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Island
Paradise?
Balinese
Victims Who Don’t Get a Mention
One
of the sacred taboos for western journalists and broadcasters is the
terrorism of their own governments. Only when they recognise this
and its pivotal role in the fate of much of humanity will they be
able to report honestly the lesser terrorism of non-state groups –
John Pilger, British-Australian journalist October 2002
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Firefighters
working at the site of the bombing in Kuta, Bali, October 12,
2002
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Vivid
descriptions of burning bodies and television images of the
makeshift morgue and smoldering ruins of a Balinese nightclub have
horrified a Western audience. Journalists have flocked to report on
the "demise of the island paradise," a haven for Western
tourists from as close as Australia and as far as the UK. Yet those
familiar with Indonesian history will notice a significant absence
in Western reporting, no reference to a terrorist act that killed
over four hundred times as many Balinese, less than half a century
ago.
Everywhere
has a history, and a former Western colony is likely to have a
particularly bloody one. Could the bombing, causing the deaths of
some 200 foreign tourists and Indonesians, have really been the
first mass atrocity on Balinese soil, as my English language news
programs would have me believe?
It
took me around two minutes to find the answer. Pulling John
Pilger’s The New Rulers of the World (London: Verso, 2002) off my
bookshelf I read the following quotation from a February 1966 report
from the British ambassador in Jakarta: “The killings in Bali had
been particularly monstrous. In certain areas, it was felt that not
enough people [emphasis in the original] had been killed.”
In
the 1960s, the West considered “Communism” not “Islamism”
the devil incarnate. In the name of the war against the red enemy,
hundreds of thousands were slaughtered across the southern
hemisphere, from Asia to South America. While the West sometimes got
its hands dirty, such as in Vietnam, generally it was seen as easier
just to train and supervise a local proxy militia to do the killing
for you. Indonesia is a prime example.
Forty
years ago, under the leadership of Megawati’s father, Sukarno,
Indonesia was part of a group of post-colonial states, like
Nasser’s Egypt, that sought to create a non-aligned movement
independent of both the West and the East. In a cold war climate,
anyone who was not with the West was automatically branded as with
the enemy; the Soviets, irrespective of how much support was
actually received from the USSR. And thus the West, notably the US,
the British and the Australians, saw it as their role to become
involved in the overthrow of the government in Indonesia, the former
Dutch colony.
And
so the West became involved in undermining the Sukarno regime,
through a simple method, using Suharto’s militia to kill the
“communists.” Detailed investigation by many journalists and
academics, such as the American Kathy Kadane and Pilger have shown
how active a role the Western powers played in Suharto’s killing
spree. The New York Times, July 6, 1966, reported the following from
visiting Australian Prime Minister Harold Holt: “With 500 000 to a
million communist sympathizers knocked off, I think it is safe to
assume a reorientation has taken place.” (Does “reorientation”
sound disturbingly like “regime change” to you?) Pilger states
that nearly 80,000 were killed in this “reorientation” in Bali
alone, “tourists who have since taken advantage of cheap package
holidays to the island might reflect that beneath the car parks of
several of the major tourist hotels are buried countless bodies.”
A doubly haunting sentence when read after the recent attack.
The
mountain of evidence indicating CIA involvement with the killings in
Indonesia makes it impossible for critics to dismiss it as
conspiracy theory. Last year the BBC and other mainstream media
reported on the withdrawal of a state department textbook at the
last minute, as it detailed too closely American involvement in the
1960s Indonesian “regime change.” Sections of the text however
were published on George Washington University’s National
Security Archive, and backed up evidence presented by
investigators such as American journalist Kathy Kadane whose
interviews with senior US personnel demonstrate that the US had
passed “death lists” to the Suharto regime.
In
1990, Kadane published the findings of interviews that she
conducted; “For the first time, U.S. officials acknowledge that in
1965 they systematically compiled comprehensive lists of Communist
operatives, from top echelons down to village cadres. As many as
5,000 names were furnished to the Indonesian army, and the Americans
later checked off the names of those who had been killed or
captured, according to the U.S. officials,” she wrote in the San
Francisco Examiner, May 20, 1990.
As
an Australian, Pilger has shown particular interest in exposing
Australian colonialism, a country that is often seen as benign or
irrelevant. This Western assumption of Australian government
political innocence was reflected in the tone of media analysis of
the grieving Australian nation, in the wake of this recent killing
of Australian citizens. Campaigning journalists have tried to alert
a Western audience to the direct role played in the killing of
hundreds of thousands of Indonesians, (not just in Bali). Yet in all
the media coverage I watched, I heard no mention of the slaughter in
Bali and across Indonesia less than 40 years ago.
Paying
heed to the mistakes of the past has never been so important for the
West, yet the majority of us are further away than we ever have been
from engaging with the bloody legacy of colonialism. Why can’t we
start addressing the right questions to ourselves as Westerners now,
instead of sitting back, blaming the usual suspects, and waiting for
the next group of random tourists, office workers or bus passengers
to be hideously blown to pieces? We must take action in memory of
the dead in Indonesia now, but in memory of them all, not just the
latest two hundred victims.
Isabelle
Humphries is a British freelance journalist and Development
Director at Sawt Al Amel (Laborer’s Voice), an organization
supporting Palestinian workers inside Israel. She has an MA in
Middle East Politics and is also a freelance writer for the Cairo
Times. You can reach her at innazareth@yahoo.co.uk
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