A Smiling Obama Returns to Bloody Jakarta

[Warph]

A Smiling Obama Returns to Bloody Jakarta

by Dan Greenfield


The media narrative is that Barack Hussein Obama is returning to the place where he grew up as part of a diplomatic tour. The truth is that Obama is visiting a genocidal country and paying homage to its regime, even while many of the atrocities continue.

While Obama found time to blast Israel for building housing in Jerusalem, he made no mention of the Indonesian genocide in East Timor. No word about the Indonesian mass murder of between 100,000 to 200,000 people in a country whose population totaled little more than half a million. Shortly after Obama left Jakarta, the Indonesian regime began an occupation that lasted until 1999. An occupation armed and aided by successive US administrations.

But there is a reason you won't hear about the meat hooks where Indonesian backed militias hung their victims, before mutilating and killing them. You won't hear about the fields of the dead where the corpses of men, women and children were piled into mass graves. You won't hear of the machete squads who hacked people to death in full public view and on video. You certainly won't hear about the ethnic cleansing, the mass deportations, the gang rapes or even the murder of Western reporters. And there's a simple reason for all that.

Indonesia is a Muslim country. Their victims in East Timor were Christians.

To understand the significance of Obama's biography-- imagine that an American President who grew up in Nazi Germany on the eve of war, wrote only about his idyllic childhood running around the streets of Berlin and learning to read Mein Kampf, and then returned decades later, with no concession that a genocide had occurred here.

Not only does Obama insist on playing dumb when it comes to his adopted country's genocidal recent history, but appointed Dennis Blair as Director of National Intelligence. Back in 1999, after 200 people had been massacred in a Catholic Church, Dennis Blair was sent to ask for an end to the killing, instead he invited the Indonesian general to Hawaii and offered him American military assistance. This did not stop Blair from being confirmed, even though he had become a collaborator in genocide. Blair then brought along Chas Freeman, who claimed that China had been restrained in carrying out the Tiananmen Square Massacre. And the likes of Joe Klein and Andrew Sullivan rose to defend Freeman against any criticism.

Blair and Freeman are gone now, but this is an administration that thought both men were worthy of high positions. A nightmarish idea by any measure. Membership in the Nazi party would have disqualified just about any nominee, but giving a thumbs up to genocide and massacres in Asia makes one an honorable man.

But East Timor isn't the end of it. The same Indonesian military is still in business.

The Kopassus special forces, Indonesia's answer to the German SS, are still out and about. In 1998, Kopassus thugs gang raped hundreds of Chinese women in Jakarta. Some were burnt alive. The victims were as young as 10 years old and some were thrown into burning buildings afterward. The attackers proclaimed to their victims, "You must be raped because you are Chinese and non-Muslim."

And because of that, because the perpetrators were Muslim and the victims non-Muslim, the whole thing was quickly swept under the rug.

This is the real Jakarta, the city of Barack Hussein Obama's nostalgia. It's the ugly truth lurking behind his "exotic" biography. During his remarks with the Indonesian President, Obama got laughs when he mentioned how much Jakarta had changed since he was there. Of course one of the reasons for those changes is that the 1998 riots torched many non-Muslim businesses. The 'joke' was akin to mentioning how different Berlin looks since Kristalnacht.

In July, Robert Gates visited Jakarta, and ended a longstanding ban on US cooperation with the Kopassus forces. This was obviously not done on his own initiative. Such a radical departure from established US policy would have come from the top down. And the top is the self-proclaimed Jakarta street kid, full of nostalgia for his former adopted country. Barack Hussein Obama.

Because it's not over. It's never over. East Timor is free, more thanks to the Aussies, than anyone else. But the Indonesian regime is continuing its atrocities in its occupation of New Guinea or West Papua. One of the lesser known crimes of the Kennedy Administration was the involuntary transfer of New Guinea into Indonesian rule. Today the Indonesian occupation of West Papua continues, because once again the majority of West Papuans are Christians. While the Indonesian occupation is Muslim.

The Kopassus forces are still up to their old game. Their enemies list has leaked and its top target for assassination is Reverend Socrates Sofyan Yoman, the head of the Baptist Synod in West Paupua. The Deputy Commander of Kopassus, Colonel Nugroho Widyo Utomo, is a war criminal. This is the organization that America will be providing aid and training to-- under the authorization of the Obama Administration. These are the Muslim war criminals that we will be helping to become better killers and more efficient monsters.

Recently cell phone video footage of Indonesian forces brutally torturing West Papuan natives surfaced, but this hasn't halted the resumption of US military cooperation with Indonesian forces-- or put a stop to Obama's visit.

And once there, Obama did not challenge Indonesia on its continuing occupation of West Papua. Nor did President Yudhoyono ever uttered a word of regret. But Yudhoyono did have the unmitigated gall to pressure Obama on an independent Palestinian Muslim state. Because unlike the Christians of East Timor and West Papua, or the Chinese women of Jakarta-- Muslims actually matter.

In response, Obama bragged about a new partnership between America and the Muslim world, and condemned Myanmar, while making no mention of the situation in New Guinea. Or acknowledging that he standing on the bloody soil of a regime that had committed genocide and shrugged it off. As President Yudhoyono did when he referred to the genocide that Indonesia had carried, only by saying that he had "deep regret" for the lives lost on both sides. But of course the Jayapura tribunal doesn't matter, compared to the houses of Jerusalem.

And that denial pervades everything the administration does. In Mumbai, the Jakarta street kid spent ten minutes talking about the terrorist attack, without once mentioning the identity of perpetrators. His only mention of Muslims was as "victims" of the attack. That Muslims had perpetrated the attack remained unspoken. And that Pakistan had likely been behind the attack was never even whispered. Instead it was a crime without perpetrators. And yet even this is an improvement over Jakarta, where there is no mention that even a crime had occurred.

And so the killings go on, and Obama keeps on smiling, as he makes his nostalgic pilgrimage to bloody Jakarta, where he lived as a Muslim, free of the violence and terror faced by non-Muslims in that city. And the media smiles along and ignores the bloody history. Because as long as the lives of non-Muslims are considered to be worth less than that of Muslims-- the blood will continue to flow.