Richard Holbrooke

by Mark Cook

[Richard Holbrooke; Indonesia; East Timor; South Korea]

Richard Holbrooke, a Wall Street banker now with Credit Suisse-First Boston, presented NATO's  last ultimatum to the Yugoslav government hours before the bombing campaign began.

      Known as the U.S. diplomat who brokered the Dayton Accords in 1994,  leading to the partition and ongoing military occupation of Bosnia-Herzegovina, Holbrooke's reputation was made 20 years earlier, in East Timor and South Korea. 

      His notoriety comes from his role in the 1980 massacre of an estimated 2,000 unarmed students and workers in Kwangju, South Korea, and his long-term involvement in the Indonesian occupation army's campaign of mass murder in East Timor in the late 1970s, resulting in the deaths of at least 200,000 people, a third of the East Timorese population.

      In 1975, East Timor had been on the verge of gaining independence from Portugal, with governmental authority expected to go to FRETILIN (Timor National Liberation Front), a leftwing popular movement with a modest reform program.

      However, the Ford administration- while going through the motions of disapproving the unprecedented invasion of the territory of a U.N. member state-underwrote the invasion of East Timor by the Suharto regime in Indonesia, a government itself installed by Washington a decade earlier in one of the worst bloodbaths in postwar history.

      From the start of the Carter administration, Holbrooke carried on the policy that the Indonesian seizure of East Timor, although regrettable because it denied East Timorese self-determination, was nevertheless a "fait accompli." But it was not a fait accompli.  As Sunil Shama notes in a recent article, by 1977 the Indonesian army was running out of military supplies to use against the Timorese.1

      Holbrooke, Assistant Secretary of State for East Asia and the Pacific under the Carter administration, immediately launched a mammoth weapons shipment to Indonesia's military to replace supplies depleted by the fighting in Timor. According to Matthew Jardines in East Timor: Genocide in Paradise, arms sales to Jakarta by late 1977 were up almost 2,000 percent from the previous fiscal year.2

Mass Starvation

The Indonesian military, as part of the repression, herded masses of Timorese into concentration camps ("refugee centers"), and imposed a policy of mass starvation. Holbrooke did nothing.

      On a visit to the camps, Holbrooke's underling, Ambassador to Indonesia Edward Masters "came away so shocked by the conditions of the refugees that [he] immediately contacted the governor of East Timor...to explore the possibilities for providing foreign humanitarian assistance," Sharma writes.

      Masters, however, kept silent until June 1979, while staggering numbers of people starved, before urging the U.S. to provide humanitarian assistance. As Sharma notes, the timing coincided with the Carter administration's enormous shipment of military supplies to Indonesia. Prof. Benedict Anderson of the Cornell Modern Indonesia Project testified in congressional hearings in 1980 that, "Until the generals in Jakarta gave him the green light, Mr. Masters did nothing to help the East Timorese, although Mr. Holbrooke insists that ‘the welfare of the Timorese people is the major objective of our policy towards East Timor.'"3

      Masters had visited the concentration camps.  Holbrooke certainly knew of them and knew of the policy of starvation the Indonesian military authorities were imposing.  In congressional testimony in December 1979, however, they said the famine resulted from Portuguese colonial neglect and slash-and-burn agriculture.4

      When, in April 1997, Indonesian Foreign Minister Adam Malik admitted to Australian journalists that 50,000 to 80,000 East Timorese-a tenth of the population-had been killed in less than two years ("but we saved 600,000 of them"5 who "want to join Indonesia,"6 he added), Holbrooke was embarrassed. His own deputy had told Congress only weeks earlier that the "total casualties, civilian, military, everything else, is probably under 10,000."7

      "I am not remotely interested in getting involved in an argument over the actual number of people killed," Holbrooke told an Australian press conference a few days after Malik's admission. "People were killed and that always is a tragedy but what is at issue is the actual situation in Timor today," an apparent reference to the decision to treat the Indonesian seizure as a done deed and to focus on "the welfare of the Timorese people."8

      In April 1977, when Holbrooke made that statement, the U.S. was doubling the supply of military weapons to Indonesia, particularly for counterinsurgent purposes. The worst period of the genocide, between 1977 and 1980, followed.

Holbrooke in Korea

For years, Holbrooke has denied an official U.S. role in the South Korean military's 1980 massacre of students and workers in the city of Kwangju. But those denials began to unravel in 1996 after journalist Tim Shorrock obtained declassified cables on the Kwangju massacre and the period leading up to it, through the Freedom of Information Act.

      When students in Kwangju took to the streets to demonstrate against martial law and other edicts of South Korean military strongman Chun Doo Hwan, military Special Forces were deployed to launch what Shorrock has called a "reign of terror."

      "Soldiers burst into houses searching for anyone under the age of 30 and dragged them out to face clubs, bayonets, and machine guns," wrote Shorrock in The Nation, December 9, 1996. "The death toll, estimated by city residents at 2,000, may never be known."

      The State Department claimed for years afterward, notably in a 1989 "White Paper," that Holbrooke and other Carter administration officials did not know that the South Korean Special Forces, trained to operate behind enemy lines in a war with North Korea, were being deployed against students and workers in May 1980. The State Department further claimed that the Carter administration was alarmed by South Korean strongman Chun's threats to use the military against the nationwide demonstrations.

      Embassy and Defense Intelligence Agency cables sent in early May 1980 and obtained by Shorrock quite clearly contradict those claims.

Special Warfare Command

"Senior officials in the Carter administration approved South Korean plans to use military troops against pro-democracy demonstrations ten days before former General Chun Doo Hwan seized control of the country in a May 17, 1980, military coup, according to newly released U.S. government documents," Shorrock wrote in a special series in the Korean magazine Sisa, February 28, 1996. "U.S. officials also knew the contingency plans included the deployment of Special Warfare Command troops to Seoul and Kwangju, the documents show."

      Shorrock's revelations sparked large protests in Kwangju and Taegu and in front of the U.S. Embassy when first published in The Journal of Commerce on February 27, 1996, and beginning the next day in Sisa, one of Seoul's largest magazines.9

      The sequence of events is clear. On May 7, 1980, the Embassy cabled that it had been officially informed that the South Korean military was deploying two Special Forces brigades "to cope with possible student demonstrations." On May 8, a Defense Intelligence Agency cable reported on the deployment of Special Forces units against campus unrest in Kwangju.

      State Department approval for the use of military force came the following day, May 9.

      Two brigades of the Special Forces units in Kwangju were later held responsible for killing hundreds of people, Shorrock wrote in the Sisa article.

      The cables he obtained further reveal that the Carter administration had set up a secret policy group on South Korea, headed by Holbrooke, after the assassination in October 1979 of South Korean dictator Pak Chung Hee. The aim of the group was to prevent "another Iran" in South Korea. According to Shorrock, "The cables document for the first time the extent of U.S. intervention in the [South Korean] political process in 1979 and 1980."

      In November 1979, Holbrooke began to hear that Christian dissidents were defying martial law commands, leading to mass arrests by Chun's security forces. "In one of his most significant cables," Shorrock reported in The Nation, "Holbrooke lashed out not at the military but at the ‘potential polarization that exists as a result of the actions of what appear to be a relative handful of Christian extremist dissidents.'"

      "The generals understood, rightly, that they were free to do almost anything," Shorrock observes.

      The following May, the U.S. authorized the deployment against the students of the special military forces, with the knowledge that they were going to Kwangju. "The cables also show that U.S. officials knew as far back as February 1980 that Chun was mobilizing Special Warfare Command troops, trained to fight behind the lines in a war against North Korea, in his repression of dissent in Kwangju," Shorrock wrote.

"Tragic, but..."

"Kwangju was an explosively dangerous situation, the outcome was tragic, but the long-term results for Korea are democracy and economic stability," Shorrock quotes Holbrooke as telling him in a recent interview. "The idea that we would actively conspire with the Korean generals in a massacre of students is, frankly, bizarre; it's obscene and counter to every political value we articulated."

      Shorrock, still quoting Holbrooke, adds that when the Carter administration heard that South Korean military strongman Chun Doo Hwan was sending Special Forces to Kwangju, "we made every effort to stop what was happening."

      The cables Shorrock uncovered appear to show exactly the opposite.

      "Holbrooke was scornful when I asked about those documents," Shorrock wrote. "‘I've read them and they're being completely taken out of context by people who don't know what was said on the telephone,' he said. ‘If you think you have a smoking gun, go out and have fun with it.'"

      Looking back on his work in Korea, Holbrooke expressed satisfaction, Shorrock reports.

      "We managed between 1977 and the 1980s a policy that kept strategic stability and encouraged democracy without losing economic growth," he quotes Holbrooke as saying. "It was an astonishing achievement." Holbrooke's parting comment was, "You ought to talk about the overall policy. Otherwise, it's simply unfair."

      Students and workers in Kwangju might differ with him, were they still alive. So might millions of South Koreans whose living standards have been destroyed in the meltdown of the Korean "tiger" economy. But Holbrooke certainly did well. As Shorrock notes, he went on to become an adviser to the Hyundai Group, one of South Korea's largest conglomerates, in the 1980s. Holbrooke's appointment as Ambassador to the United Nations has languished for months, mired in allegations that he had used his diplomatic positions in a particularly extreme fashion to aid his private business deals.

Endnotes:

1. Quoted in Sunil Sharma, "200,000 Skeletons in Holbrooke's Closet," Z Magazine webpage, Mar. 22, 1999. Diplomat James Dunn writes that Holbrooke made the "fait accompli" remark to him in March 1977. (See James Dunn, Timor: A People Betrayed (Adelaide: Jacaranda Press, 1985), p. 349.

2. Matthew Jardines, East Timor: Genocide in Paradise (Trenton, N.J.: Odonion Press, 1995), p. 42. Sixteen more Broncos were shipped in 1977, according to Jose Ramos-Horta, along with 16 A-4 Skyhawk II jet attack planes, 16 Bell "Huey" helicopters and other supplies. He notes that the Skyhawks, "capable of spraying wide areas with weapons-fire and high explosives," were, with the Broncos, the major weapons of attack against the Timorese. James Dunn, op. cit., n. 1, p. 91.

3. Op. cit., n. 2.

4. Graham Hovey, New York Times, Dec. 5, 1979.

5. Melbourne Age, Apr. 1, 1977, quoted in op. cit., n. 2.

6. Canberra Times, Apr. 1, 1977, quoted in op. cit., n. 2.

7. Quoted in James Dunn, op. cit., n. 2, p. 352.

8. John Hamilton, "Timor death toll not the issue: US," Melbourne Age, quoted in Noam Chomsky and Edward S. Herman, The Washington Connection and Third World Fascism (Boston: South End Press, 1979), p. 148.

9. The English-language version of the Sisa articles can be found on the Korea Web Weekly, which can be accessed through the Internet version of Shorrock's Dec. 9, 1996, Nation article.