Students deserve peace prize

Students deserve peace prize

By Olle Tornquist

OSLO, Norway: The crisis in East Timor and Indonesia has again
become acute. What went wrong? Is there any solution? What are
the forces at play and how can they be influenced?

Those of us who live in small countries must be able to act
through the United Nations. Its lack of alternative plans --
against the possibility of militia attacks -- was inconceivable.

As for the rest, everybody, including the independence
movement, agreed to brave the risks and seize the unique
opportunity that arose when President B.J. Habibie sought to
trade East Timor for international support.

So let us instead discuss the "truth of the day": that the UN
ought to have been able, without hindrance, to sanction armed
intervention when all hell broke lose, but that China especially,
and several other developing countries opposed the move.

That indeed can be said. But it was the United States which
approved Indonesia's occupation of East Timor, and Australia
which recognized its annexation. Both countries sponsored
Jakarta's special forces. Sweden and Norway, among others, gave
top priority to business dealings with Soeharto's Indonesia; and
it was the entire West which adopted the principle of
nonintervention in the area, even in the face of genocide (by
backing the Khmer Rouge regime).

East Timor certainly shows that international emergency
assistance must be a matter of course when people are being
terrorized and murdered, as surely as when they are starving and
dying. Yet the basic question is, will an intervention strengthen
the forces of democracy, which must be capable of assuming the
leadership?

Presuming that we do not propose making most countries in the
world into Western protectorates with UN soldiers in every bush,
I myself persist in the view that an armed intervention without
Jakarta's consent would have made it possible for the Indonesian
military and militias to transform their terror and murder into a
war of national self-defense. They would then have been able to
eliminate the independence movement and reintroduce autocratic
rule into Indonesia. In such a scenario, not even the brave
students would have been able to stand in their way.

Luckily however, the West was not able to start a war, and the
International Monetary Fund itself wanted to put the squeeze on
Jakarta (over the Bali bank scandal). So the democrats were able
to stand up to the military.

If help can now reach all those needing it, and Jose Alexandre
"Xanana" Gusmao is able to undertake his policy of
reconciliation, three main problems will remain. These are that
the militias have an escape hatch in the western half of Timor,
that about 150,000 refugees are stranded with them there, and
that all atrocities must be investigated and their perpetrators
judged.

Thus we are back in Indonesia, without which the problems
cannot be solved. Until about a week ago (Sept. 23 and Sept. 24),
the situation looked grim indeed. The military was fanning the
flames of extreme nationalism, and it had pushed through a law
enabling a constitutional coup d'etat should it and the President
take the view that people are protesting too much and threatening
national stability.

In the long run, it would have been easier for the military to
preserve its power -- either by entering into a conservative
alliance with Megawati Soekarnoputri (the strongest presidential
candidate), or by "saving the nation" from protests against
Habibie (should he be able to buy himself enough votes enough to
win the presidency).

So the line in diplomatic and business quarters (and among
scholars nourished by them) was that now was not the time to push
too hard, for everything might then lead to rack and ruin.

Fortunately however, the students intervened instead.
Collectively they should get the peace prize! Yet again it was
they, who along with a few reformist politicians, came to the
succor of Indonesia's dawning democracy.

And they did so by using the only method that really bites:
resolute popular actions. The military and its allies retired.
The respite is but a temporary one of course. But this is the way
it has to go.

For the powerful in Indonesia, real political democracy is as
dangerous as the loss of ownership prerogatives. So compromises
are more difficult than in Spain, Chile or South Africa. And
accordingly, heavy-duty pressure is needed. It would be a good
thing if the "international community" were finally to learn
this.

For this is not the first time. In the final analysis it was
not the economic crisis and negotiations that persuaded the elite
to dump Soeharto, but rather -- in the absence of a strong
democracy movement -- student demonstrations and riots.

Subsequently, the democracy movement was ignored again and the
students abandoned. No transitional government was set up and no
retreat by the military was undertaken. Finally, the kind of
elections that the West went on to support helped to create the
political vacuum and space for the military that paved the way
for the human catastrophe in East Timor and the renewed attacks
on democracy in Indonesia.

Basic problems -- such as protests in the provinces -- could
still not find an outlet in the open political system (in which
local parties are not even allowed). So such problems were
consigned to the military and to the parliament of the street.

And while the democracy movement was marginalized in the
process of liberal electoralism, the military and the old
conglomerates were granted continued political representation.

The elected politicians became dependent on the unelected 34
percent of the delegates, who are now to select a new president.

The worst thing is that the violence was committed by the
military or supported by it. East Timor has taught the entire
world how it works.

Violence became established state policy in the massacres of
1965 and 1966. The military and the militias acted the same way
then as now. Conflicts and antagonisms are consciously
exacerbated.

People become so afraid -- both of the military and of each
other (including those people who have reasons to take vengeance)
-- that the military has been able to make itself seem
indispensable, by virtue of its "protection against instability".
In East Timor however, the military lost control.

Indonesia calls to mind Germany just after World War II and
the Holocaust, and still more so to South Africa before it
settled its accounts with apartheid.

The truth cannot be repressed if reconciliation and a
reasonably functioning democracy is to be made possible. But no
Nelson Mandela is in sight, nor any ANC.

So now, when the democracy movement must be able to recreate
that part of Sukarno's and Mohammad Hatta's national project
which built on equality and freedom -- as opposed to autocracy
plus xenophobia -- what is needed is extra encouragement for such
a renewed and refined project.

What is not needed is a mixture of unilateral interventions
and concessions to the rulers, in combination with a blind
aversion to all kinds of nationalism.

The writer is a professor of Political Science and Development
Research at the University of Oslo. The above comment was first
published in the Swedish daily Svenska Dagbladet on Sept. 28 and
the Norwegian Ny Tid on Oct. 1.