Jim Wolf, Washington – US President Gerald Ford and Secretary of State Henry Kissinger gave late Indonesian strongman Suharto the green light for the 1975 invasion of East Timor that left perhaps 200,000 dead, according to previously secret documents made available on Thursday.
Kissinger has maintained that he only learned of the plan at the airport as he and Ford prepared to fly home after meeting Suharto in Jakarta on the eve of the December 7 thrust into East Timor, a former Portuguese colony.
Kissinger also has argued that any US nod for the action should be seen in its Cold War context – on the heels of the communist victory in Vietnam and amid US fears that other "dominoes" might fall in Southeast Asia.
The incursion led to a bloody occupation that ended only after an international peacekeeping force took charge in 1999 and East Timor achieved independence.
At the time of the 1975 invasion, the United States supplied as much as 90 percent of Indonesia's weapons on condition that they be used only for defense and internal security.
Ford and Kissinger appear to have gone to considerable lengths to assure Suharto, a staunch anti-communist, that they would not oppose the invasion, which was designed to keep East Timor from breaking away from Indonesia.
"We want your understanding if we deem it necessary to take rapid or drastic action," Suharto told them during a stopover on their way home from meetings with Chinese leaders Mao Zedong and Deng Xiaoping in Beijing, according to a newly declassified December 6, 1975, document.
"We will understand and will not press you on the issue," Ford replied, according to the State Department record of the conversation declassified by Ford's presidential library.
Kissinger pointed out that "the use of US-made arms could create problems," but added: "It depends on how we construe it; whether it is in self-defense or is a foreign operation," according to the same document.
Manipulating public opinion
The private National Security Archive, a Washington-based research group that obtained the document under the Freedom of Information Act, said it showed that Kissinger's concern was not that US weapons would be used offensively – hence illegally – but about how he might manipulate public opinion.
"It is important that whatever you do succeeds quickly," Kissinger told Suharto, according to the document. "We would be able to influence the reaction in America if whatever happens, happens after we return."
"We understand your problem and the need to move quickly but I am only saying that it would be better if it were done after we returned" to Washington, Kissinger said, according to the document.
Ford's current chief of staff, Penny Circle, said the former president had no comment. Kissinger did not respond to requests for comment.
The National Security Archive released a package of East Timor-related documents, some of which had been made public before but had been heavily censored. They can be accessed at the National Security Archive's Web site (www.nsarchive.org).
In a March 19, 1999, interview with WNYC Radio in New York, Kissinger denied having held substantive talks with Suharto on the invasion plan, saying: "We were told at the airport as we left Jakarta that either that day or the next day they intended to take East Timor."
He added, "And it happened in a year when southeast Asia, Indochina had collapsed. So it wasn't a question of approval but of not being able to do anything about it."
The newly disclosed material could raise new questions about President George W. Bush's drive to resume sales of non-lethal weapons to Indonesia. Former President Bill Clinton cut off most military cooperation after Indonesia's armed forces and paramilitary units attacked East Timor in response to an August 30, 1999, UN-sponsored referendum in favor of independence.
"This is a critical time in relations between the West and the Muslim world, and Indonesia is the world's largest Muslim country," said Frida Berrigan of the New York-based World Policy Institute, author of an October report on US weapons sales to Indonesia.
"This new information should force the Bush administration to move cautiously in its dealings with an Indonesian government still largely dependent on the military to retain power," she said.