'East Timor...Who?

'Pol Pot killed 1.7 million people. We can't even deal with that. We think, if somebody kills someone, that's murder, you go to prison. You kill ten people, you go to Texas, they hit you with a brick, that's what they do. Somebody who's killed a hundred thousand people, we're almost going, 'Well done, well done. You killed a hundred thousand people? You must get up very early in the morning. I can't even get down the gym.''

Eddie Izzard

Well done, indeed. 

A few weeks ago I was teetering on the brink of upping sticks and exchanging my degree for a job waiting tables on a beach in Magaluf. Which might sound pretty tempting, if you don’t consider that I don’t like beaches (too sandy), clubs (I dance like a tool) and I’m a terrible waitress (I drop things). I felt utterly deflated, and it wasn’t just because I forgot to bring my Toffee Hoops Muller Corner in for lunch (although that was genuinely distressing, tbh). I discovered some pretty unpleasant stuff about our dear, democratic Great Britain and, actually, felt a bit betrayed by what was being done in the name of all British people. 

How many of you could place East Timor on a map? How about the hemisphere? Well, it’s a tiny island a stone’s throw from the northern tip of Australia, and in 1975 the Indonesian government invaded, unprovoked, and proceeded to massacre a third of the population. The Timorese people, having finally declared independence from their Portuguese colonial rulers, were invaded just nine days later by General Suharto of Indonesia, who, according to Noam Chomsky, was unhappy about a small, newly independent democracy setting an example in the largely autocratic South East Asia.

What followed over the next two decades was a bloodbath. 200,000 Timorese died during the occupation, caught up in the crossfire, deliberately targeted, or from starvation and disease. Sound like a tiny number? Well, yes, if you think of the 20 million killed by Stalin or the staggering potential 78 million killed by Mao Zedong. But bear in mind the population of East Timor was only 700,000 at the time of the invasion. Proportionally speaking, it was one of the worst genocides of all time.

This in itself was enough to make me want to crawl into the gap between my sofa cushions and cry. The thing is, the Cambodian genocide got underway in the same year. The eyes of the world were on Pol Pot – as well they should have been; the cruelty of Tuol Sleng and The Killing Fields was evil beyond belief, and the western media, rightly, would not let the world forget it. In the meantime, though, hardly a world away, the Timorese massacre was unfolding and the international community made barely a peep.

Why was this? Did the journalists all get distracted on their way there by the fabulous surf opportunities offered by Oz? Was East Timor just too darn hard to get to?

No. Sadly, the situation in East Timor was not covered as a salient issue in the media because the governments of the US and the UK – the world’s great champions of democracy – were actively funding the Indonesian army. They were handing over (for quite a hefty sum, let’s not forget) the weapons with which Suharto was slaughtering the Timorese in their thousands. Indiscriminate attacks on civilians villages – which happened, according to multiple eyewitnesses – with alarming regularity – were carried out by Hawk ground attack aircraft, supplied by the UK. Such things continued well into the 1990s – the Indonesian government began taking out its own citizens at various peaceful pro-democracy protests in Aceh and Jakarta. UN and UK arms trade documents show hundreds of millions of pounds worth of arms being shipped out to Indonesia during this period. In the latter years of Tony Blair’s administration, he condemned in the strongest terms the Taliban regime and their human rights violations and support of international terrorism: 'No art or culture is permitted,' he bemoans. 'All other faiths, all other interpretations of Islam are ruthlessly suppressed. Those who practice their faith are imprisoned. Women are treated in a way almost too revolting to be credible. First driven out of university; girls not allowed to go to school; no legal rights; unable to go out of doors without a man. Those that disobey are stoned.'

Yes. Condemn the Taliban. They’re awful. Well done, Tony, gold star to you. But don’t sell weapons to an equivalently brutal regime at the same time. Frankly, makes you look a bit of a dick. An undercover journalist posed as an Indonesian general wanting weapons from a UK arms dealer (in Oxford, of all places); the dealer himself was filmed saying words to the effect of, 'Well, I can't just send over the whole tank, but what I can do is send the body and the gun bit separately, along with some nice instructions, and you can set it up yourself, easy peasy. Tony told me that was cool.' 

The governments of the US and UK throughout the invasion and all the way up to Blair defended the UK’s support of the Indonesian regime by invoking Article 51 of the UN Charter: ‘Nothing in the present Charter shall impair the inherent right of individual or collective self-defence if an armed attack occurs against a Member of the United Nations’. Lovely. Just one problem. INDONESIA WAS THE AGGRESSOR. They had no right to self-defence as they had not been attacked. What they did was entirely illegal.

Blair also manifestly failed to mention an equally significant portion of the same document, Article 1.2, which calls for the ‘respect for the principle of equal rights and self-determination of peoples’. The principles which have been invoked time and time again to justify intervention in Iraq, Afghanistan and most recently Libya and Syria, were in this case used to defend the aggressor, and the self-determination principle given to the Libyans and Iraqis (theoretically, if nothing else) was demonstrably denied to the East Timorese.

An ‘illegitimate’ arms sale (I would say ‘illegal’, but as it stands there are painfully few legal instruments regulating the arms trade) essentially means the sale of weapons to any state which might use them for ‘internal repression or external aggression'. Realistically, though, most suppliers only care about the external aggression bit. Do what you like in your own back garden. Hitler, though, killed people next door. Stupid man.

Many companies get round the issue of ethically dubious sales by making and distributing only components. Or dual-use. So, the nuts and bolts that hold together a tank-mounted machine-gun. Yes, definitely dual-use. Could do with some of those to put together my new Ikea bookshelf. I spoke recently to someone who defended Rolls Royce (the UK’s second largest arms exporter) by saying, ‘But they only make aeroplane engines. That’s not really a weapon.’ HOW DO YOU THINK THE PLANE STAYS IN THE AIR? HOW ELSE DOES THE HELICOPTER HOVER OVER VILLAGES SPRAYING THEM WITH BULLETS? Selling a part of the weapon – especially a crucial part, like an engine, or the bullets – is selling the weapon. It is complicity. The people who developed Zyklon-B are not innocent of the deaths in the gas chambers. Without them, they would have just been, um, chambers. And the Nazis might have had to actually put some effort in to get the job done.

Just last year, British Aerospace (or BAe, the UK’s largest arms supplier) shipped a load of weapons to Bahrain, which had just been reported opening fire on unarmed protestors in an effort to quell the pro-democracy movement of the Arab Spring. And we helped them.

There is a huge albatross around the neck of those like Campaign Against the Arms Trade (CAAT), though. There is no political will whatsoever to limit the power of arms manufacturers. And the reason is a good one (although in my opinion, not good enough); BAe employs 98,200 people, and in 2010 brought into the country profits of $34,609,000. Rolls Royce gives 38,900 people jobs, and its exports were worth $16,794,000 the same year. Companies in the US provide hundreds of thousands of jobs. I am not advocating that we ban the trade in weapons tomorrow and start selling flowers and jam jars full of kind thoughts and rainbows. It would be economically and individually disastrous.  BUT in an ideal world, we would begin a shift towards an economy that is not built upon the suffering of others.

Take slavery – at the height of the slave trade, it was a normal, acceptable and even necessary cog in the machinery of Britain’s imperial economy. It created one in every twenty pounds in circulation in the late 18^th/early 19^th centuries. It was not only the slave trade, but the profits from the sugar cane and cotton plantations of the West Indies and America, that poured vast sums into the coffers of Great Britain. Abolition was fought against, tooth and nail, on the grounds that it would destroy the economy and the empire. Yes, abolition put many out of business. Was that enough of a reason to continue to trade in the lives and bodies of other human beings? Of course not. An international awakening forced us into the realisation that such a practice was hideous. It ended. A huge leap forward for equality and humanity.

The arms trade must go the same way. Profits must be subordinate to human lives. End of.

In a (rather lengthy) nutshell, that is why Magaluf was briefly such a tempting option. Because this seems not only an uphill battle, but one already lost. But I know which side I’d rather be on. Hence why I am here and writing this. And not in Magaluf.