-Caveat Lector-
>From www.ahram.org.eg/weekly/1999/448/in1.htm
<<Egyptian view of things>>
> The fate of nations
>
> By Gamal Nkrumah
>
> Throughout 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?
A<>E<>R
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