Date: Wed, 15 Sep 1999 21:44:47 +1000 (EST)
From: billbartlett-AT-vision.net.au (Bill Bartlett)
Subject: Re: AUT: Timor


Montyneill-AT-aol.com wrote:

[...]
>I do not know a great deal of the background on this, so perhaps others can
>elucidate this if I am in error or leaving out critical points. It seems to
>me [and in part this presentation comes from a discussion the other day
>with some other folks in the Midnight Notes Collective, tho I don't want
>them responsible for any of my errors, etc] that the E Timorese leadership
>organized a situation that guaranteed an attempted massacre, while
>insisting on non-violence in response.

The Indonesian military is responsible for the massacres, you make it sound
as if the E Timorese leadership is responsible. Since their only
alternative course was to accede to annexation by Indonesia I find this to
be distinctly odd.

>They thus organized a situation in which they expected their success to be
>implemented either through the accession to the vote of the Indonesian
>military state or from the actions of the UN or other outside forces.

That's right. What other strategy was possible? The Indonesian army
outnumbers the entire adult population of E Timor, they could never prevail
militarily and appealing to the Indonesian people seems impractical.


>That is, they organized a defeat, if we believe calling on
>capitalist entities is a defeat, and they did not organize an alternative.

I don't understand this at all. It seems clear that they are in fact
heading towards inevitable success in achieving a politically independent
E. Timor. At enormous cost, but success all the same. Where do you get
defeat out of that?

[...]

>Can there be lessons from this that others can learn from? In face of these
>defeats and the constant divisions among the left as choices are made to
>support interventions of one sort or another, can we clarify these politics
>in a way that does not simply dismiss the struggles of those who end up
>requesting intervention but addresses the issues critically, in hopes of
>helping to (re)build anti-capitalism.

The E Timor crisis has nothing to do with anti-capitalism.

The E. Timorese people are struggling to throw off the yoke of semi-feudal
barbarians by achieving *political* independence.. The cost is ghastly, but
I don't see that their tactics could have been much different. The very
savagery of the reaction by the Indonesian military demonstrates more than
anything just how untenable it is for the people of E Timor to accept the
only other alternative - abject surrender and continued slavery.

Bill Bartlett
Bracknell tas





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