Yes, and we have to take political positions without all the information present, otherwise we are just philosophers analysing the world.
I agree there are plenty of possibilities of tens of thousands of more deaths. In Kosovo it was possible at one time to consider that all the young Albanian men were being exterminated.
However I was trying to make a comment about the use of terror being deliberately more alarming than what is always actually done. In both East Timor and in Kosovo the paramilitaries were trying to persuade hundreds of thousands to leave their homeland. They did so dramatically.
>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?
I think this is a fair question even though I note Yoshie's reply seems to say the item was merely interesting because it was different. One of my desires in this discussion of East Timor is to move beyond a situation of polarised sides just searching the news for items that support their interpretation of events versus the opposing one. That happened over Kosovo and there was little dialogue between sincere opponents.
I believe we may at times have to give our limited support to actions that appear to side with imperialism or with local reaction, but we should do so with our eyes open and ready to make deeper more democratic connections. That is why even now I think we should have some understanding of what is positive in the national bourgeois sentiment behind the Indonesian militias, even if their behaviour was fascist.
>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.
This is the one point at which I specifically disagree with your analysis. I do not think the object was to replace ET with a docile colony to do the bidding of imperial capital. The destruction of the Christian infrastructure is probably not different from what has happened in other communal conflicts in other islands of Indonesia under the pressure of the severe economic collapse.
I do not think this action can be analysed as directly in the service of imperialism even though imperialism will want a docile colony, and will patronise the East Timorese as much as NATO does the Albanians in Kosovo.
I can certainly see the analysis that imperialism backed and condoned the Indonesian seizure of East Timor in the early 70's. At that time the interests of the Indonesian national bourgeoisie were allied to imperialism, and imperialism saw little reason to make a principled stand on the matter. Now with the Asian financial crisis of 1998, a major contradiction has broken out between imperialism and the local national bourgeoisie. They have different lines on the economy, different lines on individual democratic rights, on devolved local democracy, and different lines on the unity of the Indonesian state. Although many of the militia may be peasants and behave like peasants the political line to which they are rallying is a sort of bourgeois Indonesian national muslim line. There are contradictions between it and imperialism.
I admit I cannot prove this but I would argue that a triangular analysis between imperialism, national bourgoisie, and the people is more robust than just an analysis of the people versus imperialism and its allies.
Chris Burford
London