More stories from Feb-April 2000 newsletter

On this page - Different priorities in East Timor, and Communism and Stalinism in Indonesia

Different priorities in East Timor

By Tom Blake

According to former deputy Prime Minister Tim Fischer, East Timor now has a bright future. The main threat is from "elements of the East Timor population of an excessive political nature". From an East Timorese point of view, the pluses and minuses must look different as the Australian-led UN military intervention force hands over to a UN administration (led for now by Portugal) which is due to rule East Timor for the next two or three years. According to a reporter sympathetic to the UN presence (in Green Left Weekly): "Very few buildings were not damaged in the post-referendum, Jakarta-sponsored orgy of violence and looting. Most remain in ruins. Whole families are living in shelters that are no more than a few sheets of rusty and twisted corrugated iron, leaning on flimsy wooden frames. Some accommodation is just a few sheets of tarpaulin stretched over pieces of timber. "In and beyond Dili, a scattering of UN-stamped tarpaulins and tents are virtually the only tangible evidence of international aid. A few buildings have been carefully repaired or rebuilt, but these are occupied either by one of the many non-governmental organisations, the United Nations Transitional Authority (UNTAET) or by wealthy East Timorese. "The opulent conditions for the highly paid foreigners staying in the [offshore] Hotel Olympia stand in grotesque contrast with the destitution and squalor faced by most East Timorese". Food is still short in East Timor. According to a UN Security Council report in January, 80% of the population are "without visible means of support". Yet the UN forces' priority has been to rebuild state institutions (police, courts and so on) and business facilities (phone lines and so on) from the top down, rather than helping rebuild the conditions of everyday life for the people on whom any future East Timorese state and economy have to rest. The floating Hotel Olympia is UK-owned and Dubai-based. It charges $180 a day. The workers who do its catering, housekeeping and laundry had to stage a sit-in and a strike to win a wage rise from $5 to $9 a day and a cut in working hours from 12 each day to eight. A sizeable chunk of East Timor's population (110,000 people) are still trapped in Indonesian military-controlled refugee camps in West Timor. According to UN estimates, about half of those 110,000 want to return to East Timor, but are intimidated by Indonesian troops and militias. The militias have been increasingly active in border areas of East Timor, too. According to ABC news on 13 March, "In the past two weeks, there have been 14 attacks on the eastern side of a border that was supposed to be secure... [The militias] have killed twice and are equipped to do far more damage". East Timorese leader Xanana Gusmao has called on the UN to allow the East Timorese guerrilla movement Falintil to take part in patrolling the border with West Timor, but the UN line remains that Falintil must be disarmed. Only in one town, Aileu, have they been given UN approval to continue carrying arms. The experience of international overlordship in Bosnia since the Dayton deal of 1995 indicates that the project of reconstructing a state from above, by means of large bureaucracies and armed forces who live on a very different level from the people "for" whom they are "reconstructing democracy", contains grave contradictions. There is an inbuilt tendency for the international overlords to become increasingly dissatisfied and exasperated with the "excessive political" nature of the people, increasingly heavy-handed, and increasingly disinclined to believe that the place can ever be made safe for business without their continuing presence. The UN, Australia, Portugal, and the other states involved do have countervailing motives of financial cost to persuade them to limit their intervention. But the truest guarantee of a future for East Timor will be the rise of "excessive political elements" who can unite the workers and peasants round programs for restoring economic life and winning full control over their country's resources, and active support for those "elements" from labour movements internationally.

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Communism and Stalinism in Indonesia

Lynn Smith reviews a detailed analysis by Paul Hampton in the latest Workers Liberty magazine, no.61.

Last year direct action by workers and students toppled the Suharto dictatorship, swept Suharto’s hand picked successor Habibie from office and forced the state to hold the first free elections since 1964. Some may have wondered where this wave of militancy came from.

Paul Hampton’s article details the long history of struggle by Indonesia’s workers, peasants and students against Dutch colonialism, Japanese occupation and the Indonesian bourgeoisie. Indonesia had a socialist party before any other nation in Asia (the Indies Social Democratic Party, forerunner of the PKI, was founded by Henk Sneevliet in 1914). Outside of Russia and China, the PKI was the largest communist party in the world with a membership of over 3 million in 1964.

The article is also an indictment of the nationalist policies pursued by the PKI’s Stalinist leaders like Aidit which bound the working class hand and foot to independence leader Sukarno and the Indonesian bourgeoisie, preventing workers from acting independently.

At the PKI’s 1954 conference, Aidit defined Indonesia as a " semi-colonial, semi-feudal country" and pushed the line that "the main enemy of the Indonesian people from the viewpoint of its domination in various spheres, particularly in the economic sphere, is Dutch imperialism".

"From this" says Hampton, ‘it was deduced that the Indonesian revolution would have two stages: In the first, bourgeois democratic stage, the PKI would form a bloc of four classes : the working class, the peasantry, the petty bourgeoisie and the national bourgeoisie. Only after (Dutch) imperialism had been expelled, land reform undertaken, and national economic independence achieved would the second "socialist" stage be on the agenda’.

The PKI underestimated the strength of the bourgeois state apparatus after 1945. And did little to cement an alliance between the workers and the peasantry. As Mortimer (an independent author quoted by Hampton) put it…" the entire emphasis was on the self abnegating role of the workers and their political responsibilities toward other classes and the nation as a whole… It has seldom happened that a party as large as the PKI has held a class fraction "the national bourgeoisie" in such high esteem, placed so many hopes on it and accommodated to it, while knowing so little about it".

When Suharto and his fellow generals staged a coup in 1965, Aidit’s policies enabled them to execute (with minimal resistance) one of the bloodiest crimes of the 20th century: the murder of over a million PKI members, supporters and sympathisers.

Since the collapse of the Suharto dictatorship and the granting of independence to the people of East Timor in 1999, the struggles of workers, students and peasants have not died away, but escalated. The drive for independence in Aceh and West Irian has stepped up. There are demands that the generals be ousted from their guaranteed seats in parliament. And demands that they be tried for organising the slaughter by "militia" of thousands of East Timorese and for directing provocations against workers and students on the streets of Jakarta last year that lead to the murder of hundreds, the mass rape of Chinese women, widespread looting and arson.

To carry out these tasks workers, students and peasants will need to learn from the past and build a party that is not tied in any way to the likes of president Abdurrahman Wahid or his deputy Megawati Sukarnoputri or to overseas capitalists.

The magazine is available from Gould’s Bookshop, Newtown, Gleebooks, Glebe, and bookshops in other cities, price $5. Or read it on the internet at http://www.workersliberty.org/ wlmags/wl61/indonesi.htm .

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