Planning Staff at the US State Department, noted that the US had "about 50% of the world's wealth but only 6.3 % of its population," and offered this advice: Our real task in the coming period is to devise a pattern of relationships which will permit us to maintain this position of disparity without positive detriment to our national security. We should make a careful study to see what parts of the Pacific and Far Eastern world are absolutely vital to our security, and we should concentrate our policy on seeing to it that those areas remain in hands which we can control or rely on.
Indonesia, with its fertile soils, wealth of natural resources and strategic location, is certainly an important area to "control or rely on." In a 1965 speech in Asia, Richard Nixon argued in favor of bombing North Vietnam to protect the "immense mineral potential" of Indonesia, which he later referred to as "by far the greatest prize in the southeast Asian area."
To protect its prizes, the US eventually killed over four million people in Vietnam, Cambodia and Laos between 1965 and 1975. In South Vietnam alone, the war resulted in a million widows and 879,000 orphans. It destroyed 9000 out of 15,000 hamlets, almost 40,000 square miles of farmland and 18,750 square miles of forest. Such carnage indicates what the US would be willing to support in Indonesia and East Timor.
Read on as I know you will at,
http://www.thirdworldtraveler.com/US_ThirdWorld/genocide_Odon.html