>Keep in mind that there is (and has been) much brutality in Peru, Columbia,
>Russia, etc. -- nearly everywhere. Nathan has no reason to limit his
>advocacy to only East Timor & Kosovo. Why, he should be arguing for a
>military intervention (be it unilateral, NATO, or U.N.) wherever and
>whenever brutality exists.
I doubt if Yoshie will change her mind fundamentally, but that does not mean reasoned polemic is pointless, so long as we try to move the arguments forward.
I would accept the argument here that there are numerous places in the world where minorities are oppressed by internal wars. There are far more than imperialist powers such as the US or Britain could police even if they wanted to. I accept Yoshie's argument (I think I am right she has made this) that the choice of which of the small number of internal wars the imperialist states intervene in, is decided above all by their interests.
There is also a more neutral analysis that says brutal though it may be, the best way of dealing with war is to let it burn out, without fuelling it. It is brutal but it is part of warfare that one side must be defeated and then peace is restored. In the Sudan is is arguable that apparently endless suffering has been promoted by charity from western Christian nations trickling through to the black areas of the South, instead of letting that area be completely subjugated by the arms of the muslim north.
It can be argued that in the case of Kosovo the Serbs have exercised hegemony over Yugoslavia for over a hundred years and have required the Albanian population in Kosovo to submit, or like their forefathers just to the east of Kosovo, to be expelled. In some ways therefore the recent war was very traditional. The Hurd line in the old British foreign office took that view over Bosnia, and merely had a watching brief to defend British interests.
[Similarly, dreadful though the treatment of Jews was in Nazi Germany there have been a thousand of years of pogroms against Jews in Christendom partly because the Jews refused to be completely assimilated, and it would have been better not to go to war, and merely to try to restrict the number of refugees flooding in to prevent racial hatred intensifying in a country like England. ]
In Indonesia and Timor now, it could be argued that the problem was all caused by Western meddling with concepts of bourgeois democratic elections. Clearly if Indonesia is to survive in a callous world, the peoples of the archipelago have to be united, if necessary by violence. The milita are Indonesian nationalists. Their terror is not mindless, but a display that the population must submit to the will of a unified state of 200 million. The people of East Timor had the option of defying them or of submitting. It would have been more peaceful if they had got the message earlier this year and voted merely for autonomy. But they were stirred up by western meddlers.
Objectively the militia represent a national, not very democratic, bourgeois interest, that is potentially opposed to US economic hegemonism.
So it is quite arguable from a number of points of view both apparently rational, and more overtly committed, to argue a blanket policy against intervention.
My reply would be
a) No country is an island in this global world,
b) the democratic right of nations to self-determination is even more important for building the unity of working people, than as a cause championed by neo-liberalism and imperialism against pre-monopoly capitalism.
c) the reasoned and more balanced interpretation of these contradictions is to be opposed to military interventions, and to be in favour of more all sided political and economic interventions. [Yoshie focussed her challenge on military interventions.] These should address the question of conflict directly, and use conflict management methods to try to damp down the sharpness of the contradictions. Further, that of the package must be the championing of local democratic *economic* solutions, that help people to build their lives again in security and interdependence. It should not be a recipe for the triumph of neo-liberalism over a population, whether grateful or cowed. This is where the left should be arguing for better interventions than the imperialist powers can or will.
Chris Burford
London