Gareth Evans, a former attorney-general and foreign
minister in Australia, threatened me because I raised the issue of his support
for the Suharto dictatorship in Indonesia.
I have rarely ever come face to face – only inches in
fact – with such anger. Certainly not at an academic conference. And certainly
not from such a prominent figure: chancellor of Australian National University,
former attorney-general and foreign minister, former head of the International
Crisis Group, and one of the world’s most prominent global thinkers.
Yet here I was with Gareth Evans, cursing at me,
ripping my badge off, and threatening to punch me in the face.
What prompted his outburst was my raising the issue
of his support for the Suharto dictatorship in Indonesia during its savage
repression in the occupied island nation of East Timor. Since the March 17
conference at the University of Melbourne – at which I, like Evans, was a
plenary speaker – was about the first anniversary of the Arab revolts, the
organizers came to his defense by insisting that I had raised an issue that was
off-topic. In reality, it was very relevant.
Gareth Evans is perhaps best known internationally as
the world’s principal intellectual architect and proponent of the doctrine of
the “Responsibility to Protect” (R2P), which calls for Western military
intervention in crisis areas to prevent massacres of civilians. He was
particularly outspoken in his support for what he referred to as “the
overwhelming moral case” for the controversial NATO military intervention in
Libya, which went well beyond the original mandate to protect civilians to
effectively become the air force of the rebel coalition. Evans has insisted
that his advocacy for the intervention was unrelated to oil or to Gaddafi’s
traditional hostility to Western interest, but out of purely humanitarian
concern.
At the time Evans began advocating for foreign
intervention in Libya, less than 300 civilians had been killed by Gaddafi’s
forces. However, as foreign minister, Evans supported close security
cooperation with the Indonesian military during its brutal occupation of East
Timor, in which over 200,000 civilians died. Furthermore, Evans denied,
downplayed and covered up for a number of Indonesian atrocities and, during
this time in office, was the only foreign minister in the world to formally
recognize Indonesian sovereignty over that illegally occupied territory.
Evans’ blatant hypocrisy is now being used by
opponents of R2P – including apologists for Gaddafi, Assad, and other tyrants –
to back their contention that R2P is not an example of benign liberal
internationalism, but simply an excuse for imperialist intervention.
The Incident
During the opening plenary of the conference when
both Evans and I were in the audience, I thought it appropriate to ask an
Egyptian speaker – who had expressed his disappointment at continued Western
support for the military junta in Egypt – about perceptions in his country of
Western double-standards. I prefaced my question by noting how the American and
British governments were opposing the repressive regime in Syria while
supporting the repressive regime in Bahrain, how Washington had called for
greater democracy in Egypt while arming its autocratic military rulers, and how
the principal advocate for Western intervention against the Libyan regime to
stop repression under the doctrine of the “responsibility to protect” had, as
foreign minister of Australia, supported far greater repression by the
Indonesian regime against the East Timorese.
Before I could get to the actual question, Evans
shouted out, “Are you referring to me?” I answered, “Yes, actually.” “That’s
crap!” he yelled. I began to explain why I thought it was a valid statement
when the conference organizer asked me to proceed with my actual question, which
I did.
At the end of the session and as the group in the
auditorium exited for a coffee break, Evans rushed over to me and launched into
his expletive-filled tirade, demanded to know who I was, ripped off my
conference badge, threatened to punch me in the face, and insisted that he had
in fact never supported Indonesia’s repression.
In order to diffuse a situation in which I felt
physically threatened, I said, “If I misrepresented you, I apologize,” and
eventually he stormed off.
In an interview about the incident with the Sydney
Morning Herald two days later, he blamed me entirely for the incident, and
quoting Clive of India, said, “I stand astonished at my own moderation.’’
Evans’ Record
Evans claimed my assertion was “as ignorant as it was
offensive.” Similarly, he later told the Sydney Morning Herald that my
allegation was ‘‘disgustingly defamatory.”
However, the record shows otherwise.
In early 1991, despite reports by Amnesty
International and other human rights groups documenting the contrary, Evans had
stated that East Timor’s “human rights situation has, in our judgment,
conspicuously improved, particularly under the current military arrangements.”
When Indonesian forces massacred 430 civilians at a funeral in the capital of
Dili nine months later, Evans falsely described the mass killings as simply “an
aberration, not an act of state policy.” In the face of international outrage
at an Indonesian “investigation” of the tragedy which blamed the massacres on
the nonviolent protesters, Evans claimed there was “no case to be supremely
critical” of the regime. He insisted that the Indonesian dictatorship had “responded
in a reasonable and credible way” and argued that “essentially punitive
responses from the international community are not appropriate” (a very
different perspective than he would later take toward non-ally Libya).
Evans was also a strong advocate of close Australian
security cooperation with the Indonesian dictatorship despite its widespread
mass killings of civilians, even though Evans later admitted that “many of our
earlier training efforts helped only to produce more professional human rights
abusers.” During the period in which Evans was foreign minister, Australia
engaged in more military exercises with Indonesia than with any other country.
Perhaps Evans’ most notorious role as foreign
minister was in his signing of the Timor Gap Treaty with his Indonesian
counterpart in 1989, which gave Australia access to oil and gas reserves in the
territorial waters of occupied East Timor. This “historically unique”
agreement, in Evans’ words, came despite provisions in international law
forbidding the exploitation of natural resources in occupied territories which
fail to benefit the country’s inhabitants. Rutgers University professor Roger
Clark, one of the world’s foremost authorities on international law, referred
to the agreement as “the same as acquiring stuff from a thief. The fact is that
they have neither historical, nor legal, nor moral claim to East Timor and its
resources.”
In order to sign the treaty, Australia became the
only country in the world to formally recognize Indonesia’s illegal annexation
of the territory, in direct contravention of basic international legal statutes
forbidding the expansion of any country’s territory by force and the legal
principle than non-self-governing territories be granted the right of
self-determination.
Despite no less than three UN Security Council
resolutions demanding East Timor’s right to independence and an eventually
successful worldwide campaign to end the occupation, Evans insisted that the
Indonesian conquest was “irreversible” and declared “the sovereignty issue as
effectively closed.” A few years later, when his Labour Party was in
opposition, he worked hard to weaken a proposed plank in the party platform
supporting an end of the occupation and the right of the East Timorese for
self-determination. When Indonesia eventually conceded to international pressure
to live up to its international legal obligations and offer independence to
East Timor in 1999, Evans referred to it as “a fit of pique.”
Since East Timor finally became independent, much has
come to light regarding the extent of the regime’s genocidal campaign against
the people of that island nation, which lost one-third of its population in the
course of the Australian-backed occupation. Yet Evans insists to this day that “the
notion that we had anything to answer for morally or otherwise over the way we
handled the Indonesia-East Timor relationship, I absolutely reject.”
Aftermath
Rather than come to my defense following Evans’
public outburst and threats against me, the principal organizer of the
conference, Professor Shahram Akbarzadeh, faulted me for provoking Evans,
asking “what else could he do?” and prevented me from explaining to the
assembly the factual basis of my allegations. Similarly, the brief article in
the Sydney Morning Herald regarding the incident appeared to put most of the
blame on me.
Australians, then, appear to be as much in denial of
their political leaders’ complicity in war crimes as are my fellow Americans.
(Indeed, the U.S. role in supporting Indonesia’s occupation is as sordid as
that of Australia.) And they appear to be just as contemptuous of those of us
who have the temerity to expose them.
The irony is that I deeply respect much of Evans’
work, particularly those addressing peace and disarmament issues. I was so
impressed with his book on the United Nations, I assigned it as a required text
in some of my courses in the 1990s. However, his failure to come to terms with
his shameful role in East Timor will forever be an albatross around his neck.
Evans certainly is not alone regarding his moral
culpability for the horror of the Indonesian occupation. Indeed, quite a number
of other prominent Australian political leaders – as well as American political
leaders, including Henry Kissinger and Richard Holbrooke – have much to answer
for as well. However, none have won such widespread accolades, honors, awards,
and recognition as a liberal internationalist and peace advocate as Gareth
Evans. Perhaps it’s not surprising, then, he could get worked up into such a
fit at someone publicly challenging such a positive image.
In many ways, Evans’ attack on me is but an extreme
example of the contempt that Western governments and their supporters have for
scholars, human rights activists, and others who raise critical questions
regarding their support for occupying powers that engage in gross violations of
international humanitarian law, be they Indonesia, Morocco or Israel. However,
we must never succumb to such intimidation by those who seek to undermine the
post-WWII international legal order and deny or justify the slaughter of
innocents.
It was the tireless efforts of Australian human
rights activists – along with their counterparts in the United States, Great
Britain, Canada, and elsewhere – who eventually shamed their governments into
ending their support for Indonesia’s occupation and helped set East Timor free.
However, if we do not also hold our politicians accountable for their collusion
in such tragedies, there will be little to stop them from doing so again.
Stephen Zunes is a professor of politics and chair of
Middle Eastern Studies at the University of San Francisco and serves as a
senior policy analyst for Foreign Policy in Focus.
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