Surviving Indonesia's Gulag: A Western Woman Tells Her Story.

by Carmel Budiardjo Cassell. 213 pages. $17.95.

Thanks to the Lippo/Riady campaign donations to the Democratic Party and the awarding of the Nobel Peace Prize to Bishop Carlos Belo and Jose Ramos-Horta of East Timor, Indonesia finally made it into the mainstream news this past fall. Readers who want to learn more about the ongoing scandal that is U.S. policy toward Indonesia would do well to buy Carmel Budiardjo's Surviving Indonesia's Gulag and Constancio Pinto's and Matthew Jardine's East Timor's Unfinished Struggle. Both memoirs show that U.S. support for the Indonesian dictatorship has been a consistently bipartisan affair for three decades.

Carmel Budiardjo is an English woman who became politically active while studying at the London School of Economics in the 1940s. In 1947 she helped launch the International Union of Students in Prague. There she met her future husband, an Indonesian, and moved to his homeland in the early fifties. Though she was barely able to speak the language, Budiardjo obtained a job translating for a news agency shortly after her arrival in Java. Within four years, she received a degree in economics at the University of Indonesia. She then wrote economic analyses for both the Sukarno government and the PKI, the Indonesian communist party.

After General Suharto took power in the phenomenally bloody 1965 coup, tolerance of the Indonesian communists, and anyone associated with them ended. By 1970, Suharto's forces had killed as many as a million Indonesians, all leftwing organizations were banned, and the prisons were crammed to capacity. Budiardjo herself spent three years in jail without charge or trial because of her PKI connections.

In understated, graceful prose, she describes the daily travails of surviving in jails where few prisoners had even mattresses. Though occasionally a bit disjointed in its chronology, her book effectively interweaves autobiography, political history (including a chapter on the 1965 coup that is a useful addition to the literature on this poorly documented period), and narratives of the people she befriended during her three years as a "tapol," or political prisoner. Not all were leftists. Suharto also cracked down on "aberrant" Muslim sects and, as Budiardjo notes, "for this regime, people in the middle are also extremists if they happen to be liberals or advocates of human rights."

Suharto's campaign of terror combined mass killings in the countryside with brutal repression in urban centers. The CIA helpfully provided lists naming thousands of communist leaders to make the Indonesian military's dirty work less taxing. Secretary of State Dean Rusk cabled the U.S. embassy in Jakarta that the military was "the only force capable of creating order in Indonesia." Small arms from the United States soon followed the communique. The U.S. press applauded the horror: Time called this "boiling bloodbath . . . the West's best news for years in Asia."

After a campaign in Budiardjo's behalf resulted in her release and exile to England, she helped set up an organization called TAPOL to publicize the plight of dissidents still jailed in Indonesia. TAPOL puts out a bimonthly bulletin whose focus has expanded to include the Indonesian pro-democracy movement and the East Timorese and West Papuan struggles for self-determination.

In 1995, Carmel Budiardjo received "The Right Livelihood Award" (sometimes known as "the alternative Nobel"). In endorsing her nomination for this award, the International Federation for East Timor wrote, "If today the tide of international opinion is turning with regard to the Suharto regime . . . in no small measure this is due to the accumulated efforts for two decades of Carmel Budiardjo and TAPOL."

The publication of East Timor's Unfinished Struggle coincided with the fifth anniversary of the 1991 massacre at the Santa Cruz cemetery in Dili. That bloodbath, in which Indonesian soldiers killed at least 271 Timorese, occurred after a nonviolent protest march Constancio Pinto helped organize.

Ace investigative reporter Allan Nairn, who joined the marchers and had his skull fractured by a soldier wielding a U.S.-supplied M-16, recalls the attack in a powerful foreword: "The troops fired no warning shots and did not tell the crowd to disperse. They . . . raised their rifles to their shoulders all at once and opened fire." Nairn recalls the last time he saw Pinto inside Timor, the night before the ill-fated march: "We were in a dark room lit by a single candle. Constancio was extremely tense. Part of his face was still frozen from the effects of torture. He was organizing the following day's protest and was under an army death warrant."

Pinto was just a boy when former colonial ruler Portugal withdrew from Timor, and the left-populist FRETILIN party (which Pinto's family supported) emerged victorious from a brief civil war in 1975. As Matthew Jardine notes in the detailed historical overview that opens the book, the United States gave Suharto the go-ahead for the December 1975 invasion and provided 90 percent of the weaponry used in the early, bloodiest years of the occupation.

East Timor's Unfinished Struggle sets Pinto's personal story in the larger context of his people's struggle. Pinto joined the army of FRETILIN as a fourteen-year-old guerrilla, dividing his time between the front lines of battle and the family farm. In the years that followed, his family often came close to starvation but managed to survive. Others weren't so lucky.

Pinto describes Indonesia's late-seventies campaign of "encirclement," in which U.S.-made F-16s dropped napalm on the Timorese: "Parents abandoned their children because they were afraid that they would slow them down, because their crying would put everyone's life in danger, or because there was no more food to feed them.... I still hear the crying of those children."

After the first decade of occupation, Indonesia's tactics had killed 200,000 Timorese.

Pinto and his family were forced to surrender to the Indonesian military. They were relocated to the capital, Dili, where Pinto eventually made contact with the underground. The personal risks were staggering: Pinto's mentor explained that freedom fighters must sometimes accept the seizure of a spouse by the enemy in order "to protect the country and the people."

In 1990, Pinto was elected leader of the urban underground, serving under the overall head of the resistance, Xanana Gusmao. That year, Pinto helped organize important demonstrations held during visits by Pope John Paul II and U.S. Ambassador John Monjo. Monjo extracted a promise from Indonesian officials that there would be no reprisals against demonstrators, but upon his departure Indonesian soldiers cracked down on activists, beating and torturing many of them.

The next year, Pinto was arrested and badly beaten for three days. But he then convinced Indonesian intelligence that he would work as an informer. In one of the most gripping sections of his story, Pinto describes the elaborate machinations involved in continuing resistance work while stalling impatient enemy operatives. He even argued with the head of military intelligence about the wisdom of attacking demonstrators. The colonel's response: "We will stop by any means necessary any demonstration that is against the Indonesian presence in East Timor."

The November 12, 1991, Santa Cruz massacre showed the world just how far occupation forces were willing to take that credo. While on the run from the military Pinto helped to compile a list of the Santa Cruz victims. This documentation, coupled with the testimony of Nairn and other foreign journalists who survived the massacre, contributed to the growth of today's worldwide solidarity movement.

The object of a massive manhunt, Pinto managed a risky escape to West Timor and Jakarta, then on to Lisbon and the United States. If he had been caught, his fate would have been harsh. His successor as head of the urban resistance was tortured to death last year.

Surviving Indonesia's Gulag and East Timor's Unfinished Struggle thoroughly discredit apologists for the corporate-friendly Indonesian terror state. Suharto's "economic miracle" has always relied on brutal repression.

The strength of spirit and tireless dedication of Budiardjo and Pinto serve as an inspiration.

Ben Terrall is a San Francisco-based writer and researcher. He recently returned from Indonesia.