>The trouble is that everything is connected to everything else. There is no
>such thing as a policy of non-intervention. Doing nothing and supporting
>doing nothing, in the present situation in East Timor and Indonesia clearly
>has a political significance. All positions are tainted in some way or
>another.
For an example of this, here is a piece by Eamonn McCann from yesterday's Belfast Telegraph which describes some interesting links between Timor, Irleand, the UK and the USA.
K. Mickey
from the Belfast Telegraph
by Eamonn McCann
FOREIGN Secretary Robin Cook complained yesterday that the Indonesian army wasn't doing enough to curb the killing in East Timor.
If the context weren't so horrible, the proper response would be to roll on the carpet with laughter.
What's Cook going to do? Send them more guns?The forces behind the slaughter in East Timor were put in power by the West 30 years ago and have been sustained in power by the West ever since.
By "the West" we mean primarily the US, Australia and the UK.
Even now, the same forces' prospects of staying in power are dependent on Western goodwill. And, even as the people of East Timor flee pell-mell in terror from their kill-crazy tormentors, it's far from certain that Western goodwill has run out.
That is, it's far from certain the Western elite will calculate that its interests are better served by opposing the murderers of the East Timorese people than by continuing to support them.
In East Timor - as in Kuwait, Kosovo, Rwanda, Iraq, Palestine, Angola, Sierra Leone, where ever - self-interest is the West's overriding consideration in determining whether and how and on what side to intervene.
In the Cold War era, there was the pair of them in it, the Stalinist East and the free enterprise West, fighting their wars by proxy over the broken bodies of Third World peoples.
T N Suharto came to power in Indonesia in 1965 in a Western-backed military coup which overthrew the regime of Achmed Sukarno, a corrupt nationalist who was hated by the West for having thrown out Dutch colonialism and later for having founded the Non-Aligned Movement.
As many as 600,000 people were butchered in the Suharto coup. The rivers of Bali were choked with corpses. Without exception, Western governments either sang dumb or supported the slaughter.
When Suharto seized East Timor following the withdrawal of the Portuguese in 1975, the United Nations passed a resolution condemning the invasion and demanding immediate withdrawal.
This resolution had the same force and legal status as, for example, the 1990 resolution demanding Iraqi withdrawal from Kuwait. Technically, it carried greater weight than last year's UN call for Serbian forces to pull out of Kosovo.
What was the reaction of the Western democracies?The US ambassador at the United Nations in 1975 was Daniel Patrick Moynihan. The following year, Moynihan, with Ted Kennedy, Tip O'Neill and Governor Hugh Carey, formed the "Friends of Ireland" group (aka the "Four Horsemen"). They worked closely with John Hume to put Ireland on the White House agenda.
More recently, Moynihan was among the key figures whose efforts secured a US visa for Gerry Adams. He is a big suppporter of our peace process.
Neither Hume nor Adams has ever seemed embarrassed when reminded of their Friend's role in the on-going East Timor atrocity.
Moynihan has described with remarkable frankness how he lobbied, manoeuvred, brow-beat and threatened other delegations at the UN to ensure that the East Timor resolution wasn't acted on. Neither he nor his immediate boss, Henry Kissinger, were swayed in the slightest by the deaths of perhaps 200,000 East Timorese.
But Moynihan, when he's mentioned in our newspapers, is not projected as an exemplar of political ugliness.
Some of us have had the experience of denouncing Moynihan for his role in East Timor and then being denounced ourselves by nationalists in the audience for, er, endangering peace.
The point is that while the hypocrisy of the New Labour Government with regard to arms sales to the Jakarta regime is so blatant as to need little elaboration, the more important contradiction is far more deeply embedded in our politics.
The governments of the great powers pick and chose whom they'll support or accept support from, not according to any consistent principle or by reference to the interests of ordinary people anywhere, but by cold calculation of where their own interests and the interests of their bank-rollers lie.
They are by no means alone in taking this approach.
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