Manufacturing Consent: Noam Chomsky and the Media Page #9

Ever heard of a place called East Timor?

- I can't say that I have.

- Where?

- East Timor.

- No.

Well, it happens that right at that time

there was another atrocity.

Very similar in character,

but differing in one respect -

we were responsible for it, not Pol Pot.

Hello. I'm Louise Penney,

and this is Radio Noon.

If you've been listening to the programme

fairly regularly over the last few months,

you'll know East Timor has come

into the conversation more than once,

particularly when we were talking about foreign

aid, and also the war, and a new world order.

People wondered why,

if the UN was serious about a new world order,

no-one was doing anything to help East Timor.

The area was invaded by Indonesia in 1975.

There are reports of atrocities

against the Timorese people,

and yet Canada and other nations

have consistently

voted against UN Resolutions

to end the occupation.

Today, we're going to take a closer look

at East Timor,

what's happened to it, and why the international

community is doing nothing to help.

One of the people who have been most active

is Elaine Brire,

a photojournalist from British Columbia.

She's the founder of

the East Timor Alert Network,

and she joins me in the studio now.

- Hello.

- Hi.

One tragedy compounding a tragedy

is that a lot of people

don't know much about East Timor.

- Where is it?

- East Timor is just north of Australia.

About 420 km, and it's right between

the Indian and Pacific oceans.

Just south of East Timor is a deep-water sea

lane perfect for US submarines to pass through.

There's also huge oil reserves there.

One of the unique things

about East Timor is that

it's truly one of the last surviving

ancient civilisations in that part of the world.

The Timorese spoke

amongst a group of 700,000 people.

Today less than five per cent of the world's

people live like the East Timorese.

Basically self-reliant, they live really outside

of the global economic system.

Small societies like the East Timorese are much

more democratic and much more egalitarian,

and there's much more sharing

of power and wealth.

Before the Indonesians invaded,

most people lived in small rural villages.

The old people in the village

were like the university.

They passed on tribal wisdom

from generation to generation.

Children grew up

in a safe, stimulating, nurturing environment.

A year ater I let East Timor, I was appalled

when I heard Indonesia had invaded.

It didn't want a small, independent country

setting an example for the region.

East Timor was a Portuguese colony.

Indonesia had no claim to it,

and in fact stated that they had no claim to it.

During the period of colonisation,

there was a good deal of politicisation

that different groups developed.

A civil war broke out in August '75.

It ended up in a victory for Fretilin,

which was one of the groupings,

described as populist Catholic in character,

with some typical letist rhetoric.

Indonesia at once started intervening.

What's the situation?

When did those ships come in?

They start arriving since Monday.

Six, seven boats together,

very close to our border.

They're not there just for fun.

They're preparing a massive operation.

Something happened here

last night that moved us very deeply.

It was so far outside our experience

as Australians

that we'll find it very difficult

to convey to you, but we'll try.

Sitting on woven mats under a thatched roof

in a hut with no walls

we were the target of a barrage of questioning

from men who know they may die tomorrow,

and cannot understand

why the rest of the world does not care.

That's all they want -

for the United Nations to care about

what is happening here.

The emotion here last night was so strong

that we, all three of us, felt we should

be able to reach out into the warm night air

and touch it.

Greg Shackleton, at an unnamed village

which we will remember forever

in Portuguese Timor.

Ford and Kissinger visited Jakarta,

I think it was December 5th.

We know that they had requested that

Indonesia delay the invasion until ater they let

because it would be too embarrassing.

And within hours, I think, ater they let,

the invasion took place on December 7th.

What happened on December 7th in 1975,

is just one of the great evil deeds of history.

Early in the morning

bombs begin dropping on Dili.

The number of troops that invaded Dili that day

almost outnumbered

the entire population of the town.

And for two or three weeks,

they just killed people.

This Council must consider Indonesian

aggression against East Timor

as the main issue of the discussion.

When the Indonesians invaded,

the UN reacted as it always does,

calling for sanctions and condemnation

and so on.

Various watered-down resolutions

were passed,

but the US were very clearly

not going to allow anything to work.

So the Timorese were fleeing into the jungles

by the thousands.

By late 1977, '78

Indonesia set up receiving centres

for those Timorese

who came out of the jungle waving white flags.

Those the Indonesians thought more educated,

or suspected of belonging to Fretilin or other

opposition parties were immediately killed.

They took women aside,

and flew them off to Dili in helicopters

for use by the Indonesian soldiers.

They killed children and babies.

But in those days their main strategy

and their main weapon was starvation.

By 1978,

it was approaching really genocidal levels.

The church and other sources

estimated about 200,000 people killed.

The US backed it all the way.

The US provided 90 per cent of the arms.

Right ater the invasion,

arms shipments were stepped up.

When the Indonesians

actually began to run out of arms in 1978,

the Carter administration moved in

and increased arms sales,

and other western countries did the same.

Canada, England... Holland...

Everybody who could make a buck

was in there,

trying to make sure

they could kill more Timorese.

There is no western concern

for issues of aggression,

atrocities, human rights abuses and so on

if there's a profit to be made from them.

Nothing could show it more clearly

than this case.

It wasn't that nobody had heard of East Timor.

Remember there was plenty of coverage

in The New York Times and elsewhere

before the invasion.

The reason was there was concern

over the break-up of the Portuguese empire

and what that would mean.

There was fear it would lead to independence,

or Russian influence, or whatever.

Ater the Indonesians invaded,

the coverage dropped.

There was some,

but it was strictly from the point of view

of the State Department

and Indonesian generals.

Never a Timorese refugee.

As the atrocities reached their maximum peak

in 1978,

when it really was becoming genocidal,

coverage dropped to zero

in the United States and Canada,

the two countries I've looked at closely.

Literally dropped to zero.

All this was going on at exactly the same time

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