Torture and possible murders of captives under “interrogation” by Australian forces in East Timor in 1999 are among the most serious charges to be detailed in the media recently. Abuse of prisoners by Australian cops in the Solomon Islands has also come to light.

Beginning in September 1999, the Australian Defence Forces (ADF) spearheaded an imperialist intervention into East Timor, which was backed by Washington and endorsed by the United Nations. Since July 2003, Australian and New Zealand military and police have formed the core of a regional intervention in the Solomon Islands in the Pacific.

In November of last year, Dateline, a Special Broadcasting Service (SBS) TV current affairs program, aired interviews with three Timorese men—Caetano da Silva, Johnny Rohiede, and Jao Ximenes—about their interrogations. They were arrested in 1999 on suspicion of belonging to a pro-Indonesian “militia.” Each described being beaten, terrorized, and tortured by Australian troops.

“It was inhumane,” Rohiede said. “We were told to lie down on human feces. They hit us. They say Westerners are never cruel. But they abused us, hit us, mistreated us.”

Ximenes showed Dateline reporters a toe he said had been “crushed under the heel of an Australian soldier” during interrogation.

Kept in a back room of the football stadium in Dili, East Timor’s capital, they said they were “badly stung” by wasps. Their Australian captors forcibly held their heads down a toilet bowl. Their faces were “covered with shit.” Punched and kicked for hours, they were told they would be killed if they didn’t talk.

All three said that another man, Yani Ndun, a native of West Timor, was tortured at the same time. Nobody has seen him since then.

The Dateline revelations were the first publicity of some of the abuses allegedly being investigated by ADF internal inquiries. The ADF has not denied the SBS story but simply insisted that the prisoners were held “in accordance with the Geneva Conventions.”

The army initially claimed to have no record of detaining Ndun. However, the day of the second Dateline program, an army press conference announced Ndun had been released Sept. 26, 2003. Yet his family and friends have found no trace of him.  
 
Military inquiry dismisses all charges
On May 5, another Dateline program noted that in the intervening six months, “not a single witness [in East Timor] has been approached” despite relevant names and places being provided to the army.

At an Australian army interrogation center set up at a Dili heliport in October 1999, other captives were reportedly deprived of food, sleep, and hygienic facilities. Another case involved an “unnecessary amputation.”

The two-year secretive military inquiry was set to investigate 19 such unspecified allegations of serious misconduct by members of the Special Air Service and an intelligence unit during the East Timor deployment in 1999. In April 2003, military investigators dismissed all torture and murder charges as “unsubstantiated.”

Australian, British, and New Zealand soldiers in East Timor initially reported the abuses. Only one charge, against an SAS officer over the “kicking of a body,” went to trial. It was dropped when witnesses in the New Zealand army refused to appear. The ADF claimed allegations against the same soldier of “unlawful killing” of a detainee were “unsubstantiated.”

Lt. Gen. Peter Leahy, chief of the Australian army, defended some actions as measures in a “robust situation,” not “a four-star resort,” and denied other allegations. Tacitly admitting heat from the exposures, however, Leahy said there is a need to overhaul some “operational procedures.”

For a quarter-century since 1975, the Australian and U.S. governments aided and abetted the Indonesian generals brutal military occupation of the country to quash the independence movement.

On Aug. 30, 1999, despite continued repression, hundreds of thousands of East Timorese voted for independence from Indonesia in a UN-sponsored referendum. The Indonesian army and cops retaliated, using their surrogate militia to kill 1,500 East Timorese and lay waste to the country.

Australian and U.S. government mouthpieces deflected blame from the Indonesian generals with the line that the militia were “rogue elements.” Then these imperialist powers pressured Jakarta to withdraw. Trumpeting the bloodshed as a pretext, the Australian government led the military intervention.  
 
Abuse of prisoners in the Solomons
In July 2003, the governments of Australia and New Zealand led a force of troops, cops, and civilian officials, with the cover of participation of some Pacific Island forces, to intervene in the Solomon Islands. On the pretext of countering “worsening lawlessness and ethnic violence,” the imperialist intervention was unleashed to strengthen neo-colonial control of policing and finances of the island country.

The Australian government provided millions of dollars to build a high-security section at Rove prison in the capital of Honiara. Abusive treatment there against prisoners held under Australian Federal Police orders has recently come to light.

At least nine prisoners have been kept in lengthy solitary confinement with as little as half an hour out in late afternoon sunlight.

Moses Su’u said he was kept for the first two days sleeping on a bare concrete bunk wearing only underpants. “What they did to me was inhuman,” Su’u said. “They would not even give me my trousers.”

Another man says he was held in solitary confinement for months, with only rice and tinned fish with no fresh fruit or vegetables for food. “They only let me out for one hour to walk in the corridor and have a shower,” he said.

Lawyers for some of the prisoners have pointed out that these are especially harsh conditions for people with a culture based on outdoor life.  
 
 
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