8
BRAD SIMPSON
In June 1977, U.S. National Security Council staffer Michael Armacost wrote National Security Advisor Zbigniew Brzezinski of the “perplexity” in Jakarta regarding the new U.S. emphasis on human rights. Despite the Indonesian government’s intention to release tens of thousands of political prisoners arrested when General Suharto rose to power in 1965–1966, the U.S. Congress continued to condemn Indonesia’s December 1975 invasion and occupation of the former Portuguese territory of East Timor. “The Indonesian decision is irreversible,” he argued. “The U.S. government has accepted it. Continued Congressional hearings are regarded as unwarranted and mischievous interference in their internal affairs.”1
While Armacost wrote to Brzezinski, Indonesian Foreign Minister Adam Malik admitted to journalists that at least fifty thousand Timorese had died since Indonesia invaded. During this period, Indonesian forces employed mass killings, forced resettlement, mass arrests, forced sterilization, and torture to crush East Timorese military and civilian resistance.2 Yet the Carter administration continued to pursue closer relations with Indonesia, partly in the name of human rights, pressing it to release political prisoners and investing substantial resources to this end. In doing so, it joined numerous nongovernmental and multilateral organizations, as well as the Western media in framing the fate of tapols (tahanan politik, or political prisoners) as Indonesia’s chief human rights challenge. Through nonstate channels at the United Nations and among the nations of the Non-Aligned Movement, meanwhile, East Timor’s resistance fought for recognition of its claim to self-determination as the fulcrum on which transnational debates about human rights should pivot.
This contrast between the international human rights community’s priorities and those of many East Timorese and their supporters raises the question how and why some conceptions of human rights ascended over others during the 1970s. Despite a wealth of scholarship exploring the explosion of transnational human rights organizations and the institutionalization of norms in state bureaucracies and multilateral forums, historians have largely told a story of diffusion of civil and political rights, generally radiating from the West outward. But a reexamination of the Carter administration’s human rights policies toward Indonesia and East Timor, and Indonesia’s own emerging human rights movement demonstrate that in the 1970s there was no single “human rights movement” with clear goals or agreement on what constituted core human rights. Moreover, this history challenges the teleological, self-referential, and self-congratulatory story that scholars have told about campaigns against torture and political imprisonment during the 1970s. Instead, it treats the human rights politics and discourses of the decade as an ongoing contest in which alternative conceptions of rights, especially the right of self-determination, were subordinated as a result of often bitter political conflict within and among state bureaucracies, international forums, and NGO boardrooms. These disputes often transcended not only Cold War limits but North–South divides as well.
Indonesia invaded the former Portuguese colony of East Timor on December 7, 1975, following a brief but bloody civil war won by the radical pro-independence party Fretilin. Indonesia was determined to prevent the emergence of a potentially destabilizing neighbor on its eastern border, while allies in London, Canberra, Washington, and elsewhere agreed that absorption by Indonesia, rather than independence, was the preferred outcome of the decolonization process.3 Facing imminent attack, Fretilin declared East Timor’s independence on November 28, 1975. The announcement prompted Indonesia’s invasion a week later, just after U.S. President Gerald Ford and Secretary of State Henry Kissinger visited Suharto in Jakarta, offering explicit approval for Indonesia’s actions. East Timorese guerrillas mounted a fierce resistance for six years before Indonesia consolidated its control, during which time between 108,000 and 180,000 Timorese were massacred or died of starvation and disease, out of a population of perhaps 600,000.4
The invasion of East Timor provoked divergent international responses. The UN Security Council condemned the invasion and affirmed East Timor’s right to self-determination, but the United States prevented it from enforcing this and subsequent resolutions. The State Department wrote President Ford that the United States “has no interests in Portuguese Timor” and should “follow Indonesia’s lead on the issue.” Most Western governments concurred, though many of their citizens did not.5 Australia’s support for Indonesia prompted the emergence of a vocal and well-organized movement to support Timorese self-determination.6 Several European nations, including Portugal, the Netherlands, and Great Britain, also witnessed the rise of East Timor solidarity groups. NGOs such as Amnesty International, the Catholic Institute for International Relations, and Tapol, a human rights group started in 1973 by former political prisoner Carmel Budiardjo, eventually took up East Timor’s cause.7 Following the invasion, however, Indonesia effectively closed East Timor to the outside world, barring journalists and aid workers from the territory and making it extremely difficult to gather and disseminate information about the situation in the territory. In the United States, East Timor remained the concern of a tiny coterie of journalists, Catholic Church activists, Portuguese Americans, human rights activists, and academics, who founded Tapol US in 1974 and the East Timor Defense Committee in 1975.8 But the fate of East Timor barely resonated with the American public, whose concern for Soviet dissidents and Latin American torture victims contributed to the “phenomenal burst of human rights activism in the United States” in the mid 1970s.9
The 1976 election of Jimmy Carter as U.S. president raised expectations worldwide of a change in U.S. policy toward repressive regimes. Suharto’s supporters recognized that Indonesia, which held more political prisoners than any nation on earth, was vulnerable to condemnation. After Suharto rose to power in the wake of the failed September 30th movement in 1965, his regime killed an estimated five hundred thousand alleged communists and imprisoned an estimated one million more, overwhelmingly without trial. Some were eventually executed, while the rest were held in local prisons, released with onerous restrictions or “forcibly resettled to penal colonies in remote areas of the archipelago.”10
A wide range of national, multilateral, and nongovernmental organizations condemned Indonesia’s detention practices. In 1966, Amnesty International (AI) began to focus on the plight of Indonesia’s long-term detainees, as did many local and country chapters. In 1973, as Carmel Budiardjo founded Tapol in London, AI released a series of reports on Indonesian political detainees and called for the UNCHR to demand their unconditional release. The next year, the World Council of Churches, International Labor Organization, and International Commission of Jurists issued similar calls. Such demands had little effect on the Suharto regime—insulated from criticism by skyrocketing oil revenues—or its international donors.11
Two years later, however, Indonesia was more vulnerable to international pressure because of a major debt scandal in 1974 involving the national oil company Pertamina; investigations into bribes paid to the Suharto regime by Ford Motor Company and Hughes Aerospace; mounting student protests against corruption; and preparations for the invasion of East Timor.12 In April 1975, the Suharto regime began lobbying donors for increased foreign aid and for the first time faced sharp questioning from the Inter-Governmental Group on Indonesia, a forum of donor governments which AI had targeted the previous two years. When Suharto visited Washington in July, officials warned him that Congress would likely cut aid to Jakarta unless it released political prisoners.13 Three months later, a delegation led by General Ali Murtopo and Lim Bian Kie of the Center for International Studies—two architects of the East Timor invasion—also traveled to Washington to lobby U.S. officials, initiating quiet negotiations over the mechanisms of a prisoner-release program and issuing public statements “designed to appeal to Congress as a sign of the regime’s progress in human rights.” But few detainees saw the light of day, and criticism from human rights groups continued.14
In December 1976, following months of negotiations with U.S., Japanese, and other policymakers, Jakarta announced that it would begin a three-year, phased release of thirty thousand political prisoners.15 In Washington, Indonesia’s prisoner-release program muted congressional opposition to increased economic and military assistance, despite continued reports of mass killings in East Timor and at a time of declining aid to the rest of Southeast Asia.16 The State Department’s annual human rights report for 1976, issued shortly before Carter’s inauguration, reflected this contradiction. It characterized the Suharto government as “a moderate authoritarian regime” with “no consistent pattern of violation of human rights,” identifying political detainees as “the single major human rights problem in the country” (emphasis added). The report did not mention Timor.17 The State Department’s assessment coincided with AI’s publication of a more damning report, which estimated that one hundred thousand political prisoners crowded Indonesian jails and that torture was employed “systematically” during interrogation.18 Amazingly, the Amnesty report did not mention East Timor either, nor did AI Secretary General Martin Ennals raise the abuses in Timor in meetings in 1976 and 1977 with top World Bank leaders and Indonesian military and diplomatic officials.19
By the end of 1976, however, abundant evidence was emerging that Indonesia was engaged in ferocious military operations and committing massive atrocities in the territory. At the end of April, Chief of Staff of the U.S. Pacific Command Lt. General Joseph Moore met with Indonesia’s Assistant Minister for Defense Planning Major General Yoga Supardi, who warned that Indonesia was encountering a “serious drain on resources” because of its operations in East Timor, “with shortages of ammunition for small arms, artillery, tank and naval guns.” Other Indonesian officials admitted that Fretilin forces controlled perhaps three-quarters of the territory.20 In November, a group of pro-integration Indonesian church officials publicly charged that Indonesian troops had killed sixty thousand Timorese.21
As the new administration settled in, Secretary of State Cyrus Vance and Zbigniew Brzezinski ordered a review of U.S. policy toward Southeast Asia. Ominously, Brzezinski ranked human rights dead last on his list of planning priorities, reprimanding staffers who proposed to cut assistance to Indonesia, the Philippines, and South Korea on these grounds.22 Before the policy review even commenced, Indonesian officials told the U.S. embassy that President Suharto would refuse aid “if it’s tied to human rights pressures,” a bluff to be sure, given Jakarta’s dependence on Washington for military assistance, but indicative of the Suharto regime’s concern.23 He should not have worried. Carter administration officials saw no need to reevaluate the foundations of U.S.-Indonesian relations, long premised on forging closer relations with Jakarta through increased foreign investment, military assistance, and enmeshment with the IMF, World Bank, and regional organizations such as ASEAN.24
Further reports of continued Indonesian atrocities in East Timor quickly tested the Carter administration’s professed commitment to human rights. In March 1977, former Australian consul to East Timor James Dunn alleged that Indonesian forces had killed up to one hundred thousand civilians in East Timor.25 Testifying before Congress, Dunn concluded that East Timor might be “the most serious case of contravention of human rights facing the world at this time.”26 Indonesian and Western officials quickly sought to discredit Dunn, whose claims contradicted their position that the fighting in Timor was effectively over and atrocities exaggerated. The Carter administration’s response to his charges might have been scripted in Jakarta. The State Department wrote to Congressman Donald Fraser that Dunn’s figures were “greatly exaggerated” and argued, citing no evidence, that “a more accurate estimate” of deaths would be “a few thousand, most of whom would have been fighting men on both sides.”27 Whatever the facts, State Department officials concluded, the basic question before Congress was “whether the situation in ET should be allowed to affect our overall policy goals in Indonesia.” Clearly, they thought, it should not.28
Indonesian officials recognized the implications of the Carter administration’s approach to Congress and responded accordingly. Shortly after the Fraser hearings, a Congressional delegation led by Lester Wolff (D-NY) and William Goodling (R-PA), accompanied by Assistant Secretary of State Richard Holbrooke, visited Indonesia and East Timor, meeting with President Suharto and collaborating Timorese officials.29 Upon their return, Wolff and Goodling hailed Indonesia’s actions in East Timor and mused that “the Indonesians should have entered the fray much earlier and perhaps more lives could have been spared.”30 Holbrooke’s visit to Jakarta, the first by a high-ranking Carter administration official, took place shortly before tightly controlled general elections in which hundreds of Suharto opponents were arrested and critical newspapers shuttered. The assistant secretary’s trip was, the U.S. embassy reported, an “unusual opportunity” to advance concerns about human rights and democracy. In meetings with Suharto, Foreign Minister Adam Malik, and Defense Minister General Maraden Panggabean, however, Holbrooke offered no criticism of Indonesia’s human rights record.31 President Suharto and other officials were “pleased” and “reassured” with the results of these stage-managed visits, which Carter administration officials appeared to view primarily as a means for deflecting international criticism of Jakarta. Officials in Canberra agreed, viewing the visit as a de facto U.S. recognition of East Timor’s integration into Indonesia.32
Shortly after Holbrooke’s return, the NSC completed its review of U.S. regional policy and recommended deeper military and economic ties with ASEAN countries.33 “All are eager to preserve close links with the United States,” Zbigniew Brzezinski wrote the president. “All provide a hospitable climate for our investments; all take a moderate and pragmatic stance in North–South gatherings”; and “all share apprehensions about our current interests and future role in that part of the world.”34 All were also authoritarian states. To build on the Ford administration’s initiatives, the NSC recommended a vice presidential visit to the region, expanded economic assistance, and more generous terms for Foreign Military Sales (FMS) that the Indonesian Armed Forces hoped to use to pursue its long-delayed program of military modernization.35 Brzezinski urged a continued “focus on the human rights pressures directed at Indonesia” and praise regarding the release of political prisoners, but deleted any mention of East Timor.36
Suharto got the message. Over the summer, Indonesian officials paraded to Washington to pledge progress on human rights in exchange for more military and economic aid. Indonesian officials were particularly worried about the prospective phasing out of the Military Assistance Program for Jakarta at the end of 1977 and were determined to extract as much aid as possible to make up for it. Between 1978 and 1980, the Suharto regime requested $167 million worth of A-4 and F-5 ground attack fighters, surveillance radar, armored car and personnel carriers, and a co-production facility for M-16 rifles—a near doubling of U.S. military assistance compared to the Ford administration.37 Two years prior, the Suharto regime had been able to exploit the Ford administration’s anticommunism and concern with regional credibility in the aftermath of the end of Vietnam War to help secure U.S. support for the invasion of East Timor. While such concerns lurked in the background they did not animate the Carter administration’s high-level deliberations on Indonesia or the region more generally, where, as Zbigniew Brzezinski told the president, “our prospect for nurturing effective relationships with the countries of East Asia” were “more favorable than at any time since World War II.”38
During this period, the State Department Bureau of Human Rights and Humanitarian Affairs, working with congressional supporters and prodded by grassroots activists, sought to block the expansion of military assistance to Indonesia and link economic assistance to an improvement in human rights. However, Secretary of State Vance, Assistant Secretary of State Holbrooke, and especially Brzezinski formed a formidable wall of opposition, as they did for human rights supporters seeking to cut or condition U.S. assistance to other authoritarian states. When Assistant Secretary of State for Human Rights Patricia Derian’s office sought to identify Indonesia as a “consistent and gross violator of human rights,” rendering it ineligible for military assistance, the NSC intervened, arguing that Indonesia had human rights “problems” but did not engage in systematic abuses.39 Attempts to delay plans for an M-16 co-production facility and the sale of F-5 fighter planes to Jakarta met a similar fate, when Secretary of State Vance personally intervened after Indonesian officials threatened to seek European weapons suppliers.40
The U.S. silence on East Timor contrasts sharply with the dramatic expansion of human rights activism and media attention directed at Latin America. There congressional activists mounted significant efforts to halt U.S. military assistance and restrict multilateral development aid to rightsabusing regimes, while country and regionally based campaigns sought to raise awareness of torture and shift public debate over U.S. interests in the western hemisphere. These groups benefited from geographic proximity, relatively high public awareness, refugees and immigrants living in the United States, a long history of travel by U.S. citizens, and extensive religious and missionary ties.41 None of these conditions prevailed in East Timor, where Indonesia enforced a near total news blackout and blocked journalists and other visitors access. However, activists still managed to covertly gather and distribute information about atrocities in the territory.42
Indonesia’s nascent human rights movement fared no better. The two main human rights organizations in Indonesia—the Institute for Defense of Human Rights (LPHHM), founded in 1966 by Dutch activist H. J. C. Princen, and the Indonesian Legal Aid Foundation (LBH), founded in 1970 by lawyer Adnan Buyung Nasution—initially focused their work on the “extension of legal, civil and political rights” as well as “social justice and popular participation in development projects.” Both organizations cultivated transnational ties to make political prisoners an international concern and lobbied Attorney General Ali Said for their release. But their fear of repression, nationalist identification, and lack of access to information concerning abuses in East Timor prevented Indonesian human rights groups from taking on the far more dangerous task of challenging Indonesia’s invasion and occupation of Timor.43
The Suharto regime adroitly exploited nationalist sentiment to delegitimize the work of Amnesty International and other human rights groups, charging that it “still suffers from a ‘moral arrogance’ of the West.” It also periodically targeted the first generation of human rights activists for harassment and arrest. Restrictions on discourse, funding, activism, and travel severely restricted local NGOs’ ability to develop transnational links, forcing LBH and LPHHM to couch their work within the rhetorical confines of the regime’s nationalist project, presenting it as a contribution to the legal reform and modernization of the state rather than as a challenge to its legitimacy.44
The legal aid approach of LBH and LPHHM also appealed to international donors who were considering funding human rights work.45 Ford Foundation officials often framed these questions in functional terms, asking of Indonesia in 1976: “Is the present level of repression necessary to maintain an orderly society and carry on the variety of development efforts?” Initially, the Ford Foundation supported the International Commission of Jurists and ICRC, both of which worked directly with LBH and LPHHM to gather and disseminate information about political prisoners. Ford also began funding the Jakarta Public Defenders office, the Institute for Legal Aid, and other programs to give higher prominence to “legal aid and the rule of law” as a framework for human rights advocacy and development.46
Foreign donors soon came to dominate human rights funding in Indonesia, a development with dramatic and sometimes contradictory long-term consequences. External funding helped make NGO work an “alternative middle class career path for those with critical ideas,” while serving as “transmitters into Indonesia of new paradigms for thinking about social, economic, and political change.”47 By the late 1970s, LBH began to engage in recognizably “Western” human rights work, establishing a human rights division and issuing its own annual reports on Indonesia. But foreign funding also imposed subtle constraints, giving a higher profile to NGOs that could frame goals, analyze problems, report abuses, and compile information in ways useful to the transnational human rights community. One former Amnesty researcher described an accretive process by which Amnesty’s institutional needs indirectly worked to shape the language, style, and structure of human rights reporting from Indonesian and Timorese activists, imposing over time a discursive discipline that stripped their accounts of politics and ideology to appear neutral for international consumption.48
But the sidelining of East Timor as a human rights concern stemmed from more than mere great power hypocrisy, limited information, or geopolitics. The individualistic, liberal human rights discourse in the West, which ranked civil and political over collective economic and social rights and, in particular, the right to self-determination, compounded the difficulties faced by East Timor advocates working to reverse U.S. and Western support of Indonesia. As political scientist Kathryn Sikkink observed regarding Latin America, “The focus on the rights of the person found an echo in the liberal ideological tradition of the Western countries, where the human rights movement had the bulk of its members. But [it] was also consonant with the human rights problems in the main target countries of the early movement”—all long independent states in which rights-talk grew out of legal and political traditions of individual rights rather than recent anticolonial struggles. This narrow vision also reflected the original mandate of Amnesty International, which for the first twenty years of its existence focused almost exclusively on prisoners of conscience, torture victims, and the death penalty.49
If Western human rights advocates during the 1970s focused on crimes against the individual and the body, many postcolonial states and more politically radical solidarity campaigns continued to frame human rights demands in an anticolonial context. The leaders of Fretilin organized themselves along lines similar to FRELIMO, Mozambique’s political party which ousted the Portuguese colonial regime in 1975. Many East Timorese sought refuge in Mozambique after 1975 and found in FRELIMO’s colonial past Marxist analysis and organizational principles that paralleled their struggle. In their view, East Timor was fighting not for human rights in a Western context but for self-determination from colonialism, both Portuguese and Indonesian, which it exercised when it declared independence on November 28, 1975.50
Though historians of human rights have produced a small torrent of scholarship in the last decade, we still lack broad historical treatments of self-determination’s descent through the twentieth century and its intersection with contemporary debates about minority protection, human rights, and related concepts.51 Yet the limited studies we do have suggest that, from the moment of the December 1948 signing of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights, significant fissures opened within the postcolonial world, and between the colonial powers and the scommunist bloc as to the scope and meaning of self-determination as a human right. These debates, every bit as fierce as those over the UDHR itself, were inseparable from the dynamics of the Cold War and broader contests over postcolonial social, political, and economic organization.
Underlying these conflicts was a series of unanswerable questions: “Was self-determination a human right or a general principle? Did it implicate economic as well as political independence? Did it encompass the right to internal democratic participation? Did it apply only to colonial or non self-governing territories, or did it apply to national groups seeking to secede from recognized states?”52 Inclusion of an explicit “right to self-determination” in the first two UN human rights charters and in the 1960 Declaration on the Granting of Independence to Colonial Countries and Peoples did little to clarify matters. Few national liberation movements or postcolonial states claiming the right to self-determination practiced internal democracy, and new multiethnic states rejected the application of self-determination to internal minorities. Indonesia’s first President Sukarno, for example, threatened war with the Netherlands in 1962 in order to “recover” the territory of West New Guinea, which he argued could only exercise its right to self-determination as part of the unitary republic of Indonesia. These fissures sometimes burst into the open when ethnic, religious, and political minorities claiming the right of secession or internal rule, as in Biafra and Bangladesh, challenged the sanctity of colonial borders that served as the basis for independence claims—and for the nation-state system itself—in the postwar era.53
It is no coincidence that the last gasp of European colonialism in the early 1970s paralleled the explosion of human rights activism in Europe and the United States, or that postcolonial states continued to insist that self-determination broadly construed was the “first right” from which all other human rights derived.54 Western nations in the 1970s, however, “did not agree that this was a fundamental human right,” often viewing movements for self-determination as the untidy leftovers of decolonization. U.S. officials were particularly opposed to claims by members of the Non-Aligned Movement that effective self-determination required economic sovereignty and control over natural resources, a challenge to the prerogatives of multinational corporations also reflected in calls for a New International Economic Order.55
The U.S. stance on East Timor at the United Nations illustrates the difficulty U.S. and other Western officials had in reconciling self-determination with other framings of human rights. Immediately following Indonesia’s December 1975 invasion, the United States voted in favor of UN Security Council resolutions affirming East Timor’s right to self-determination and calling on Indonesia to withdraw from East Timor “without delay,” while working mightily behind the scenes to make sure the resolution would never be enforced. A few months later, convinced that Indonesia’s takeover of East Timor was a fait accompli, the Ford administration ordered U.S. Ambassador to the UN Daniel Patrick Moynihan to simply abstain from voting on a similar resolution.56 On November 19, 1976, the United States voted against a General Assembly resolution rejecting Indonesia’s July 1976 annexation of the territory (which Jakarta argued constituted an act of self-determination), thereafter maintaining the position that “while we have never recognized that a valid act of self-determination by the Timorese people has occurred, we accept the incorporation of East Timor into Indonesia.”57
The Carter administration between 1977 and 1980 reiterated its predecessor’s position at the UN recognizing Indonesia’s incorporation of East Timor. At the 32nd UN General Assembly meeting in the fall of 1977, Mozambique and Guinea Bissau introduced a resolution calling for a cease-fire and the admission of a UN fact-finding mission to East Timor, significantly diluting the previous year’s submission in the hopes of gaining U.S. support.58 Not even Assistant Secretary of State Patricia Derian—a former civil rights activist—supported the resolution, though doing so would “dramatically underscore our human rights concerns” and “conform to our position that the UN has a responsibility to deal with problems relating to human rights, including self-determination” (emphasis added).59 The United States, Australia, New Zealand, and other regional supporters of Indonesia in succeeding years continued to vote against UN resolutions rejecting Indonesia’s invasion of East Timor and worked to remove the territory from the agenda of the UN Decolonization committee.60 These efforts reflected a desire on the part of the United States and other countries both to support the Suharto regime’s position on East Timor and to close off international forums where the territory’s status could be contested.
The United States and Australian position was strikingly at odds with the Non-Aligned Movement, Lusophone nations, the communist bloc, and older human rights groups such as the International League for Human Rights.61 The Fifth Conference of the Non-Aligned Countries in Colombo, Sri Lanka, for example, in August 1976 rejected Indonesia’s claim that its annexation of Timor constituted an act of self-determination and affirmed support for East Timor’s independence in accordance with recent UN resolutions.62 The United States and other Western governments, however, were not alone in seeking to wall-off self-determination from other framings of human rights. Amnesty International’s International Secretariat in a worldwide directive reminded members that “while governments may regard the human rights situation in East Timor as having a bearing on their stand on the issue of self-determination, AI does not urge governments to take any particular position on the issue.” Most solidarity groups focusing on East Timor rejected Amnesty’s analysis and sought explicitly to link human rights abuses to the denial of self-determination—exposing a gulf between differing visions of NGO human rights politics that historians have accorded little consideration.63
Western diplomats, while affirming East Timor’s rights in principle, effectively ruled out independence and framed self-determination squarely in the context of integration with Indonesia. Developmental discourses, moreover, provided shorthand for dismissing Timor as too small and primitive to merit self-government; New Zealand’s ambassador mused that “considered as human stock they are not at all impressive.” Britain’s Foreign and Commonwealth Office, which worried about the precedent set for decolonization in Belize, in March 1976 frankly argued that “morals and the law do not always go hand in hand. Self-determination is a laudable principle, but it may not always be morally right to grant it.”64
Carter administration officials, like their regional allies, continued to formulate policy on the assumption that Indonesia’s incorporation of East Timor was irreversible, and that any abuses, while regrettable, had occurred in the past and that the international community’s priority should be gaining access for humanitarian organizations such as Catholic Relief Services and the Red Cross.65 Not until contending claims over self-determination were resolved, in other words, would human rights in East Timor emerge as an acceptable subject of discussion for Western governments. But reports smuggled out of the territory by Catholic Church activists and journalists suggested that the Indonesian armed forces were not only still carrying out mass killings, but that they struggled to assert control over rural areas where most of Timor’s population had fled.66 In September 1977, Australian Labor Party leaders, citing reports smuggled out of East Timor, warned that Indonesia was planning a major offensive to wipe out Fretilin resistance, following an offer of “amnesty” to tens of thousands of Timorese living outside of army-controlled areas. Rather than allowing the refugees to return to their homes, however, Indonesian officials forced them into resettlement camps where starvation and disease killed thousands.67
Indonesian officials continued to admit privately that they controlled less than half and perhaps only 20 percent of East Timor’s population. Meeting with U.S. embassy officials, General Benny Murdani complained that the armed forces lacked “manpower, supplies and expertise” to defeat Fretilin guerrillas. In July, the CIA observed that Indonesian military forces were engaged in their largest military operations since independence but “have had difficulties extending their control to the countryside and in some cases, even pacifying areas near the large population centers.”68 Moreover, despite a near doubling of U.S. military aid since 1976 the Armed Forces were “running out of military inventory,” their operations in Timor having “pushed them to the wall.”69
The continued reports of Indonesian atrocities and the military stalemate in East Timor at the end of 1977 provide the crucial backdrop for evaluating the Carter administration’s framing of human rights in Indonesia, as well as its continued commitment to expanding military assistance to the Suharto regime. After two years of accumulating evidence of a possible genocide in East Timor, the State Department’s annual human rights report for Indonesia, released in January 1978, acknowledged reports of atrocities by Indonesian troops in East Timor in 1975 and 1976 but claimed that “the Indonesian government withdrew and disciplined offending units guilty of individual excesses, [and] most of the human losses appear to have occurred prior to Indonesia’s intervention.”70
As the U.S. embassy was preparing its human rights report, Congressman Fraser wrote Secretary of State Vance concerning reports of indiscriminate killings in East Timor and the use of defoliants by U.S.-supplied OV-10 Bronco counterinsurgency aircraft. The State Department acknowledged the use of OV-10 aircraft to attack East Timor but noted that Indonesia had limited the weapons employed to “machine guns, rockets, and perhaps bombs” used in the “aerial bombing” of Fretilin-controlled areas—at the time sheltering tens of thousands of refugees fleeing Indonesian attacks.71
In the face of continued criticism, Carter administration officials sought to recast Indonesia’s assault as a counterinsurgency effort. In February 1978, Assistant Secretary of State Robert Oakley appearing before Congress defended continued Indonesian military operations in East Timor as a legitimate response to “armed groups such as Fretilin who are employing armed force against the government.”72 The day after Oakley’s testimony, the State Department notified Congress of its intent to sell to Indonesia sixteen F-5 fighter planes and spare parts worth $125 million, just as Australian ham-radio operators received broadcasts from East Timor reporting that Indonesian forces had massacred the entire population of the town of Atabai for supporting Fretilin, killing an estimated five hundred people.73
Three months later, in the culmination of the Carter administration’s efforts to forge closer relations with Indonesia, Vice President Walter Mondale visited Jakarta, meeting with President Suharto and other Indonesian officials.74 “This will be an especially important moment for U.S.-Indonesian relations,” the NSC argued, an opportunity to “erase doubts as to U.S. policy toward Indonesia and Southeast Asia.”75 Both U.S. and Indonesian officials recognized the importance of such a visit. Mondale’s briefing papers for the visit accordingly stated that one of his chief objectives was to “affirm our commitment to promote progress on human rights.” Yet the NSC urged the vice president to discuss human rights in both countries “with a very light touch,” emphasizing “our determination not to impose our values, our understanding of local cultural and historical factors, [and] our recognition of recent progress.”76
The Suharto regime viewed Mondale’s visit as an opportunity to plead for expedited approval and shipment of military assistance, including twenty-eight A-4 ground attack aircraft.77 Mondale agreed, requesting that Carter accelerate approval of the A-4 sale, since “the underlying purpose of my visit is to affirm that we want to work with Indonesia.” As the vice president arrived in Indonesia, Carter issued a special Presidential Guidance approving the sale, seeking clarification “on the circumstances in which … the planes will be used, in particular in East Timor,” an acknowledgement that the new U.S. weapons would be used there (emphasis in original).78 Following Washington’s lead, Great Britain and Australia immediately announced the sale of Hawk ground attack aircraft, transports, and helicopters to Jakarta.79
In his meeting with Suharto, the vice president treated human rights as a matter of perception and politics whose effective management would enable still closer relations with Jakarta.80 Mondale noted that the recent release of detainees had “helped create a favorable climate of opinion in the Congress” for expanded arms sales. He suggested that releasing smaller numbers of prisoners more regularly would further improve public opinion and deflect criticism—a suggestion the regime later implemented. The vice president likewise noted the two nations’ “mutual concerns regarding East Timor,” in particular “how to handle public relations aspects of the problem.” He suggested that allowing humanitarian groups such as Catholic Relief Services access to East Timor would not only help refugees in the area (overwhelmingly generated by Indonesian military operations) but “have a beneficial impact on U.S. public opinion.”81 Suharto was “exuberant” over the visit, finding Mondale “completely friendly and open and to have an excellent understanding of the Indonesian situation,” a sign that the regime expected no more real pressure on either human rights or East Timor, at least none that could not be effectively managed.82
As the White House worked to “consolidate the Administration’s position” with the regime, Indonesian army and navy units launched a campaign of “encirclement and annihilation” against Fretilin guerrillas lasting through the end of 1978. In one of many such incidents reported during the campaign, Indonesian troops using U.S.-supplied Bronco aircraft massacred upwards of five hundred people assembled at the foot of Vadaboro Mountain in the Matebian range on the eastern end of the island.83
When Western ambassadors and journalists finally gained access to the territory in September they were shocked by the extent of starvation and misery among the tens of thousands of refugees in forced resettlement camps.84 Horrific pictures of emaciated Timorese refugees finally forced Indonesia to permit the reentry of the ICRC, but not before many thousands had died of starvation and preventable disease. In July 1979—ten months after his visit to East Timor—U.S. Ambassador to Indonesia Ed Masters finally requested U.S. emergency assistance, a move which the administration trumpeted as a symbol of the U.S. and Indonesian commitment to the welfare and human rights of the Timorese.85
Between 1977 and 1979, the Carter administration did succeed in its goal of deepening relations with the authoritarian Suharto regime and advancing U.S. regional interests. Indonesia continued to play a politically moderate role in ASEAN and the Non-Aligned Movement on issues of North–South conflict. It welcomed U.S. investment and served as a reliable anticommunist counterweight to China and Vietnam. Indonesia also continued to release political prisoners detained after 1965, enabling Washington to claim progress on human rights and keep the pipeline of economic and military assistance flowing. Improved relations with Jakarta, however, enabled a near-genocidal assault on the people of East Timor and negated Indonesia’s human rights “progress.” There is no indication, however, that the Carter administration ever reconsidered U.S. support for Indonesia’s occupation of East Timor or viewed mounting Indonesian atrocities there as a human rights violation. Rather, U.S. officials, almost without exception, treated East Timor as a public relations or humanitarian problem, significant not for the abuses occurring there but for the problems it might pose for U.S. plans to expand economic and military assistance to Indonesia. The United States, together with its British, Australian, and Japanese allies, denied East Timor’s right to self-determination, a right accorded little weight even by the emerging human rights establishment.
If human rights were “preeminently a politics of the information age,” then the handful of Westerners knowledgeable about East Timor faced a formidable challenge.86 Into the 1980s, East Timorese refugees and church activists periodically smuggled out letters and messages describing the appalling human rights situation, and journalists penned occasional stories about Southeast Asia’s “forgotten war.”87 However, the U.S. government, Indonesia’s primary military patron, could and did ignore this trickle of information, aided by a pliant media which generally refused to cover East Timor and often accepted Indonesian government propaganda at face value when it did. Without consistent and reliable sources of information, mobilized constituencies, or organized pressure on Congress, and other institutions the small and scattered community of East Timor supporters—relying largely on information provided by activists elsewhere—was unable to effectively challenge U.S. support for the Indonesian occupation. In addition, the focus of the organized human rights movement on civil and political rights at the expense of postcolonial self-determination enabled the Carter administration to argue that discussions of East Timor should focus on improving the conditions of the Timorese under Indonesian rule rather than pressing for an Indonesian withdrawal.
As he began hearings on East Timor in June 1977, Congressman Donald Fraser stated that “to write off the rights of 600,000 people because we are friends with the country that forcibly annexed them does real violence to any profession of adherence to principle or to human rights.” De facto foreign minister in exile José Ramos-Horta framed the same issue in anticolonial terms: “What in the final act of analysis, is an act of self-determination? When one-tenth of our nation has been massacred by the Nazi army of Java, but in spite of this the whole nation continues the struggle for liberation, is this not the supreme act of self-determination?”88 To recall Fraser’s and Horta’s words is not to elevate self-determination to a privileged position in the history of human rights but to place a certain vision of self-determination as human rights in its proper perspective, and to suggest that historians have yet to sufficiently and critically unpack the complicated international and organizational politics of human rights in the 1970s.
The diplomatic and discursive fight over East Timor exposed a major fissure in transnational conceptions and hierarchies of human rights at the end of the colonial era that the Indonesian armed forces and its sponsors were able to manipulate to their advantage for twenty-four years. Human rights, in this reading, was not a trajectory or a gradually expanding set of norms and institutions but an arena of contestation over expertise and representation and therefore power, waged on highly unequal terms. The final report of East Timor’s Commission for Reception, Truth and Reconciliation rightly situates both the human rights politics and denial of self-determination to East Timor in both a Cold War and a postcolonial context.89 The persistent and countervailing demands of East Timorese and their outnumbered and outgunned supporters for a different ordering of rights would await the collapse of the Cold War, the reemergence of a transnational movement for East Timor, and a reconsideration of the meaning of self-determination and human rights in an age of accelerating globalization.
NOTES
1. Memo, Armacost to Brzezinski, June 14, 1977, NSA Staff Materials, Far East, Box 6, James Carter Presidential Library (hereafter NSA SMFE JCPL).
2. Taylor, “‘Encirclement and Annihilation’: The Indonesian Occupation of East Timor,” in The Specter of Genocide: Mass Murder in Historical Perspective, ed. Robert Gellately and Ben Kiernan (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2003), 166–68.
3. Note on Meeting With [excised], Note New Zealand Embassy in Jakarta to Wellington, July 5, 1975, declassified document in authors possession; Memo, C. W. Squire, South East Asian Department, “The Future of Portuguese Timor,” March 5, 1975, FCO 15/1703, UK National Archives; Cablegram O.JA1201 Australian Embassy in Jakarta to Canberra, August 14, 1975, quoted in Australia and the Indonesian Incorporation of Portuguese Timor, 1974–1976 (Melbourne: Department of Foreign Affairs and Trade, 2000), 306–9.
4. Brad Simpson, “‘Illegally and Beautifully’: The United States, the Indonesian Invasion of East Timor and the International Community,” Cold War History 5, no. 3 (August 2005): 281–315.
5. Telegram 286596, the State Department to US Delegation Secretary’s Aircraft, December 7, 1975, NSA Country Files, East Asia and the Pacific, Indonesia, Box 6, Gerald Ford Library (hereafter GFL).
6. Cable Canberra to Jakarta, October 7, 1975, cited in Australia and the Indonesian Incorporation of Portuguese Timor, 447; Nancy Viviani, “Australians and the Timor issue,” Australian Outlook 30, no. 2 (August 1976): 197–226.
7. James Dunn, Timor: A People Betrayed (Sydney: ABC Books for the Australian Broadcasting Corporation, 1996), 311, 333; Pedro Pinto Leite, ed., The East Timor Problem and the Role of Europe (Leiden: International Platform of Jurists, 1998), passim.
8. Arnold Kohen, “Human Rights in Indonesia,” The Nation, November 26, 1977, 553–57; Richard Franke, East Timor: The Hidden War, (New York: East Timor Defense Committee, 1976).
9. Kenneth Cmiel, “The Emergence of Human Rights Politics in the United States,” Journal of American History 86, no. 3 (December 1999): 1231–50.
10. Greg Fealy, “The Release of Indonesia’s Political Prisoners: Domestic Versus Foreign Policy, 1975–1979” (working paper 94, Centre for Southeast Asian Studies, Monash University, 1995, 7); Memo, Executive Committee Meeting of August 26, 1976, “Proposal for an Indonesia Campaign,” RG IV, Box 10, Amnesty International USA Papers, Columbia University (hereafter AI Papers).
11. Fealy, “The Release of Indonesia’s Political Prisoners,” 13–14; David Hinkley, “The Work of Amnesty International for Indonesian Prisoners of Conscience,” TAPOL US, US Campaign for the Release of Indonesian Political Prisoners, Bulletin no. 1, October 1, 1975; “ILO Given Indonesia Pledge on Prisoners,” The Guardian, June 17, 1976, 4.
12. Indonesia: Economic Prospects and the Status of Human Rights, Center for International Policy, Vol. II, no. 3 (Washington, DC, 1976).
13. Memo, sec. gen., “The Forthcoming meeting of the Intergovernmental Group on Indonesia,” November 20, 1973, RG II, Box 7, AI Papers; Memo, Ingersoll for Ford, July 1, 1975, Indonesia, Box 6, GFL.
14. Fealy, “The Release of Indonesia’s Political Prisoners,” 28; Telegram 252899, State to Jakarta, October 23, 1975, declassified as a result of author’s Freedom of Information Act request (hereafter FOIA).
15. Telegram 15467 Jakarta to State, November 30, 1976, FOIA; Jusuf Wanandi, Kebijakan Luar Negri President Carter Dan Peranan Kongress AS, (Jakarta, Centre for Strategic and International Studies, Monograf No. 5, February 1978), 9–13.
16. Jan Pluvier to Cong. Donald Fraser, October 25, 1976, Subject Committee Files 1976, Box 149.G.9.8F, Fraser Papers, Minnesota State Historical Society, Minneapolis, MN (hereafter MSHS); TAPOL, US Bulletin no. 4, New York, April 15, 1976.
17. Telegram 13695, Jakarta to State, October 20, 1976, FOIA.
18. Indonesia (London: Amnesty International, 1977), 21; Telegram 12787, Jakarta to State, September 30, 1976, FOIA.
19. “Note of a Conversation with Indonesian Delegation led by Lt. General Ali Moertopo,” November 18, 1976, RG II, Box 7, AI Papers; Memo for the Files, Meeting With Representatives of AI, October 26, 1977, Accession A1994–021, Box 53, Indonesia General Vol. I, Fol. 1388105, World Bank Archives, Washington, DC.
20. Telegram 5605, Jakarta to State, April 29, 1976, FOIA; Indonesian Times, February 1, 1976; Telegram 0021, Jakarta to State, January 3, 1978, FOIA.
21. “Indons Killed 60,000: Report,” Melbourne Age, November 19, 1976, 2.
22. Memo, for Zbigniew Brzezinksi from Armacost, January 28, 1977, NSA SMFE, Box 4, JCPL; Memo, for Brzezinksi from Jessica Tuchman and Robert M. Kimmitt, February 7, 1977, NSA SMFE, Box 4, JCPL.
23. Memo, for Zbigniew Brzezinksi, East Asia Evening Report, January 18, 1977, NSA SMFE, Box 4, JCPL.
24. Telegram 059033, State to Jakarta, March 17, 1977, FOIA.
25. Telegram 1472, Canberra to State, March 3, 1977, FOIA.
26. Subcommittee on International Organizations and Asian and Pacific Affairs, “Human Rights in East Timor and the Question on the Use of U.S. Equipment by the Indonesian Armed Forces,” March 23, 1977, 95th Congress, First Session (Washington, DC, 1977), 26; Memo, to Asst. Secretary Maynes from USUN, October 10, 1977, FOIA.
27. Submission to Peacock by A. R. Parsons, Canberra, March 17, 1977, cited in Australia and the Indonesian Incorporation of Portuguese Timor, 829–34; Ali Murtopo to Donald Fraser, March 16, 1977, Subject Committee Files 1977 Box 151.H.3.7B, Fraser Papers, MSHS; Telegram 3166, Jakarta to State, March 12, 1977, FOIA.
28. Telegram 066813, State to Jakarta, March 25, 1977, FOIA.
29. “Congressmen [sic] Back Takeover of Timor,” Melbourne Age, April 17, 1977, cited in Taylor, Indonesia’s Forgotten, 83–84.
30. Telegram 4724, Jakarta to State, April 14, 1977, FOIA; Telegram 100498, State to Jakarta, May 4, 1977, FOIA.
31. Telegram 4980, Jakarta to State, April 18, 1977, FOIA; Telegram 4893, Jakarta to State, April 18, 1977, FOIA.
32. Cablegram O.JA13174, Jakarta to Canberra, Lisbon, New York, May 26, 1977, quoted in Australia and the Indonesian Incorporation of Portuguese Timor, 836–38; Telegram 5572, Jakarta to State, May 2, 1977, FOIA.
33. W. W. Rostow, The United States and the Regional Organization of Asia and the Pacific (Austin: University of Texas Press, 1986). In 1977 ASEAN’s member states were Indonesia, the Philippines, Thailand, Singapore, and Malaysia.
34. Memo, for the President from Brzezinski, May 16, 1977, NSA SMFE, Box 4, JCPL.
35. Memo, for Brzezinski from Armacost, June 14, 1977, NSA SMFE, Box 4, JCPL.
36. Memo, for the President from Brzezinski, July 8, 1977, NSA SMFE, Box 4, JCPL.
37. Memo, for Brzezinski from Armacost, October 21, 1977, FOIA.
38. Memo, from Brzezinski to the President, May 16, 1977, NSA SMFE, Box 4, JCPL.
39. Memo, from Armacost to Jessica Tuchman, August 24, 1977, NSA SMFE, Box 6, JCPL.
40. Rep. Helen S. Meyner to Secretary of State Cyrus Vance, June 22, 1978, Box 14, Box 14, East Timor and Indonesia Action Network Papers, Tamiment Library, New York University (hereafter ETAN Papers); Fraser to Vance, February 23, 1977, Subject Files 1977, Box 151.H.3.7B, Fraser Papers, MSHS.
41. Kathryn Sikkink, Mixed Signals: U.S. Human Rights Policy and Latin America (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 2004), chs. 2–4; James Green, “We Cannot Remain Silent”: Opposition to the Brazilian Military Dictatorship in the United States, 1964–85 (Durham, 2009).
42. “East Timor Information Bulletin,” no. 3, March 1976, British Campaign for an Independent East Timor, Box 16, ETAN Papers.
43. Edward Aspinall, Opposing Suharto: Compromise, Resistance and Regime Change in Indonesia (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 2005), 103–5; Anja Jetschke, “Linking the Unlinkable? International Norms and Nationalism in Indonesia and the Philippines,” in The Power of Human Rights: International Norms and Domestic Change, ed. Thomas Risse, Stephen C. Ropp, and Kathryn Sikkink (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1999), 134–72.
44. Jetschke, “Linking the Unlinkable?” 140.
45. William Korey, Taking on the World’s Most Repressive Regimes: The Ford Foundation’s International Human Rights Policies and Practices (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2007), 28–37; Rosalyn Higgins, “Human Rights: Needs and Practices,” September 1973, Ford Foundation Archives New York (hereafter FFA).
46. Ford Foundation, “Notes on Human Rights and Indonesian Development,” Paper for Southeast Asia Development Advisory Group Seminar, May 14–15, 1976, Box 14, ETAN Papers; “Human Rights and Intellectual Freedom,” Ford Foundation Information Paper 005527, March 1978, FFA.
47. Aspinall, Opposing Suharto, 93–95.
48. “East Timor: Indonesian Armed Aggression,” Speech by José Ramos-Horta, Representative of Fretilin (n.d.), Box 14, ETAN Papers; Author correspondence with Geoffrey Robinson, November 2008.
49. Sikkink, Mixed Signals, 57.
50. David Webster, “Non-State Diplomacy: East Timor, 1975–1999,” Portuguese Studies Review 11, no. 1 (2003): 10; excerpt from People’s Daily of the People’s Republic of China, December 10, 1975, published in F. X. do Amaral, East Timor: A People’s War (New York: Ministry of External Relations, Democratic Republic of East Timor, April 12, 1976), 5.
51. Eric Weitz, “From the Vienna to the Paris System: International Politics and the Entangled Histories of Human Rights, Forced Deportations, and Civilizing Missions,” The American Historical Review 113 (December 2008):1313–1343; Erez Manela, The Wilsonian Moment: Self-Determination and the International Origins of Anticolonial Nationalism (New York: Oxford University Press, 2007).
52. Roger Normand and Sarah Zaidi, Human Rights at the UN: The Political History of Universal Justice (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2008), 212–20.
53. M. Rafiquil Islam, “Secessionist Self-Determination: Some Lessons From Katanga, Biafra and Bangladesh,” Journal of Peace Research 22, no. 4 (1985): 217–27; Daniel Sargent, “From Internationalism to Globalism: The United States and the Transformation of International Politics in the 1970s” (PhD diss., Harvard University, 2008), 278–344.
54. Rupert Emerson, “The Fate of Human Rights in the Third World,” World Politics 27, no. 2 (January 1975): 204; Press release No. 288/1006, June 28, 1977, Indonesian Mission to the United Nations, New York.
55. Cmiel, “The Recent History of Human Rights”; Telegram 1290, Geneva to State, “Human Rights Commission—Self-Determination,” March 23, 1973, FOIA.
56. Geoffrey Gunn, East Timor and the United Nations: The Case for Intervention (Lawrenceville, NJ: Red Sea Press, 1997), 107–11.
57. State Department Press Advisory, “East Timor—Self Determination,” August 4, 1982, FOIA.
58. Memo, for Richard Holbrooke from Andrew Young, USUN, August 4, 1977, FOIA; Telegram 2776, State to Jakarta, August 30, 1977, FOIA.
59. Memo, for Philip Habib from Maynes, Holbrooke, Hansen and Derian, November 1, 1977, FOIA.
60. Telegram 5688, USUN to State, December 6, 1978, FOIA; Telegram 04413, USUN to State, October 21, 1980, FOIA; Memo, New Zealand Embassy in Jakarta to Wellington, June 16, 1976, declassified document in author’s possession.
61. Petition from International League for Human Rights to Fourth Committee of the UN General Assembly, October 14, 1980, Box 14, ETAN Papers.
62. Ton Duc Thang, President of the Democratic Republic of Vietnam to Francisco Xavier do Almaral, President of Fretilin, January 27, 1976, Box 14, ETAN Papers; Memo, Grozney to Rundell, July 21, 1976, FCO 020/1(333), UKNA.
63. Memo, Asia Research Department to All Sections, “AI’s concerns in East Timor,” August 1983, RG IV, Box 25, AI Papers.
64. Memo, Roger Peren to New Zealand Secretary of Foreign Affairs, January 13, 1978, released under Official Information Act request; Foreign and Commonwealth Office Diplomatic Report no. 182/76, March 15, 1976, FCO 15/1709, UKNA.
65. Submission, Roger Holdich to Fraser, August 6, 1976, quoted in Australia and the Indonesian Incorporation of Portuguese Timor, 825–26.
66. Telegram 5366, Jakarta to State, April 25, 1978, FOIA; Telegram 6209, Jakarta to State, May 12, 1978, FOIA.
67. Telegram 6150, Canberra to State, September 1, 1977, FOIA.
68. Telegram 000345, Jakarta to State, January 3, 1978, FOIA; CIA National Foreign Assessment Center Weekly Military Review, July 26, 1978, FOIA.
69. “Indonesia Quietly Starting to Modernize Its Hopelessly Outmoded Military Force,” Los Angeles Times, December 4, 1977, B18.
70. U.S. Department of State Country Reports on Human Rights Practices 1978, February 3, 1978 (Washington, DC: GPO, 1978), 235.
71. Assistant Secretary for Congressional Relations Douglas Bennett to Fraser, January 7, 1978, FOIA; Telegram 0333, Jakarta to State, January 8, 1978, FOIA.
72. Subcommittee on International Relations of the Committee on International Relations, U.S. Policy on Human Rights and Military Assistance: Overview and Indonesia, February 15, 1978, 96th Congress, 1st Sess. (Washington, DC: GPO, 1978).
73. Telegram 040604, State to Jakarta, February 16, 1978, FOIA; John Taylor, Indonesia’s Forgotten War, 85.
74. Scope paper for Vice President’s Visit to Southeast Asia, March 17, 1978, NSA SMFE, Box 7, JCPL; Raymond Bonner, Waltzing with a Dictator, Expanded and Updated Ed. (New York: Vintage, 1988), 231–49.
75. Inventory of Vice Presidential Trip to Indonesia, February 28, 1978, NSA SMFE, Box 7, JCPL.
76. Scope paper for Vice President’s Visit to Southeast Asia, March 17, 1978, NSA SMFE, Box 7, JCPL.
77. Telegram 1874, Jakarta to State, February 10, 1978, FOIA.
78. Memo, for the President from the Vice President, April 26, 1978, NSA SMFE, Box 7, JCPL; Memo, for Deputy Executive Secretary of State Frank Wisner, “Presidential Guidance on A-4s,” May 9, 1978, FOIA.
79. Carmel Budiardjo and Liem Soei Liong, The War in East Timor (London: Zed, 1984), 30.
80. Telegram 5613, Jakarta to Manila, May 1, 1978, FOIA.
81. Telegram 6004, Jakarta to State, May 9, 1978, FOIA; Telegram 8864, Jakarta to State, July 5, 1978, FOIA; Telegram 6076 Jakarta to State, FOIA.
82. Telegram 8736, Jakarta to State, May 15, 1978, FOIA; Memo, for Brzezinski from Armacost, May 16, 1978, NSA SMFE, Box 7, JCPL.
83. Taylor, Indonesia’s Forgotten War, 86–87.
84. Telegram 12189, Jakarta to State, September 8, 1978, FOIA.
85. Telegram 313771, State to Jakarta, December 6, 1979, FOIA.
86. Cmiel, “The Emergence of Human Rights Politics in the United States,” 1235.
87. Sharon Scharfe, “Human Rights and the Internet in Asia: Promoting the Case of East Timor,” in Human Rights and the Internet, ed. Stephen Hick, Edward F. Halpin, and Eric Hoskins (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2000), 129–37.
88. Human Rights in East Timor, June 28 and July 19, 1977, hearings before the Subcommittee on International Relations of the Committee on International Relations (Washington, DC: GPO 1977); Horta quoted in Francisco Xavier do Amaral, East Timor: A People’s War, April 12, 1976, p. 44, Box 14, ETAN Papers.
89. Chega! Final Report of the Commission for Reception, Truth and Reconciliation in East Timor (CAVR) (Dili, 2006), Executive Summary, 47–55.