Max Lane
The March 24 public meeting that will set the Third Asia Pacific International Solidarity Conference (APISC 2005) in motion will not feature a panel of speakers from Asia or the Pacific island countries. A single speaker — former US Special Operations soldier Stan Goff — will address the forum.
Goff is a veteran of almost every region of the world where the US has sent in special operations soldiers, from Indochina, to Grenada, to Somalia. Goff is no longer in the US military. Today he writes about US war policies and is a leader of the Military Families Speak Out.
There can be no doubt that the US occupation of Iraq and Afghanistan is at the centre of world politics today. The US is mobilising 150,000 troops in a war that is costing tens of thousands of Iraqi lives and stealing two countries' sovereignty. The US, with enthusiastic support from the Australian government and elite, is attempting to set a new framework in which it can protect and advance its interests. Pre-emptive military action and even direct colonial occupation are being put back on the international political agenda. Gunboat diplomacy and direct foreign rule, however disguised with puppetry, were the ways and means of the colonial era. Current US policy wants to take the world back to that era.
Australia's sending of police to Papua New Guinea and the Solomon Islands and its insistence on the placement of Australian officials inside the Indonesian state apparatus to help supervise the reconstruction of Aceh are the Australian government's initial forays into this realm.
The return to colonial-style politics is driven, as it was in the colonial era, by the need to protect the imperialist countries' economic plundering of the rest of the world, something that proceeds apace throughout the Asia-Pacific region.
Neighbourhood
There are some specific challenges before the Australian left and progressive movements. Six years after East Timor's victory over the Indonesian military occupation, the Australian government is still demanding almost total control of the most lucrative slices of Timor's natural resources, its oil and gas fields. Timor Sea Justice Campaigns have been established in many Australian cities but there is much to do to advance the movement against this Australian plunder.
APISC 2005 will have the biggest delegation of Timorese activists to visit Australia since East Timor's independence. This delegation of seven people will include Tomas Freitas from Lao Hamatuk, a key organisation campaigning for just economic development and for full Timorese sovereignty over the country's oil. Avelino da Silva, secretary-general of the Timorese Socialist Party, and leaders and members of the Alliance of Socialist Women will also attend. They will join those interested in building the campaign here in Australia, to work out what to do next.
While the theft of East Timor's oil represents the moral centre of resistance to Australian imperialism's plunder of its own neighbourhood, the presence of the 220 million people next door in Indonesia has always been the long-term issue for the Australian elite. It was scared out of its wits in the 1950s and '60s when the Indonesian Communist Party was on the ascendancy. It bathed in a sense of security when Suharto's military murdered a million workers, peasants and intellectuals in 1965. It raked in huge profits during Suharto's 33-year dictatorship.
It is nervous again now that the dictatorship is over and there are signs of the unravelling of social stability. There are Islamic fundamentalist groups that have started to use suicide bombing as a tactic, hitting Australian targets such as the embassy in Jakarta. There is an armed separatist movement in Aceh. There have been four presidents in six years after there was only one for 33 years.
Indonesia is a site of major oil, gas and mineral exploitation, in which BHP, Rio Tinto and other companies with Australian ties are heavily involved. Australian engineering, telecommunications and construction companies are constantly hunting for new million-dollar contracts. Australia is a major supporter of the International Monetary Fund's neoliberal recipe for Indonesia, which is plunging the country into a crisis of de-industrialisation and agricultural underdevelopment. More than 80% of the population live on less than US$4 per day.
The Australian government has officially described the Indonesian archipelago and the islands of Papua New Guinea and the Solomons as the "arc of instability". The government has been on constant watch for opportunities to resume close relations with the Indonesian military, which it sees as the final guarantor of stability.
In Aceh, this military, frightened of losing its main fiefdom, has locked itself into a position of permanent war against the Acehnese people. While claiming the Acehnese are a part of Indonesia, the military treats them as the hostile population of an occupied foreign country. Thousands of Acehnese have been killed or brutalised under military terror. Yet the Australian government still seeks a way to establish closer ties with the generals. A similar picture can be painted of West Papua.
Indonesian, Acehnese and West Papuan activists who are involved in the fights against neoliberalism and militarism throughout the country will also participate in APISC 2005. These will include Dita Sari, a former political prisoner under Suharto and a campaigner against neoliberal globalisation.
Resistance, revolution, socialism
For a couple of decades, movements against war, poverty and exploitation have grown, retreated and grown again, changing their form and direction, yet all detached from a confidence in the possibility of actually winning power. The alternative to capitalism was socialism, and "actually existing socialism" was collapsing in many countries, throwing their populations back into a state of impoverishment and backwardness.
Vietnam and Cuba survived these collapses — in Cuba's case despite having a huge, hostile neighbour in the US — but alone they did not have the weight to counter a sense of demoralisation after the Soviet Union collapsed. Vietnam was recovering from the devastation of war and struggling to overcome its isolation, suffering embargo by the US. Cuba also faced its own stresses after the collapse of the Soviet Union and the consequent loss of an important economic relationship.
Today, in the 30th anniversary year of Vietnam's defeat of the US, both Vietnam and Cuba, while still suffering all the constraints of any Third World country in an imperialist world, are consolidating their economies. And starting to give these two socialist survivors more weight in the struggle to reverse the demoralisation is the rise of the Venezuelan revolution, manifested in the continuing consolidation of President Hugo Chavez's government and the deepening organisation of the Venezuelan people in defence of the progressive policies of this government. Venezuela now has a close and active political and economic relationship with Cuba. And both Cuba and Venezuela are exploring deeper connections with Vietnam.
The change in mood among many sections of the worldwide anti-war and anti-neoliberal movements was illustrated by President Chavez's invitation to be a keynote speaker at the recent World Social Forum, a major gathering of the movements. Two years ago, at the same forum, he was forced to speak in a minor venue.
The revolutionary movements of Vietnam, Cuba and now Venezuela are, in fact, anti-war and anti-neoliberal globalisation people's movements that have won or are winning power. These three countries on two continents are increasingly working together and linking up with other movements still emerging, providing great potential for ending the demoralisation.
There will be Venezuelan and Vietnamese participants at APISC 2005, and we hope also Cuban. But the discussion of anti-war and anti-neoliberal globalisation movements winning power will not simply be a discussion around these three countries. All the international participants — from the Philippines, Indonesia, Aceh, West Papua, South Korea, Pakistan, India, Bangladesh, Turkey, El Salvador, Germany, the US and New Zealand — have this as their major concern. Ideas for building these movements and for socialist regroupment will be at the centre of all discussion.
With a new revolution unfolding before us, hope is revived and we can usually see and understand more about what is happening around us when we are armed with such hope. So for all of us coming to APISC 2005, and we hope it will be many hundreds, there is a lot to learn from each other and a lot to plan.
From Green Left Weekly, February 16, 2005.
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