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.