Chris Burford wrote:
> This is not surprising, I suggest. Death counts in Kosovo seem to be much
> less than the worst feared, although they are at least in 4 figures ie
> between 1000 and 10,000.
Your lack of surprise and your assessment are a bit premature, I think, Chris. Perhaps you could read the article, short on details as it is, again. Noone has been allowed into the camps in West Timor that allegedly contain hundreds of thousands of East Timorese, where there have been many reports of deaths. Parts of the countryside are off limits to the UN "peacekeepers". There are many ways bodies could have been disposed of that would not yet be apparent--the article mentions dumping into the sea. The first thing the killers did was drive out everyone who could keep track of what was happening on any kind of systematic. We are left with fragmented accounts of locals who were themselves hiding the whole time to save themselves. So let's not reach any conclusions about anything that happened there just yet, no matter how tentaive.
Note to Yoshie: On Lou P.'s marxism list, you posted this same article below the words of a person who was saying he thought a serious massacre had occurred in ET. You posted it without saying a word, i.e., without even saying you thought it was a response to his point (which I can only infer you did). Is that what you think this article is, a rebuttal of some sort? If so, a rebuttal of what?
But the body count itself isn't what matters, is it? Here is what a Wash Post reporter named Keith Richburg, who has been in both ET and Rwanda, wrote in an article that appeared in my local paper today: "It is worse [than Rwanda] in terms of the killing. Not the actual numbers; in many ways, they do not matter. What matters is the systematic nature of the murders--priests, nuns, refugees sheltering in a church, and student leaders who defied the militia intimidation and tried to organize the villagers and educate them in how to vote."
They targeted the priests and nuns because they saw them as crucial social support to ET society. This was made explicitly part of the plan to destroy ET back in February. The point is, the object was to destroy ET as a functioning society and replace it with a docile colony to do the bidding of imperial capital. How much of a body count do you think they needed to accomplish that? Please tell me and then we can judge the severity of what has happened to ET.
> Is the reaction of "the world community" all nonsense, and moral panic?
> We badly need objective human rights abuse studies in Kosovo and in Timor
> to catalogue how many deaths there were so that the debate about
> intervening in the next crisis can be more objective. This is part of the
> inevitable development of an understanding of global governance, in which
> marxists and other progressive people should play a part.
An "objective" human rights abuse study? I'll settle for reasonably clear accounts of what happened. The massacre is the culmination of the genocide that has been going on in ET for 25 years, including the sterilization of ET women (see the latest issue of Z magazine, e.g.). But, see above; for marxist or any progressive analysis (in your terms) it's not about cataloguing the number of deaths. The value of that would seem to be limited to shocking those who have no idea what imperial capital is about. Not totally useless, of course, but of little real value without further connections being made to capitalist imperatives. In fact, emphasizing body counts unconnected to their meaning in this case for imperial capital, is likely to merely open the door to "humanitarian" interventions of considerably less merit than ET. Which I, as a supporter of intervention to prevent or limit the destruction in ET, nevertheless recognize as a continual danger.
RO