New Socialist Party statement against East Timor intervention
Six years after their first military intervention, a second Australia-led military and police force has re-occupied East Timor.
By Stephen Jolly
Back in 1999 the Australian government was under pressure from an electorate keen for 'something to be done' for the East Timor masses who were facing brutality from Indonesian-backed militia. Canberra used the instability in East Timor and the opportunity of a weak Jakarta government to intervene and capture the resources of the new country.
The new Fretilin government essentially sub-contracted their independence to the Australian ruling class and they have paid a price ever since. A series of uneven deals between Australia and the world's newest state on access to oil and gas in the Timor Sea has meant Australia now earns $1 million a day from resources that in any other part of the world would be controlled by East Timor.
That's $356 million a year in stolen profits, compared to aid to East Timor from Australia of $43 million for 2006/07. Not a bad result for Canberra. These are the brutal facts of neo-colonialism and imperialism.
The Fretilin government has therefore had precious little resources to deal with the massive social problems that exist. 95% of schools were destroyed by the Indonesians, yet six years into independence only 50% of students have textbooks and 25% of youth are illiterate.
The country is the poorest in Asia with over 50% unemployed. One in two people live without safe drinking water and three in five without sanitation facilities.
As is often the case in such circumstances, the weak East Timorese capitalists and politicial elite turn to corruption, having no confidence that they can develop society.
A desperate population has no clear united, union, or socialist alternative and are therefore suseptable to division.
On the one side is Prime Minister Mari Alkatiri. He was in the ex-Portuguese colony of Mozambique during the Indonesian occupation and the Lisbon government has condemned Canberra's moves to remove him from office. He has stacked the party and state with his cronies and there are corruption allegations about his faction. In the last resort, he represents the interests of Portuguese capital who want their share of East Timor's wealth.
On the other side is President Xanana Gusmao, who led the resistance fighters during occupation. This still gives him credibility amongst the masses, especially in the east of country, who consider many in the west of East Timor to have been complicit in the Indonesian occupation. He has the backing of the Australian government.
The opportunist Foreign Minister Joes Ramos Horta was based in Sydney during the occupation and after being linked to Alkatiri is now firmly in Gusmao's camp, especially after the foreign forces arrived in Dili.
Such is the chaos that on top of the Fretilin faction fight and the division between the two halves of the country there is now tribal, cultural and even bloody family feuding occuring. This is expressed through a form of ethnic cleansing in the suburbs of Dili and elsewhere.
The Australian-led force (2,000-odd troops, 500 police plus 200 New Zealand and 500 Malaysian troops) is not finding their task as easy as previous interventions in the region. It is only a matter of time before they become dragged into a 'mini-Iraq'-style conflict.
This intervention is about reintroducing 'stability' to protect Australian ruling class profit interests in East Timor. The intervention will not build schools or hospitals. World Vision had to appeal via ABC-TV's 'Lateline' to get 2 or 3 troops to protect their food store in Dili, one of the last still unlooted. The Australian army had been too busy taking UN personnel to the airport and safety.
Almost alone of the left, the Socialist Party opposed the Australian intervention in 1999. Back then the Democratic Socialist Perspective championed the intervention. Now they write in Green Left Weekly: "(the invitation from Dili to intervene) will be used to justify Australian imperialism's interventionist foreign policy in the region, a strategy that involves the Australian military, police and financial advisors interfering in the running of a number of Australia's small, poor neighbours in the interests of Australian business and at the expense of the people of the region." What was different in 1999?
They make the naive statement in their paper: "we must expose any attempts by the Australian government to exploit or manipulate the situation".
They also make a utopian call on the Bush, Howard and Blair governments to provide material and financial help for the masses. Do the DSP think these goverenments will donate anything close to the amount capitalist monopolies steal for East Timor everyday?
The DSP also call on Bush, Blair and Howard to establish a war crimes tribunal to investigate human-rights abuses in East Timor during the Indonesian occupation. This will never happen, as these three countries want to keep Jararta onside in the 'War on Terror'.
The only road of the East Timor masses is through the rebuilding of a united, secular and working class party around a socialist programme, plus the strenghthening of the weak trade union movement. This programme would include the nationalisation of the oil and gas interests and the pumping of massive resources into public health, education, housing and transport. This would create thousands of jobs. Such a party would attempt to build links with the Indonesian and Australian workers, unions and left.
There is no force other than the East Timor workers, poor farmers, urban poor and youth who will take society forward. Foreign armies, imperialist governments and their political allies in Dili offer nothing but on-going poverty, insecurity and war.
Comments
Bullshit, Jolly, and you know it!
You ask: "What was different in 1999?"
Well, there was mass-slaughtering of innocent civilians going on and no power to stop it. full stop. no illusions in austrlia and it's very own imperialism.
For the other - you say utopian - calls: well, this is politics, intermediate demands to put immediate and concrete pressure onto the different governing bodies. again no illusions. no maximum demands. pure demands for some little reforms. doesn't contradict being revolutionary and following a revolutionary program. it's all just steps. when will you ever understand, ultra-left sectarians. you would have just watched that genocide happening right in fornt of your eyes, at your doorstep, back in 1999. shame on you!
Re: New Socialist Party statement against East Timor interventio
It was the DSP and other groups who took Gusmao at his word who were responsible for letting the killings happen in 1999 - you acquiesced to the locking up in cantonments of the Falintil troops who could (and in the isolated cases where they disobeyed orders, did) have protected the East Timorese people and defeated the militia. Time to learn some hitory and stop believing CIA stooges like Gusmao and Ramos-Horta.
Armchair revolutionary Scott ...
... sat back and watched the genocide unfolding ... disgusting!
Re: New Socialist Party statement against East Timor interventio
What did you do mate, sit up and cheer the troops on?
Re: New Socialist Party statement against East Timor interventio
The DSP are shite, fuckem
Re: New Socialist Party statement against East Timor interventio
Hi DSP'r,
Well actually, to the best of my knowledge your group never actually had a clear statement that you supported the Australian occupation in 99.
A bit like now, the DSP prevaricated, waited, said not much concrete, and then followed along behind events. Then later you all tryed to put a radical gloss on the lack of leadership by making all kinds of daft demands on the imperialists as Steve Jolly points out. When this was questioned, defending the inaction with displays of emotion about massacres and ethnic cleansing - as though everyone else was unaware of developments.
If you are a card carrying member then at least this is confirmation of what was long suspected - that this was always the party-line.
It also explains what transpired when your less evasively schooled junior cadre were left to their own devices. On rallies and demos(in Sydney at least) the DSP members chants went from from the lamentable; "Indonesia Out - UN in! , to "Indonesia Out -Ozzi in", within minutes as their excitement grew. I was right there when it happened. (As an aside, I bet this line would also run quite well in Cronulla.
The DSP did plenty of good solidarity work on ET over the years keeping the issue alive in the middle class milieu where these issues are comfortable. But the clapped out politics undermined their work when it came to the question of a homegrown imperialist takeover from the brutal semi-colonial occupation by indonesia.
That the ET were practically unable to defend themselves against a military backed rabble of provocateurs during the UN elections is of course history.
But how it was, that after years of amassing arms and of resolute armed struggle against the full might of the Indonesian STATE forces that they suddenly became invisible in the face of a ratbag militia is a question best left to those more versed in the internal politics of Falantil.
In relation to this thread, the question is what should have been done then and now that would have avoided the probability of junior-imperialist invasion.
Bouganvill, Solomons, ET and Iraq - nowhere has the result of Australian /NZ intervention been a positive one.
Clearly self defence is the best defence.
Armed self defence is the only weapon that pacific peoples have against the increasingly rapacious reach of the junior-imperialisms in the region.
Organisation along class lines is the only defence aganist the active manipulation of the population by the imperialists and their stooges.
As for "me again"s cheap shot re; genocide.
Perhaps the question should be put like this:
"How was it possible that an organisation(the DSP)involved in solidarity work in Bouganville where 10,000 people died at the hands of the PNG/ Australian backed "resistance" militias, did not forsee a similar slaughter during the changeover in ET?
How is it that they found themselves in a situation where, when the inevitable occured, thay had no responce other than to accede to an occupation.
Given the history of the Australian complicity in Bouganville - how did they ever immagine that Australia would intervene to defend the ET over their strategic interests?