CIA services by proxy
Although in his letter (The Jakarta Post, Feb. 2, 2000: On the CIA's role), Mr. Richard Lewis confirms some of the facts mentioned in my article (the Post, Jan. 13 and Jan.14: The U.S.: A party to mass murder?), worryingly he stops just short of exonerating the CIA by rather recklessly stating, "The CIA, while a contributor, was neither the cause nor the catalyst".
It is Mr. Lewis' opinion that, even without CIA involvement, the massacre would have occurred, but he provides no real basis for such a view except the opinion of an Indonesian embassy spokesman who claimed, "the Indonesian people fought by themselves to eradicate the communists". Since the communist threat was used to justify and provide legitimacy for what was in fact an American-sponsored Soeharto coup, would one expect an Indonesian embassy spokesman to claim otherwise?
Mr. Lewis needs to delve deeper than the Internet alone allows him. He might like to consult Brian May's book The Indonesian Tragedy and read Distant Voices by the Australian journalist, John Pilger, who writes that, "Declassified American documents have since revealed that the United States not only supported the slaughter but helped the generals to plan and execute it. The CIA gave them a 'hit list' of 5,000 Communist Party supporters including party leaders, regional committee members and heads of trade unions and women's and youth groups, who were hunted down and killed".
Pilger goes on: "In 1990 a former U.S. embassy official in Jakarta disclosed that he had spent two years drawing up a hit list, which was a big help to the army".
Historian Gabriel Kolko, in his book Confronting the Third World, writes that, "No single American action in the period after 1945 was as bloodthirsty as its role in Indonesia, for it tried to initiate the massacre, and it did everything in its power to encourage Soeharto".
In light of this, can the CIA use the rather suspect,"the massacre would have happened anyway" as an extenuating factor? If I shoot dead a man whose life appears to be endangered by another, am I absolved? Can I plead that my victim would have died anyway at the hand of another? I would suggest that anyone using this as mitigating circumstances is on very dangerous ground indeed. I am sure that if Gen. Wiranto were to use such a defense to reduce his culpability for the East Timor mayhem, he would be laughed out of court.
It may be hard for Mr. Lewis to accept that the American government through, inter alia, the services of the CIA, is responsible for torture and mass murder by proxy. However, he should be aware that it is this apparently unshakable but often unfounded conviction of Westerners, that their governments act morally and benevolently, which still makes it possible for sophisticated, covert barbarity to be carried out by Western governments when they deem it necessary.
FRANK RICHARDSON
Jakarta