Sun, 19 Jan 1997 09:29:36 +0100 (MET) COCKROACH! #30 Indonesia (part 1) A EZINE FOR POOR AND WORKING CLASS PEOPLE. WE HAVE NOTHING TO LOSE BUT OUR CHAINS. It is time that the poor and working class people have a voice on the Internet. Contributions can be sent to Subscribtions are free at How often this zine will appear depends on you! --------------------------------------------------------- 1. Indonesia (part 1) -------------------------------------------------------- The following article is from the 25 October 1996 issue of _Workers Vanguard_, the Marxist working-class biweekly of the Spartacist League. A one year subscription to _Workers Vanguard_ is $10.00 (includes English-language _Spartacist_, _Women and Revolution_, and _Black History and the Class Struggle_). Make checks payable/mail to: Spartacist Publishing Co., Box 1377 GPO, New York, NY 10116. For Workers Revolution to Sweep Away Suharto Dictatorship! Indonesia Powder Keg Remember 1965 Bloodbath--No More Popular Front Betrayals! The military regime of Indonesian dictator Suharto is facing the most convulsive political and social upheaval in decades. On July 8, army troops, marines and police brutally attacked a strike and rally of 20,000 workers in the east Java city of Surabaya. Later that month, police, troops and rightist vigilantes in the capital city of Jakarta stormed the headquarters of the Indonesian Democratic Party (PDI), one of two tame opposition parties permitted by the military dictatorship. Supporters of opposition leader Megawati Sukarnoputri, daughter of former Indonesian ruler Sukarno, had occupied the building to protest her ouster from the PDI leadership in a government- orchestrated maneuver in June. More than 10,000 people took to the streets in outrage over the government's raid on the PDI building, and banks and government buildings were torched. The military ordered demonstrators shot on sight; at least five protesters were officially reported dead and 74 "disappeared." The regime then launched a countrywide manhunt against a wide range of dissidents. At least nine are charged with "subversion," punishable by death. While Megawati was pulled in several times for lengthy police interrogation, the main targets were not PDI supporters but trade-union organizers and supporters of the leftist People's Democratic Party (PRD). Among those arrested was Muchtar Pakpahan, chairman of the banned Indonesian Workers for Prosperity Union (SBSI), the largest of the independent unions. Arrested for playing a leading role in strike struggles in Medan in April 1994, Pakpahan's conviction was overturned last October. Now he faces the death penalty on charges of subversion stemming from the July 27 protest. Budiman Sudjatmiko, 27-year-old leader of the PRD, was also hunted down and faces the firing squad for treason. At least 25 PRD leaders are being held, according to an overseas spokesman for the group. All are in isolation, and there have been reports of electric shock and other torture being used to force confessions. Leaders of the PRD-affiliated trade union, peasants union and student group were also arrested. PRD offices in Jakarta and Surabaya have been seized and ransacked. The military has ordered the arrest of all PRD supporters and announced that they will likely be tried under the 1962 anti-subversion law, which carries a maximum penalty of death. Determined to crush the PRD, the government has denounced it as "analogous" to the earlier Communist Party. As we noted in a recent protest statement sent by the Partisan Defense Committee in Japan to the Indonesian ambassador there demanding the immediate release of all those imprisoned (see "Free Victims of Right-Wing Repression in Indonesia!" WV No. 650, 30 August): "The regime's tirades against a supposed þCommunist threat' evoked--as was intended--the spectre of the horrendous anti- Communist bloodbath of workers and peasants carried out by the military and by anti-Communist mobs in 1965. The message was as clear as it was brutal: All who oppose Suharto's þNew Order' government will be slaughtered in the same manner as were the more than one million supporters of the Indonesian Communist Party (PKI) and other militants in 1965 and the workers and peasants of East Timor who have been fighting for their independence for over 20 years." Suharto's blood-soaked regime was born out of the 1965 massacre. Old and sick men condemned as Communist activists following the 1965 bloodbath are still sitting on death row. Only last year did the regime say it would remove the designation "ET" (ex-Tahanan Politik--former political prisoner) from the identity papers of some 1.4 million people. One of these, writer Pramoedya Ananta Toer, has been accused of being a leader of "formless organizations"--a reference to Communist front groups--and his writings are banned. His novels, like Child of All Nations and This Earth of Mankind, are powerful indictments of brutal exploitation by the former Dutch colonial rulers. Today they are banned by an authoritarian regime which fears that readers might see too many parallels between the situation then and now. U.S. imperialism has played a key role in propping up the bloody Suharto dictatorship from the time of the 1965 anti- Communist massacre. The recent flap over Indonesian funding for Clinton's election campaign underlines not only Washington's continuing close ties with the butchers in Jakarta but the rampant nepotism and corruption of the Indonesian ruling family. Now the imperialist bloodsuckers who for years lauded Suharto for ushering in "political stability" are worried about the aging dictator's health and the absence of a credible alternative to his regime. An editorial in the London Economist (3 August) titled "If Indonesia Erupts" warns that as "a vital part of Asia's fragile security balance, turmoil there would produce tremors from China to Australia" and "shake boardrooms." In an accompanying article, this mouthpiece for the imperialist bankers wants Suharto to allow a little "space" lest he contribute to "a future explosion of potentially devastating consequences"-- devastating, that is, to the maintenance of neocolonial enslavement, where stifling repression, starvation wages and draconian union-busting assure a huge flow of profits from the sweat of millions. The imperialists have reason to be worried. Even official figures point to a huge growth in strikes and other workers' struggles. There have also been outbursts of student unrest. In April, three students were killed during two weeks of protests against public transport fare increases in south Sulawesi. Student activists frustrated at the tight military control of campuses and the lack of job prospects have turned to labor organizing. Protests by workers, students and the unemployed in urban centers have intersected peasant struggles for land and grievances against ethnic and national oppression. Incapable of developing a unified Indonesian nation, the Java-centered bourgeoisie presides over a prison house of peoples. Indonesia is a powder keg waiting to explode. Yet despite the evident courage and dedication of its supporters, the PRD offers a strategy of class collaboration like that which paved the way for the 1965 slaughter. The PRD actively organizes support for the tame bourgeois opposition led by Megawati--who denies any intention of threatening the power of Suharto and the generals--and itself calls for nothing more than a "multiparty democracy." SBSI leader Pakpahan, meanwhile, says that he is not a communist but a "nationalist" and avows his support for the 1945 bourgeois constitution (Far Eastern Economic Review, 2 November 1995). But in this backward country tied by a million strings to international finance capital, there can be no thoroughgoing democracy without sweeping away the entire capitalist class, which acts at the behest of the imperialist overlords. A new generation of working-class militants must come to grips with the burning question: Will they be led once more down the suicidal path of class collaboration which led to the 1965 bloodbath or undertake the struggle to unite the dispossessed peasants, horribly oppressed women and ethnic and national minorities in a revolutionary struggle to end the brutal rule of capitalism? Indonesia and Permanent Revolution The world's fourth most populous country, Indonesia is a vast archipelago of more than 13,000 islands spanning 3,000 miles and encompassing a diverse collection of ethnic, national and religious groupings. Separatist insurgencies have taken place from the tip of the westernmost island of Sumatra to Irian Jaya (on the island of New Guinea) in the Far East. The deepgoing divisions among these peoples are the heritage of the brutal rule of Dutch colonialism, which ended with the Japanese occupation in World War II and, following Japan's military defeat, the 1949 victory of Sukarno's nationalists in the war of independence against the Dutch. The struggles of oppressed ethnic and national minorities in Indonesia were recently highlighted by the awarding of the Nobel Peace Prize to two of the more moderate figures in the struggle of the East Timorese people, who have been subjected to a genocidal military occupation since 1975. In November 1991, Indonesian troops carried out a slaughter of 200 demonstrators in the Timorese capital of Dili. As our Australian comrades wrote recently (Australasian Spartacist No. 159, Spring 1996): "For 350 years, the people of East Timor suffered the brutal rule of Portuguese imperialism. As the Portuguese empire collapsed in 1974/75, the Indonesian capitalist military regime invaded and annexed East Timor. Twenty years of bitter resistance has ensued, with over 200,000 East Timorese killed by gunfire, disease or starvation. As Marxists and Leninists who recognise the right of self- determination, we of the Spartacist League of Australia (Australian section of the International Communist League) demand: Independence for East Timor! Indonesian troops out of East Timor! Australia hands off!" Until the Dili massacre, many Indonesians knew little about what was happening in East Timor. Intended by the military as a signal not only to the East Timorese but also anyone who might oppose the regime, the killings were a catalyst in galvanizing new opposition to the regime. Ethnic and religious tensions have also been stoked by government policies encouraging settlement of outlying islands like Irian Jaya by people from Java and other densely populated areas of the country. Closely intertwined with the struggles of minorities is the fight for land. The Dutch left in their wake massive plantations, which are now worked by millions of landless laborers and small tenant farmers. And with the accelerated flow of imperialist investment over recent years, countless tribal and peasant families have been thrown off the land in favor of mining, manufacturing and other corporations. Indonesia presents a classic case of "combined and uneven development" in the epoch of imperialism, where pre-capitalist forms of exploitation and oppression exist side by side with modern industry, communications and transportation. In such countries of belated capitalist development, no wing of the bourgeoisie is capable of lifting society up from neocolonial subjugation and oppression. The dynamic growth of the Indonesian proletariat and its re-emergence into the arena of class struggle points to the one social force that can successfully lead the struggles of the oppressed--from land-hungry rural toilers to women, youth and religious and ethnic minorities--against the entire capitalist-landlord ruling class and its imperialist patrons. As Leon Trotsky, co-leader with V.I. Lenin of the 1917 Russian Revolution, explained in "What Is the Permanent Revolution?" (1930), in colonial and semicolonial countries, "the complete and genuine solution of their tasks of achieving democracy and national emancipation is conceivable only through the dictatorship of the proletariat as the leader of the subjugated nation, above all of its peasant masses." The validity of this perspective was confirmed by the workers revolution in backward Russia itself. Under the leadership of Lenin and Trotsky's Bolshevik Party, the numerically small Russian proletariat was able to mobilize behind it the mass of the peasantry and oppressed national minorities in a proletarian revolution which broke the power of the capitalists and landlords and opened a period of revolutionary struggle internationally. The Bolsheviks' revolutionary program was trampled on by the Stalinist bureaucracy which usurped power in the Soviet Union in 1923-24, following the failure of the revolution to spread to advanced capitalist countries like Germany. Stalinist betrayal finally culminated in the capitalist counterrevolution which destroyed the bureaucratically degenerated and deformed workers states in the Soviet Union and East Europe in 1989-92. This, in turn, has emboldened the imperialist powers to seek the destruction of the remaining deformed workers states, which (with the exception of Cuba) are all located in East Asia--China, Vietnam, North Korea. In a desperate and futile balancing act, the Stalinist regimes in these countries have opened the door to imperialist investment and capitalist exploitation, strengthening outright capitalist-restorationist forces (including within the bureaucracy). The defense of the remaining gains of these anti-capitalist revolutions can be ensured only by proletarian political revolution against the bureaucratic Stalinist regimes as part of a perspective of international socialist revolution, centrally aimed at the advanced industrial powers, whose vast economic wealth and productive resources must be liberated in the interests of all humanity. The central lesson of the October Revolution retains its full force today for the exploited and oppressed around the world: Bolshevik parties must be forged in the struggle for a new October Revolution, from the islands of Indonesia to the imperialist centers in Australia, Japan, the U.S. and West Europe. CONTNUED IN PART 2