Foreign Correspondent
Inside Track On World News
By International Syndicated Columnist & Broadcaster
Eric Margolis <[EMAIL PROTECTED]>
www.foreigncorrespondent.com
DECLINE AND FALL OF THE JAVANESE EMPIRE
By
Eric Margolis 19 Sept 1999
NEW YORK - Indonesia, the world�s fourth largest nation, with 200 million
people and armed forces of 476,000, admitted last week it could no longer
keep order in strife-torn East Timor, a dismal half-island at the end of
nowhere whose feuding citizens have been killing one another and burning
the capital, Dili, to the ground.
Taking up the white man�s burden, as Rudyard Kipling would say, Australian
troops under the UN banner, backed by contingents from Portugal, France,
New Zealand, and Asia are being dispatched to restore order to the
600,000-800,000 benighted East Timorese. The Aussies, who just landed,
and their western mates are likely to discover a dangerous mess that is
more complicated than the simple drama being depicted by the world media
of good East Timorese versus the wicked Indonesian Army and its local
armed henchmen.
The brutality of Indonesia�s 24-year occupation of East Timor become an
international cause cel�bre primarily because its independence-seekers are
mostly Catholics, while Indonesia and anti-independence East Timorese are
Muslims. However, this simple Christian v. Muslim passion play is clouded
by the awkward facts that the recent Indonesian Army commander in East
Timor was Christian, that people of West Timor, some of whom are
Catholics, appear content under Indonesian rule, and that many orthodox
Muslims don�t even consider Indonesia, the world�s largest Muslim state,
to be truly Muslim at all.
The East Timor uprising also became a hot crusade of the New Left: East
Timor�s bearded marxist rebels in their black berets were depicted as
romantic, anti-imperialist heirs of the martyred communist saint, Che
Guevara, battling the army of capitalist, pro-western Indonesia. When
Timor was abandoned by Portugal in 1974, the US and Australia encouraged
Indonesia to invade East Timor lest it become the Cuba of East Asia.
By contrast, off in western Sumatra, 5,000 kms away at the other end of
Indonesia, the former Muslim sultanate of Aceh has been in revolt ever
since Indonesia gained independence from Dutch colonial rule in 1950. The
central government in Jakarta has been even more ruthless with Islamic
rebels in Aceh than with insurgent Catholics in Timor, but the outside
world totally ignored the Sumatran uprising. So, too, the decades of
struggle by Islamic rebels in the southern Philippines to secure an
independent state, in which an estimated 75,000 Muslims were killed in
Mindanao and Sulu Archipelago by troops of the former Marcos regime.
The UN and most nations now favor independence for East Timor. By
contrast, four predominantly Islamic states that are seeking independence
- Kashmir, Kosova, Chechnya, and Dagestan - are being told by the world
community they must remain part of India, Serbia and Russia, respectively,
while Christian East Timor is to be freed from Indonesian rule. The world
is certainly not a fair place. In fact, the British commander of the NATO
force in Kosova is now threatening the Albanian Kosova Liberation Army
with armed action unless it disbands.
Race, a point never raised by the media, plays an important role in the
East Timor mess. Many Catholic East Timorese are Melanesians, or Negritos,
as they are called locally, akin to the Negroid-Australian aborigines and
peoples of Papua New Guinea, or mixed-blood, Portugese mestizos. The
mainly Malay Indonesians look down on dark-skinned, flat-nosed
Melanesians, who are also found in the province of Irian-Jaya(Indonesian
New Guinea), as primitives. During the colonial era, the Dutch used
Amboinese, fierce Melanesian Christians from the South Moluccas, to
terrorize the Malay majority and crush rebellions with ferocity.
So far, so bad. But there�s worse to come. Tiny, dirt-poor East Timor is
of no value to anyone. But its departure from Indonesia could begin
unraveling of the huge nation of 17,508 islands that stretch over a
distance equal to that between Toronto and Vancouver, in which 30 major
languages and 250 dialects are spoken, there are 300 distinct ethnic
groups, including 4 million Chinese, and large minorities of Catholics,
Protestants, Hindus-concentrated in Bali, and animists.
Unseen by outsiders, Indonesia has long simmered with regional unrest and
rebellions. Besides Aceh, there have been secessionist movements of
varying intensity in the South Moluccas, formerly the Spice
Islands(supported by the CIA in the 1960�s); in remote, stone-age Irian
Jaya; in Kalimantan on the huge island of Borneo; on Sulawesi; and in the
Nusa Teggara archipelago, which includes Timor, Lombok, Sumbawa, and
Sumba.
These `out-islanders� and Sumatrans have long chaffed at what they call
`Javanese imperialism,� ie domination by the huge island of Java, home of
60% of Indonesia�s population, whose capital is Jakarta. Indonesia was
created from a patchwork of disparate islands by Dutch imperialists, just
as India was cobbled together from independent states by Great Britain.
All multi-island nations are inherently unstable and difficult to
harmonize: Indonesia particularly so because of its vast distances and
dizzying variety of inhabitants.
Strong leaders, like founding father Sukarno, or the recently deposed
Suharto, are need to hold Indonesia together. The current lame-duck
president, B.J. Habibie, considered a weak, unstable eccentric by many
Indonesians, appears to be fast losing power to the army through a
slow-motion coup. His potential successor, the hardly inspiring
opposition leader, Devi Sukarnoputri, may never assume power. Right now,
no one is in charge in either Dili or Jakarta. Indonesia is on
autopilot�and heading right for the ground. Western intervention in East
Timor could spark nationalist fury in always explosive Indonesia, or a
full-scale coup in Jakarta, or even begin the agonizing and bloody
disintegration of the Javanese Empire.
Copyright eric margolis 1999
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