The 2,500-page report, presented to the United Nations last Friday by East Timor’s President Xanana Gusmao did not hold back. It provided a detailed account of Indonesia’s 24-year occupation of the island nation, where Jakarta’s military forces, along with local militias they supported, reportedly killed close to 180,000 East Timorese through torture, starvation, arbitrary execution and massacres.

The report, key excerpts of which were leaked to Australian and American newspapers, including The Australian and The Washington Post, also charged Indonesia with using napalm in its counterinsurgency campaign and “starvation as a weapon of war,” condemning thousands of civilians to death in camps for displaced Timorese.

This devastating report does not come as a surprise to those of us who have closely followed the tragic events in East Timor since 1975 — when the occupation began — nor would it come as a surprise to us to discover that, were a war crimes tribunal to be held, the accused will not be exclusively Indonesian officials but Australian and American ones as well. First, context. In August 1999, this remote, impoverished island erupted into violence in the wake of a referendum.

The violence, however, was not the beginning but the endgame of a long struggle that went back almost a quarter century, to the time when the Indonesian military invaded the former Portuguese colony in 1975 and annexed it as Indonesia’s “27th province” the following year. For both the US and Australia it was, from the get-go, real politic, where, following in the tradition of Machiavelli, you conduct your foreign policy without a politico-moral impulse, a foreign policy driven by the notion of “what’s in it for us.” And the devil with the human cost to others.

To the US at the time, soon after Indonesian paratroopers dropped from the sky on Dili, East Timor’s capital, on Dec. 8, 1975, support for Jakarta was immediate and unstinting. The invasion of the island coincided with the fall of Vietnam seven months earlier and was seen by Washington as a counterbalance to the successes of the Communists in Saigon.

In addition, Washington gained the right from President Suharto of free passage through the deep sea of Lombok and the Ombai water straits for American nuclear submarines directed against Soviet targets. Such was Washington’s support of the invasion then that 90 percent of the weaponry used in the operation was supplied by Americans.

While American interests in Indonesia’s seizure of East Timor were strategic, Australia’s were economic. The vast oil reserves that were known to exist under the seabed between the Australian coastline and the little troubled island were enormous, and with that in mind a secret agreement was signed, by virtue of which these oil reserves would be shared between Indonesia and Australia. Canberra then, as a quid pro quo, extended official recognition in 1976 to Indonesia’s annexation — becoming the only capital in the Western alliance to do so. Washington pressed ahead with its massive arms sales to Indonesia and continued the training program of its military forces.

The Aussies not only adopted the same disingenuous and cavalier approach as their American counterparts, but actually took it upon themselves to lobby in international forums on behalf of their patrons in Jakarta. Australian Foreign Minister Gareth Evans, according to a report in the Australian Financial Review that appeared on Nov. 24, 1994, took the opportunity, while on an official visit to the US, to meet with editors of the New York Times and chastise them about “the paper’s criticisms of human rights violations in Indonesia” and its “continued harping on Indonesia’s invasion of East Timor.”

That was to be the end of that, with everyone living happily after. But it didn’t work out that way.

Oh, yes, those were the days, my friend — the cold war days when “stability at the cost of democracy” was the coin of the realm, when as a big power you turned a blind eye to the excesses of your two-bit dictator friends, and a deaf ear to the entreaties of those subversive democrats and reformers, in lesser endowed countries around the world.

The killing of a 180,000 people out of a pre-invasion population of 650,000 is a lot of people. It puts to shame those ministers, commentators, diplomats and academics, both in the US and Australia, who at the time not only played down or ignored the consistent human rights abuses by Jakarta but acted as a “Jakarta lobby” that opposed East Timor’s legitimate claims for independence.

Indonesia’s military chief, Gen. Endriartono Sutarto, denied the allegations in the report. He said: “I’m not at all sure that such a huge number of deaths came about as the result of the actions of Indonesia’s armed forces and police at the time.” And he denied that napalm was used.

“It is not true that we deliberately carried out massacres using napalm and starving people,” he added. “That is not true at all.”

The 2,500-page UN report, which took two years to compile and drew on testimonies from 8,000 witnesses, concludes: “The violations were committed in execution of a systematic plan approved, conducted and controlled by Indonesia’s military commanders at the highest level.” As to whom you want to believe, well, I’ll leave it to you.

There’s a lot of damning stuff there — against Jakarta, to be sure, but decidedly against Washington and Canberra as well — capitals whose least expression of remorse should be to pay serious reparations to the people of East Timor for all the suffering they were made to endure for three decades.