Friday 3rd of May 2024
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once & always a bully boy .....

pnce & always a bully boy .....

Milan Kundera's truism, "the struggle of people against power is the struggle of memory against forgetting", described East Timor. The day before I set out to film clandestinely there in 1993, I went to Stanfords map shop in London's Covent Garden. "Timor?" said a hesitant sales assistant. We stood staring at shelves marked South East Asia. "Forgive me, where exactly is it?" 

After a search he came up with an old aeronautical map with blank areas stamped, "Relief Data Incomplete."  He had never been asked for East Timor, which is just north of Australia. Such was the silence that enveloped the Portuguese colony following its invasion and occupation by Indonesia in 1975. Yet, not even Pol Pot succeeded in killing, proportionally, as many Cambodians as the Indonesian dictator Suharto killed or starved in East Timor. 

In my film, Death of a Nation, there is a sequence shot on board an Australian aircraft flying over the island of Timor. A party is in progress, and two men in suits are toasting each other in champagne. "This is an historically unique moment," babbles one of them, "that is truly uniquely historical." This is Gareth Evans, Australia's foreign minister. The other man is Ali Alatas, the principal mouthpiece of Suharto. It is 1989 and they are making a symbolic flight to celebrate the signing of a piratical treaty that allowed Australia and the international oil and gas companies to exploit the seabed off East Timor. Beneath them are valleys etched with black crosses where British and American-supplied fighter aircraft have blown people to bits. In 1993, the Foreign Affairs Committee of the Australian Parliament reported that "at least 200,000", a third of the population, had perished under Suharto. Thanks largely to Evans, Australia was the only western country formally to recognise Suharto's genocidal conquest. The murderous Indonesian special forces known as Kopassus were trained in Australia. The prize, said Evans, was "zillions" of dollars.

Unlike Muammar al-Gaddafi and Saddam Hussein, Suharto died peacefully in 2008 surrounded by the best medical help his billions could buy. He was never at risk of prosecution by the "international community". Margaret Thatcher told him, "You are one of our very best and most valuable friends." The Australian Prime Minister Paul Keating regarded him as a father figure. A group of Australian newspaper editors, led by Rupert Murdoch's veteran retainer, Paul Kelly, flew to Jakarta to pay their tribute to the dictator; there is a picture of one of them bowing. 

In 1991, Evans described the massacre of more than 200 people by Indonesian troops in the Santa Cruz cemetery in Dili, East Timor's capital, as an "aberration". When protesters planted crosses outside the Indonesian embassy in Canberra, Evans ordered them torn up. 

On 17 March, Evans was in Melbourne to address a seminar on the Middle East and the Arab Spring. Now immersed in the busy world of "think tanks", he expounds on great power strategies, notably the fashionable "Responsibility to Protect", which Nato uses to attack or threaten uppity or out-of-favour dictators on the false pretext of liberating their people. Libya is a recent example. Also attending the seminar was Stephen Zunes, a professor of politics at San Francisco University, who reminded the audience of Evans's long and critical support for Suharto.

As the session ended, Evans, a man of limited fuse, stormed over to Zumes and yelled, "Who the fuck are you? Where the fuck are you from?" Zumes was told, Evans later confirmed, that such critical remarks deserved "a smack on the nose". The episode was timely (see Zumes’ own account of his encounter with Evans). Celebrating the tenth anniversary of an independence Evans once denied, East Timor is in the throes of electing a new president; the second round of voting is on 21 April, followed by parliamentary elections. 

For many Timorese, their children malnourished and stunted, the democracy is notional. Years of bloody occupation, backed by Australia, Britain and the US, were followed by a relentless campaign of bullying by the Australian government to manoeuvre the tiny new nation out of its proper share of the seabed's oil and gas revenue. Having refused to recognise the jurisdiction of the International Court of Justice and the Law of the Sea, Australia unilaterally changed the maritime boundary. 

In 2006, a deal was finally signed, largely on Australia's terms. Soon afterwards, Prime Minister Mari Alkitiri, a nationalist who had stood up to Canberra and opposed foreign interference and indebtedness to the World Bank, was effectively deposed in what he called an "attempted coup" by "outsiders". Australia has "peace-keeping" troops based in East Timor and had trained his opponents. According to a leaked Australian Defence Department document, Australia's "first objective" in East Timor is for its military to "seek access" so that it can exercise "influence over East Timor's decision-making". Of the two current presidential candidates is Taur Matan Rauk, a general and Canberra's man who helped see off the troublesome Alkitiri. 

One independent little country astride lucrative natural resources and strategic sea lanes is of serious concern to the United States and its  "deputy sheriff" in Canberra. (President George W. Bush actually promoted Australia to full sheriff). That largely explains why the Suharto regime required such devotion from its western sponsors. Washington's enduring obsession in Asia is China, which today offers developing countries investment, skills and infrastructure in return for resources.

Visiting Australia last November, President Barack Obama issued another of his veiled threats to China and announced the establishment of a US Marines' base in Darwin, just across the water from East Timor. He understands that small, impoverished countries can often present the greatest threat to predatory power, because if they cannot be intimidated and controlled, who can?

John Pilger

 

vukture capitalists .....

Australia sharing disaster capitalism with Afghanistan.

Dispiriting news. Australia, apparently so proud of exploiting resources, now wants to share this knowledge with a poor nation such as Afghanistan that is open to vulture capitalists. The Australian reports:

Afghanistan is looking to the Australian mining industry for instruction and investment as the war-torn nation stakes its stability and economic future on the success of its nascent natural resources sector.

An Afghan Ministry of Mines delegation will tour Australia in coming weeks on an industry roadshow to convince Australian mining companies that the opportunities for mineral exploitation outweigh the security risks.

The government is also seeking Australian expertise in the creation of an Afghan school of mines. Mines Minister Wahidullah Shahrani said, “Australia is a model for us”.

“The government of Australia has been very generous to help us with our technical capacity, give us scholarships for postgraduate programs in the mining area and we’ve also been sending some people to the Australian department of mines and petroleum,” he told The Australian.

Afghanistan is sitting on enormous mineral wealth.

A review of Soviet-era survey data by the US Geological Survey estimates oil reserves of three billion barrels, 15 trillion cubic feet of natural gas, and significant copper, gold, iron ore, gemstone and lithium deposits.

The survey valued the country’s known natural resources at about $US1 trillion ($970bn), although Mr Shahrani says it could be three times that amount given only 30 per cent of Afghan territory has been surveyed.

Three decades of war and insecurity, coupled with widespread illiteracy, have in the past prevented the successful exploitation of Afghanistan’s minerals wealth.

But with most coalition forces pulling out in December 2014, and international aid to decline after that date, Afghanistan’s future depends heavily on the successful exploitation of its minerals.

“By 2016 we expect revenues to government from mines will be at least $1.5 billion,” Mr Shahrani said.

…

et security – as ever – remains Afghanistan’s biggest problem.

Major Western mining companies such as Rio Tinto are understood to view Afghanistan, even under NATO forces, as too dangerous and everyone is jittery about the post-2014 landscape when security fully transfers into Afghan hands.

The government has tried to allay those fears by creating a Mines Protection Unit that will secure all projects at the state’s expense.

But it must also convince its own population – weary of occupation and wary of strangers – that foreign exploitation of its mineral resources is the key to its future.

Mr Shahrani says involving local communities in mining projects, through local jobs and community spin-offs, is the best way to reduce risk.

In coming months Kabul will begin a public awareness campaign, sending groups of MPs, officials and journalists to Australia to see the economic benefits mining can deliver.

Mr Shahrani said: “Afghanistan has never been a major mining country, unlike South Africa, Kazakhstan or Australia, so people need to be able to understand its potential.”

Antony Loewenstein

Gareth would be so proud!!!

the ethics of intervention .....

When should the international community intervene in civil conflict? What made last year's Libyan conflict suitable for intervention, while Syrians continued to struggle against despotism alone?

In this Wheeler Centre event, David Rieff, a widely published intellectual (and the son of Susan Sontag), speaks with former Australian foreign minister Gareth Evans (author of Responsibility to Protect) on the ethics of intervention.

David Rieff: The Ethics of Intervention

The ‘responsibility to protect’?

Notwithstanding his recent public calls for the recognition of Palestine, or his criticism of successive awstraylen governments on foreign policy, I can’t believe that anyone could take the former Foreign Minister seriously on questions of human rights, given his form in dealing with East Timor.

This is the bloke who, as Foreign Minister, was instrumental in bringing about Australia’s de jure recognition of Indonesia’s 1975 invasion & annexation of East Timor, by signing the Timor Gap Treaty (http://www.austlii.edu.au/au/other/dfat/treaties/1991/9.html), which also formalised arrangements for Australia & Indonesia to exploit East Timor’s oil & Gas resources.

In a report on the University of NSW website – ‘Gareth Evans and the Responsibility to Protect East Timor’ (http://hass.unsw.adfa.edu.au/timor_companion/fracturing_the_bipartisan_consensus/evans.php), the former Foreign Minister is reported to have responded to the massacre of more than 200 people by Indonesian troops in the Santa Cruz cemetery in Dili, East Timor’s capital, by describing it as ‘aberrant behaviour’.  

Notwithstanding Evans’ assertions about the ‘aberrant behaviour’ of the Indonesian military in a massacre of innocent civilians, the United Nations thought strongly enough about the behaviour of the Suharto regime that, in February, 2002, it set-up The Commission for Reception, Truth, and Reconciliation, to investigate human rights violations committed there between April 1974 and October 1999, which resulted in the death of an estimated 200,000 East Timorese (http://www.usip.org/publications/truth-commission-timor-leste-east-timor).

But let’s not get caught-up over numbers.

In my opinion, providing the seriously self-important Gareth Evans with a platform from which he is able to hold forth on the subject of human rights is simply hypocritical & under the circumstances, also quite offensive.

I’m disgusted.

gareth evans – always the hypocritical shill ….

from my friend Dr Vacy Vlazna ….

peddling a zionist ticket to nowhere

Daily, the gorgeous and saintly Tony Blair looks fondly into his mirror and asks (a rhetorical question), “Magic mirror on the wall who is the fairest and greatest and goodest of them all?”

Automatically, it replies, “You, my Tony, are the most moral leadership exemplar of all.”

But, on 1 November the mirror replied, “Tony, you are full fair blah blah, it is true, but the The Grand Lord Gareth is more erudite, more arrogant, and a more moral peacemaker than you”

After reading Gareth Evan's speech, ‘Buying a Ticket for Peace' (ie buying tickets on himself) one could be forgiven for thinking the priggish Evans was primping himself (note the name dropping - Yitzhak Rabin, Kofi Annan, Vaclav Havel, Bob Hawke, Kofi Annan and Kofi Annan) for the position of Special Envoy of the Middle East Quartet, given, as he states that Blair's contributions “ can reasonably be described as having been about as useful as an ashtray on a motorbike.” (Evans link below)

While true, Evans' speech is flawless hasbara and a preening pontification on his qualifications for the job: the sine qua non loyalties to the Zionist status quo; urging Israel's right to exist and defend itself, sympathising with Israel the holocaust victim, promoting the fictional 2 state solution and future Israeli annexation of the illegal settlements, opposing the Palestinian right of return, denouncing accusations of Israeli apartheid, advocating the evils of BDS and Iran.

Addressing mesmerised fans from Australian Palestine solidarity in Adelaide, Evans, former Attorney-General and Foreign Minister of Australia, former Head of the International Crisis Group (ICG) and Chancellor of the Australian University, offered a grandiose crumb of righteous insistence that Australia should be on the right side of history by supporting Palestine's bid for statehood recognition in the UN General Assembly.

However, from this point the reasonableness of the speech deteriorated into exquisite Israeli normalisation and misinformation as in this sanitised and censored version of Palestinian history;

“THE INTENTION OF THE UN IN 1947, which was defensible in the circumstances of the time but never likely to win easy Arab support, was to accommodate both Jewish and Palestinian nationalist aspirations by creating Jewish and Arab states side by side, with new sovereign boundaries but no one physically dispossessed and full citizenship rights for the minorities that would be left in each new state. That fell apart with the terrible war of 1948 and the conflict which continued through the intervening years to erupt again in 1967.”

As a self-proclaimed expert on international law, Evans knows that the UN had and has no legal mandate to partition any foreign lands. Hence Arab opposition.

Furthermore, it had a responsibility to fulfil its obligations to grant Palestine full independence under the still binding Article 22 of the Covenant of the League of Nations. Evans made no mention of the Palestinian Nakba during the ‘terrible war of 1948'  wherein 700,000 Palestinians were systematically ethnically cleansed by Jewish militia nor  mentions the war crimes and crimes against humanity perpetrated by Israel in the intervening years that overflow to this very day.

As for the illegal occupation and Israel's flaunting of UN resolutions since the 1967 war pre-empted by Israel, Evans didn't hold Israel accountable. According to him, it was the blanketing vagueness of the ‘tragedy of all the years since 1967 is that it has proved simply impossible to deliver on that [land for peace] deal.' 

To counter the peace process impasse, Our Action Man energetically shook the mothballs from the 2003 Geneva Accords, a rehash of previous unsatisfactory negotiations, partly crafted by the government and corporate funded ICG which he headed. He would have been wiser to distance himself from it as 10 days after the signing, “ More than 500 academics, civil society activists, writers, and journalists signed up to a public statement “The Reality of the ‘Geneva Accord'?” expressing their opposition to the document that was recently signed by Israeli and Palestinian figures. The undersigned, consider this initiative as “inconsistent with the prerequisites of a just and durable peace”. (EI link below)

Evans is aware that the never-ending proliferation of Israeli colonial settlements on stolen Palestinian land breaches ‘not only of international law but of multiple agreements or agreed strategies', so he offered a generous accommodating solution - for Israel -via the Geneva Accords:

“It is entirely possible to draw a border that allows most of the Israeli settlers to stay and gives the Palestinians a contiguous and viable state that has the same territory as that occupied in 1967.” 

Ever dogged, in line with Israel and its PA lackey, the speech energetically promoted the two state solution which sustains the defunct peace process which in turn fuels illegal settlement expansion on Palestinian land. He argued this solution has Palestinian  backing by pointing to his mate, Annan who ‘says of Yasser Arafat: “he was the leader who had brought his people to accept the idea of a two-state solution, relinquishing their claim to 78 per cent of mandate Palestine, and had signed the Oslo Accords, which recognised Israel” plus mentioning polls that show  ‘half and two thirds' support overlooking polls like Palestine Center for Public Opinion, poll number 169, published February 1st, 2010 that showed 62% favoured a one state solution based on equality for all. 

Evans, the Man with All the Answers, set out reasons for the failure to date of the  peace process including  “ the failure to support Abu Mazen (Mahmoud Abbas) in 2005, after he had won in a landslide, was the uncontested leader of all Palestinians, and in a position to sell difficult compromises;”

This is pure hasbara. Since 2006, the unelected Abbas suffered no failure of support propped up, as he is, by US and EU aid, and his security forces that arrest, imprison and torture fellow Palestinians not of Fatah ilk are armed and trained by American military experts in Jordan. Evans, of course, would bless Abbas' ‘difficult compromises', which in real terms are the attempted ‘back door deals with Israel' exposed in the Palestine Papers; to concede all Israeli settlements in and around East Jerusalem except Bar Homa, giving up Sheik Jarrah, a mere 5-10,000 refugees picked by Israel out of 5 million given the right of return, a joint committee to take over the Haram al-Sharif/Temple Mount holy sites in Jerusalem's Old City.

Another failure was the West's refusal to engage with Hamas after it won free and fair elections in 2006. Evans implied that Hamas gave the West no choice to do other wise because “we [ICG] summarised the Hamas response, as we found it, to be ‘let us govern or watch us fight'. This is followed by pure Evans hasbara, “Events since then have done nothing but reinforce the accuracy of that assessment” that deftly ignored the fact that the ceasefires were broken by Israel especially the one that led to Israel's apocalyptic assault on defenceless Gazan families in 2008/9. 

In the speech you cannot find one instance of true human compassion for the 64 years of suffering of the Palestinian people, yet Evans, friend of Israel, loudly beat the drum of Israeli victimhood:

If friends of Palestine really want to be helpful in finally realising the dream of a genuinely independent and viable Palestinian state, I think it is very important to cast the arguments in a way which recognises and accepts that Israel, for all the unacceptability of so much of its behaviour [what a glorious understatement!] , does have legitimate interests which it is entitled to defend [oy vey poor Israel] that it does also have psychological needs, [oy vey poor Israel] born of the terrible history of the Jewish people, [oy vey poor Israel] which must be understood and somehow recognised if progress is to be made; and also that Israelis are presently feeling a little more insecure [oy vey poor Israel] now than they have for a long time in the context of the Arab Spring, with Islamists of one kind or another having a bigger role in government in a number of key regional countries [oy vey poor Israel] , and the steady progress of Iran toward nuclear weapons capability (if not necessarily actual weapon manufacture). [oy vey poor Israel that hasn't signed the Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty]

It's hard to figure out what helpful strategies  Evans offered the Australian Friends of  Palestine (AFOPA) apart from shutting up about Israeli Apartheid and terminating its BDS actions:

For all the frustration generated by inaction for so long, and for all that some friends of Palestine will find this unpalatable, I strongly believe and urge you to accept that just as physical violence has proved both totally unproductive, and indeed counterproductive, so too is head on political assault of the kind involved in the Zionism as Racism resolution in the UN, and the current sporadic campaign to boycott Israeli-connected businesses. [oy vey poor Israel]

AFOPA has, for more than two years, faithfully maintained a weekly boycott campaign and protest against  the Israeli Seacret cosmetics manufactured illegally by L'Oreal' from stolen Palestinian mineral resources in the Dead Sea.

Just as Blair will never shake off the IRAQ gorilla clinging to his back, Evans will always be the Indonesian Apologist who helped steal East Timor's oil resources. On 11 December 1989, in a plane above suffering Timor, the Australian and Indonesian foreign ministers, Gareth Evans and Ali Alitas swilled champagne to celebrate the signing of the obscene Timor Gap Treaty dividing the stolen Timor gas and oil between their shameless nations. 

Far below, in a death net of Indonesian military camps, outposts and checkpoints and closed to the outside world, lay what John Pilger aptly called  ‘A Land of Crosses‘  because Timor's cemeteries  were burdened with bodies of one third of its population. The Timorese, the most impoverished people in Asia, struggled to survive physically as well as barely surviving the daily brutalities of the genocidal occupation with its systematic intimidation, killings, and terror. 

11 months after the signing of the treaty, over 400 young students from high school and university were brutally massacred in Dili simply for attending the funeral procession of a murdered fellow student. Evans, ever the Indonesian apologist, announced publicly the Santa Cruz Massacre was not state policy but an ‘aberration' (like calling the Deir Yassin massacre an Israeli aberration).

The aspiring peacemaker, in March 2012, at an academic conference  at the University of Melbourne, ripped the badge off a fellow  plenary speaker, Professor Stephen Zunes, cursed and threatened to punch him in the face for ‘raising the issue of his support for the Suharto dictatorship in Indonesia during its savage repression in the occupied island nation of East Timor'. (See Zunes below)

All in all, Evans' speech is a poisoned apple offered to the Palestinians and their supporters; seemingly rosy but laced bitter taste of Zionism. 

Peddling A Zionist Ticket To Nowhere

 

Gareth Evans, Buying A Ticket For Peace http://www.theglobalmail.org/feature/buying-a-ticket-for-peace/456/ Academics, activists and writers oppose "Geneva Accord" http://electronicintifada.net/content/academics-activists-and-writers-oppose-geneva-accord/325 Zunes , Why One of the World's Leading Peace Advocates Threatened to Punch Me in the Face : http://www.alternet.org/story/154807/why_one_of_the_world's_
leading_peace_advocates_threatened_to_punch_me_in_the_face/?page=1

 

Dr. Vacy Vlazna is Coordinator of Justice for Palestine Matters. She was Human Rights Advisor to the GAM team in the second round of the Acheh peace talks, Helsinki, February 2005 then withdrew on principle. Vacy was coordinator of the East Timor Justice Lobby as well as serving in East Timor with UNAMET and UNTAET from 1999-2001.