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The global economy and Indonesia
THE recent invasion in Iraq show that the most potent weapon in modern war is pseudo-information. The rest of the world may think about the subject differently, but Blair and Bush have told the world their views on it as was written in the George Orwell's great prophetic work, 1984. What however they didn't mention is that the main theme of their WMD phobia is the creation of a business world in the west.
Those views aside, on the surface it is mobile phones or holidays booked on the Internet. Beneath the gloss, it is globalisation of poverty as Arundhati Roy writes. This is a world where most human beings never make a phone call and live on less than a dollar a day, where thousands of children die everyday from diarrhea because millions of people have no access to clean water (UN Report, cited in the London Guardian, October 22, 2001).
It is no wonder that a sophisticated system of plunder is widening the existing divide between the rich and the poor as never before. Take the case of Indonesia for instance. The disgraced president General Suharto was a blue-eyed leader of the west. He basically designed a legal infrastructure for investment in Indonesia with the assistance and support of IMF, the World Bank and the many well-wishers in the west. With his master plan prepared in the mid sixties, mountains of copper and gold, nickel and bauxite were handed out to American transnational companies. Of the thirty-four oil companies operating in the late sixties in the deep sea of Indonesia under the production-sharing contract (PSC) almost eighty per
cent were American companies. A group of American, Japanese and French companies got a tropical forest of Sumatra; and so on. The plunder was unabated.
But, when asked about the authenticity regarding violent deaths of about one million people in bringing the new global economy in Indonesia, there was no answer from either IMF or Suharto. In fact, this was never allowed to be discussed. Only the world's fourth most populous
country Indonesia was shown the magical ladder of economic growth. The news on massacre was not taken into cognisance. Instead, Suharto's ascendancy as 'the west's best news' in years was focused continuously. James Reston, the then doyen of the American columnists, told readers of the New York Times that bloody events in Indonesia were a gleam of light in Asia. The Australian Prime Minister Harold Holt said, "With a million communist sympathisers knocked off, I think it's safe to assume a reorientation has taken place". But it's a surprise that Indonesian scholars in the American universities approved Suharto's big lie about a communist coup as being the cause of killings, while western corporations annotated his regime's stability.
It was only much later that the world learned that the American Embassy was supplying names and ticking them off as they were no more. In establishing the Suharto regime, the involvement of IMF and the World Bank was part of it. Sukarno, the former President of Indonesia, had kicked them of; now Suharto would bring them back. That was the deal (The New Rulers of the World, John Pilger, London, 2002). The silence continued more than a quarter of a century, until it was broken by the cries of Suharto's victims in the East Timor: a second genocide
conducted with western military backing. In 1998, General Suharto was forced to resign after about 32 years of his dictatorial regime, taking with him severance pay estimated at US $ 15 billion, the equivalent of almost 13 per cent of Indonesia's foreign debt, much of it owed to the World Bank (The World Bank reports, September 1997 and March 1998).
During his dictatorship, seldom a day would pass when General Suharto was not being congratu-
lated by western politicians and scholars for bringing stability to the nation. In Bangladesh, over the past two decades, governments fought tooth and nail to obtain certificates of good conduct from the west. When human rights violation was reported, the government's simply disagreed. Be that as it may, for Suharto, British politicians were especially appreciative, beginning with Harold Wilson's foreign secretary, Michael Stewart, who in 1966 lauded the dictator's 'sensible economic policies' and said his regime was not aggressive (Carmel Budiardjo and Liem Soei Liong, The War against East Timur, London: Zed Books, 1984, P.49). Margaret Thatcher, one time British Prime Minister (popularly known as iron lady) called Suharto "one of our very best and most valuable friends". In 1997, Robin Cook's first trip abroad as foreign secretary of UK 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 British Foreign Office's report on human rights in the world.
They all knew, of course, Amnesty International almost filled a room with evidence of Suharto's grisly record. Robin Cook as aware of an exhaustive investigation by the foreign
officers' committee of the Australian Parliament that concluded Suharto's troops had caused deaths of at least 200,000 East Timorese, a third of the population (Joint Standing Committee on Foreign Affairs, Defence and Trade, Australia's Relations with Indonesia, Canberra : Australian Government Publishing Service, 1993, P.96). Yet, Britain was the biggest weapons supplier to Indonesia, during the New Labour's first year
in office, with Blair approving eleven arms deals with Indonesia under cover of the Official Secrets Act and Cook's declaration of an ethical dimension to foreign policy (John Pilger, Flying the Flag, Arming the World; Hidden Agendas, London: Vintage, 1998).
The World Bank emphasises these days that its mission in Indonesia, as anywhere else, is 'poverty reduction and reaching out to the poor'. It was the World Bank that set up 86 million US dollar loan to build the Shangrilla Hotel (in Jakarta), which would provide the security of regular employment! Before 1997, there were more banks in downtown Jakarta, than in any city on earth; half of them went bust when the dynamic economy collapsed beneath the weight of its barely credible corruption. During Suharto's thirty-two years dictatorship, contracts of 'global' capital poured into Indonesia. The World Bank handed out more than 30 billion US dollars. In August 1997, a secret internal World Bank report disclosed the greatest scandal in the history of 'development' that at least 20 to 30 per cent of the bank's loans 'are diverted through informal payments to Government of Indonesia staff and politicians (World Bank, Confidential Assessment-Corrupted Bank Funds: Summary of RSI staff views regarding the problem of 'leakage'
from World Bank project budgets, Jakarta, August, 1997). Besides, the arms trade is one of globalisation's successes, and Indonesia has played a vital role. The Western countries helped Suharto's government to secure huge modern arms and weapons, used to terrorise the Indonesians.
Let's take a pause and recall about President Ahmed Sukarno. He was a revolutionary socialist who led his people to independence after 350 years of Dutch rule.
A mercurial leader, he was spellbinding in the affairs of state. He was aware of Washington's understandable annoyance essentially because he had taken over most of the private holdings of the Dutch and had vowed to drive them out of West Irian (New Guinea); he had requested for Russian arms; and he had brought the communists into his new coalition government. From the start of its independence in 1949 until 1957 Indonesia was a parliamentary democracy. The power of the central government was balanced and diffused by the local powers of Indonesia's six major and 3000 minor islands stretching in a 3000-mile arc from the Malayan peninsula. But in a surprise move, Sukarno declared parliamentary democracy to be a failure in Indonesia. A dissident group grew. The CIA and the State Department of the US overtly and covertly supported the dissident political group. They were planning to oust Sukarno. Even if Sukarno were not overthrown, they argued, it might be possible for Sumatra, Indonesia's big oil producer, to secede, thereby protecting private American and Dutch holdings. That was the actual intent. They were looking for an occasion. It came soon.
General Nasutin, the army chief, promptly asserted his allegiance by dishonourably discharging six high-ranking
officers who had sided with the rebels. The US government using the media threatened Indonesian government. Sukarno accused the US of direct intervention and warned Washington not to play with fire in Indonesia. Brigadier Suharto (who later became a general) was looking for an opportune moment to kill two birds with one bullet.
He took over through a bloody coup the country's administration from Sukarno, the father figure of that nation. According to a CIA memorandum, Prime Minister Harold Macmillan of UK and President John Kennedy of the United States had agreed to liquidate President Sukarno, depending on the situation and available opportunities. The CIA author added, "it is not clear to me whether murder or overthrow is intended by the word liquidate" (The Times, August 8, 1986; cited by Paul Lashmar and James Oliver in Britain's Secret Propaganda War 1948-1977, London: Sutton, 1998, P.4). Sukarno was a populist, the founder of modern Indonesia and of the non-aligned movement of developing countries, which he hoped would forge a genuine third way between the spheres of two superpowers.
In 1955, he convened the Asia-Africa Conference in the Javanese hill city of Bandung. It was the first time the leaders of the nonaligned countries, the majority of humanity, had met to forge a bond on common interests: a prospect that alarmed the western powers, especially the vision and idealism of non-alignment represented a potentially popular force that might seriously challenge neocolonialism. In 1996, as a member of a Bangladesh delegation, I had the opportunity to visit Indonesia and watch the faded tableaux and black-and-white photographs in the museum at Bandung and in the forecourt of the splendid art deco of Savoy Hotel where Bandung principles were displayed. I understand that the Indonesians have not yet removed the photograph of their father of the nation from Bandung Conference Hall.
Nuruddin Mahmud Kamal is a former government official.