Hasn’t Lord Snooty done Britain proud during his Asia jaunt?
Accompanied by an entourage of 35+businessmen, with the usual cohort of
reps from British arms manufacturers, he has been looking for trade and
investment opportunities and selling weaponry wherever he can.
Cameron has been particularly keen to flog weapons to the Indonesian
military, which is looking to replenish its outmoded arsenal. But
don’t assume that our leader is motivated by crass commercialism.
During his visit to Indonesia, Cameron took time out to lecture students at Al-Azhar university in Jakarta
on democracy, the Arab Spring, Islam and Islamic extremism, drawing
appropriate lessons from Indonesian and world history and applying them
to the crises of the present.
This close attention to the past was evident in his opening observation that
Indonesia, your country, is embarked on an extraordinary journey. In just over a decade you have begun a transformation that has taken my country and many others several centuries. You are forging an inspirational path from dictatorship to democracy…Where once the government denied human rights to its people, today it promotes them, not just here, but right around your region.
Nowhere in his paean to Indonesia’s democratic transformation does
Cameron mention the fact that the Suharto dictatorship came to power
through the mass killings of more than a million members of the Indonesian Communist Party (PKK) in 1965 – in what a 1968 CIA report described as ‘one of the worst episodes of mass murder of the 20th century’.
The generals’ coup was aided and abetted by the British, American and
Australian governments, who encouraged Suharto and his co-conspirators
to overthrow the Sukarno government as a precursor to the purge of the
PKI. The prevailing attitude of the British government to the
massacres that followed was summed by the British ambassador Andrew
Gilchrist, who wrote to the Foreign Office at the time
‘I have never concealed from you my belief that a little shooting in
Indonesia would be an essential preliminary to effective change.’
Britain continued to do business with the Suharto ‘New Order’ right
up until the dictator’s death in 1998. Throughout that period the
Indonesian Armed Forces continued to carry out atrocities and human
rights abuses on a massive scale in the internal repression of
separatist insurgencies in Aceh province and West Papua, or its
murderous war in East Timor that killed some 230,00 people.
In his Jakarta speech, Cameron skipped lightly across these events,
noting only that the ‘troubles in East Timor are over and the military
is now playing its proper role: defending the country from external
attack.’
Well not quite, according to Amnesty’s 2011 country report on Indonesia, which found that:
The security forces tortured
and otherwise ill-treated detainees, and used excessive force against
protesters, sometimes leading to death. No adequate accountability
mechanisms were in place to ensure justice or act as an effective
deterrent against police abuses. The criminal justice system remained
unable to address ongoing impunity for current and past human rights
violations. Restrictions on freedom of expression were severe in areas
such as Papua and Maluku.
In 2010 Human Rights Watch criticized the Obama administration’s new military assistance to the Indonesian army’s brutal special forces unit Kopassus, arguing that
This is not the right way
to encourage reform of a military that has yet to demonstrate a genuine
commitment to accountability for serious human rights abuses. This
decision rewards Kopassus for its intransigence over abuses and
effectively betrays those in Indonesia who have fought for decades for
accountability and justice.
Cameron’s suggestion that the Indonesian armed forces are now
concerned only with ‘defending the country against external attack’ also
ignores the brutal military occupation of West Papua, where as many as
100,000 people have died since the 1962 Indonesian invasion.
In 2010, a video showing Indonesian soldiers torturing Papuan villagers provided
graphic evidence that democratic values have yet to permeate the
Indonesia military. That same year 50 members of the US Congress wrote to Obama to protest the ‘slow-motion genocide’ that was taking place in West Papua.
Given these events, it isn’t surprising that Kaye Stearman, spokesperson for Campaign Against Arms Trade (CAAT) has described Cameron’s weapons sales to Indonesia as a ‘sick joke.’
But nor is it surprising that Cameron chose to ignore them. This
reluctance to delve too deeply into the past – or the present – cannot
be attributed merely to a diplomatic reluctance to offend his hosts, or
do anything that might jeopardize the new commercial relationships with
the military.
For Cameron’s praise for Indonesian democracy and its armed forces
stems from a selective and shallow analysis of the past and present,
which also underpins his grand narrative of world affairs as a perpetual
struggle between democracy and its ‘dangerous foes’, that extends
‘ from slavery in America to the civil-rights movement a century later,
from apartheid in South Africa to the situation in Syria today.’
These ‘foes’, according to Cameron, include ‘ a rise of extremist
political Islamism that takes a warped view of this religion, and tries
to turn people against each other’ and also ‘authoritarians’, such
as Gaddafi, Mubarak, Ben Ali, and Assad, all of whom are cited by
Cameron as examples to the instability that can ensue ‘where cries for
reform are being resisted and where people are being repressed.’
Noble sentiments no doubt. Western support for Suharto was motivated
by a similar desire for ‘stability’, and as in the case of Indonesia,
Cameron’s praise for the Arab Spring ignores the fact that most of the
‘authoritarians’ he condemns all received support from democratic
governments.
Had it not been for the totally unexpected events of the Arab Spring,
these same governments would still be supporting Gaddafi, Mubarak and
all the others, just as they continue to ally themselves with the
‘authoritarians’ in the Gulf who are currently promoting democracy in
Syria.
Cameron’s speech is littered with similar omissions, evasions, and
specious observations. On the one hand, this was a very shallow speech
from a very shallow politician, who is beginning to make Blair seem like
a great intellectual by comparison.
But like his predecessor, his selective interpretation of the past
and his shunting together of reference points and historical events is
intended to bolster support for wars, regime change and interventions
in the present, whether in Syria, Afghanistan or ‘the threat of a
nuclear-armed Iran.’
In the question-and-answer session that followed the speech, Cameron
even hinted that there might be a peacekeeping role in Afghanistan ‘ for
countries like Indonesia that have a majority Muslim population’,
following the NATO withdrawal in 2014.
The idea that the Indonesian military, freshly-equipped with British
weaponry, might one day be deployed in Helmand province, does not bode
well for the future of Afghanistan. But such a possibility is a natural
consequence of Lord Snooty’s grand historical narrative, which manages
to place one of the most brutal armies in the world within a common
tradition that includes Abraham Lincoln, Nelson Mandela and the Arab
Spring.
It may be bad history, but it does make good propaganda, and that, in the end, is the point of the exercise.
http://www.infernalmachine.co.uk/?p=1612
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