[Marxism] East Timor

[Louis Proyect <lnp3@xxxxxxxxx>]

http://readingthemaps.blogspot.com/2006/05/east-timor-on-brink-of-civil-war-whos.html

East Timor is on the brink of civil war, after a revolt by rank and file
soldiers and a series of bloody attacks on protesters by police.

On February the 8th nearly six hundred soldiers - a third of the army -
went on strike by walking out of their barracks. Most of the rebel soldiers
come from the Loromonu ethnic group in the West of the country. They have
complained of brutal treatment by commanders, poor pay, and poor living
conditions. They have also been bitterly critical of East Timor's police
force, accusing it of widespread human rights abuses and links with
pro-Indonesian militias.

On the 16th of March the government of Mari Alkatori sacked the rebels en
masse, but the protests did not end. On April the 28th the rebels marched
on the capital, determined to win reinstatement and have their grievances
heard by Alkatari and President Xanana Gusmao. The march was joined by
thousands of unemployed Dili youths shouting anti-government slogans. When
the march reached the offices of the Prime Minister in the centre of the
city police opened fire on it, killing six people and prompting the youths
to begin a riot that saw one hundred buildings burnt down or vandalised.
The rebel soldiers fled the city, pursued by police. The World Socialist
Website has recieved a report that one rebel was shot along with his two
sons on the outskirts of the city. Two female relatives of the slain men
were also reportedly murdered when they attempted to recover the bodies of
their loved ones. Twenty thousand civilians fled Dili in the wake of the
violence of April the 28th.

The rebels have regrouped and established a zone under their control in
East Timor's mountainous interior. They have been joined by sympathisers
carrying arms and by many members of East Timor's military police. On May
the 5th the rebels issued a declaration which threatened attacks on Dili
and other towns. On May the 9th a thousand of their supporters surrounded
the police station at Gleno, a town outside Dili. After stones were thrown
the polcie opened fire on the demonstation, killing one person and injuring
thirty.

The violence in East Timor has alarmed the governments of Australia and New
Zealand. John Howard and his Foreign Minister Alexander Downer have both
suggested that Australian troops may have to return to East Timor in large
numbers, and on the 5th of May New Zealand Foreign Minister Winston Peters
echoed their sentiments. Australia has already boosted the size of the
skeleton UN force in Dili from 90 to 200, in response to a request from
East Timorese Foreign Minister Jose Ramos-Horta.

The East Timorese government has characterised the rebel soldiers and their
supporters as 'terrorists' bent on 'undermining democracy', but the
country's opposition politicians tell another story. Angela Feitas, who
plans to run for President against Gusmao in the elections scheduled for
next year, has blamed the government for the crisis, and said that 'Right
now, it's worse [than it was] during the 1999 referendum [for independence]'.

The bloodshed and chaos in East Timor these past few weeks must have come
as a rude shock to many New Zealanders. Over the past few years politicians
and the media have turned East Timor into a sort of modern fairytale story.
According to this story, Australia and New Zealand liberated the
defenceless little country from Indonesian occupation in 1999 out of sheer
benevolence. Since 1999, East Timor has supposedly been an island of
democracy and peace, a positive example for the rest of the Third World.
The reality is that the current crisis in East Timor is the direct result
of 1999's 'humanitarian' intervention.

After wholeheartedly supporting Indonesia's genocidal occupation of East
Timor for nearly a quarter of a century, the US and its South Pacific
deputy sheriffs in Canberra and Wellington did a u turn near the end of
1999. By then it had become clear that Indonesia would be unable to retain
control of East Timor much longer. Decades of guerrilla warfare and the
weakening of the Indonesian state after the overthrow of the Suharto
dictatorship in 1997 had made East Timor impossible to govern from Jakarta.

The US and its allies had supported the invasion of 1975 because they were
worried about the emergence of an uncooperative government in East Timor.
Their concern had returned in 1999. The Timor Strait which separates East
Timor and Australia contains rich deposits of oil and gas, and in 1989
Australia had signed a deal with Indonesia that had allowed it to begin
exploiting these deposits. The Howard government did not want to see this
lucrative operation jeporadised by a nationalistic East Timorese
government. Australia and the US were also worried by the possibility that
an East Timorese government might encourage the secessionist war being
fought in West Papua, another territory Indonesia had acquired illegitimately.

But the US, Australia and New Zealand soon found that the leaders of
Fretelin, East Timor's main pro-independence movement, were more than ready
to listen to their concerns. In the 1970s, Fretelin icons like Gusmao and
Ramos-Horta had been anti-imperialists who espoused a mixture of radical
Catholicism and Marxism; by the end of the '90s, though, they had long
since become believers in free market capitalism and collaboration with the
US and its allies. Ramos-Horta had spent years travelling the world trying
to enlist Western support for the East Timorese cause, always emphasising
the 'reasonableness' and 'moderation' of Fretelin. (In recent years,
Foreign Minister Ramos-Horta has been an outspoken supporter of the US
invasion and occupation of Iraq.)

At the beginning of September 1999, Indonesian-backed militia launched
attacks on civilians across East Timor in the aftermath of a referendum on
independence. The militia were far weaker than the regular Indonesian army,
which had mostly been withdrawn from East Timor in the lead-up to the
referendum. Many militiamen lacked military training and used homemade
weapons. Fretelin's armed wing Falintil could easily have defeated these
amateur soldiers, but Gusmao and Ramos-Horta had ensured that Falintil
troops were barracked deep in the countryside, away from major population
centres. Falintil fighters who wanted to march on Dili and smash the
militia there were disarmed and disciplined on the orders of the Fretelin
leadership. Fretelin's strategy was to sacrifice East Timorese civilians to
the anti-independence militia, in order to generate international sympathy
and help push the US and Australia to organise an armed intervention.

In Australia and New Zealand, thousands of people took to the streets to
protest the slaughter taking place in East Timor. In Australia, trade
unions took industrial action against Indonesia's national airline and a
number of other businesses linked to the government in Jakarta. In
September 1999 Auckland was hosting the annual APEC summit of Asia and
Pacific leaders; a handful of Falintil politicians flew into the city to
lead demonstrations. In a backroom meeting at the APEC summit in downtown
Auckland, Bill Clinton, John Howard, and New Zealand Prime Minister Jenny
Shipley were already organising an armed intervention force that would
operate under a UN mandate.

The vast majority of those demonstrating in solidarity with East Timor
supported Fretelin's call for UN intervention in the country. Australia's
most popular left-wing paper, the Green Left Weekly, demanded that John
Howard organise a force to occupy the island; the trade unions of Australia
and New Zealand echoed this call. Only a few small Marxist groups opposed
the intervention and pointed out the strategy Fretelin leaders were employing.

Many East Timorese welcomed the troops that landed under the UN's banner in
October 1999. But the reality of the occupation soon set in. The mainly
Australian and New Zealand troops had come to ensure the submission of an
independent East Timor, and to safeguard Australia's interests in the Timor
Strait. Tens of millions of dollars worth of military material was poured
into East Timor, but relatively little humanitarian aid arrived. Many East
Timorese resented the arrogance of the new occupying force, which was not
subject to any local control.

In December 1999, UN troops and East Timorese police opened fire on a march
through Dili by unemployed workers, killing several people and sparking a
series of riots (the photo at the bottom of this post shows an Australian
soldier standing gaurd over a detainee in the aftermath of one of the
riots). Over the next few years Dili would see more riots, as the reality
of the new order the UN force had established became ever clearer. On
December the 4th 2002, for instance, two Dili students were killed after a
protest against police and UN brutality was fired on and turned into a
riot. By December 2002 it was clear to many East Timorese that their
country's formal independence masked domination by Australia and New
Zealand. Australia continued to exploit the oil and gas of the Timor
Strait, but paid the East Timorese government only $130 million in
royalties every year. In May 2005 Australian control of the Strait was
cemented by a one-sided deal which saw the East Timorese agreeing not to
stake territorial claims to previously-disputed areas of seabed for sixty
years.

With only a trickle of money coming from the Timor Strait, East Timor
remains very poor. The UN estimates that per capita income is $370 a year,
and falling. Unemployment stands at sixty percent. It is not surprising
that the extreme poverty caused by imperialist superexploitation has led to
widespread dissatisfaction. But even before the soldiers' strike, the East
Timorese government had been in the habit of responding to opposition with
threats and repression, not dialogue. Under the rule of Fretelin, the East
Timorese police force has become almost as feared as the Indonesian army of
occupation once was. A Human Rights Watch Report released in April accused
the police of torture, rape, and the murder of opponents of the government.

When we consider the recent history of East Timor, it is easy to see why
the soldiers' rebellion has attracted the support of many people outside
the military. The soldiers' complaints of poor pay, poor living conditions,
and police abuses are complaints that many East Timorese share. The big
military-civilian protest which was so brutally repressed on April the 28th
showed the level of popular anger with the regime of Gusmao and Alkatari.
That regime and its backers in Canberra and Wellington may yet try to crush
the rebellion by deploying thousands of Anzac troops across East Timor in a
re-run of 1999. The Australasian left must learn from the mistake it made
then, and refuse to support any new imperialist adventure in East Timor.

--

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