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Since 1980, Nairn has covered military and human rights issues from Guatemala, El Salvador, Haiti, Indonesia, East Timor, and elsewhere. His reporting on East Timor has primarily appeared in The Nation and on Pacifica Radio's Democracy Now – where he has exposed both the brutality of Indonesian military forces in East Timor and the complicity of the United States government in the occupation. Nairn survived the 1991 Santa Cruz Massacre, when more than 250 East Timorese were gunned down by M-16-toting government soldiers in Dili. Last year the Indonesian government banned him from entering the country after he reported on U.S. collusion with Indonesia's brutal military regime, but he quietly slipped back in several months ago. After the Aug. 30 referendum on independence for East Timor, Nairn documented the campaign of terror by anti-independence militias and Indonesian army troops. He was picked up by Indonesian authorities near a military checkpoint early Sept. 14 as he darted from house to abandoned house, one of the few foreigners and the only American journalist left to observe the carnage of the burning city and the implementation of a program of genocide against the East Timorese. When we reached him, he was being held for interrogation at the Korem central army command headquarters. Nairn told us over the faulty phone line that the command post was crawling with members of the same militia that had burned down Dili and was slaughtering church workers and leaders in the independence movement. (The Indonesian government has denied any connection between the militias and either the police or the military.) Nairn was threatened with prosecution and imprisonment for overstaying his visa, but he was eventually deported Sept. 19. The following interviews were conducted from custody in the days following Nairn's arrest. We spoke with him first in East Timor, then after he was transferred to Kupang in Indonesian West Timor. Sept. 13, Korem Military Base, Dili, East Timor Dennis Bernstein: How did you get there? Allan Nairn: Some soldiers picked me up and brought me here. Right now I can hear many gunshots, and on the streets on the way here I could see that there were quite a few militias that were out in force. And here on the Korem Base, you can see militias, men in militia uniform, mixing with the uniformed soldiers. At dawn this morning there were a good number of gunshots again, in Dili. I've seen many militias in red and white bandannas roaming the street, together with military vehicles. I can't tell from where I'm sitting in the military headquarters whether there have been new burnings, but yesterday I saw a whole series of burnings of public buildings in the middle of town. These included some Indonesian government offices – I hadn't seen those before. That seems to be consistent with the plan that was laid out in a memo from the office of General Feisal Tanjung. Tanjung was the Indonesian minister of politics and security. [The memo] talked about destroying all key installations and facilities as they left. That seems to be consistent with the plan to level Timor and make it unusable as the military departs. Sept. 14, Korem Military Base DB: Are you still being held in custody by the security forces? AN: Yes, I'm in the Korem Military Base. I've been here for about the past 24 hours. But I've also been shunted back and forth to the Poldri Police Headquarters. You could see that even more of Dili has been burnt. They have moved on to burning now the nonmilitary government offices – government offices having to do with agriculture development, that kind of thing. The army and the militia are burning those down. You could also see uniformed Aitarak [militia members] going in and out of the police offices, the Intel intelligence office, and so on. When they were interrogating me over at Police Intelligence, they were simultaneously outside building a bonfire where they were burning Intel files, their surveillance reports and dossiers and that kind of thing – because, as one of my interrogators put it, Timor is about to become a free country, so the police, he said, would be moving out in a week or two. DB: Have you been interrogated? AN: I have been, although from what they've told me, I'll probably get a lot more of it today. They're just trying to find out what I'm doing here and who I'm in contact with and so on. But they don't get anything of substance on that. Probably the most interesting part of the interrogation was, at one point last night they sent a man from Kopassus Group Five to ask me some questions. Kopassus are the Special Forces. They specialize in torture, disappearance. And Group Five is the most elite wing of Kopassus; they're the so-called Anti-Terrorist Group, and they have been heavily trained by U.S. military and U.S. intelligence. This particular officer spoke excellent English. He asked me some questions; then I asked him, "Well, what are you doing here? What is your job here in Timor?" He smiled and said, "I guess you could say I'm part of the Indonesian peacekeeping force for East Timor." Then he started to laugh. DB: Bishop Belo has been talking about an international war crimes tribunal, and there seems to be some growing support for that. Would that be important? And who would they need to put on trial? AN: Well, it would be very important if it could be pulled off. They would have to put on trial the generals who have commanded this operation – people like General Benny Murdani and General Dubin Kowali and more recently General Wiranto. Also General Theo Syafei, who is now the principal advisor to Megawati Sukarno. But, if they were being evenhanded about it, I think they would also have to bring in the outside accomplices, the foreign political figures who provided the go-ahead and the weapons and the training and so on. And that would implicate American presidents and secretaries of state from Ford on out. Politically, I think that is not going to happen. But it would be very helpful for us to start talking about it and letting people see that this would really be the only just and rational thing, and over time maybe we can move toward a point where American presidents and military people and policy makers don't have impunity. DB: They cleared out the United Nations, they evacuated the Australians. They took between 1,000 and 1,500 Timorese in the evacuation. Is that a bad sign for more violence to come, given that all the people are disappearing and there's fewer and fewer foreigners? AN: Well, it's good that they were able to get the refugees who were inside the compound out and get them safely to Australia. But it is bad, very bad, that the U.N. presence is now down to almost nothing. There are just a handful of U.N. people now sheltering in the old Australian consulate building, which the Australian government abandoned about a week ago. There are virtually no foreigners left in Dili, and that situation had already been created in the countryside of Timor as the U.N. pulled their staff back into the city a couple of weeks ago. I think I may have been the last foreigner left on the streets of Dili until they picked me up. Some International Red Cross people were allowed to come in yesterday, and they'll be making daily relief flights. But as far as eyes being on the street to observe and be a presence and hopefully in some way create an atmosphere that might slow down some of the atrocities, it doesn't look good. Because a lot of Dili has been depopulated anyway, and now the outsiders have been cleared out. So it's the Timorese one-on-one with the army and their militia killers. DB: It's being suggested that the relationship between the U.S. military and the Indonesian military is what allowed the Americans to intervene. What's your response to this positive spin on the relationship between the U.S. military and the Indonesian military? AN: It's inaccurate and illogical. There is indeed a very close relationship between the U.S. military and the Indonesian military. But that has not been used to stop the militia. On the contrary: as the terror has increased systematically since the early part of this year, the Pentagon has been sending messages of reassurance to General Wiranto. According to internal Pentagon cables, even when Admiral Dennis Blair, the U.S. Pacific commander, was sent in to meet General Wiranto and had the mission as the State Department understood it to tell Wiranto to shut the militias down, Blair didn't do that. Instead he offered him new military perks and new military training programs, much to Wiranto's delight. The Indonesian military, very reasonably, took that as a green light to increase the militia terror. And that's been the story all along. DB: Have they said where they are going to take you now? AN: Well, they say different things. I think they're still figuring it out. Some of the officers told me last night that a military plane would come in for me today and would fly and take me out perhaps to Kupang in Indonesian West Timor and that I would later be put out of the country. I was told later in the night by these people in the U.S., who had been talking to the embassy, who had been talking to the Indonesian military, that a military plane may come and take me all the way to Jakarta. I might be put out from there. Sept. 16, Kupang, West Timor, Indonesia DB: Where are you now? AN: I was just brought back from quarantine at immigration headquarters, I assume for further questioning. I was interrogated all day yesterday. When I was flown over here from Dili, in occupied East Timor, to West Timor, it was on a military chartered plane, and I was accompanied by several military police escorts. The interesting thing was, everybody else on the plane, maybe four, five, six dozen men, were apparently militia members. I recognized them from the streets of Dili. Some of them still had their militia black T-shirts and red and white headbands on and were carrying all sorts of long rifles and pistols and knives. My escort told me these men were police intelligence from Indonesia. It was another example of the obvious: that the militias are a tightly coordinated police and military operation in East Timor. DB: Did you recognize any? AN: Yes, several of them. Several of those I recognized on the plane were several of the scariest, most prominent, most visibly terrifying people who were roaming the streets of Dili in recent weeks. I asked one of the top officers there at Korem, "Are those Aitarak in the back?" He said, "Oh yes, those are Aitarak. This is where they are based, so we can control them." DB: What are conditions like in the refugee camp? AN: There was a problem with clean water in Kupang, and there were many problems of diarrhea and dysentery among the children as a result. Yesterday my chief interrogator here estimated that about 40,000 East Timorese had been brought here to Kupang. There are internal Indonesian documents that indicate that this first relocation of East Timorese has been part of a formal operation. According to these papers, more than 323,564 East Timorese have been relocated. That's more than 40 percent of the current population, off the top of my head. It's a huge number. DB: What has been the focus of the interrogations, and how did you respond? AN: They are asking a lot about why I came to Indonesia, why I came to Timor, exactly what I was doing, my movements. I was asked a lot about my political motives and views and about who I know in Indonesia and Timor. My response is basically in two parts. I don't tell them anything that is useful about my movements or if I know anyone in Indonesia or Timor, but on the political questions I give straightforward answers. I answer as completely as I can, and I tell them what I really think and what I know about the crimes the army is committing. DB: What are they going to do with you now? AN: I could be tried and jailed for ten years. The person doing the questioning said that various officials want to do that. The other option is to just throw me out of Indonesia. That is certainly the most likely. I don't think they are going to put me in jail – it probably wouldn't serve their purpose. The problem is, I'm here and not in East Timor on the final days of the occupation, when the danger and the terror on the streets of East Timor is the worst. DB: Would they let you go back and do your job as a journalist? AN: They've got me for the moment, and I don't have any choice in that. But if East Timor becomes free very quickly, if they do deport me, I can ask to be deported to free East Timor. DB: Which U.S. officials need to be investigated for their participation in helping the Indonesian military? AN: All the top U.S. executive branch officials who made the decisions to send the weapons and give training to the Indonesian military. That would include people like President Ford and Henry Kissinger, who gave the green light from the early days of the invasion. Richard Holbrooke, who in the Carter administration was in charge of U.S. policy on Timor and Indonesia, and who, together with President Carter, sent in the planes and helicopters the Indonesian military used to flush the Timorese out of the hills and put them in prison camps. One person that I think would be very important to question in a judicial setting would be Admiral Dennis Blair, the current commander-in-chief [of U.S. military forces in the Pacific region], on questions raised by my piece in the Nation, which quotes an internal cable describing a meeting that Blair had with General Wiranto. Blair was sent in with a mission from the State Department to tell Wiranto to shut the militias down. But he did the opposite. He embraced Wiranto, politically offered him all sorts of rewards, assured him the Pentagon would lobby on his side – against prevailing U.S. policy in Congress – to get new military training for Indonesia. This meeting was two days after the unbelievable massacre in which militiamen and riot police murdered dozens of Timorese refugees. To contact the East Timor Action Network, call (415) 626-3723. Dennis Bernstein is host and producer of KPFA-FM's Flashpoints, where these interviews were first aired.
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ALLAN
NAIRN'S VOICE distorted and faded in and out during our Sept. 13 interview
with him from Dili, East Timor. We reached the journalist on his cell phone
minutes after he was taken into custody by Indonesian intelligence agents.