We’re continuing to explore the world tour of Kissinger as he visits his “political expertise and counsel” from nation to nation. He couldn’t do all this alone of course.
A good liar must have a good memory: Kissinger is a stupendous liar with a remarkable memory. So perhaps some of this hysterical lying is explained by its context - by the need to enlist China's anti-Soviet instincts. But the total of falsity is so impressive that it suggests something additional, something more like denial or delusion, or even a confession by other means.
8
East Timor
Another small but significant territory has the distinction of being omitted-entirely omitted-from Henry Kissinger's memoirs. And since East Timor is left out of the third and final volume (Years of Renewal) it cannot hope, like Cyprus, for a hasty later emendation.
It has, in short, been airbrushed. And it is reasonably easy to see why Kissinger hopes to avoid discussion of a country whose destiny he so much affected.
Let me state matters briefly. After the collapse of the Portuguese fascist regime in Lisbon in April 1974, that country's colonial empire deliquesced with extraordinary speed.
My family escaped the regime of Antonio Salazar (above) with the help of my great uncle Virgilio de Simões who had been Chief of Police of Coimbra, Portugal. I wrote a “fact-ion” book about my interesting great uncle and it’s available for free here.
The metropolitan power retained control only in the enclave of Macau, on the coast of China, and later remitted this territory to Beijing under treaty in 2000. In Africa, after many vicissitudes, power was inherited by the socialist-leaning liberation movements which had, by their tactic of guerrilla warfare, brought about the Portuguese revolution in the first place and established warm relations with its first generation of activists.
In East Timor, situated in the Indonesian archipelago, the postcolonial vacuum was at first also filled by a leftist movement, known as FRETILIN or the Front for the Liberation of East Timor. The popular base of this movement extended from the Catholic Church to the Westernized and sometimes Leninized students who had brought back revolutionary opinions from the "motherland."
FRETILIN and its allies were able to form a government but were at once subjected to exorbitant pressure from their gigantic Indonesian neighbor, then led by the dictator (since deposed and disgraced by his own people) General Suharto.
General Suharto
Portugal, which had and which retains legal responsibility, was too unstable and too distant to prevent the infiltration of Indonesian regular units into East Timor and the beginning of an obviously expansionist policy of attrition and subversion.
This tactic was pursued by the generals in Jakarta for a few months, under the transparent pretext of "aiding" anti-FRETILIN forces which were, in point of fact, deliberately inserted Indonesian ones.
Can you perceive the same exact tactics being deployed against the entirety of humanity right now?
All pretense of this sort was abandoned on 7 December 1975, when the armed forces of Indonesia crossed the border of East Timor in strength, eventually proclaiming it (in an act no less lawless than Iraq's proclamation of Kuwait as "our nineteenth province") a full part of Indonesia proper.
Timorese resistance to this claim was so widespread, and the violence required to impose it was so ruthless and generalized, that the figure of 100,000 deaths in the first wave - perhaps one-sixth of the entire population - is reckoned an understatement.
The date of the Indonesian invasion- 7 December 1975 – is of importance and also of significance. On that date, President Gerald Ford and his secretary of state, Henry Kissinger, concluded an official visit to Jakarta and flew to Hawaii. Since they had come fresh from a meeting with Indonesia's military junta, and since the United States was Indonesia's principal supplier of military hardware (and since Portugal, a NATO ally, broke diplomatic relations with Indonesia on the point), it seemed reasonable to inquire whether the two leaders had given the invaders any impression amounting to a "green light."
Thus when Ford and Kissinger landed at Hawaii, reporters asked Mr. Ford for comment on the invasion of Timor. The President was evasive.
“Above the law” war criminals only stop if they are stopped.