report
by John Pilger,
Guardian
Weekend 14 July 2001
"
Like the majority of humanity who are not touched by the delights of McDonald's
and Starbucks, the internet and mobile phones, who cannot afford to eat enough
protein, these are globalisation's unpeople."
In
Indonesia 35 years ago, a military dictator took over, a million people were
killed and a red carpet was rolled out for western capital. It was the start of
globalisation in Asia, a model for the rest of the world, leaving a legacy of
sweatshops and corruption.
Flying
into Jakarta, it is not difficult to imagine the city below fitting the World
Bank's description of Indonesia. A "model pupil of globalisation" was
the last of many laurels the bank bestowed. That was almost four years ago, in
the summer of 1997. Within weeks, short-term global capital had fled the
country, the stock market and currency had crashed, and the number of people
living in absolute poverty had reached almost 70 million. The next year,
General Suharto was forced to resign after 30 years as dictator, taking with
him severance pay estimated at $15 billion, the equivalent of almost 13% of his
country's foreign debt, much of it owed to the World Bank.
From
the air, it is the industrial design of the model pupil that is striking.
Jakarta is ringed by vast compounds, known as economic processing zones. These
enclose hundreds of factories that make products for foreign companies: the
clothes you buy on the high street, from the cool khakis of Gap to the Nike,
Adidas and Reebok trainers that sell in the UK for up to 100 pounds a pair. In
these factories are thousands of mostly young women working for the equivalent
of 72 pence per day.At current exchange rates, this is the official minimum
wage in Indonesia, which, says the government, is about half the living wage
and here, that means subsistence. Nike workers get about 4% of the retail price
of the shoes they make - not enough to buy the laces. Still, they count
themselves lucky: they have jobs. The "booming, dynamic economic
success" (another World Bank accolade) has left more than 36 million
without work. At a factory I saw, making the famous brands, the young women
work, battery-style, in temperatures that climb to 40 degrees centigrade. Most
have no choice about the hours they must work, including a notorious "long
shift": 36 hours without going home.
Clinging
to the factories, like the debris of a great storm, are the labour camps:
Hobbesian communities living in long dormitories made from breeze blocks,
plywood packing cases and corrugated iron. Like the majority of humanity who
are not touched by the delights of McDonald's and Starbucks, the internet and
mobile phones, who cannot afford to eat enough protein, these are globalisation's
unpeople. They live wit open, overflowing sewers and unsafe water for many, up
to half their wages go on drinkable water. Through their homes run stinking
canals dug by the former colonial masters, the Dutch, in the usual vainglorious
attempt to recreate Europe in Asia. The result is an urban environmental
disaster that breeds mosquitoes today, a plague of them in the camps has
brought a virulent form of dengue fever, known as "break-back fever".
After several visits here, I was bitten and took two months to recover. For the
undernourished young children in the camps, however, dengue often means death.
It is a disease of globalisation the mosquitoes domesticated as the camps grew
and as the sweatshop workers migrated from rural areas, having been impoverished
largely by World Bank programmes that promote export cash crops over
self-sustaining agriculture.
I
could just squeeze along a passageway. It was filled with people's clothes,
hanging in plastic, like the backroom of a dry cleaner's. The cleanliness and
neatness of people's lives is astonishing. They live in cell-like rooms, mostly
without windows or ventilation, in which eating and sleeping are tuned to the
ruthless rhythm of shiftwork in the factories. During the monsoon season, the
canals rise and flood, and more plastic materialises to protect possessions: a
precious tape player, posters of the Spice Girls and Che Guevera. I almost
tipped over a frying pan of sizzling tofu. There are open paraffin fires and
children darting perilously close. I watched a family of five perched on a
patch of green, gazing at the sunset through a polluted yellow haze tiny bats
circled overhead in the distance were the skeletal silhouettes of unfinished
skyscrapers. It was an apocalyptic glimpse of a "globalised" world
that Blair and Bush say is irreversible.
A
code of conduct issued by the American company Gap says: "Dormitory
facilities [must] meet all applicable laws and regulations related to health
and safety, including fire safety, sanitation, risk protection and electrical,
mechanical and structural safety." Because these dormitories are not on
the factory site, however, Gap and the companies they contract to make their
products are not liable. Consumers humming into Gap's numerous stores in
Britain might reflect on this non-liability as they pay for smart shirts made
by people who, on the wages they are paid, cannot afford even the buttons, let
alone a decent place to live. Ten miles from the camps, along the toll road
owned b Suharto's daughter (he distributed the national power grid among his
children banks and vast tracts of forest were tossed to generals and other
cronies), lies downtown Jakarta. This is the approved face of the global
"model pupil". Here you can find McDonald's with sugar-plump children
on Ronald's knee, and shopping malls with Versace leather coats at £2,000 and a
showroom of Jaguar cars. One of the smartest hotels is the Shangri-la. There
are four wedding receptions here every Sunday night. Last December, attended
one that cost $120,000. It was held in the grand ballroom, which is a version
of the ballroom of the Waldorf Astoria in New York, complete with chandeliers
and gold-leaf arches. The guests wore Armani, Versace and real diamonds, and
dropped cheques in a large box. There was an eight-tier cake with the initials
of the couple embossed in icing and the holiday snaps of them on a world tour
were projected cinema-size. The guests included former cronies of the deposed
Suharto and the chief representative of the World Bank in Indonesia, Mark
Baird, a New Zealander, who looked troubled when I asked him if he was enjoying
himself. The World Bank says its mission in Indonesia is "poverty
reduction" and "reaching out to the poor". The Bank set up the
$86 million loan that built the Shangri-la, which, shortly after the wedding
attended by Baird, sacked most of its workers when they went on strike for
decent pay.
The
Gotham City skyline of downtown Jakarta is mostly banks, many of them empty,
and unfinished buildings. Before 1997, there were more banks here than in any
city on earth, but half of them have gone bust since the "dynamic"
economy collapsed beneath the weight of its corruption. During Suharto's
30-year dictatorship, a cataract of "global" capital poured into Indonesia.
The World Bank lavished more than $30 billion. Some of this went to worthwhile
programmes, such as literacy, billions went elsewhere - $630 million was spent
on a notorious "transmigration" programme that allowed Suharto to
colonise the archipelago. Migrants from all over Indonesia were sent to
occupied East Timor, where they controlled the economy. The recent
blood-letting in Kalimantan (Borneo) was directed against Madura islanders who
had been shipped in to "develop" the territory. In August 1997, an internal
World Bank report, written in Jakarta, confirmed arguably the greatest scandal
in the history of "development" - that "at least 20 to 30%"
of the bank's loans "are diverted through informal payments to GOI
[Government of Indonesia] staff and politicians".
Seldom
a month would pass when Suharto was not being congratulated by western
politicians for bringing "stability" to the world's fourth most
populous nation. British politicians were especially appreciative, beginning
with Harold Wilson's foreign secretary, Michael Stewart, who in 1966 lauded the
dictator's "sensible economic policies". Margaret Thatcher called
Suharto "one of our very best and most valuable friends". John
Major's foreign secretary, Douglas Hurd, championed the Suharto regime's
"Asian values" (the unctuous code for lack of democracy and abuse of
human rights). In 1997, Robin Cook's first trip abroad included Indonesia,
where he shook hands warmly with Suharto - so warmly that a colour photograph
of the pair of them was chosen, bizarrely, to illustrate the Foreign Office's
report on human rights in the world.
They
all knew, of course. Amnesty filled cabinets with evidence of Suharto's grisly
record. Milosevic and Saddam Hussein were wimps by comparison. Shortly before
Cook flew in, an exhaustive investigation by the foreign affairs committee of
the Australian parliament concluded that Suharto's troops had caused the deaths
of "at least" 200,000 East Timorese, a third of the population. In
New Labour's first year in office, Britain was the biggest weapons supplier to
Indonesia.
This
made sense - the arms trade is one of globalisation's great successes an
Indonesia, the model pupil, has played a vital role. When the "global
economy" (ie, unfettered capitalism) took hold in Britain in the early
80s, Margaret Thatcher set about dismantling much of Britain's manufacturing,
while restoring the country's arms industry to a world leader, second only to
the US. This was done with veiled subsidies, of the kind that underwrite and
rig the "free market" in the west. Almost half of all research and
development funds went on "defence" and the export credit guarantee
department (ECGD) of the Department of Trade and Industry offered "soft
loans" to third world regimes shopping for hi-tech sabres to rattle. That
many had appalling human rights records and internal conflicts and/or were on
the verge of war with a neighbour (India, Pakistan, Iran, Iraq, Israel) was not
a barrier. Indonesia was a major recipient of these virtual giveaways. During
one 12-month period, almost pounds 1 billion of ECGD money financed the sale of
Hawk fighter-bombers to Indonesia. The British taxpayer paid up the arms
industry reaped its profits. The Hawks were used to bomb villages in the
mountains of East Timor - and the Foreign Office lied about for years, until
Cook was forced to admit it. Since then, the Hawks have bombed the West Papuans
as they have struggled to free themselves.
I
drove into the Krawang region of Java, where I met a rice farmer calle Sarkom.
It is fair to describe Sarkom as representative of the 80% of humanity whose
livelihoods depend on agriculture. He is not among the poorest, he lives with
his wife and three daughters in a small, bamboo-walled house and there are
tiles on the floor. At the front, under the eave, is a bamboo bed, a chair and
a table where his wife, Cucuk, supplements their income with sewing. Last year,
the International Monetary Fund offered the post-Suharto government a
"rescue package" of multi-million-dollar loans. The conditions included
the elimination of tariffs on staple foods. "Trade in all qualities of
rice has been opened to general importers and exporters," decreed the
IMF's letter of intent. Fertilisers and pesticides also lost their 70% subsidy.
This means that farmers such as Sarkom are likely to go bankrupt and their
children forced to find work in the cities. Moreover, it gives the green light
to the giant US foodgrains corporations to move into Indonesia.
The
double standard embodied in these conditions is breathtaking. Agribusiness in
the west, especially in the US and Europe, has been able to produce its
infamous surpluses and develop its export power only because of high tariff
walls and massive domestic subsidies. The result has been the soaring power of
the west over humanity's staples. The chief executive of the Cargill
Corporation, which dominates the world trade in foodgrains, once boasted,
"When we get up from the breakfast table each morning, much of what we
have eaten - cereals, bread, coffee, sugar and so on - has passed through the
hands of my company." Cargill's goal is to double in size every five to
seven years. This is known as "free trade". "I went to prison
for 14 years so that this would not happen," said Sarkom. "All my
friends, those who were not killed, went to prison so that the power of big
money would not take us over. I don't care what they call it now - global this
or that. It's the same force, the same threat to our lives."
That
remark refers to a chapter in Indonesia's recent past that western politicians
and businessmen would prefer to forget, although they have been among the chief
beneficiaries. Sarkom was one of tens of thousands imprisoned when General
Suharto seized power in Indonesia in 1965-66 - the "year of living
dangerously" - deposing the nationalist president Sukarno, who had led
Indonesia since the end of Dutch colonial rule. Scholars now estimate that as
many as a million people died in a pogrom that was directed primarily at
Indonesia's communist party, the PKI. Sarkom was 19 when he was taken away. He
is trying to write down in an exercise book his memories of the horrors he
experienced. He was for many years on Buru Island, where thousands were dumped,
at first without housing, food and water. On the day I went to see him, he had
gathered a group of friends for me to meet, men in their 60s and 70s, who had
also been tapols - political prisoners released since the fall of Suharto in
1998. Two were teachers, one a civil servant, another a member of parliament.
One man was imprisoned because he refused to vote for Suharto's front party,
Golkar. Several were PKI members. Adon Sutrisna, a teacher, told me, "We
are the people, the nation, that the world forgot. If you know the truth about
what happened in Indonesia, you can understand clearly where the world is being
led today." A few miles from Sarkom's farm is a hump of earth overgrown
with mustard flowers. It is a mass grave, but it has no markings - 35 years
after the murders, the families of the victims, believed to be a dozen, are
still too frightened to place a headstone. However, in the post-Suharto era,
many Indonesians are slowly overcoming the fear that has blighted a generation
throughout the countryside, families have begun to excavate the remains of
their loved ones. They are furtive figures of the night, occasionally glimpsed
on the rim of a paddy or a riverbank. The older witnesses recall rivers
"jammed with bodies like logs" in village after village, young men
were slaughtered for no reason, their murder marked by rows of severed penises.
I
have a friend in Jakarta whose name is Roy. Others call him Daniel. These are
just two of many aliases that have helped keep him alive since 1965. He is one
of a group of remarkable revolutionaries who went underground during the long
years of Suharto's repression - the years when the World Bank was tutoring its
"model pupil" - emerging at critical moments to lead spears of a
clandestine opposition movement. On several occasions, this led to his arrest
and torture. "I survived because they never knew it was me," he said.
"Once, a torturer yelled at me, 'Tell us where Daniel is!' " In 1998,
he helped bring on to the streets the students whose courageous confrontations
with troops usin British-supplied anti-riot vehicles played a critical role in
finally bringing down the dictator.
Roy
took me back to his primary school where, for him, the nightmare of Suharto's
rule began. As we sat in an empty classroom, he recalled the day in October
1965 when he watched a gang burst in, drag the headmaster into the playground,
and beat him to death. "He was a wonderful man: gentle and kind," Roy
said. "He would sing to the class, and read to me. He was the person that
I, as a boy, looked up to . . . I can hear his screams now, but for a long
time, years in fact, all I could remember was running from the classroom, and
running and running through the streets, not stopping. When they found me that
evening, I was dumbstruck. For a whole year I couldn't speak."
The
headmaster was suspected of being a communist, and his murder that day was
typical of the systematic executions of teachers, students, civil servants,
peasant farmers. "In terms of the numbers killed," reported the
Central Intelligence Agency, "the massacres rank as one of the worst mass
murders of the 20th century." The historian Gabriel Kolko wrote that
"the 'final solution' to the communist problem in Indonesia ranks as a
crime of the same type as the Nazis perpetrated". According to the Asia
specialist Peter Dale Scott, western politicians, diplomats, journalists and
scholars, some with prominent western intelligence connections, propagated the
myth that Suharto and the military had saved the nation's honour from an
attempted coup by the Indonesian communist party, the PKI. Until then, Sukarno
had relied on the communists as a counterweight to the army. When six army
generals were murdered on September 30, 1965, Suharto blamed the PKI. Since the
dictator's fall in 1998, witnesses have spoken for the first time and documents
have come to light strongly suggesting that Suharto, who had military control
of Jakarta, opportunistically exploited an internecine struggle within the army
in order to seize power.
What
is also no longer in doubt is the collaboration of western governments and the
subsequent role of western big business. Indeed, globalisation in Asia was
conceived in this bloodbath. For Britain, the goal at the time was to protect
its post-colonial interests in Malaysia, then threatened by
"confrontation" with an "unstable" Sukarno - a 1964 Foreign
Office file called for the "defence" of western interests in
Southeast Asia, "a major producer of essential commodities. The region
produces nearly 85% of the world's natural rubber, over 45% of the tin, 65% of
the copra and 23% of the chromium ore." Of Indonesia, Richard Nixon wrote,
"With its 100 million people and its 300-mile arc of islands containing
the region's richest hoard of natural resources, Indonesia is the greatest
prize in Southeast Asia."
Sukarno
was a populist as well as a nationalist, the founder of modern Indonesia and of
the nonaligned movement of developing countries, which he hoped would forge a
genuine "third way" between the spheres of the two superpowers. He
could be a democrat and a demagogue. He encouraged mass trade unions and
peasant, women's and cultural movements. Between 1959 and 1965, more than 15
million joined political parties or affiliated mass organisations that were
encouragedto challenge British and US influence in the region. With three
million members, the PKI was the largest communist party in the world outside
the Soviet Union and China. According to the Australian historian Harold
Crouch, "the PKI had won widespread support not as a revolutionary party
but as an organisation defending the interests of the poor within the existing
system". It was this popularity, rather than any armed insurgency, that
alarmed the Americans. Indonesia, like Vietnam to the north, could "go
communist".
In
1990, the American investigative journalist Kathy Kadane revealed the extent of
secret US collaboration in the massacres of 1965/66 that toppled Sukarno and
brought to power Suharto, who at the time was little known outside western
intelligence circles. In a series of interviews with former US officials, she
concluded, "They systematically compiled comprehensive lists of communist
operatives. 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."
In
1966, the US ambassador in Jakarta assured Suharto that the "US is
generally sympathetic with and admiring of what the army is doing". The
British ambassador, Sir Andrew Gilchrist, reported to the Foreign Office:
"I have never concealed from you my belief that a little shooting in
Indonesia would be an essential preliminary to effective change." Having
already armed and equipped much of the army, Washington secretly supplied
Suharto's troops with a field communications network. Flown in at night by US
Air Force planes from the Philippines, this was state-of-the-art equipment,
whose high frequencies were known to the CIA and the National Security Agency.
Not only did this technology allow Suharto's generals to coordinate the killings,
it also meant that the highest echelons of the US administration were listening
in. Suharto was able to seal off large areas of the country. Archive film of
people being herded into trucks and driven away exists but that is all. To my
knowledge, the fuzzy photograph published here is the only pictorial record of
the actual killings in this Asian holocaust.
It
ought to be salutary for journalists these days to heed the important role that
western propaganda played then, as it does now. British intelligence
manipulated the press so expertly that Norman Reddaway, head of the Foreign
Office's Information Research Department (IRD), boasted to Ambassador
Gilchrist, in a letter marked "secret and personal", that the spin he
and his colleagues had orchestrated - that Sukarno's continued rule would lead
to a communist takeover - "went all over the world and back again".
He describes an experienced Fleet Street journalist agreeing "to give your
angle on events in his article . . . ie, that this was a kid-glove coup without
butchery". Roland Challis, who was the BBC's Southeast Asia correspondent
at the time, believes that the cover-up of the massacres was a triumph for
western propaganda. "My British sources purported not to know what was
going on," he told me, "but they knew what the American plan was.
There were bodies being washed up on the lawns of the British consulate in
Surabayo, and British warships escorted a ship full of Indonesian troops down
the Malacca Straits, so that they could take part in this terrible holocaust.
It was only much later that we learned the American embassy was supplying names
and ticking them off as they were killed. There was a deal, you see. In
establishing the Suharto regime, the involvement of the IMF and the World Bank
was part of it. Sukarno had kicked them out now Suharto would bring them back.
That was the deal."
With
an ailing Sukarno powerless and Suharto about to appoint himself president, the
US press reported the Washington-backed coup not as a great human catastrophe
but in terms of the new economic advantages. The military takeover,
notwithstanding the massacres, was described by Time magazine as "The
West's Best News in Asia". A headline in US News and World Report read:
"Indonesia: Hope . . . where there was once none." The renowned New
York Times columnist James Reston celebrated "A gleam of light in
Asia" and wrote a kid-glove version he had clearly been given. The
Australian prime minister, Harold Holt, who was visiting the US, offered a
striking example of his sense of humour: "With 500,000 to a million
communist sympathisers knocked off," he said, "I think it's safe to
assume a reorientation has taken place."
Ralph
McGehee, a senior CIA operations officer at the time, whom I first interviewed
almost 20 years ago, described the ousting of Sukarno in Indonesia as a
"model operation" for the US-run coup that got rid of Salvador
Allende in Chile seven years later. "The CIA forged a document purporting
to reveal a leftist plot to murder Chilean military leaders," he wrote,
"[just like] what happened in Indonesia in 1965." He says the
Indonesian massacres were also the model for Operation Phoenix in Vietnam,
where US-directed death squads assassinated up to 50,000 people.
In
November 1967, following the capture of the "greatest prize", the
booty was handed out. The Time-Life Corporation sponsored an extraordinary
conference in Geneva which, in the course of a week, designed the corporate
takeover of Indonesia.
It
was attended by the most important businessmen in the world, the likes of David
Rockefeller, and all the giants of western capitalism were represented. They
included the major oil companies and banks, General Motors, Imperial Chemical
Industries, British Leyland, British-American Tobacco, American Express, Siemens,
Goodyear, the International Paper Corporation, US Steel.
Across
the table were Suharto's men, whom Rockefeller called "Indonesia's top
economic team". Several were economists trained at the University of
California in Berkeley. All sang for their supper, offering the principal
selling points of their country and their people: "Abundance of cheap
labour . . . a treasure house of resources . . . a captive market."
Recently, I asked one of them, Dr Emil Salim, if anyone at the conference had
even mentioned that a million people had died in bringing this new
business-friendly government to power. "No, that was not on the
agenda," he replied. "I didn't know about it till later. Remember, we
didn't have television and the telephones were not working well."
The
Indonesian economy was carved up, sector by sector, at the conference. In one
room, forests in another, minerals. The Freeport Company got a mountain of
copper in West Papua (Henry Kissinger is currently on the board). A US/European
consortium got West Papua's nickel. The giant Alcoa company got the biggest
slice of Indonesia's bauxite. A group of US, Japanese and French got
thetropical forests of Sumatra, West Papua and Kalimantan.
A
Foreign Investment Law, hurried on to the statutes by Suharto, made this
plunder tax-free for at least five years. Real, and secret, control of the
Indonesian economy passed to the IMF and the World Bank through the
Inter-Governmental Group on Indonesia (IGGI), whose principal members were the
US, Canada, Europe and Australia. Under Sukarno, Indonesia had few debts. Now
the really big loans rolled in, often straight into pockets, as the
treasurehouse of resources rolled out. Shortly before the Asian financial crash
in 1997, the IGGI godfathers congratulated their favourite mass murderer for
having "created a miracle economy.
©
copyright John Pilger.
Copyright,
The Guardian, 2001. For fair use only.
