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CERTAINLY,
there will be a reckoning. But it will not be soon, no
thanks to intrepid members of so-called Western journalism
who, in the days his life hang in the balance, bravely
sifted through the minutiae of the despot Suharto’s
medical condition even as they avoided the anatomy of how
and why he remained in power for so long.
Since the
Indonesian tyrant was rushed to a hospital in Jakarta on
January 4, readers were introduced to an army of details
about swollen intestines and weakened kidneys. We learned
of the fluid that accumulated in Suharto’s lungs and his
anemia. Even the ready tomb “in a mausoleum at the peak of
a small mountain…surrounded by shimmering green rice
terraces.”
They’d
rather forget?
But of
Suharto’s crimes, and about those who were in a position
to prevent them but who chose instead to look away or
profit from them, we are told little. We are told, for
instance, by the New York Times, of the dictator’s “severe
human-rights abuses and prodigious corruption,” as if the
extermination of a third of East Timor’s population could
be qualified as simply “severe abuse” and the wholesale
plunder of the Indonesian archipelago a dishonest act that
resulted in illicit gain.
Whether
Suharto had died much later or survived to live for a few
more years is immaterial. As is standard journalistic
practice, obituaries had already been written, released
with few revisions within minutes after the dictator’s
death by the biggest institutions of Free World punditry.
What they are not saying will echo more loudly than what
they will articulate, and they would not be inconsistent
with past practice.
How did
the leading journalistic lights of the West write about
the massacres in Indonesia in 1965 and 1966, using
“systematically compiled comprehensive lists” supplied by
US officials to Suharto and his generals, and described
by the CIA as “one of the greatest mass murders in the
20th century”?
In June
1966 star columnist James Reston of the New York Times
portrayed Suharto’s cleansed republic as “a gleam of light
in
Asia.” A month later Time magazine lauded “the West’s best news
for years in Asia” under the heading “Vengeance with a
Smile,” and depicted the rampaging army as “scrupulously
constitutional” and “based on law, not on mere power,”
led by the “quietly determined” Suharto with his “almost
innocent face.”
There is
always a reason for fawning when combined with hard-nosed
business journalism and realpolitik.
‘Reorientation’ after slaughter
Who will
tell us of Australian Prime Minister Harold Holt’s
remarks, on his visit to the
US in 1966, “With 500,000 to a million communist sympathizers
knocked off, I think it’s safe to assume a reorientation
has taken place”? And who will recall the advice to
Washington
by the New York Times in December 1965—as the carnage was
under way—that it “would do well to encourage the
International Monetary Fund, the new Asian Development
Bank and, perhaps, an international consortium to take the
lead.” A year later the Times would follow up and counsel
Washington
“to retain a neutralist posture. There is an urgent need
for a large international loan—perhaps as much as a
half-billion dollars.... [I]t is vital that the United
States play a positive role in building an international
aid consortium.”
Two
decades later, the Economist of London would describe
Suharto as “at heart benign” and the Christian Science
Monitor would call the dictator a “moderate leader.” As
far as official lines go, they were not far off the mark.
Margaret Thatcher called Suharto “one of our very best and
most valuable friends,” and with good reason. “With its
100 million people and its 300-mile arc of islands
containing the region’s richest hoard of natural
resources,” said Richard Nixon in 1967, “Indonesia is the
greatest prize in Southeast Asia.”
Indonesia’s corporate takeover
Time-Life
Corp. itself organized “an extraordinary conference” in
Geneva in 1967 which, according to dissident writer John
Pilger, “designed the corporate takeover of Indonesia.”
Everyone was there, from major oil companies and banks to
firms such as General Motors, American Express and
Goodyear.
“We are
trying to create a new climate,” said the president of
Time Inc., James Linen, as he opened the
Geneva
meet, “in which private enterprise and developing
countries work together…for the greater profit of the free
world. This world of international enterprise is more than
governments….It is the seamless web of enterprise, which
has been shaping the global environment at revolutionary
speed.”
Linen’s
speech was visionary, as if it were a manifesto of
corporate globalization issued from the Davos Forum. With
a few changes in dates, perhaps it was.
On the
second day of the gathering in Geneva, “the Indonesian
economy was carved up, sector by sector,” recounted
Jeffrey Winters, a Northwestern University of Chicago
professor who studied the Geneva conference papers.
Won by
Suharto, Southeast Asia’s greatest prize was “divided up
into five different sections: mining and finance in one
room, services in another, light industry in another,
banking and finance in another; and what Chase Manhattan
did was sit with a delegation and hammer out policies
that were going to be acceptable to them and other
investors. You had these big corporate people going around
the table, saying this is what we need: this, this and
this, and they basically designed the legal infrastructure
for investment in
Indonesia.”
There was
a deal, recounted the BBC Southeast Asia correspondent
Roland Challis, who admitted that he had unwittingly used
as “news” the official hogwash fed to him by the British
government’s Foreign Office. “It was only much later that
we learned the American embassy was supplying names and
ticking them off as they were killed…. In establishing the
Suharto regime, the involvement of the IMF and the World
Bank was part of it. Sukarno had kicked them out; now
Suharto would bring them back. That was the deal.”
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Blog: The Kamuning Republic
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