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Message: <blockquote data-quote="netlife007" data-source="post: 15798217" data-attributes="member: 79514">Canadian Prime Minister : Stephen Harper By James Winter    Tell me if you find any  irony or hypocrisy in this: Canadian Prime Minister Stephen Harper  announced from Indonesia, where he was attending APEC, that he will be  unable to attend the Commonwealth Heads of Government summit in Sri  Lanka next month, owing to that country’s “unacceptable human rights  violations?”   Put your hand up if you are aware of Indonesian history?    No? Well, have you seen  any good documentary films lately, such as, The Act of Killing, which  screened at the Toronto International Film Festival in September?   Indonesia, from whence the  prime minister announced his boycott, is infamous for two genocides.  The first was in 1965, when General Suharto overthrew President Sukarno.  During and following that purge, it is estimated that more than a  million people were killed. The purge was ostensibly aimed at communist  leaders, and party members. Ultimately, paramilitary gangs devastated  opposition parties, the labour movement, teachers, student leaders, and  others.    In a June 2013 film review  of Joshua Oppenheimer’s film about these killings, The Observer’s Mark  Kermode wrote, “Many of the killings — and the persecutions that  followed — were carried out by gangsters who have not only escaped  prosecution, but are now heralded as local heroes” in Indonesia.    “We shoved wood in their  anus until they died,” Adi Zulkadry, a death squad leader, says in the  film as he is shown shopping in a mall in the capital Jakarta with his  wife and daughter. “We crushed their necks with wood. We hung them. We  strangled them with wire.    We cut off their heads. We  ran them over with cars. We were allowed to do it. And the proof is, we  murdered people and were never punished. The people we killed, there’s  nothing to be done about it. They have to accept it. Maybe I’m just  trying to make myself feel better, but it works. I’ve never felt guilty,  never been depressed, never had nightmares.”    The second genocide was  conducted by Suharto in an invasion of East Timor in 1975, wherein his  troops slaughtered a quarter million Timorese, one-third of the  population, in five years. U.S. president Gerald Ford and his Secretary  of State Henry Kissinger infamously visited Suharto in Jakarta the day  before Suharto’s invasion of East Timor. Kissinger encouraged Suharto to  “act quickly,” to succeed and to avoid criticism.    This was the same  autocratic General Suharto who was protested at the APEC meetings in  Vancouver in 1997, where the police infamously pepper sprayed and  strip-searched peaceful Canadian protesters.    The Indonesian leadership,  which was responsible for these atrocious crimes, has never been  brought to account. Nor have the other governments which supported them,  such as the U.S. and Canada.    Oppenheimer’s film  documents the complicity of some of the lower-level Indonesians  responsible. The film is brilliant and horrific. And, it makes no  mention of the political leadership of any of the countries which were  responsible.    Hope you enjoyed your time  in Indonesia, Prime Minister Harper. Take pride in your bold boycott  against Sri Lanka, in support of Human Rights. My question is: how do  you choose your friends and enemies?    Dr. James Winter is a professor at the University of Windsor.</blockquote>

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