G'day again,
Some idle speculation I sent to Pen-l - for what it's worth:
>What i don't understand is when the Indonesian state and the military as well
>as all the members of the security council decided to have the referendum,
>what were they thinking? They simply couldn't be stupid enough not to know
>what >the results would be. To me that very decision suggests that both
>the world
>and the Indonesian powers that be decided that it was no longer worth
>>maintaining the occupation of East Timor. It would have been expected
>that the >militias would create some violence given that they live in East
>Timor and >would be losing all their privileges, and may get punished for
>their crimes as >well. What is surprising is that how come there was no
>planning on the part of >the UN security council as well as the Indonesian
>state to deal with the
>inevitable. I really don't think that the Indonesian state and the
>military are >stupid enough to think that they could hold on to East Timor
>now. So i find the >wholepolitics quite baffling.
A speculative answer to the very real weirdness of all this:
1) Habibie did want rid of East Timor - for both economic and foreign
policy reasons.
2) Habibie gave the referendum the go-ahead in May.
3) Then comes the Indonesian election - it's everything the ideal-type
Indonesian general would hate:
- inefficiently inconclusive (as a member of the Magalang generation, his
technocratic instrumentalism is exceeded only by his 'Indonesianness');
- a contribution to the sorts of social cleavages he sees himself as being
there to guard against (one of these is an empirical manifestation of
religious differences - just like the one highlighted in East Timor, where
a Catholic enclave would split from a Muslem West Timor/Indonesia);
- a threat to his role and status as a salient guide in the entrenched
'guided democracy' regime (the Indonesian military has long been a beast
tuned to 'internal security' rather than threats from outside);
- Megawati is (a) a woman (a problem with some Muslems), (b) daughter of
Sukarno (a problem with the right of the 'New Order'), (c) apparently a
liberal democrat (a problem with the 'New Order' advocates of guided
nation-building); Wahid and Raimsy are identified as Muslems above all
things - dangerous in a nation with 20 million non-Muslems; Habibie has
never been a military man, has never enjoyed genuine trust within the
military, is implicated in scandal-mongering gossip;
- Golkar, the civilian wing of the Indonesian military and THE
one-party-state party has lost public respect (well, this has long been the
case, but the disillusionment used to be difficult to express) as a
consequence of Suharto's excesses (many of which had not been known about)
and little election glitches - like when 110% of the Sulawesi electorate
turned up to vote Golkar;
- Aachi, Ambon, West Irian, and places we've not heard of in the west have
been kicking up an unprecedented seccessionist stink, requiring a firmer
'guiding' hand than Habibie seems likely to extend;
- the '97-'98 crash has shown just how vulnerable to the slings and arrows
of core-finance Indonesia has become;
- the ranks are grumbling, and even here provincial differences are
becoming apparent.
4) It's too late to stop the referendum, so it's time to fire up the
militias so thoughtfully instituted and armed by Suharto's now-disgraced
son-in-law. That affords the required arms-length association and
guarantees the sort of crisis that's gonna require explicit military
occupation, martial law, big-time profile for said general (at possible
rivals' expense) and then a chance to do efficiently what (a) the militias
could not be relied upon to do efficiently, and (b) what the military has
been very good at for decades - deporting populations to populate or
depopulate according to the 'guides'' plans.
5) The job done (inculding loud-mouthed militia members going missing and
lots of bodies burned/buried/feeding the fish), it's time to smell of roses
and allow THE ally to look all humanitarian and effective. The UN is
allowed in to put out the fires and wonder where everyone's gone. The
media loses interest. And then get 'round to fixing the presidential
election (either enter it, directly or indirectly - or just chuck in a
hefty spanner to throw the whole process out).
6) Now for those ungrateful bastards in Aachi, Ambon, West Iria et al ...
Does that wash?
Cheers,
Rob.
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