Documents prove what U.S. denied
Ford gave go-ahead to invade E. Timor
Ever since the invasion of East Timor in December 1975 by
the Indonesian military, progressive groups have charged that
the generals got the go-ahead from Washington. The U.S.
government always denied it.
Now it's official. The National Security Archive at George
Washington University on Dec. 6 published on the World Wide Web
previously secret archival documents confirming that the
Indonesian government launched its bloody invasion with the
concurrence of President Gerald Ford and Secretary of State
Henry Kissinger. The two had met with President Suharto in
Jakarta the day before the invasion. Since then, the Suharto
regime has disintegrated and East Timor has achieved
independence, but as many as 200,000 Timorese died during the
25-year occupation.
Kissinger has denied that any substantive discussion of East
Timor took place during the meeting with Suharto, but a newly
declassified State Department telegram from December 1975
confirms that such a discussion took place and that Ford and
Kissinger advised Suharto that "it is important that whatever
you do succeeds quickly."
Suharto was used by the CIA to grab power in Indonesia in a
bloody U.S.-supported coup in 1965 that led to the massacre of
nearly a million leftists and nationalists.
The new documents are available on the web at
www.nsarchive.org.
--Deirdre Griswold
Reprinted from the Dec. 20, 2001, issue of
Workers World newspaper
This article is copyright under a Creative
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