As the West mobilises a 'peacekeeping' force to go in to East Timor, should socialists welcome this initiative, or is it merely imperialism in a velvet glove?
The terror campaign by the Indonesian army and its military in East Timor has been pushed back by a tremendous surge of working-class solidarity. In Australia, the Maritime Union banned all trade with Indonesia. Oil refinery workers refused to work with Indonesian oil. Construction workers stopped Indonesia-linked building projects. Transport unions took action against Garuda flights and air freight to Indonesia. Postal and telecom workers stopped services to Indonesian government and Garuda offices.
All this action was illegal under Australian law. Prime minister John Howard denounced it. Workplace Relations minister Peter Reith called on employers to take legal action against the unions, and the airline Qantas threatened to do just that. But so widespread was mass support for the East Timorese that ACTU president Jennie George, no daredevil, could confidently declare: “Any employer who seeks to penalise workers for participating in the campaign will be opposed by the whole union movement”. Trade unions were also central in organising the larger of the many street demonstrations in support of East Timor, ranging in size up to 25,000 in Melbourne on 10 September and 35,000 in the same city on 17 September.
That the Indonesian army and its militias have begun to withdraw is a great victory for the solidarity movement - though unfortunately, one won only after thousands, probably tens of thousands, of East Timorese had been massacred, and many more driven into West Timor, when they are still at the mercy of the Indonesian military. For all immediate political calculations, it is a victory far outweighing the adverse effects of the fact that Indonesian rule is due to be replaced by UN-Australian military rule in East Timor for an indefinite period. But relief at the victory should not drown sober calculation.
Thanks to the long and heroic struggle of the East Timorese, the big powers had already decided that Indonesian rule over East Timor is no longer a stable and viable long-term option. Meanwhile, “the East Timorese independence movement has quickly reassured Canberra that… independence will not threaten Australia's projected profits of up to $US2.2billion ($A3.5 billion), over 25 years, from its Timor Gap Treaty with Indonesia [of 1991, on the oilfields in the narrow seas between East Timor and Australia]. Leading pro-independence activist Mr Jose Ramos Horta said… "If East Timor becomes independent... Timor would have to become signatory without changing the content of the treaty.'' (The Age, 29 January 1999).
The referendum in East Timor which produced a 78.5% vote for independence on 30 August was first proposed by Australian prime minister John Howard. Indonesian president B J Habibie then organised the referendum on a quicker timetable than proposed by Howard, indicating that sections of Indonesian big business, too, reckoned that the costs and risks of continuing to try to hold East Timor by brute military force now outweighed the benefits. Other sections, and certainly a large part of the military top brass, evidently didn’t. The journalists John Aglionby, Jason Burke, Christopher Zinn, Eduardo Gonzales, and Ed Vulliamy have shown that “the atrocities in East Timor ha[d] been carefully conceived for nearly a year by the Indonesian army. The aim, quite simply, was to destroy a nation. Our investigation has also revealed that Western intelligence services were also aware of the army's plans - and warned the United Nations, many months ago… The coffee estates of Ermera, nearly 30 kilometres south of Dili, paint a fertile green swath through the barren landscape. They might not look like it, but the estates are one reason the East Timorese are dying in their thousands. They are among thousands of properties owned by the Indonesian military in East Timor”.
For the ruling classes, such issues are always matters of calculating profit and loss, just as they were when Australia, Britain and the USA supported Indonesian conquest of East Timor in 1975 and then supplied, trained and collaborated with the Indonesian military for 24 years after that. Yes, the UN had effectively given its approval to East Timorese independence by organising the referendum, but then the UN recognised Bosnia’s independence in 1992 and responded to Serbia’s invasion chiefly by enforcing an arms embargo against the Bosnian government! The UN has passed dozens of resolutions in support of Palestinian rights, and done no more than wring its hands when the Israeli state ignored them. The big powers’ profits from business with or in Indonesia are much more important to them than anyone’s human rights. Without the mass mobilisations, the big powers would have limited themselves to polite diplomatic protests.
The authentic voice of calculated ruling-class judgment can be heard in former Liberal leader John Hewson’s complaint: “Worst of all, we have basically let the ABC run our East Timor policy. The cry became ‘independence for East Timor’ at any cost…”. Or from former Australian Labor prime minister Paul Keating, complaining that protests over East Timor have jeopardised important Australian economic and strategic interests tied up with Indonesia. Or US State Department spokesperson Jaime Rubin in one of his daily briefings, "We have myriad interests in Indonesia, and what our job is is to try to balance those various interests." (New York Times, 9 September). Or, again, US national security adviser Sandy Berger: "Because we bombed in Kosovo doesn't mean we should bomb in Dili. Indonesia is the fourth-largest country in the world. You know, my daughter has a very messy apartment up in college, maybe I shouldn't intervene to have that cleaned up".
The Far East Economic Review (23 September) reports that: “While the IMF and the World Bank have both condemned the violence in East Timor, neither organization wants to withhold aid to achieve a purely political objective”. (Imposing poverty and misery on the Indonesian workers and peasants in order to secure the profits of international banks count with the IMF and the World Bank only as an “economic objective”, not political at all!) Yet the great mobilisations pushed the governments which control the IMF and the World Bank into having those institutions make warnings to Indonesia about cutting off the cash. They pushed John Howard into speaking out so much against the Indonesian terror that - much to Howard’s chagrin - the Indonesian state has cut its military ties with Australia and Australian business interests in Indonesia are under threat.
It is vital that as much as possible of the solidarity movement should now remain mobilised and vigilant. There is no definite schedule for the Indonesian army leaving East Timor. There is no agreement on disarming or withdrawing its militias. Nothing definite is agreed about getting supplies to the East Timorese who have fled to the mountains. Those who have fled or been force-marched to West Timor are still at risk of being massacred or used as hostages. UN troops are entering East Timor on the basis of recognising Indonesian authority over East Timor and working with the Indonesian military. Who knows what dirty deals they may do? Partition? Disarming the East Timorese? If the Indonesians do withdraw, East Timor is still not free. It comes under UN-Australian military rule. Australian capitalism, in particular, has large economic and strategic interests in the oilfields and the seaways lying in the narrow gap between East Timor and Australia. The Australian military presence will be used to secure those interests. Any assistance to the East Timorese is, in the calculations of those now in control, strictly incidental.
Unfortunately, some on the left, even the revolutionary left, have advocated political positions which can only dull vigilance and reinforce the tendency (which was bound to be strong anyway, whatever the left said) to rely on the UN-Australian troops and to think that the East Timor problem is “solved” by those troops going in.
Pro-troops socialists like the Democratic Socialist Party, Australia’s largest far-left group, have argued that they prefer working-class action, but that is too slow and unsure. We have to support troops because they are the only immediate answer.
DSP member Andy Giannotis wrote: “we're calling on the Australian state to stop the genocide in East Timor because nothing else will within the period of one week. That is how much time they have left (probably)”. Doug Lorimer, writing officially for the DSP, argued that “troops in” was “a clear and immediate practical answer to the question of what should be done to assist the East Timorese” (GLW, 15 September).
The “troops in” position was not “immediate” and “practical” at all, unless you think that the UN would set about waging altruistic war “immediately” and “practically” on receiving a request from pro-troops socialists. In the week between the start of the militia terror campaign (weekend 4-5 September) and Habibie’s declaration that he would accept UN troops (12 September), the call for “troops in” was a foolish and irresponsible diversion from the main task of working-class solidarity. It made no sense to imagine that the working class and the left were too weak to force Indonesia out, yet somehow strong enough to force the Australian capitalist state or the UN to wage an altruistic war. If we were not strong enough, we could not become stronger by "imagining" or "demanding" that we could add the UN or the Australian state to our forces, or get them to do the job in our stead. Such foolish imagining could only lessen our sense of urgency about working-class action, and thus make us weaker.
The Australian unions did organise tremendous solidarity action despite including “UN peacekeepers” among their demands. In other words, reformist unions organised strong class-struggle action despite reformist politics. Nothing new about that, fortunately -- and certainly no new reason for us to support reformist politics ourselves. It should also be said that the ACTU raised the “troops in” call in a far less harmful way than the DSP. The ACTU ended its list of demands on East Timor with: “Call for the formation of an international peacekeeping force to enter East Timor as soon as possible to assist in the restoration of peace and stability”. All its actual calls for action were aimed against Indonesian interests - not against the Australian government, as it would have to have been if the main focus was to get the Australian government to send troops. The ACTU position was effectively to campaign for Indonesian withdrawal from East Timor on the assumption that UN troops would then enter. It was not to advocate Australia go to war. The sharp end of the policy was against Indonesia, not for troops. The DSP called, effectively, for immediate war by Australia against Indonesia to save the East Timorese - but they too aimed their action against Indonesian interests rather than proposing industrial action to paralyse the Australian government unless it would immediately send troops. (Why? Because they did not, and could not, think through their position).
Moreover, the success of the industrial action was in forcing the Indonesians to back off. It was not in forcing Australia, or the UN, to send troops. Australia had no objection to sending troops so long as it was done with the agreement of the Indonesians. To the contrary. Those troops will help secure an area of considerable economic and strategic interest for Australian capitalism. That they are going is no victory. That the Indonesians are backing off is the real gain secured by the trade-union bans and the demonstrations.
The “troops in” position was, to repeat, foolish and irresponsible in immediate practical terms. What effect could it have on working-class solidarity action to argue that such action could not possibly make much difference, and really the only hope was for the UN to act? It could only demobilise that action, and encourage people instead to sit at home waiting and hoping for the UN. Fortunately it did not have much demobilising effect on the DSP and on the labour movement - but that testifies only to the ability of sound class instinct to make itself felt despite intellectual confusion. What effect will it have on our argument for continuing solidarity if socialists give political support to the UN-Australian troops, and give it to be understood that their role can be adequately summarised as “assisting the East Timorese”? It can only weaken it, by encouraging people to think there is no more need for them to go on the streets or take industrial action - the UN-Australian forces will sort things out.
The “troops in” argument also has devastating consequences in its broader logic for the labour movement. It says that working-class action is suitable and preferable for problems where there is no great urgency - no matters of life and death - but in serious emergencies we must look to the powers-that-be. Working-class politics are a luxury route, to be used when we have time and leisure, but when the going gets tough we must instead hope for capitalist state action. In other words, in any situation of serious turmoil - such as always accompanies revolution or counter-revolution - working-class politics are null and void. We are working-class revolutionaries - but only when no emergencies confront us. We have our programme - and the DSP would no doubt agree that UN-Australian troops for East Timor is not it - but that’s for quiet seas. When storms come we fall in behind someone else’s programme.
That the Indonesian troops and militias have been pushed into starting a withdrawal is a very good thing. That the East Timorese are so weak - by reason of their own lack of numbers and arms, and the weakness, despite the great recent mobilisations, of the world labour movement - that the Indonesians are replaced by UN-Australian military rule is a bad thing. The East Timorese prefer UN-Australian military rule, and understandably so. Against the Indonesians, we defend their right to invite in UN-Australian troops. We do not raise the demand “UN troops out”, with its implication that “Indonesian troops in” would be a preferable “anti-imperialist” alternative. But we do not support the UN-Australian troops either. We fight for a free East Timor. We fight to strengthen the forces of international workers’ solidarity so that the East Timorese have other options.
Leon Trotsky explained the principle very well in another context: “If somebody sets, or helps to set a house on fire and afterward saves five out of ten of the occupants of the house in order to convert them into his own semi-slaves, that is to be sure a lesser evil than to have burned the entire ten. But it is dubious that this firebug merits a medal for the rescue”. No medals for John Howard or Peter Cosgrove!
Socialists should not offer any support to the UN-Australian troops. We should obviously be glad if they save some lives, and they probably will. It will be a lesser evil for them to be there than the Indonesians. But when the Australian state, after 24 years of actively assisting the suppression of the East Timorese, sends troops with the promise (not yet delivered on) of helping the East Timorese, should socialists respond “yes, sir, present and correct!” to its calls for support for this action? No! we should reply. Hold on! You’ll have to do a lot more than that to win our support! Before we discuss your call for my support for your claimed act of benevolence, we insist on discussing a few other questions, like what you’ve been doing for the last 24 years! What is your record? What does it tell us about the nature of this Australian dependent-imperialist state? In the meantime, I don’t trust you!
The whole pro-troops case relies, again and again, on the sort of foolish, Pollyanna, “wouldn’t-it-be-nice-if”, thought that shapes the DSP’s scenario about UN troops whose ”task… must be [‘must’ by what compulsion?] to assist the East Timorese resistance”. The DSP’s call for troops, on 6 September, declared: “these troops must supervise the rapid withdrawal of all Indonesian military and police personnel from East Timor so as to enable the East Timorese to take full control of their nation's affairs”. To demand that a state like Australia sends troops to enable a small nation to take full control of its own affairs is just foolish. Australian troops will serve the interests of Australian capitalism. They will allow East Timorese independence only when and to the extent that they are assured that an East Timorese government will collaborate with and serve Australian economic and strategic interests. They are carrying out their current operation only because they know that the current East Timorese leadership (acting according to an understandable logic of realpolitik) is willing to offer them full cooperation and reconfirmation of the Timor Gap Treaty. They act not in order to assist the East Timorese to free themselves, but, rather, only because they know that the East Timorese do not feel strong enough to “take full control of their nation’s affairs”.
And - “supervise the withdrawal of Indonesian military personnel”. “Supervise!” That’s a nice word, evoking images of a friendly traffic policeman directing the army trucks. “Supervise the withdrawal!” What if the Indonesian army disobeyed the traffic directions? The DSP, though inexplicit about their call for war, were explicit that it was calling for immediate Australian troops to East Timor because the Indonesians were not willing to withdraw - in other words, that the Australian troops were to drive out the Indonesians.
In hard fact, the DSP were demanding that Australian go to war against Indonesia to save the East Timorese. How incoherent and muddled they were is illustrated by one telling fact. Their official statement on 6 September demanded: “that the Australian government insist that the United Nations authorise the immediate dispatch of Australian troops to East Timor”. The situation was so urgent that all the usual rules of socialist politics about relying on working-class action and having no confidence in capitalist states ceased to apply - but, by God, nothing should be done without obeying the rules of the United Nations!
If Australia were a workers’ state, and had the military strength to do it, it might be the right thing to propose war to save the East Timorese (though the UN would hardly approve!) Australia is a capitalist state, as predatory as other capitalist states. The (half-heartedly expressed) demand for it to go to war to save the East Timorese was foolish. Capitalist states go to war for vital class and strategic interests, and saving East Timorese lives does not count as one of those. Neither the UN, nor any capitalist state, has ever gone to war for altruistic reasons. It could only be illusion-breeding, self-deluding, and diversionary nonsense to "demand" that John Howard’s Australia and Bill Clinton’s UN break the pattern .
The DSP took refuge in the idea that they were somehow assured that this would be a small, nice, democratic war - not, for example, like the NATO war against Serbia. “Indonesia’s armed forces have little capacity to carry out a war against Australia… they are vastly outclassed in weaponry, organisation, and training… the Indonesian army, like most Third World armies, is little more than a glorified police force… This argument [that the war might be at all nasty] has some merit only if it is assumed the the Australian troops would act on their own… But if they went in to secure areas in which to help to organise the East Timorese people into armed self-defence units, they would quickly be able to create an allied force… superior to the Indonesian forces” (Green Left Weekly 15 September).
All this argument was based on the assumption that the Indonesians could not be forced to withdraw by working-class action, and therefore that war by a sizeable capitalist state was the only way to force them out and save the East Timorese. The assumption has been disproved - though too late to save the lives of tens of thousands of East Timorese.
If that assumption had been correct - if Indonesia’s military had been so dead set on holding East Timor that no working-class action could push them out - then the assumption about the Indonesian troops collapsing with hardly any fight would have been wrong. At the outside, the Indonesian troops would withdraw without a fight only if they perceived that the Australia (or the UN) were fully geared up to wage war right through to victory, whatever it took. For that benign scenario to work out, we would have to have the Australian state, or the UN, ready to throw all they had into war against Indonesia for purely altruistic reasons of saving the East Timorese.
Even if they were - and I would say flatly that hundreds of years of experience of how capitalist states act rules out the possibility - the DSP’s rather arrogant armchair-general assumptions about any Third World army collapsing with scarcely a shot fired when faced by Australia’s troops are dubious. The Indonesian army is very large. Over the years it has received much modern equipment and training - much of it from Australia! It would also have the “advantage” over the Australian army of being able to take large ground-troops casualties with less fear of paralysing domestic political consequences. (Study the experience of the long war between those two rather formidable “Third World” armies, Iran and Iraq).
It is still a possibility - remote, I hope - that Australia and the UN will stumble into war with Indonesia. Suppose, for example, that there is a coup in Jakarta led by a chauvinist faction in the military who then decide on war to restore their control in East Timor. Our attitude in that war should be similar to our attitude in the Kosova war - we would wish for the defeat of Jakarta (as of Milosevic in Kosova), but we would give no political support to the UN and Australian troops. Our efforts would be concentrated on the cause of self-determination for the East Timorese, independent both of Indonesia and Australia, as they were on the cause of freedom for the Kosovars. Comrades of the DSP, would you be waving the flag for the Australian troops? If you think you would be, you should know in advance that this war would be no more pleasant or humane than NATO’s war over Kosova. In Indonesia, too, the big-power forces would maximise the use of their air superiority. They would avoid ground battle as much as possible - even at the cost of permitting the Indonesian army to massacre more East Timorese, just as the NATO tactics allowed the Serbians to massacre more Kosovars - and focus on breaking the Indonesian army’s supply and communication lines. Whether they would bomb as far back along those lines as Jakarta, and how many Indonesian workers and peasants they would kill, would be simply a matter of military calculation. And your protests - “We thought we were supporting a democratic and altruistic war, not this!” - would be of no weight.
The idea that refusing support to UN-Australian troops is a matter of “theorising”, or finicky concern for academic political correctness, is the negation of all independent working-class politics. Socialist theory, worked-out political stances, Marxist programmes, then become assets which it is desirable to have in quiet, leisurely times - but to be jettisoned in favour of desperate appeals to the UN, or John Howard, or any other quarter-plausible component of established authority, as soon as anything serious happens. In fair weather, we are socialists; in stormy weather, petitioners of the powers-that-be.
The major forces and factions of the ruling class will always be more powerful than the working-class movement - until we can overthrow them. We can prepare the working class to do that only by consistently - in rough times as well as smooth - arguing for the working class to rely only on its own forces, to seek its own solutions, never to give in to the logic of established power. Sometimes this means explaining that terrible things are happening, and cannot be stopped, because the working class movement is too weak. We deduce not the comforting illusion that we had best support whatever quarter-solutions the established capitalist powers may offer to the problems, but the realistic conclusion that all our efforts, the whole of our lives, must be directed to strengthening working-class solidarity.
Trotsky put it this way, arguing against those many socialists who at the time looked to any half-plausible established authority - the Popular Fronts, “the democracies”, or the USSR - to deal with fascism and the descent of 1930s capitalism into barbarism. “To face reality squarely; not to seek the line of least resistance; to call things by their right names; to speak the truth to the masses, no matter how bitter it may be; not to fear obstacles; to be true in little things as in big ones; to base one's program on the logic of the class struggle; to be bold when the hour for action arrives - these are the rules of the Fourth International”. To face reality squarely, to tell the truth, no matter how bitter it may be - not to take refuge in self-consoling myths about the Australian state suddenly being transformed into a force for “defending the East Timorese”.
Trotsky expounded the same idea again in these words: "We are not a government party; we are the party of irreconcilable opposition.... Our tasks... we realize not through the medium of bourgeois governments... but exclusively through the education of the masses through agitation, through explaining to the workers what they should defend and what they should overthrow. Such a 'defence' cannot give immediate miraculous results. But we do not even pretend to be miracle workers. As things stand, we are a revolutionary minority. Our work must be directed so that the workers on whom we have influence should correctly appraise events, not permit themselves to be caught unawares, and prepare the general sentiment of their own class for the revolutionary solution of the tasks confronting us".
Trotsky is well aware that working-class action “cannot give immediate miraculous results”. And he is writing in a world where the problems on which he is seeking “results” generate horrors on a scale far greater than East Timor. In this particular passage, he had in mind the prospect of the Nazi state conquering the USSR: we know that its actual attempt to do so cost tens of millions of lives. But Trotsky does not capitulate. He does not say: since working-class action cannot produce results quickly enough, or strongly enough, we must look instead to some faction or another of established power. He argues for independent working-class politics.
Either our “theories” and our “correct political positions” are the only way out for humanity from war, exploitation, and ecological disaster - in which case they are of most value in emergencies, not in quiet times - or they are pointless sectarian fancies, in which case they are no use at all. If all we can do in a crisis is add our ten cents to whichever billion-dollar enterprise seems the immediate lesser evil, then how will we ever be more than ten cents’ worth? And why bother to keep a separate “fund” at all?
The idea that it is finicky purism, or even equivocation, to draw a difference between, on the one hand, not calling for the withdrawal of the troops and, on the other, positively supporting them, is also the negation of all working-class politics. Where two ruling-class projects are in play, very often we do not call for “down with” or “out with” one because that implies support for the other, which may be a greater evil. But to tell the working class to support the lesser-evil bourgeois project that we cannot immediately replace by a democratic or socialist solution is to cancel out independent working-class politics - to postpone such politics to the day when we’re strong enough to implement socialist solutions immediately. And that day will never come unless we can find the will to counterpose working-class policies against the bourgeois alternatives now, in emergencies, in rough times. We do not say “down with the European Union”, or “Britain out of the European Union”, because that implies support for re-raising national frontiers in Europe. But we give no political support to the Europe of the bankers and the bosses and the racist immigration laws of Schengen - and that is not just some detail of finicky purism! Such a stance is the only way of maintaining independent working-class politics, and of not having the workers’ movement reduced to the status of small change to be thrown in to help the funds of whichever billion-dollar project seems least evil.
The victory of the workers’ revolution in Russia in 1917 depended on Lenin’s political struggle, in his April Theses, to break the Bolsheviks from political support for the Provisional Government. Lenin also quickly contradicted some Bolsheviks who then proposed the slogan “Down with the Provisional Government!” In fact, what permitted the Bolsheviks to gain the majority in the Soviets and make the October Revolution was their struggle, in September 1917, on the side of the Provisional Government against Kornilov’s military conspiracy - and the fact that they conducted that struggle, as Lenin carefully and repeatedly explained, without giving political support to the Provisional Government. It was this supposed finicky purism, this concern for “theorising” and “a correct political position”, that made the revolution possible. Without it the working class is always the tail of one or another bourgeois faction in politics.
In an argument I had with Jim McIlroy of the DSP about the troops, he volunteered an analogy with the Russian army in Afghanistan in 1979-80. It had been right to support the Russians, he said, for the same reason that it was right to support the UN now - as the only force with the power, ready to hand, to deal with an urgent threat from reactionaries (Islamic fundamentalists in Afghanistan, Indonesian army in East Timor). Despite all the obvious differences, Jim is right that there is a common political method. You favour working-class action, but if that seems too weak or too slow you look to the powers-that-be instead. The DSP could pursue that method on a large scale before 1989-91 -- the USSR was not only an established power, but also, despite faults that the DSP recognised, a "workers' state" - and now can only do it piecemeal. They were wrong on Afghanistan, and they're wrong on UN troops now.
Footnote:
I’ve deliberately included nothing in this article about the follies of the ISO, Socialist Alternative, or the ultra-left “first denounce the UN” circles we have here in Brisbane. I could write another article about them, and indeed in some arguments with ISOers and DSPers I find myself much more in agreement with the spirit and instincts of the DSPers on this question than of the ISOers. That is all beside the point.
Postscript
A small addition - maybe uncontroversial - to my article on East Timor. The biggest mistake I think we've made is not to have paid sufficient attention to East Timor before the referendum. Janet wrote an article heavily focused against the idea of UN troops to supervise the referendum; I commented that wanting UN troops in was a reasonable response from the East Timorese feeling themselves in a position of weakness, and not to be denounced - but foolishly, stupidly, irresponsibly, I left it at that.
We should have been denouncing the big powers for organising a referendum without defence and security acceptable to the East Timorese. In practice that would have meant UN troops - but I hope I've written enough to explain that the "nuance" is vital between siding with the East Timorese (who, in their weakness, want UN-Australian troops rather than relying on their own strength) and ourselves positively supporting UN-Australian troops (instead of seeing our task as building up international workers' solidarity to remedy the weak position of the East Timorese).
Obviously part of the reason why we didn't was that the East Timorese themselves did not make much noise about it. I don't know why. Quite likely they thought that if they passed up this "offer" from the UN, then they'd never get another one, so they had to take the risk. We should not suppose that even Ramos ("Yes, I'll sign the Timor Gap Treaty! Yes, Australian capitalism, your billions are safe!") Horta is naive about the limits of the UN's "support" for East Timor.