Build A Campaign to Get Australian Military And Cops Out of East Timor!
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The Many Faces of Australian Imperialism
The masses of East Timor have suffered hundreds of years of colonialism - starting with Portuguese domination from the 16th century, through the 1975 invasion by Indonesia to Australian imperialist subjugation today. Historically, the Australian ruling class' aims in East Timor mirror its policies in Indonesia. That is: 1) to stop the spread of pro-communist revolution into Australia's "backyard" and 2) to plunder a chunk of the country's wealth of resources. In 1975, as the leftist Fretilin forces gained the ascendancy in the East Timorese independence struggle against Portugal, the Australian rulers feared a "second Cuba on its own doorstep." In the same year, Canberra and Washington, and their local puppets, had been trounced on the battlefield by the Vietnamese communists. The Western imperialists desperately wanted to prevent an ally of the Peoples Republic of China and/or the USSR emerging elsewhere in South-East Asia. So, when the pro-Western Indonesian regime of President Suharto proposed to invade East Timor and crush Fretilin the U.S. rulers and the Whitlam Australian (ALP) government gave the green light. Ten years earlier it was the U.S. and Australian intelligence agencies that had helped Suharto to take power in Indonesia itself through a right-wing military coup and a massacre of Indonesian Communist Party supporters. Now Suharto was doing the job for Washington and Canberra in East Timor.

Subsequently, successive Australian governments helped to train the Indonesian military and to shield Jakarta diplomatically while the Suharto regime cruelly oppressed the people of East Timor ... and Indonesia itself. And Canberra and Jakarta did a deal to facilitate the looting by Australian mining giants of the massive oil and gas resources in the seabed around East Timor.

But by the late 1990s the military dictatorship in Indonesia was so challenged by student and worker unrest that the U.S. and Australian rulers knew that a regime with a more "democratic" facade would be needed to maintain capitalist domination - which includes Western-owned sweatshops and mines - in Indonesia. Washington and Canberra calculated that with Fretilin continuing to doggedly maintain its guerilla resistance, the crisis-wracked Indonesian regime would not be able to maintain "stability" in East Timor in the way it previously had. Menwhile, the Australian capitalists sniffed a chance to bite off a bigger share of the resource loot from East Timor through more direct intervention. So, in September 1999, John Howard sent the Australian military to take over East Timor under the guise of a UN peacekeeping operation. Canberra seized on the ongoing brutality of the Indonesian occupation and bloody violence by pro-Jakarta right-wing "militias" to "justify" the occupation. This had all the sincerity of Washington/London/Canberra "justifying" the invasion of Iraq partly on the grounds that they were "saving" the oppressed Kurdish people from Saddam Hussein - after having previously supported Saddam when he was killing Kurds. Far from "protecting human rights" in East Timor, the Australian and UN military forces violently attacked anti-colonial resistance, harassed local women and in general walked all over the Timorese people with utter racist contempt.

Canberra's aim was to use military might to smash into place a political regime and state apparatus in East Timor that would be subordinate to, and dependent on, the interests of the Australian ruling class. But Australia's rulers had an obstacle that they faced in this project. Any pro-Canberra regime that was established in Dili had to include Fretilin which, having led the independence struggles against Indonesia and Portugal, had the most authority amongst the Timorese masses. But while the multi-class, nationalist Fretilin party was not committed to the program of a workers revolution, many of its activists had beliefs in the party's sometimes Marxist rhetoric and in its avowed opposition to colonialism. How were these Fretilin ranks, having made such huge sacrifices to wage a pro-independence guerilla insurgency, now going to accept the replacement of Indonesian occupation with Australian colonialism? Well, months before the September 1999 Australian takeover and while Timor was still under Indonesian rule, a UN force that included 300 Australian cops and military advisers corralled Fretilin guerillas into camps and began disarming them. And it was not long after the September 1999 intervention that the UN occupation forces began turning against dissident elements in and around Fretilin who remained opposed to the now rebranded colonial order. Australian and New Zealand troops and police bashed, imprisoned and, in some cases, simply opened fire on these opponents of the new order.

Canberra calculated that while it would shape and in practice control the new Timorese police and bureaucracy, it would still have to accept that the new Dili government would, at first, be dominated by Fretilin. But while Fretilin stalwart Mari Alkatiri became prime minister, the pro-Western Xanana Gusmao was made president and the even more pro-Western Ramos Horta was the foreign minister. This government did, overall, indeed impose the interests of Australian capitalism upon the Timorese masses. Most strikingly, on East Timor's very "Independence Day" in May 2002 the new "sovereign" Dili government signed a "treaty" with Canberra that projected Australia grabbing the lion's share of the royalties from East Timor's biggest resource - the Greater Sunrise oil/gas field located in the Timor Sea.

But this was not enough for Australia's capitalist rulers. These white racist bully boys thought Alkatiri too cheeky for continuing to press Australia to allow East Timor to keep a greater share of the proceeds ... from Timor's own oil fields! Furthermore, Alkatiri and co. were not going fast enough in instituting neoliberal economic policies. So, Washington and Canberra began a destabilization campaign against the Fretilin government. In 2005 the Catholic Church in East Timor, aided by the U.S. government, organised right-wing demonstrations against the government demanding a stop to secular education. They denounced Alkatiri as a "communist" who was taking East Timor down the "Chinese model." Canberra was meanwhile working things up with right-wing elements that it had nurtured in the Timorese military. Having sown these seeds, the Australian rulers reaped the harvest in May 2006 when they seized on a violent split in the Timorese forces to again send fresh contingents of troops to occupy the country. The pretext was "restoring order." And having reimposed its direct physical power in East Timor, Australia engineered what was in effect a coup d'etat to depose of Prime Minister Alkatiri. He was replaced by Canberra's man, Ramos Horta, a supporter of the invasion of Iraq.

The Horta/Gusmao team was then confirmed in presidential and parliamentary elections held in East Timor this year. Of course, Australia's maneuvers were aided by the fact that Fretilin's time in government had eroded that party's support base. During that period, Fretilin became direct partners in the exploitation of the Timorese people by the Australian and other Western overlords. Nevertheless it took sham elections to defeat Fretilin. Just like the ones in Iraq where "voting" takes place under the gunpoint of an occupation, Australian troops intimidated Fretilin supporters by often stopping them on their way to election rallies or seizing their banners. During campaigning for the May 2007 presidential elections, the Australian military twice landed a helicopter and inserted heavily armed soldiers into the middle of Fretilin rallies in the central mountain city of Ainaro. Despite being specifically targeted like this, Fretilin won the most number of votes of any party in the June 30 parliamentary elections but fell well short of a majority. So Horta who had become president got Gusmao to cobble together a right-wing, pro-Canberra coalition government.

What Timorese people have described "as the new Australian government" has met with angry protests. And Fretilin youth have courageously defied continued victimization by Australian forces. In the four days after Gusmao's inauguration as Prime Minister, the ANZAC-led International Stabilisation Force fired more than 200 rounds of tear gas at protesters. On August 20, Australian troops caused outrage when they moved into an anti-government rally and ripped down two Fretilin flags and wiped their backsides with it. For many Timorese that flag symbolized the resistance to colonialism. The Australian military's arrogance finally prompted Fretlin leader Alkatiri to openly demand that the Aussie troops "had better go home because they are not neutral." But in his first official overseas trip, new Australian prime minister Kevin Rudd went to Dili to assure his Horta/Gusmao henchmen that Australian troops would remain in East Timor for "as long as it takes." Labor's Rudd is just as committed as Howard to crushing any resistance to the Australian ruling elite's setup in Timor.

For United-Front Protest Against Australian Colonialism in the Pacific!
If one needed proof as to the true motives behind Australia's 2006 East Timor coup, one did not have to wait long. Barely six months after the coup, Ramos Horta signed an agreement in Sydney that acquiesced to Australia's grab of a big part of the Greater Sunrise gas reserves in the Timor Sea. Although the resources are on East Timor's side of the midpoint in the seabed between Timor and Australia, the Sydney "Agreement" deliberately buries that fact by making East Timor put on hold for 50 years (by which time the oil/gas in the Timor Sea should run out!) the determination of the maritime boundary in the Timor Sea.

The rich corporate owners of Australian mining giants BHP and Woodside have already made hundreds and hundreds of millions from the plunder of East Timor's resources. But for the Australian working class this colonialism is a bad thing. Sure a small number of workers may get some short-term flow on but overall the Aussie bosses looting abroad only makes the greedy exploiters more emboldened to attack unions and workers rights in this country. The expansion of the state superstructure of Australian capitalism to the Asia-Pacific makes these structures stronger and therefore more able to enforce the unfair system at home - that is, the irrational system that means union-busting, higher prices and racism today and ultimately economic catastrophe and full-scale wars in the future.

But the current Labor Party leaders of the workers movement can't see this. Bending ever more to the powerful tycoons, they can see only the short-term economic interests of the relatively well-paid, skilled portion of the working class who wrongly imagine that they can continue to get a tolerable deal out of the current social system. The ALP hacks convince themselves that Australia's exploits in the Asia-Pacific are good for or at least not harmful to Australian workers' interests and then, like the Liberals, dismiss concerns by claiming that Australian overlordship promotes "democratic values" in the region. This is a short-sighted vision blinkered by "first-world" arrogance. Today, those in the workers movement who cannot see beyond this myopic vision are quickly getting poked in the eye. The present political order is allowing those on Australia's rich list to reap fabulous profits both at home and abroad but workers are not seeing a smidgen of it. The ALP governments now in office are not melding the interests of Australian labour and Australian capital simply because that is not possible. Instead, guess who these governments are actually serving? The same lot that were previously served by one notorious Johnny Howard! The Rudd/Gillard team have already shown that they are in no hurry to wind back Howard's union busting. Meanwhile, in NSW the Iemma ALP government has shown its intentions to ram through privatizations of ferries and the power industry that will mean job losses and cuts in workers conditions.

It is up to internationalist minded activists in the union movement to link up anger at anti-union laws, privatization and racist oppression at home with campaigning against the Aussie bosses' tyranny abroad. A crucial step to building workers solidarity with anti-colonial resistance in East Timor is to build protest actions here that can involve and motivate the most politically aware and respected union members and left activists. These will be united-front actions based on the demand for all Australian troops and cops to get out of East Timor. Such protests should seek to draw in all those in the workers movement who genuinely support this demand, including both those who opposed the Australian intervention from the start and those who only took this position recently.

Actions here in solidarity with those standing up to Australian imperialism in the Asia-Pacific will inspire such resistance abroad. In turn the Australian working class will be encouraged in its struggles against its own exploiters when it can see that those very same Aussie exploiters are meeting opposition to their deeds abroad. Anger at Australian colonialism in this region extends beyond East Timor. In Papua New Guinea there is widespread outrage at Canberra's demands for PNG to privatise both its public services and its land held by kinship groups. In the Solomon Islands many are sick to death of the Australian-led "Regional Assistance Mission" which consists of troop and police deployments as well as Canberra's takeover of that country's public service bureaucracy. In the Philippines a local indigenous community living in the mountainous ancestral land around Nueva Vizcaya stopped a gold and copper exploration project by Australian-owned Oxiana Philippines Inc in response to that company's indifference to the destruction of local agricultural livelihoods and the displacement of thousands of people by the project. The issue came to a head in late August when 1,000 indigenous protesters blocked trucks and physically stood up to local militias sent in by the Aussie corporation. Meanwhile, in the Philippines area of Bicol the Maoist New Peoples Army (NPA) insurgents have vowed to attack the depradations of a "poly-metallic" mining project run by majority Australian-owned Lafayette Mining. Australia has an SAS military contingent in the Philippines that under the guise of fighting "Islamic terrorism" is aimed at propping up the pro-US Arroyo government which is facing strong resistance from the Philippines toilers and leftists, including the likes of the tens of thousands-strong NPA, the armed-wing of the Communist Party of the Philippines. The left and workers movement in Australia should call for Australian troops and police to get out of East Timor, the Solomon Islands and the Philippines! Get out of Northern Territory black communities! Hands off PNG! For solidarity with the people of Iraq and Afghanistan who are standing up to the U.S./Australian occupiers!

East Timor and the Global Tensions Between Imperialism and Workers States
When the Australian ruling elite acts in East Timor as when they act anywhere else they think not only of the immediate profits they can grab but also about securing a political environment that will allow them to continue to exploit workers both at home and abroad in a "stable" way. A main concern for them in all of their foreign policy is to reverse the social revolutions that have ripped a few countries out of the grip of imperialism. In these countries (Cuba, China, Vietnam, North Korea and Laos), however far they may currently be from the socialist ideal, the rule of workers states restricts the ability of the world's big capitalists to "freely" exploit. And it not only restricts their ability to exploit in those particular countries but to some extent can also undermine their ability to exploit elsewhere in the world. So when a capitalist power hears that an area within its own sphere of exploitation is having some connection with one of those "evil" workers states, it reacts in the same way that a greedy boss does when he learns that his workforce is talking to the unions. The imperialists see red! And that is exactly what the Australian rulers saw when they heard that the former Alkatiri government was getting Cuban assistance to provide badly needed training for Timorese doctors. Indeed, that had former foreign minister Alexander Downer hopping mad.

Even more worrying for the Australian rulers was the fact that the biggest workers state, the Peoples Republic of China, had been assisting the ex-Fretilin government to develop East Timor's own oil refining capacity. Canberra saw this as a threat to the Aussie corporations' stranglehold over Timor's energy resources. China's state-owned socialistic steel companies may be holding up Australia's economy through its massive purchases of WA iron ore and Canberra may therefore currently be maintaining cordial trade relations with Beijing but, at bottom, Australia's rulers are hostile to Red China. And alongside their U.S. senior partners they are trying to undercut PRC relations with Pacific countries. They don't like it when the PRC grants aid to Pacific countries (for example by cancelling debts) and does not follow the practice of the capitalist powers whose token "aid" is always associated with patronizing demands that the "Third World" nation privatize public assets and adopt neoliberal economic policies. It is for this same reason that Britain and the U.S. are infuriated by Chinese assistance to African countries.

Overall, the Chinese state-owned oil companies that had been working with East Timor operate on a different principle to the likes of BHP, Woodside or Exxon-Mobil. Their prime motive is not to make huge profits for their corporate owners but mainly to provide energy supplies for Chinese industry and residents through stable, mutually beneficial trading arrangements. This flows from the nature of the ownership of this core industry in the PRC. PetroChina, for example, the company that had been assisting the development of an indigenous East Timorese oil/gas industry is at least 87% owned by the PRC state. In the context of a workers state (however deformed), this means that PetroChina is 87% owned collectively by ... 1.3 billion Chinese people! What that means in practice is that despite PetroChina now being the world's biggest company, it is forced to sell refined oil products within China at a loss because state prices of refined petroleum products are set radically lower than the world market crude oil price. Could you imagine one of the capitalist-owned oil giants like Exxon-Mobil or Shell wearing that!

Of course, the difference between the Western private, and the PRC state, oil giants is not so simple. For example, the 13% non-state investors in PetroChina, working with wanna-be capitalists within sections of its management and encouraged by 29 years of pro-market reforms by the Beijing government are pushing for the company to be able to sell its products in China at the market price. And they would also like the firm to conduct its overseas operations (including, naturally, in the likes of East Timor) in accordance with the "laws of the market," i.e. to grab as much profit as possible. But these pro-capitalist elements don't always get their own way. Recently, PetroChina and the other Chinese oil giant Sinopec were forced by Beijing, under pressure from the masses, to publicly commit to increase their output of low-priced (and loss-making) refined products. This battle over prices in the world's biggest country is being waged over a range of products from oil to egg noodles (which is why you should care about the price of eggs in China!) and is a manifestation of the overall struggle happening in that country between the existing socialist-type property and capitalist encroachment. The result of that struggle will have a profound effect on the fate of countries like East Timor. But the reverse is also true. When capitalist powers try to restrict the influence of the PRC and Cuba in countries like East Timor they are trying to isolate these workers states in order to strengthen within these states those internal tendencies that are willing to capitulate to the capitalist world order. Therefore, the international workers movement's need to oppose imperialist machinations in countries like East Timor is increasingly a question of not only opposing colonial injustice but also, indirectly, a matter of defending the anti-capitalist conquests (however deformed they may be) that have been won in Cuba, China etc.

The Australian Left and the East Timor Question
Events in nearby East Timor have been one in which the population in Australia has been engaged in for over three decades. The different tendencies across the Australian political spectrum historically took a wide range of positions on the East Timor question. But when an Australian and UN military takeover of East Timor became a short-term prospect in September 1999, virtually the entire political spectrum here from the Greens, to the trade union leaderships, to the ALP, to the conservatives and to far-right racist groups all joined together to campaign to send the Australian troops into East Timor. They united in huge demonstrations that screamed for "Australian/UN Peacekeepers In!" to supposedly "save East Timor." The demonstrations were greatly assisted by the propaganda of the mainstream media. The Murdoch, Packer and government-owned ABC and SBS media all sang the same tune: that only the Australian military could bring "human rights" to East Timor. Sadly, the various socialist and anarchist left groups actively built the pro-imperialist "Troops In Now" demonstrations.

For those who have become involved in left-wing activism in the last few years, it is hard to imagine how the groups that are today strongly opposing the U.S. and Australian occupation of Iraq could have once campaigned to actually send the Australian imperialist military into another country. After all, the notion that capitalist Australia's troops should occupy East Timor to "protect human rights" is fundamentally no different from the claims that the U.S. should occupy Iraq to "defend" the Kurds and protect "freedom." So why then did much of the left buy into, and feed into, Canberra's colonialist agenda in East Timor. At bottom it is because much of the left, to a degree, accept the "democratic" credentials that Australian capitalism gives itself. You see in 1999 those left groups did not necessarily think that the Australian state forces were perfect, but they did think that they were fundamentally "more democratic" than the Indonesian ones. However, after you know of the Australian military's role in the torture at Abu Ghraib, of ASIO's role in dragging people into Guantanamo Bay, of all the massacres of civilians by the colonial troops in Iraq and Afghanistan and of the brutality of the Australian forces in East Timor itself, it would be hard to argue that the Australian capitalist state machine is "more democratic" than any other state.

The belief that the militaries of the richer capitalist "democracies" can play a progressive role in the "Third World" ignores what capitalist dictatorships, on the one hand, and capitalist "democracies" on the other are based on. So let us here explore this issue in further detail. Now, the prevalence of dictatorships in "Third World" capitalist countries is a product of the terrible poverty of the masses there and the big gap between rich and poor. In such a situation, the local capitalist elites can only maintain themselves in power through the most extreme repression. But it is important to understand, in the first place, that the desperate economic conditions for the toilers in those "Third World" countries comes from the fact that the masses are exploited not only by the local ruling classes but by the capitalists from the "democratic" imperialist powers like the U.S., Australia and Japan. These "democratic" capitalists superexploit cheap labour in the "Third World" countries, manipulate world market prices, loot poor countries natural resources and then squeeze them with debt interest repayments. It is this imperialist exploitation by the "democratic" capitalist powers that is ultimately responsible for the dictatorial forms that capitalist rule takes in countries like Indonesia, Mexico and Pakistan. Indeed, notwithstanding hypocritical sermons about the need for democracy in Pakistan and Burma from the likes of George Bush, the Western "democracies" have often been the direct makers of murderous repression in the Third World. Just think of the endless series of right-wing coups that the CIA has organized in the Middle East (like in Iraq in the early 1960s) and in South America (as in Chile in 1973)! Or, equally, of Washington and Canberra's backing of the brutal Marcos and now Arroyo regimes in the Philippines.