Re: Future answer to Jose and Jim

[Carlos Eduardo Rebello <crebello@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx>]

> ----------------------------------------------------------------------
>
> Date: Sat, 2 Oct 1999 21:42:30 -0400
> From: "Jose G. Perez" <jgperez@xxxxxxxxxxxxxx>
> Subject: Re: Future answer to Jose and Jim.


>     I do not at all claim that Indonesia is an imperialist country; it is
> not, it is a semi-colonial country. But the Indonesian government and army
> are willing tools of imperialism -- precisely what you think WOULD happen to
> an independent East Timor is IN FACT how the Indonesian regime has
> functioned.

This is perhaps too schematical. The Indonesian Suharto regime has in
fact leaned on Imperialism to smother in blood all spontaneous mass
movement that had begun to sprout in Indonesia under Sukharno, and had
of course fear of E Timor acting as a magnet to other movemnts that
would react against its brutal and ruthless internal colonization
projects in the periphery of Indonesia.

But the fact is that *any* post-Suharto regime in Indonesia , however
progressive, will have need of a unified Indonesian economic space in
order to develop some coherent economic strategy, and the perspective of
a diminished and fragmentated Indonesian archipelago will have nothing
progressive about it, specially when the successor statelets are under
the *direct political tutelage* of some imperialist power. The fact is
that, by placing itself under the aegis of imperialism, the Indonesian
biurgeoisie has, *by the same token, developed interests of its own*,
related to the necessity of a coherent territorial basis for its project
of speedy industrialization. The brutality of the reaction against any
manace of territorial fragmentation appears to me to be linked to the
fact that the Indonesian bourgeoisie cannot react to the independence of
E Timor, Aceh, W New Guinea, etc. ,as the Bolsheviks reacted to the
independence of the Baltic States, Transcaucasia, or their loose
connection with Ukraine before 1920 - ie, the Inonesians cannot expect
to regain through ideology later what they lose now for lack of
political and military might.

 That means that the continued existence of a unified Indonesian
archipelago - later to contain, say, N. Borneo and Malaysia proper by
means of a federation - depends on the development of a real socialist
project in Indonesia. But the fact is that the startegy of the present
Indonesian regime expresses a real and actually existing *national*
interest of Indonesia, that can - and actually has - clashed with
imperialist interest. After all, the comtemporary Brazilian military
dictatorship (begun in 1964, a year before of Suharto's takeover) also
leaned on Imperialism early to clash with it later.

Carlos Rebello


 I repeat: what forces were behind the policy of military
> occupation and conquest of East Timor by Indonesia? Imperialism. The
> reactionary, genocidal nature of the war did not change because the
> Indonesian rulers and their imperialist masters decided in the last year or
> so that it was unwinnable and counterproductive.
>
> Jose
>
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