all the enemies in the world and all the world's enemy
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Diana Johnstone on what NATO and the U.S in particular has wrought and its
consequences, including comments on East Timor.
Jared: I just spoke to Ben Works.I wanted to interview you too. On East
Timor.
Diana: Oh oh oh!
Jared: That's a great beginning. Your opinion is important on this because
you raised the whole question of the new Crusade, the 'Humanitarian
Trigger.' (1) . And the question is, liberals are clamoring for some kind of
intervention in Timor. And I'm suspicious. How do you feel?
Diana: And I am too. That's why I said 'oh oh oh.' What a mess. I think that
one of the problems is precisely the 'humanitarian' intervention in Kosovo
that was supposed to be an example to the world to show that we had this New
World Order where from now on self-determination was going to be enforced by
the righteous missiles of the United States. It's going to have a backlash
effect. Countries around the world are going to smash their minorities
preemptively, to keep the U.S. from coming in. Indonesia is a very spread
out, multi-national society with lots of possibilities of separatist
movements.
I want to point out, the case of East Timor is completely different from
Kosovo. East Timor was never a part of Indonesia. It was invaded after the
Portuguese let it go. It was part of this de-colonization mess, the same way
the Southern Sahara is part of it, only then it was Spain; Spain let the
colony go in an irresponsible way that allowed Morocco to grab it. That led
to this long, still unresolved conflict. In Indonesia, Portugal let East
Timor go without a proper transition which allowed Indonesia to grab it but
that has never been recognized internationally. Indonesia has no historic or
legal right to be there, whereas Kosovo is a part of Serbia, which was
recognized; it's always been.
But the problem remains. There are a lot of countries in the world with
minorities that are very alarmed by this new American policy. Governments
are going to smash their minorities to avoid the sort of situation where
everybody will be clamoring for independence and self-determination with the
idea that the United States will help them.
That doesn't answer the question what to do now. I don't really know. You've
got these bands in there who are doing what we accused the Serbs of doing,
only they weren't. The Indonesian Military has a long record of that -
Jared: Starting with murdering the Communists and the ethnic Chinese - vast
numbers -
Diana: I think probably the largest slaughter since WWII. An unbelievably
huge massacre plus people whom they didn't massacre they put in prison
forever. So they totally wiped out the Communists, the left in Indonesia;
it's been a dictatorship ever since, 'our ' kind of dictatorship, etc. Now
it's falling apart.
And probably the Army, which has been the authority holding it together, is
afraid that the United States, having supported them all this time, now that
they are in economic difficulty, political difficulty, isn't going to
support them anymore and might support a whole lot of separatist movements
since that seems to be the trend. All of Asia, you see, except the country
we like to quote, which is Singapore, because that's our great ally out
there - all of Asia has been quite appalled by the NATO aggression in Kosovo
and fears that something like this is in store for all of them. Because
everybody has got minorities somewhere that can be supported as a pretext
for going in, you see. Now I don't think that's actually the case in Timor.
I think it's somewhat different. However, the danger of announcing these
great principles that are in fact not great principles at all but simply a
pretext to go into one place which is strategically interesting namely the
Balkans - that's the only place the United States wanted to go into right
now, I mean later they might want to go into the Ukraine, Azerbaijan -
they're interested in places that have oil reserves and so on - but this
issue has nothing to do with great principles but of course they call on
these great principles when they want to occupy a particular territory as
they wanted to occupy Kosovo and set up NATO bases there. They don’t want to
set up NATO bases right now in East Timor, but they might later in someplace
else around there, Sumatra or someplace else. I think in fact, with this
Kosovo action the United States has initiated a long series of bloody wars.
On the one hand encouraging minorities to think they can get some kind of
self determination and on the other encouraging the states who don’t want
that to massacre the people who might ask for self-determination.
Jared: The Portuguese seem very anxious to intervene directly.
Diana: Well of course. East Timor was let go when they had this
anti-colonialist revolution in Portugal, that's what brought it about.
Because the military was tired of fighting colonial wars and made the
revolution in Portugal to get rid of the Salazar dictatorship. It was
soldiers who'd been sent to fight in colonies who became sympathetic with
the revolutionaries who made that revolution. So they let the colonies go
but they were being sabotaged all along the way, of course. In Africa it's
notorious because all of the right wing of South Africa, intelligence
services of all kinds backed UNITA in order to wreck Angola, they invented
UNITA. East Timor was too far away to be terribly interesting to anybody.
But now times have changed in Portugal. It probably could use the influence
again because we no longer have the left wing regime that freed the
colonies. You know I hesitate to speak too much on this because the fact is
I'm not an expert on East Timor.
Jared: But your perspective is quite interesting.
Diana: This is a particularly delicate one because everyone has been asking
for this election. Of course one thing this should point out is that
elections are being regarded as some sort of magical ritual that are going
to solve problems stemming from the relationship of forces in various
countries, and they don't. I'm sorry to point that out. They sent in
observers but the observers afterwards are being driven out and killed.
There is an awful lot of - I don't want to insult anybody, but -
Jared:. Insult them. Please.
Diana: - naivete. What did Ben Works have to say?
Jared: He said the United States had mishandled the situation. He said
people who should have had not talked to the military about controlling the
situation if there was an election. He said President Habibe was very much
weakened. He said the military is afraid that the U.S. or the West has
designs on the area, wants to break it up into little bite-sized pieces -
Diana: I do want to repeat that the case of East TImor is different from
others because of the fact that this was not a part of Indonesia. But one
thing that is perfectly clear is that the style of our State Department with
Mrs. Albright there is anything but diplomatic. This style of the United
States going around lecturing people, telling them what to do, threatening
them, is absolutely the opposite of the kind of diplomacy that is needed in
almost any difficult situation.
Jared: Yeah. About a year ago, Gore wrecked the Asian economic conference.
He disrupted dinner and walked out after calling for street demonstrations
in Malaysia to overthrow the Prime Minister because he didn't like the fact
that they had locked out Western financial -
Diana: That's become their whole style. This may have something to do with
the media. This 'we've gotta be tough' style of the United States throwing
its weight around in a very moralistic way. I mean this is going to make us
all the enemies in the world and all the world's enemy; and rightly so,
because anywhere, and particularly in Asia, if you are going to be helpful
to any kind of conflict you have to understand the points of view of the
different parties and not simply view them as people who can be bribed by a
carrot or beaten with a stick -
Jared: You're right. People have national sensibilities.
Diana: A complete absence of diplomacy. And you've got this chorus of
moralistic columnists, always egging them on: the US has got to act tough,
it's got to act moral. And if anybody attempts subtlety they'll be lynched
in the media. They would feel that would be Munich or something. You have
all of these little slogans you know.
You know, there's a timing in all this. Indonesia is suffering from a
terrible economic meltdown. One of the NY Times columnists said happily:
"Well that's good for them. They didn't have the right kind of capitalism so
this will show them." So you've got millions of Indonesians with no jobs, no
money, nothing. Actually a lot of Indonesia is split over this. There's been
an inconclusive election. The country is in a traumatic situation. The
prosperity has collapsed. The timing is terrible. The timing for East Timor
comes right after the economic collapse in Indonesia and then the Kosovo
thing. And all of that is designed to cause very bad psychological
reactions. I am a bit uncomfortable talking about this, because I am not an
expert on East Timor and Indonesia. When I talk about Yugoslavia I know a
lot, and I may be missing some important points in this case, but one thing
does seem to me clear: this is exactly a case where you really needed
diplomacy, diplomacy, diplomacy. Tact. But it does appear the US government
is incapable of that. And then on top of that you have the IMF which always
seems to make matters worse.
Jared: The IMF makes impoverishment the condition for lending money.
Diana: As the Bulgarian lady's letter (2) said, they take away the little
things that people have, the right to ride the trains at reduced fare and so
on. I think with this sort of policy you're going to get lots of insanity.
And I'm sure you have massacres going on and you have terrible things going
on but you see the problem with this Humanitarian Left is that they've
forgotten all these things that what used to be the left knew - that you
have to have a structure of society which will create conditions more or
less amenable to civilization. We are breaking all that down so that you are
going to have everybody massacring everybody. Because of the fact that
they're starving or they're confused or they're going crazy. We are really
setting up that kind of a situation in many places. We are destroying
people's economies, we're destroying their culture, we're destroying
everything And then afterwards they go berserk and kill each other. And then
we say, "Oh my goodness, how terrible. Should we perhaps send in our armed
forces and kill some more of them?"
>From http://www.emperors-clothes.com
Macdonald
***************************
How many times have I wondered if it really possible to forge links with a
mass of people when one has never had strong feelings for anyone, not even
one's own parents; if it is possible to have a collectivity when one has not
been deeply loved oneself by individual human creatures. Hasn't this had
some effect on my life as a militant- has it not tended to make me sterile
and reduce my quality as a revolutionary by making everything a matter of
pure intellect, of pure mathematical calculation?
---Antonio Gramsci, 1926.
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