A sharp intake of breath comes when those bespectacled Prussian eyes gaze at me from the bookshelf. Whatever aphrodisiacal effect the former US Secretary of State reportedly induces in women, his still-intact aura of absolute power gives him a dispassionate bearing. I cannot really imagine him sinking to his knees, within the dark recesses of the White House, to join a Gentile incumbent (and a pretty anti-Semtic one too) in prayer. I shall take Bob Woodward's word for it.
But for all Dr Henry Kissinger's cold gravitas, I breathed him a silent prayer of thanks recently. Flipping open a copy of his recently published memoirs, Years of Renewal, I scanned the index.
Down through the "Ts": Le Duc Tho, Time. . .nope. There is nothing. Zero. Zilch. Mercifully, the reader is spared any reminiscence whatsoever about "Timor". It is probably for the best that he considers the former Portuguese colony, whose calamitous anschluss with the Suharto's Indonesia he encouraged, then aided, as unworthy of even five taps on his keyboard.
Evasions
With regard to the old Indo-China, destroyed forever by B52 bombers, there is the expected litany of evasions, buck-passing and distortion. But Dr Kissinger's vengeful revisionism inspires a chill, unlike that of Richard Milhous Nixon, which inspires loathing.
During a period I spent some months back in Dili, East Timor, I would often stroll down to the waterfront. The rusting hulks of old Indonesian landing craft still dot the beaches, as if to remind any recalcitrant locals who the masters are.
Plenty of locals, recalcitrant or not, remember December 7th, 1975. They told me how the ships bombarded "Fretelin" positions east and west of Dili. Then paratroopers began dropping on the city from American-supplied helicopter gunships. The Indonesians began as they meant to continue, amid bloodshed and terror. Within days, scores of bodies, those people summarily shot and dumped off Dili's wharf, would be washed ashore at the Aria Branca (White Sands) beach. Dr Kissinger's amnesia notwithstanding, it is well known that the "big wink" to Suharto had been delivered by him in Jakarta the day before the invasion. Although, unlike Ferdinand Marcos next door, Suharto didn't permit US bases on his soil, he had been a loyal ally and a good anti-communist.
This is something those studying the "failure" of America's crusade against Asian Marxism tend to overlook. Indonesia was one of the success stories. In the same year that Lyndon Johnson had sent the Marines to South Vietnam, Indonesia's populist president, Dr Ahmed Sukarno, seemed to be edging towards an alliance with Peking, not to mention coalition with the Indonesian Communist Party (PKI), then the world's third largest.
In September 1965, a coup by General Suharto enjoyed the backing of the CIA, which supplied lists of PKI members. Suharto's crackdown on socialists, Marxists, Islamic organisations, youth groups and intellectuals was a success. The PKI was smashed - and with it went any semblance of Indonesian democracy, one of the Third World's richest political and cultural habitats and at least 600,000 lives.
Independence
When US President Gerald Ford and Dr Kissinger arrived in Jakarta on December 6th, 1975, Washington was still smarting from the "loss" of South Vietnam and Cambodia seven months before.
Nine days earlier, before a cheering crowd in Dili, the East Timorese had made their unilateral declaration of independence. In September, the "Marxist" Fretelin (Revolutionary Front for an Independent East Timor) had emerged victorious in the brief civil war which followed the Portuguese governor's retreat by boat to the offshore island of Atauro.
Suharto knew the issue was not "communist" expansionism. The islands which form the volcanic stepping-stones of the eastern archipelago, where most of Indonesia's revenue is generated, are largely populated by Christians or Animists, unlike largely Muslim Java, where most of the population lives.
In Jakarta's eyes, an independent East Timor was and remains a catalyst for separatism in other areas where Javanese domination is resented. Thus, on December 6th, the "big wink" (the words of an ex-State Department official) was to be the reward for services rendered.
The invasion had been set for December 5th but Washington demanded that it wait until Ford was gone; this request was respectfully granted.
Western complicity
It would be disingenuous to suggest that Dr Kissinger was solely to blame, when other Western governments were complicit in the still-birth of the Timorese nation. The great Australian reformist, Prime Minister Gough Whitlam, had rubber-stamped "integration" as early as September 1974. The Labour government in Britain furnished Suharto with Hawk jets in 1978, accompanied by Foreign Secretary David Owen's craven claims that reports of atrocities were "exaggerated".
And it was the administration of President Jimmy Carter, the man who wanted to put "human rights" on the international agenda, who supplied the dreaded Bronco bombers. These allowed the Indonesians to subjugate most of the island and kill about a third of the population.
But Dr Kissinger's absolute refusal to even acknowledge the occurrence of this sordid episode is telling. Meanwhile, I fear to gaze into those cold Prussian eyes on the bookshelf for too long, lest they deliver another murderous big wink.