Jimmy Carter’s Legacy Includes Arming and Funding the Genocide in East Timor

We continue to reflect on Jimmy Carter’s foreign policy with history professor Brad Simpson. Despite presiding over an administration that stood out for its successful championing of human rights elsewhere in the world, “in Southeast Asia, Carter really continued the policies of the Nixon and Ford administration,” particularly in Indonesia, which was at the time occupying and carrying out a genocide in East Timor. Simpson founded the Indonesia/East Timor Documentation Project at the National Security Archive, which provided thousands of U.S. documents to East Timor’s Truth Commission in the aftermath of the Indonesian military’s mass killings of tens of thousands of Timorese civilians with U.S. arms under the dictatorial regime of President Suharto.

TRANSCRIPT

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AMY GOODMAN: This is Democracy Now!, democracynow.org. I’m Amy Goodman.

Today, the late President Jimmy Carter is remembered as the human rights president. But as we continue our critical look at the life and legacy of President Carter, we turn now to Southeast Asia, where his legacy is more complicated. When I spoke to President Carter at The Carter Center in 2007, he discussed his regrets over sending weapons to Indonesia during its brutal occupation of East Timor.

AMY GOODMAN:I was wondering, in your time as president, the period that Indonesia occupied Timor, if you regret the allowing of Indonesia to buy U.S. weapons at a time when it was one of the worst times for the people of Timor?

JIMMY CARTER: Well, as you may know, I had a policy when I was president of not selling weapons if it would exacerbate a potential conflict in a region of the world, and some of our allies were very irate about this policy. And I have to say that I was not, you know, as thoroughly briefed about what was going on in East Timor as I should have been. I was more concerned about other parts of the world then.

AMY GOODMAN: For more on President Carter’s legacy in Indonesia and East Timor, we’re joined by Brad Simpson, professor of history at the University of Connecticut, author of Economists with Guns: Authoritarian Development and U.S.-Indonesian Relations. He founded the Indonesia/East Timor Documentation Project at the National Security Archive, which provided thousands of U.S. documents to East Timor’s Truth Commission which were used in its final report.

Professor Simpson, thanks so much for being with us. Talk about the legacy of President Carter when it comes to Southeast Asia, and start with Indonesia’s occupation of East Timor.

BRAD SIMPSON: Thank you for having me on the show, Amy. And it’s good to be with you.

I think that we should recall that in 1975, the United States effectively pulled out of Southeast Asia just as Indonesia was invading East Timor, with U.S. support, on December 7, 1975. Shortly after President Ford and then-Secretary of State Henry Kissinger left Jakarta, Indonesia invaded East Timor. Over the course of the next year, they killed upwards of 10% of the population, an invasion that was entirely financed and armed by U.S. weapons. The CIA estimated that about 95% of the weapons used by Indonesia in its invasion were provided by the United States.

And so, when Jimmy Carter became president in January of 1977, he confronted an ongoing genocide, which many officials and journalists were already describing as the worst human rights crisis in the world at the time. And Jimmy Carter, like his top officials, Secretary of State Cyrus Vance and Zbigniew Brzeziński, were primarily concerned with reassuring right-wing allies in the region, such as Indonesian President Suharto, Philippine President Ferdinand Marcos and the South Korean government, that the United States was still committed to providing military and economic assistance. And we see this right from the start, that when Carter was evaluating his policies toward Southeast Asia, his national security adviser, Zbigniew Brzeziński, reassured his staffers that the Carter administration would not be and should not be prioritizing human rights in the wake of the U.S. withdrawal from Southeast Asia and the end of the Vietnam War.

And throughout Carter’s administration, although Carter himself may have been sympathetic to human rights in other parts of the world and actually did curtail U.S. military assistance to governments in Latin America and was very good, for example, in enforcing an arms embargo against Rhodesia, in Southeast Asia, Carter really continued the policies of the Nixon and Ford administration. Between 1977 and 1979, the Carter administration more than doubled U.S. military aid and sales to Indonesia, precisely at the moment when the atrocities that Indonesia was carrying out, which included mass murder, the forced displacement of hundreds of thousands of people, and starvation and disease that killed tens of thousands, was escalating into a genocide.

And the Carter administration’s response, at least those of his top officials, was to lie before Congress. In the spring of 1977, U.S. Assistant Secretary of State Richard Holbrooke and his deputies lied to Congress and said that Indonesia had effective control of East Timor, that the situation was calm, and that the majority of those who had died had died before Indonesia’s invasion. And they used these lies to justify continuing to expand military assistance and weapons sales at a time when congressional human rights supporters and some human rights supporters within his own administration, including the new assistant secretary of state for human rights, Patricia Derian, were calling on the Carter administration to halt weapons sales and weapons aid to Indonesia because of the ongoing humanitarian catastrophe in East Timor.

And the Carter administration’s response was pretty illuminating. The CIA, in the spring of 1977 and into 1978, told the Carter administration that Indonesia was literally running out of weapons, running out of bullets and bombs, because of the intensity of its bombardment of East Timor, and that the Suharto regime was requesting a doubling of military assistance so it could more effectively prosecute that war. And in 1978, the Carter administration actually increased military sales to Indonesia, including the provision of ground attack fighters, such as OV-10 Broncos, A-4 and F-5 ground attack fighters, which the administration knew would be used to bomb and attack the defenseless civilian population of East Timor.

AMY GOODMAN: Brad, we just have a minute to go. If you can summarize the presidency to the post-presidency, the post-President Carter, and the human rights framework he put forward, that was applied and not applied in different situations?

BRAD SIMPSON: I think we should acknowledge that President Carter was the first president to elevate human rights to an idea that should guide U.S. foreign policy, at least in theory. I think what he also showed is how difficult it is for even well-intentioned presidents to support human rights, when the vast majority of the U.S. foreign policy apparatus believes in a more hawkish foreign policy that’s designed to support military dictators around the world with U.S. military aid and sales. And the fact that Carter was not able to sort of elevate human rights as he might have wished in East Timor and Indonesia is a reminder of the challenges that activists and human rights supporters in the U.S. and around the world face in trying to get the United States to actually support human rights and do more than give lip service to the idea that human rights should be a guiding principle in U.S. foreign policy.

AMY GOODMAN: Brad Simpson, I want to thank you for being with us, professor of history at University of Connecticut, author of Economists with Guns: Authoritarian Development and U.S.-Indonesian Relations, founded the Indonesia/East Timor Documentation Project at the National Security Archive. To see our documentary, Massacre: The Story of East Timor, which I did with journalist Allan Nairn, about one of the great genocides of the late 20th century, that was Indonesia’s occupation of East Timor, killing off a third of the population, go to democracynow.org.

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