SPECTATOR
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HAWK IN DOVE'S CLOTHING
At last Britain is 'acting' in East Timor. At last the humanitarian spirits of New Labour can endure the spectacle no more. It has taken weeks of violence; internation- al television screens have been filled with scenes of unimaginable brutality. Thou- sands of East Timorese have perished at the hands of Indonesian-backed militias, to add to the 250,000 of the largely Catholic population who have been killed since Indonesian forces invaded in 1975. Villages are being emptied by the day. There is talk of 'headhunters' scouring the jungle with terrible reprisals on those who have had the temerity to vote for independence. Jose Alexandre Gusmao, the East Timorese rebel leader, has begged Britain and other powers to act, predicting that 'many will die during the coming week'.
`I appeal to friendly countries to take immediate measures to help us, to save lives, to save my people,' he said on Tues- day. 'It is the only way to stop a new geno- cide.' Can Robin Cook, the man who articu- lated Labour's 'ethical foreign policy', sit on his hands? Can the victor of Kosovo allow these massacres to go unchallenged?
Mr Cook has given the orders for a full- scale mobilisation. That is, accompanied by officials, he has flown to the war zone, and there — or in New Zealand, which is at least in the right hemisphere — he has launched, well, he has launched all-out dis- cussions with other interested governments. He has expressed his 'worry' and 'deep con- cern' about the massacres. Apart from that, we may be assured that he will do nothing. He will posture; he will strike an assortment of moral attitudes; and all his studied, clipped-toned vapourings will do nothing to save a single life in Dili, or save a single vil- lage from ethnic cleansing.
If he makes one contribution to the East Timor crisis, it is this: to show that Labour's ethical foreign policy is, and has been since its conception, a sham and a figment of ado- lescent dreams. When the Serbs persecuted the Kosovo Albanians, Robin Cook and Madeleine Albright decided not just to bomb Yugoslavia but to send 40,000 West- ern troops for an indefinite occupation of Serbia's sovereign territory. And what does Mr Cook do when the machetes swing in East Timor and a slaughter far eclipsing Kosovo is exacted on another set of inno- cent civilians? You might say, reasonably, that East Timor is a very long way away; it is not inhabited by Europeans; the fate of the East Timorese does not impinge directly on our own security. But then neither, frankly, did the fate of the Kosovo Albanians.
We bombed and bullied the Serbs because, unlike Indonesia, Yugoslavia is a small and unimportant country that has the merit of being within reach of RAF Fair- ford. Serbia is a country of ten million peo- ple which, after a decade of sanctions, has no very spectacular business dealings with Britain. And those differences, more than any others, explain why the sky above Jakar- ta does not currently howl to the sonic boom of Western jets. When John Battle, Mr Cook's junior, who is visiting Indonesia, spoke against the imposition of sanctions because, he claimed, the seriousness of that country's economic situation made such sanctions unlikely to work, he spoke with the authentic voice of perfidious Albion. It wasn't the Indonesian economy that he was thinking of. It was the British arms industry, which is now in the middle of exporting even under this morally conceited Govern- ment — a total of 20 Hawk jets and 23 armoured combat vehicles to Indonesia: vehicles which, naturally, are ideal for the violent suppression of a peaceful demon- stration.
The reason Britain is not taking any action worth mentioning against the Jakarta government, apart from sending Mr Cook to chinwag in New Zealand, is not just that Indonesia is the fourth most populous coun- try on earth, and the largest Muslim country — though that is important. It is that having lost a valuable market for armaments in South America by the arrogant and inept arrest of General Pinochet, Mr Cook does not want to lose another market in South- East Asia by the precipitate condemnation of a government whose actions in Timor make General Pinochet look positively benign. The contract currently being ful- filled by British Aerospace and other com- panies is worth £100 million, and Mr Cook simply does not dare to endanger it.
Of course, it is true that if Britain now placed an arms embargo on Indonesia, other countries (mail oui) would step in. It may even be true, as Mr Battle suggests, that sanctions would make matters worse; though if one seeks a text-book case of how high-minded Western intervention immedi- ately made matters worse, one need look no further than Kosovo. None of these practi- cal objections to an embargo — if they have any force — dispels the reek of hypocrisy which now surrounds Labour's foreign poli- cy. Let us by all means encourage British industry to sell arms to foreign govern- ments. But if we are going to continue to sell arms to people who indulge in butchery, Mr Cook should stop mocking the public's intelligence, and drop his ridiculous and dis- gusting pretensions to some greater moral wisdom.
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