From: "Nathan Newman" <nathan.newman at yale.edu> Date: Sat, 18 Sep 1999 06:26:56 -0400
To avoid a bit of the beating the dead horse thing, I will try to be as unpolemical as possible in this post and hope for the same in the responses.
With East Timor, Kosovo and Kuwait, we have three key situations of a larger local power seeking to dominate a smaller region with aspirations of independence, followed by some sort of multilateral intervention with US involvement. Now, there are folks out there who have supported interventions in all three cases - although only a marginal number would identify as leftists. There are also folks who opposed all interventions, even sanctions, in any of these cases - a few stray pacificists and maybe Pat Buchanan.
Most self-identified leftists have opposed at least one of these interventions (most predominantly Iraq) and support some form of intervention against Indonesia over East Timor, if only economic sanctions against Indonesia (similar sanctions against Iraq being deemed forms of mass murder by many of those same leftists).
I frankly see large similarities in Kosovo and East Timor, where many of the leftists who condemned any NATO intervention as inherently unjust are denouncing FAILURE of the US and other Western countries to strongly intervene as a terrible thing. That some urge economic sanctions only goes so far as a difference, since economic sanctions against Iraq are denounced as imperialistic.
Now, of course there are many views and ways to make consistent stories out of these differing positions, but it would ease polemics if folks could admit that the distinctions are confusing and often complicated, so we could all be a little less quick to denounce as a betrayal either calls for intervention or a reluctance to support intervention in specific cases.
But in the name of focusing discussion, I made up the following table comparing some aspects where the interventions in question differ, with some hope that might explain some of the differences in reaction.
Note: "Local Power" means Iraq, Indonesia and/or the Serbian government respectively, "population" refers to population in Kuwait, East Timor, and/or Kosovo
KUWAIT EAST TIMOR KOSOVO Historical claim of distinct society Low Medium High
Contempory Desire of population for Independence * High High
Military Brutality of Local Power Medium Extreme Medium to High
(disputed)
Cultural Repression by Local Power ? High High
Ties of population to US activists None-Low High Low
Socialist tradition in Local Power High Low High
Self-interest of US in Intervention High Low Low-to-medium (disputed)
* Note that in Iraq, Kuwaiti CITIZENS had strong desire for independence, but many of the much larger category of residents such as Palestinians welcomed the invasion.
? Little time to see what kind of cultural repression Iraq might have imposed.
Kuwait has obvious failings as a sympathetic symbol of independence, from its exploitation of its internal foreign workers, its artificial history and role in promoting inequality of resources within the region, and the relatively low level of violence by Iraq when it conquered the country (despite the propaganda). With the naked self-interest of the US intervention, the general left revulsion against the Gulf War is pretty clear.
In some areas, on the other hand, Kosovo has a greater claim to independence, since the Kosovar Albanians have a long history as a distinct society, while the East Timorese like the Kuwaitis are more a product of artificial colonial divisions of the map than more historic divisions (although the high levels of Catholicism in East Timor give it a distinct cast from Muslim-dominated Indonesia). On the other hand, the extremity of Indonesian violence there gives Kosovo one of the strongest bases for claiming "irreconcilable differences" with a home country.
But I think it is also fair to highlight issues such as the "ties to US activists" as explaining some of the differences in attitudes towards the two areas. Given Chomsky's writings, the East Timorese figures of resistance are much more in left consciousness than folks like Rugova ever were, despite the fact that the Kosovar nonviolent resistance in the 90s has much that was admirable. The US and other left activists' sympathy for the socialist tradition of the Serb regime versus the distaste for the more capitalist Indonesian regime also play a role in this reaction, despite the fact that for the Timorese and Kosovars, the official ideology of the Local Power mattered little for the repressive police apparatus that really governed their lives.
I would be interested to hear more general comments on these distinctions and if there are other categories worth comparing the three interventions?
--Nathan Newman