Free at last?

INDONESIA'S ECONOMIC CRISIS IS GOOD NEWS. IT MAY HELP END ONE OF THE WORST ONGOING CASES OF HUMAN RIGHTS ABUSES IN THE WORLD: THE REPRESSION OF EAST TIMOR.

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SYDNEY, AUSTRALIA -- "Morally and psychologically, the overnight collapse of the 'Asian tiger' economies is the equivalent of the fall of the Berlin Wall. But it is not yet the political equivalent."

Not since the days when I used to sit in cold and smoky rooms and hear East European dissidents like Adam Michnik and Jan Kavan and Rudolf Bahro foreshadow the end of the communist nomenklatura have I seen such a contrast between the grandness of the prediction and the modest circumstances of the speaker. Jose Ramos-Horta, East Timor's Nobel Laureate for Peace in 1996, sits in a scruffy kitchen in a humble walk-up apartment behind a gas station in a remote Sydney suburb. The other rooms are occupied by various members of his family, who are in varying stages of exile from their tortured homeland off the north coast of Australia.

Horta is a small, intense, charming, eloquent and stubbled man, rather reminiscent in appearance -- though not, I rush to add, in demeanor -- of a Graham Greene "whisky priest." And what he has to say has the ring of sober, imminent truth, not the hollow grandiosity of inebriated delusion.

"In May 1995," he recalls, "the Portuguese parliament hosted an interparliamentary conference on East Timor. Judge Michael Kirby -- a fine lawyer and good friend -- gave his opinion that Indonesia would soon supersede Japan, and that we could not challenge the might of Suharto. I got up -- you can read it in the record -- and said that everybody once believed in President Salinas of Mexico, the great liberal reformer and creator of a new market. Salinas is now on the run, discredited and despised. Who would have predicted that Armenia, Eritrea, the Baltic States would all be reborn? East Timor will be free also. Indonesia's economic might -- the element to which everybody bowed down -- is now melting."

Horta said this before the Indonesian rupiah fell into a bottomless well last week, before Suharto's subjects staged panicky runs on the local supermarkets (and rioted in Java), before President Clinton felt compelled to call Suharto with a reassurance that America will be there for him -- so long as he does what the IMF says -- and Defense Secretary William Cohen made a hurried trip to Jakarta for a quick pep talk to the local constabulary.

It is now almost a quarter century since, with the frank encouragement of President Gerald Ford and his unspeakable valet, Henry Kissinger, the Indonesian military moved to annex East Timor, just after it received its independence from Portugal. They brought to the task the same fascistic ruthlessness with which, a decade earlier -- and with the help of the CIA -- they wiped out a million or so of their fellow countrymen unfortunate enough to be labeled communists.

Since then, while democracy and human rights were supposedly sweeping through Asia, Indonesia has held East Timor in a murderous vice. But its grip on East Timor, like the Suharto family's wholesale looting of the Indonesian economy, may not last much longer. For example, last July, Nelson Mandela paid a state visit to Indonesia and demanded to see Xanana Gusmao, the leader of the guerrilla resistance, who had been captured by the Indonesian army and held in a fearsome prison. "They met for two hours," said Horta. "It has never happened before -- it is diplomatically unprecedented -- that a head of state should ask to pay a long call on a man who is being held as a common criminal." When Suharto paid a return visit to South Africa, the South African press wrote about East Timor every day.

Similarly, we will soon he learning the names of the Indonesian opposition, who have been shielded from us by a loving relationship between Washington and a corrupt dictatorship described by the Clinton administration as "our kind of ally." Megawati Sukarnoputri, daughter of Indonesia's independence leader, President Sukarno, and Abdel Rahman Wahid, leader of the largest Muslim reformist group, have already called on Suharto to step aside. So, assuming he is permitted to speak, would the electrifying novelist Pramoedya Ananta Toer, and Muchtar Pakpahan, leader of the nascent movement for free trade unions.

Jose Ramos-Horta knows these names well, and his movement is in touch with them. He understands that not all the opposition forces look with favor on an independent East Timor, but he is confident that the Indonesian army will not be able to hold the ring for much longer. "They are losing the will to do so. The conscripts do not speak our language and do not want to be sent there anymore. Bishop Belo [the Catholic Bishop of Dili and Ramos-Horta's fellow Nobel Prize winner] returned home after a conference in Jakarta, and there were 200,000 people waiting to greet him. That was spontaneous. If he, and I, and Xanana Gusmao call people to the streets, there will be half a million. They can't kill us all."

With no official country and with a Portuguese passport, Ramos-Horta travels the world as a "personal envoy" of the Timorese resistance. He is also the second consecutive Nobel Peace Prize winner -- along with the 1997 winner, Jody Williams of the International Committee to Ban Landmines -- who won't get the welcome mat at the White House anytime soon. Not that he cares. "When I was the Timorese foreign minister during our short-lived independence, the Maoists would call me O Americano -- the American. But what has the United States ever done for us, except to sell weapons to Suharto? Our Nobel Prize was not just an embarrassment to Indonesia. It embarrassed the United States, Europe and Australia too. The State Department now covers its embarrassment by saying falsely that I have 'a violent past.' I have never been received by President Clinton or by Secretary [of State Madeleine] Albright. But never mind. We survived Ford and Kissinger, Carter, Reagan and Bush. We will be free, and there will be no hard feelings."

Portugal, which labored under fascist rule for longer than any other European country, was in effect freed from dictatorship in 1974 by the revolt of its overseas subject peoples. Angola, Mozambique and Guinea are only just beginning to emerge from the appalling barbarism imposed upon them as punishment for a mutiny they had the temerity to launch in the middle of the Cold War. East Timor is the orphan of this historical process, but has managed to survive a process of cultural and physical obliteration that meets most of the working definitions of genocide.

It's too bad the Clinton administration, with the leverage it now has over Indonesia, remains blind to this. Asked whether we shouldn't be linking aid packages to human rights reforms in Indonesia and elsewhere in Asia, Treasury Secretary Robert Rubin seemed to suggest there were more important considerations than genocide. "In a healthy economy, there is far greater success in promoting human rights than in one under economic duress," he said last Thursday. "If we try to add other objectives to the objective of financial stability, I think we probably will reach the point of impracticality in terms of accomplishment."

Blinkered by fatuous worries about the possible "spread" of the crisis of neo-liberalism ("Our" stocks! "Our" bonds! "Our" arms sales!), we might bear in mind that it is a crisis of dictatorship and exploitation, and thus an opportunity and not a tragedy. The Timorese, who purchased the "information" at a high price, know this already.
SALON | Jan. 16, 1998