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Al-Ahram Weekly 23 - 29 September 1999 Issue No. 448 
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Published in Cairo by AL-AHRAM established in 1875 |
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Al-Ahram Weekly 23 - 29 September 1999 Issue No. 448
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| Published in Cairo by AL-AHRAM established in 1875 |
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Egypt Region International Economy Opinion Culture Comment Focus Special Features Profile Travel Living Sports People Time Out Chronicles Cartoons Letters The fate of nations
By Gamal NkrumahThroughout modern history, and more than ever today, the cold-bloodedness of international diplomacy and its invariably tragic consequences weigh heavily upon those communities which seek to exercise their right to national self-determination from a position of weakness.
Indeed, it is very much in vogue these days for the aspiration of one part of an existing nation to independence to be used as a pretext by another nation, or group of nations, to intervene militarily. Once the precedent has been established, however, then for the powerful, and the unembarrassable, the world is very much their oyster.
Today, many peoples' dreams of national self-determination lies in ruins. But the lingering death of their just aspirations is of little or no concern to the powers that be. True, the West likes to make a big song and dance about preserving endangered cultures, and championing the causes of obscure ethnic groups. But behind this multi-cultural post-modern rhetoric, lies the politics of divide and rule. Those countries most susceptible to disintegration by such tactics are precisely those where nobody -- not even the elites and the establishment -- is in full control of the state. In such a situation, the way is open for mischief of the worst kind.
The West, as is well known, once deliberately cultivated despicable regimes such as Suharto's Indonesia for their anti-Communist credentials, only to abandon them outright once the end of the Cold War was in sight. Mobutu's Zaire, now the war-torn Democratic Republic of Congo, is another case in point.
"East Timor was not a big thing on our radar screen," former US Secretary of State Henry Kissinger confessed recently. "You have to understand these things in the context of the period. Vietnam had just collapsed. Nobody yet knew what effect the domino theory would have. Indonesia was [...] a key country in Southeast Asia. We were not looking for trouble with Indonesia."
International media commentators rarely publicise the fact that Indonesia's generals decided to invade East Timor less than 24 hours after Kissinger and former President Gerald Ford had visited Jakarta.
"The Indonesians told us that they were going to occupy the Portuguese colony of Timor," Kissinger remembered. "To us that didn't seem like a very significant event."
Washington may not have given the Indonesian army their marching orders, but it certainly turned a blind eye once it had given Jakarta the green light. Indeed, it went much further. Between 1995 and 1997, Britain exported some $100-million-worth of arms to Indonesia. Germany's share of this lucrative trade was $70 million, while America came first with $110-million-worth of deliveries.
Once he had fallen from grace -- that is, once he had outlived his usefulness -- Suharto found himself catapulted into Washington's notorious gallery of international pariahs. The dejected dictator reacted by ordering the most brutal suppression of the Timorese independence forces, culminating in the Dili massacre of November 1991 -- the now infamous slaughter at the Santa Cruz cemetery. By then, however, the West's hands were as bloody as the Indonesians.
"We are anticipating that there will be some disquiet at our arrival," the Australian commander of the UN-authorised force, Major-General Peter Cosgrove, told a press conference in the northern Australian city of Darwin, barely 400 kilometres from East Timor.
And well might the East Timorese feel disquiet at the approach of their saviours. The Australians, who are now leading the UN intervention forces, have always maintained that an independent East Timor would be politically unviable, as well as an economic liability, and would most probably finish up utterly dependent on Australian aid and financial bailouts. Australia, of course, was the first and only country that officially recognised Indonesia's annexation of East Timor. As part of the 7,500-strong international peacekeeping force, they now find themselves pitted against the 50,000-strong pro-Indonesian militia of Euroco Guterres. It is Guterres who has been leading the campaign of terror which followed the announcement on 4 September of the results of the UN-sponsored referendum, in which 78.5 per cent of the territory's inhabitants opted for independence.
Ominously, Gutteres warned the UN force that they were free to operate in the east of the island, but would not be tolerated in the fertile and mountainous western zones of East Timor close to the Indonesian border. These hills have long served as the strongholds of the militias. Thus, 13 districts have effectively been declared off limits to the International Force for East Timor (INTERFET). As the militias dig in to their positions, a disaster similar to those we have witnessed in Kosovo and Bosnia may well be in the making.
The West is today obsessed with the construction and reconstruction of national identities the world over -- feigning the excuse of consolidating the rule of law and democracy and upholding human rights, and ever eager to intervene and flex its muscles. Yet this passion is far from consistent: the Western powers sometimes speak out as if they were spoiling for a fight, and at other moments retreat into a scandalously vague and mumbled evasiveness.
For example, none of them would ever dare make any significant declaration to mark the annual Tibetan Democracy Day. Nor will any hand be raised to try and prevent Macau, a two-million-strong territory currently under Portuguese administration, from passing into Chinese hands later this year. But then Macau is not Timor. This former colony turned international gambling resort can boast a per capita gross domestic product of $15,600, a figure to rival that of Portugal itself.
The official State Department position on Timor dates from 1976. Readopted by every subsequent administration, it consists in the US "accepting Indonesia's incorporation of East Timor, without maintaining that a valid act of self-determination has taken place." As late as November 1996, the Clinton administration intended to sell nine F-16 fighter jets to Jakarta. There are no prizes for guessing what the fighter jets would have been used for.
So how is Tibet different from East Timor? The Buddhist kingdom's spiritual and temporal leader, the Dalai Lama, who fled Tibet during the Chinese invasion of 1950, is now well-known as a frequent visitor to Western capitals. As if to remind us that not only politicians, but capitalists too like to dabble in diplomacy, Australian media magnate Rupert Murdoch, newly married to a Chinese-American woman several decades his junior, recently described His Holiness as "a very political old monk shuffling around in Gucci shoes." But then, Murdoch's News Corps is poised to become the largest provider of satellite TV to China, through its Star TV subsidiary. The "dirty digger", as he is known to his friends, is quite a political old monk himself.
The Dalai Lama's presentation of a five-point peace plan to the US Congress in 1987, and the uprising by Tibetan monks demanding independence from China that followed, marked a political turning point for his nation. But because of China's standing in the international arena, and its likely role as a 21st-century economic powerhouse, few Western nations have dared to press the case of the Tibetans with any vigour, for fear of being ostracised.
Even the last surviving superpower is not immune to secessionist pressures. Last month, in response to continuous lobbying from minority politicians and human rights activists, US President Bill Clinton commuted the sentences of 16 members of the militant Puerto Rican independence movement, the Armed Forces of National Liberation (FALN). The convicted prisoners were between them implicated in over 100 bombings of political and military installations in Puerto Rico and the US, most of which took place over 15 years ago. Two of the prisoners declined Clinton's conditional clemency, but 14 accepted and were released after having served sentences far out of proportion to the nature of the crimes for which they were convicted. Seditious conspiracy, the possession of unregistered firearms or interstate transportation of a stolen vehicle were in those days deemed to merit 50 years in gaol. Doubtless they would be still, were the American flag at risk. One man was sentenced to 90 years, of which he has served nearly 25 already, while the others have served at least 14 years each. In return for this gesture of clemency, each of the former militants was required formally to renounce the use of violence.
Former US President Jimmy Carter, for his part, had already pardoned four Puerto Rican nationalist prisoners in 1977 and 1979, and he took the lead in urging his successor to release the 16 FALN prisoners. Other leaders calling for their release included retired South African Archbishop Desmond Tutu, Coretta Scott King, Cardinal John O'Connor of New York, and several Hispanic Democratic Congressmen and women from New York.
This gesture -- which is distinctly too little and too late -- at least serves to remind us that calls for national self-determination should not be viewed selectively. This truth particularly bears repeating as a time when the right of nation-states to protect their territorial integrity and sovereignty is being eroded ever more rapidly than before. At the same time, the narrow line separating military intervention to help a hapless people from military intervention to further the regional interests of certain world powers is increasingly blurred. Crossing the line between them is often dishonest, and always ends in tragedy. Yet what is most worrying, and what should be of concern to everyone, is not so much that the line is being crossed repeatedly, but that -- to judge by the pattern of voting in the United Nations General Assembly -- very few of the governments which are supposed to represent us are at all alarmed by this sinister development.
East Timorese leader Xanana Gusumao is now in Darwin, even as Australian-led troops move into East Timor. Gusumao, like the Dalai Lama, is a Nobel peace laureate. Why haven't the leaders of the Puerto Rican independence movement been given a Nobel prize? Why doesn't the United States occasionally invade itself, and stand up for the rights of its own "citizens"?
Joao Carrascalao, president of the National Council of Timorese Resistance (CNRT), told reporters that Gusumao fled Jakarta after threats were issued against him by Indonesian integrationists. "His plans were to leave in two or three days time and Darwin is only a temporary base," said Carrascalao. "He will be going from here, for sure, to Dili."
US Secretary of State Madeleine Albright recently met with Gusumao in Jakarta. No doubt this brave man will be beholden to her in the years to come. But how different things might have been had Kissinger met with Gusumao back in 1975. Which leads us, yet again, to the eternal question: Why should the history of three-quarters of humanity always be dictated by the interests of the other quarter?
