jonivar
http://www.greenleft.org.au/current/376p14.htm
[Picture] `Left-wing' dogmatism and the East Timor crisis
By Doug Lorimer
The Democratic Socialist Party has called on supporters of
democracy in Australia to mobilise to demand that the UN and/or
the Australian government immediately send troops to East Timor to
help the East Timorese people resist and defeat the Indonesian
occupying army's genocidal campaign to physically extinguish the
East Timorese people's struggle for liberation from Indonesian
rule.
The DSP has raised this political demand because, firstly, it is a
clear and immediate practical answer to the question of what
should be done to assist the East Timorese.
Secondly, mass mobilisations around this demand will help sharpen
working-class opposition to the policy of the Australian ruling
class on East Timor, which is to maintain its alliance with the
Indonesian military.
We have also raised this demand because it indicates how the DSP
would solve the problem of stopping the Indonesian army's genocide
in East Timor if our party were in power.
[Picture] Some others on the left, however, have implicitly or
explicitly argued against this demand. For example, an
editorial in the September 10 issue of Socialist Worker,
fortnightly paper of the International Socialist Organisation,
acknowledges: "The people of East Timor are facing the most
desperate circumstances and there are mounting calls for Australia
or the UN to intervene.
"But the Australian government had been complicit in the
oppression of East Timor since Indonesia invaded in 1975."
The Socialist Worker editorial correctly observes that Prime
Minister John "Howard insists that the Indonesian military and the
Indonesian police `must do the job' when he knows that it is
precisely these forces that are behind the killing".
It goes on to point out: "The hypocrisy of Howard and the West has
outraged thousands upon thousands and fuelled the protests.
"The West bombed Iraq when Saddam Hussein invaded Kuwait in 1990
`because big countries can't invade small countries and get away
with it.' A massive bombing campaign was unleashed on Serbia in
the name of democracy.
"But just as with the Kurds, the West has turned it back on East
Timor."
[Picture] Why, then, is the ISO opposed to demanding that Howard
and the West cease their hypocrisy and militarily
intervene to stop the Indonesian army drowning in blood the
aspirations of the East Timorese?
Socialist Worker offers no explanation as to why it does not agree
with the demand for Australian troops to be sent to East Timor,
other than to remind its readers of the indisputable fact that all
Australian governments, including the Howard government, "have
been complicit in the oppression of East Timor since Indonesia
invaded in 1975".
Put demands on Howard
But at the present time, Howard claims to be against the present
terror campaign in East Timor and to support the agreement made by
Jakarta with the UN to grant East Timor independence if the
majority of East Timorese rejected autonomy in the August 30
referendum. Why, then, can't supporters of the East Timorese
nation's democratic right to self-determination demand that Howard
"put his money where his mouth is" and use Australian troops to
halt the terror campaign and help realise East Timor's freedom
from Indonesian rule?
The only explanation offered by the editorial is: "In any case,
Howard says there won't be a peace-keeping force without
Indonesia's permission and that has been ruled out at least until
the new Indonesian parliament meets which could be as late as
November".
In other words, Howard has stated he doesn't want to send
Australian troops without Jakarta's agreement, and since Jakarta
won't agree, opponents of Indonesia's genocide shouldn't bother
demanding that Howard break his alliance with the Indonesian
generals and act immediately to save the East Timorese from the
campaign being organised by these generals.
The Socialist Worker editorial, however, is not very consistent in
this capitulationist line of argument. Later it tells us:
"Without military support from Indonesia, the militias would
dissolve or be quickly disarmed.
"But the Australian government refuses to call on the Indonesian
government to withdraw or to deny them military aid."
The editorial does not use this fact to argue that there is no
point in demanding that the Australian government call on the
Indonesian government to withdraw its troops.
Instead, it correctly calls on the "movement here" to demand that
the government call for the immediate withdrawal of Indonesian
troops and end military ties with Indonesia. Why, then, can't the
East Timor solidarity movement demand that the Howard government
immediately send Australian troops to act directly to stop the
bloodbath?
The reason is that the ISO is opposed on principle to Australian
troops being sent to East Timor. But they know that openly saying
this and giving their reasons would completely isolate them in the
East Timor solidarity movement. Therefore, they hide behind an
expression of abject resignation to Howard's desire not to take
any action that would seriously threaten Australian imperialism's
alliance with the Indonesian generals.
The real argument
The ISO's real argument for its refusal to support the immediate
sending of Australian troops to East Timor was articulated in an
internet posting by David Camfield, a co-thinker of the ISO in
Canada. Camfield wrote:
"Socialists should not call on imperialist armed forces to
intervene (whether under the UN flag or not) in East Timor any
more than we did in Kosova. There was overwhelming support for
NATO intervention among the Kosovar Albanians.
"Although we supported them against the violence of the Serbian
army and paramilitaries, we argued against NATO or UN involvement
as imperialist intervention in the Balkans that wouldn't advance
peace, democracy and social justice in the region.
"The same should apply in the case of Australian and/or other UN
troops and East Timor."
The assumption behind this argument appears to be that, because
the Australian armed forces are imperialist armed forces, any
military intervention by them -- regardless of the concrete
circumstances and regardless of what policy objectives they are
asked to achieve -- would be "imperialist interference" that
"wouldn't advance peace, democracy and social justice".
Such an outlook is nothing more than "left-wing" dogmatism, which
refuses to take into account actual circumstances, instead simply
repeating old formulas laid down for different conditions.
The Marxist approach to foreign military interventions and wars
was explained by Lenin in his writings during World War I. In his
1916 article "A Caricature of Marxism and Imperialist Economism",
Lenin explained that Marxism "requires an historical analysis of
each war in order to determine whether or not that particular war
can be considered progressive, whether it serves the interests of
democracy and the proletariat and, in that sense, is legitimate,
just, etc."
Foreign military interventions and wars, Lenin explained, are the
continuation of a state's foreign policy by violent means.
"Consequently", Lenin argued, "we must examine the policy pursued
prior to the war, the policy that led to and brought about the
war. If it was an imperialist policy, i.e., one designed to
safeguard the interests of finance capital and rob and oppress
colonies and foreign countries, then the war stemming from that
policy is imperialist. If it was a national liberation policy,
i.e., one expressive of the mass movement against national
oppression, then the war stemming from that policy is a war of
national liberation."
What issues?
The NATO and Australian armed forces are certainly imperialist
armed forces; i.e., their primary purpose is to safeguard the
general interests of the different financial oligarchies that
dominate the economy and political life of each of the developed
capitalist countries. But that, in and of itself, does not provide
an answer to whether any particular military intervention or war
they carry out is the continuation of the imperialist policy of
oppressing other nations.
"For the Marxist", as Lenin explained, "the important thing is
what issues are at stake" in each war.
Thus Lenin himself, while analysing the first world war as an
imperialist war on the part of all of the major powers because
they were fighting over the redivision of colonies, did not
exclude the possibility of socialists supporting a war by
imperialist states that was aimed solely at the liberation of
another imperialist state from an invasion by a third imperialist
state.
In his 1915 pamphlet Socialism and War, for example, Lenin cited
the hypothetical example of a German to invasion of Belgium, in
which this invasion was not simply a subordinate part of a
struggle between the "great powers" over the division of colonies:
"Let us suppose that all states interested in the observance of
international treaties should declare war on Germany with the
demand that Belgium be liberated and indemnified. In that case,
the sympathies of socialists would, of course, be with Germany's
enemies."
The DSP opposed NATO's military intervention in the Balkans, i.e.,
its bombing campaign against Serbia and its military occupation of
Kosova, not because the NATO armies are imperialist armed forces,
but because their war against Serbia was a continuation of NATO's
policy of opposing the Kosova Albanians' democratic right to
national self-determination.
When the 90% of the inhabitants of Kosova voted in favour of
Kosova's independence from Serbia in a referendum in 1991, the
NATO powers ignored the wishes of the Kosova Albanians and
supported the Serbian state's repression of the independence
movement.
It was only when the Kosova Albanians launched an armed resistance
struggle against Serbian repression, i.e., in 1998, and the US
government lost confidence in the ability of the Serbian
occupation forces to crush the Kosova Liberation Army, that NATO
decided to intervene militarily under the cover of claiming to
"protect" the Kosova Albanians.
Belgrade's refusal to allow NATO armed forces into Kosova led to
the NATO bombing campaign against Serbia. The goal of this bombing
campaign was to force Serbia to agree to a NATO military
occupation of Kosova so that NATO could contain the KLA and block
the Kosova Albanians from achieving an independent state.
Australian capital's interests
What are the issues at stake in the present East Timor crisis? For
24 years, Australian governments have supported the Indonesian
military occupation of East Timor and opposed the East Timorese
nation's struggle for independence. They have done this because,
as Downer so bluntly put it recently, "in geopolitical terms"
(i.e., in terms of the interests of Australian finance capital)
they considered that an independent East Timor would be an
"inconvenience".
That is, they have considered that the exploitation of the working
people of the Indonesian archipelago by Australian finance capital
is best served by a political arrangement in which all of these
people, regardless of their wishes, are placed under the rule of a
single state power -- a power exercised by the Indonesian
generals.
That is why the Australian imperialist state supported the
Indonesian army's 1975 invasion of East Timor, and why it gave
legal recognition to Jakarta's annexation of East Timor in 1976.
However, the inability of the Indonesian army to extinguish
completely the struggle of the East Timorese for independence has
been a running political sore in Canberra's relations with
Jakarta. This is because the big majority of Australian working
people have sympathised with the East Timorese people's desire for
national self-determination.
Last December, Howard proposed to Indonesian President B.J.
Habibie a "solution" to this problem: Indonesia should agree to a
UN-organised referendum in which the East Timorese people would
vote on whether to remain under Jakarta's rule.
Howard evidently expected that Jakarta would be able to "persuade"
the East Timorese to vote for integration with Indonesia. Right up
to the August 30 ballot, the Howard government expressed its
opposition to a vote for independence.
In July of this year, the Indonesian military, which has no
intention of relinquishing its control over East Timor, drew up a
plan to "persuade" East Timorese voters to vote against
independence. It funded, organised and armed pro-integration
"militias" to coerce voters to reject independence.
If this didn't work, then the plan called for the launching a
genocidal scorched-earth campaign to destroy East Timor, deport
the majority of its people and resettle East Timor with people
from other parts of Indonesia. On September 4, this campaign was
put into effect.
This is an excruciating political problem for the Howard
government: the overwhelming majority of Australians believe that
the Australian government should act to ensure that Jakarta
respects the expressed will of the East Timorese for national
independence. But the Howard government does not want to take
measures that will undermine its collaborative alliance with the
Indonesian military.
To retain its political legitimacy in the eyes of Australian
working people, the Howard government has to present itself as a
defender of democracy in East Timor. At the same time, in serving
the interests of its real masters, the Australian financial
oligarchy, it must do nothing that would jeopardise the political
power of the Indonesian generals.
That is why Howard has to appease public opinion in Australia by
saying he is for Australian troops being sent into East Timor,
while at the same time protecting the political power of the
Indonesian army generals by insisting that this can happen only if
the Indonesian government (i.e., the Indonesian generals) agree to
let them in.
Demanding that Howard send Australian troops to East Timor to help
the East Timorese resistance defeat the genocidal campaign, far
from supporting the continuation of Australia's imperialist policy
toward East Timor, is the sharpest and most concrete way, in the
current conditions, of opposing this policy.
By contrast, by opposing this demand, the "left-wing" dogmatists,
despite their evidently sincere anti-imperialist intentions, are
in practice helping the Australian government in its efforts to
preserve its imperialist policy toward Indonesia and East Timor.
[Doug Lorimer is a member of the National Executive of the
Democratic Socialist Party.]
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