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People’s Rage
Thunders Through Indonesia!
Statement by the Committee
of the Revolutionary Internationalist Movement
After a mass revolt that engulfed almost the entire Indonesian archipelago,
the US-backed dictator Suharto has finally fallen. Suharto’s reign
lasted 32 years; it began and ended amidst bloody suppression, and
his ignominious defeat is a cause for joy for all the world’s oppressed.
For the past few months the Western imperialists and their lackeys
have been presiding over a deep economic crisis in East Asia. From
Thailand to South Korea, Malaysia and Indonesia, the region’s comprador
regimes have been imposing austerity programmes under the baton
of the International Monetary Fund (IMF). Suharto’s regime, like
many others, had raised prices, cut back government services, and
opened the country even more to foreign plunder. Currencies plummeted,
unemployment spiralled and the effect on the masses was a brutal
and extreme intensification of misery, while the ruling regimes
and their Western masters struggled to ensure the steady flow of
their own channels of wealth.
The masses of Indonesia rose in rebellion and stood up to one
of the most vicious forces of repression in the world. Trained and
armed by the US and its imperialist allies, the regime’s armed forces
first sought to do what they had always done, stamping down with
the iron boot. But their efforts were in vain, as students were
joined by shantytown youth and hundreds of thousands of others.
The regime used its monopoly on the media to bluster and to try
to divert the people’s anger towards Chinese shopkeepers and away
from the real centres of reactionary power. But the advanced forces
among the masses refused to back down, rallied new support, and
targeted the Suharto clan in particular, as well as symbols of Western
domination.
As waves of revolt rolled over the country, the imperialists did
their best to distance themselves from Suharto, just as they did
last year in the case of Zaire’s Mobutu. The Western media exposed
Suharto’s crony style of capitalism, unveiled the intricate links
of his family businesses, and decried the billions he had looted
from the Indonesian people. And they should know, for they set him
up and backed him as long as they could. Suharto was a monster,
but, like Mobutu, Haiti’s Duvalier and so many others, he was imperialism’s
monster.
Suharto rose to power on the corpses of as many as a half a million
people. Many of them were communists and others who had dared to
dream of an Indonesia independent of Western imperialism, and peasants
who longed for land. Suharto ruthlessly suppressed them in some
of the bloodiest months of slaughter since WW II, and imprisoned
hundreds of thousands more. But barely a word has been uttered in
the reactionary press about this bloody crime. Indeed, the US had
hailed Suharto’s bloody rise to power, with the liberal Time
magazine calling it “the best news for the West in Asia in years”.
Suharto’s 1965 coup was part of an overall effort by the imperialists
and reactionaries to stem the rising tide of national liberation
and revolution in the 1960s. Vietnamese peasants were thrashing
the supposedly invincible US military machine, and brushfires of
revolt were being fanned throughout Asia and the Third World, supported
by the revolutionary bastion of Mao’s China. The imperialists needed
a servile lackey in Indonesia, an important source of oil and the
4th most populous country – and largest Muslim population – in the
world. Suharto was chosen, trained and backed to the hilt by the
US and other imperialists for this role.
The Suharto coup took advantage of serious errors by the Indonesian
revolutionaries. The leadership of the Communist Party of Indonesia
[PKI] had tried to steer a “middle course” in the great debate then
raging in the international communist movement between Mao Tse-tung’s
revolutionary line and the revisionist line of capitulation and
betrayal preached by the Soviets. The PKI negated the Leninist teaching
that the state was a dictatorship of one class over another, and
instead argued that, thanks to the then President Sukarno, there
was a “people’s aspect” in the Indonesian government. While the
blood of hundreds of thousands was shed by the imperialist puppet
Suharto and his cronies, it was revisionism that paved the path
to the slaughter.
Instead of taking the road of people’s war, the PKI leadership
tied the hands of the people. What had seemed like a mighty party
of hundreds of thousands collapsed, and the workers, revolutionary
peasants and revolutionary Party members were unable to put up effective
resistance. This bitter lesson illustrates once again the truth
underlying Mao Tse-tung’s forceful dictum that “political power
grows out of the barrel of a gun” and that “without a people’s army,
the people have nothing”.
With its hands still dripping with the blood of the Indonesian
people, the Suharto regime launched another crime with its invasion
and occupation of East Timor in 1975. Indonesian troops have killed
200,000 people there, one-third of the Timorese population – per
capita, the largest genocide since the Holocaust in World War II.
Even today, 60,000 Indonesian troops, police and informers are stationed
there – one for every 10 Timorese. Yet the people of East Timor
fight on valiantly, and their struggle was an integral part of the
rising that knocked down Suharto.
Today the imperialists and the Indonesian ruling class are manoeuvring
urgently to divert the people’s anger and protect the core of Indonesia’s
reactionary ruling institutions, especially the armed forces. Only
a few months ago, they thought Suharto could be salvaged for a while
longer and continued to give him support. Indonesian troops, especially
the hated KOPASSUS Red Berets, were trained by the US. Tony Blair
and his “New Labour” government in Britain continued to sign weapons
contracts and supply the regime with arms, and the Australian military
even held joint exercises with Indonesian troops this spring. Nonetheless,
as wave after wave of revolt poured over Indonesia, the reactionaries
and their imperialist backers were forced to yield ground, until
the tyrant himself had to go.
This was a great victory – Suharto was indeed a big exploiter
and oppressor of the Indonesian people. But he was not the biggest.
While his family pillaged billions, behind him the Western imperialists
have raked off tens of billions. The Suharto set-up was simply the
local agency of the vast tentacles of imperialism that envelop every
sector of economic life in Indonesia, sucking the wealth and labour
of its people. Suharto and his family were “Mr 10%” but in another
sense, they were only “Mr 10%”, local flunkeys who skim off
a bit before the big boss gets the lion’s share. It is men with
names like Bill Gates, the IMF’s Camdessus, Clinton, Blair, Chirac,
Kohl, etc, who are the overall masters of this system that has kept
Indonesia backward and impoverished. While their so-called Asian
tiger had brought some improvement for sections of the upper and
middle classes in Indonesia, the Indonesian “miracle” never alleviated
the grinding poverty of the basic masses of the country, and now
millions of those who had earlier believed life was changing for
the better have been dramatically impoverished and the poor find
their very survival threatened. To see that this is due to a world
system, one need look no further than neighbouring Malaysia or Thailand,
countries where millions of others are being subjected to the same
austerity measures as in Indonesia. Their rulers, like Suharto,
were petty corrupt tyrants, and, like him, they too are creatures
of a bigger, world historic system, imperialism.
Truly changing the face of Indonesia means freeing it from imperialism
and thoroughly uprooting the semi-feudal system. It requires breaking
the imperialists’ hold on the economic arteries that are pumping
the wealth and lifeblood of Indonesia out of the country and into
the coffers of the West. This can only be done by overthrowing the
imperialist-backed neocolonial regime and its reactionary armed
forces – which means revolutionary war, a war based among and rallying
the peasants as its main force, along the path of new democratic
revolution as charted by Mao Tse-tung. Mao showed not only how a
protracted people’s war could defeat the seemingly invincible armies
of the reactionaries and imperialists but also how the masses in
power could be led to build a self-reliant economy to stand with
the people of the world as a beacon of world revolution. This is
what China did up until 1976, and the science of revolution summed
up and raised to a new level by Mao, Marxism-Leninism-Maoism, today
lights the path forward for the oppressed around the world.
Unless the old regime is smashed through such a revolutionary
war, the reactionary forces will use their grip on power to ride
out the storm, to make temporary concessions to some while brutally
suppressing others. Millions of people in Indonesia are yearning
for revolution, hoping that today’s overthrow of Suharto will be
only a prelude to a deeper, more thoroughgoing change. But for this
aspiration to become a reality, the people need leadership, the
leadership that only a vanguard party based on Marxism-Leninism-Maoism
can provide. Without this kind of uncompromising vanguard leadership,
the ruling class will reassert its authority over the oppressed
masses and keep them shackled.
Only days after Suharto’s departure, the reactionary clique now
led by B.J. Habibie is revealing its colours by protecting Suharto’s
cronies and keeping in prison those they consider most dangerous.
They are refusing to free the many PKI members and sympathisers
held for over 30 years, as well as Timorese fighters – while making
endless promises that will come to nothing.
Over a century ago, as looming crisis faced Europe, Frederick
Engels observed that crowns would soon be rolling on the pavement,
the question was, who would pick them up? Today, the crown of the
long-standing dictator Suharto of Indonesia has followed that of
Zaire’s Mobutu to go tumbling onto the streets, and Engels’ question
is posed more urgently than ever. The Revolutionary Internationalist
Movement salutes the Indonesian people whose fierceness and defiance
in the face of the iron fist has given renewed heart to all those
around the world fighting against imperialism and reaction. We call
upon the most advanced revolutionary elements in Indonesia to make
bold efforts to group themselves together on the basis of Marxism-Leninism-Maoism
and link up with RIM, and we call upon Maoist forces in other countries
to assist this effort. The debts of the Indonesian reactionaries
and their imperialist masters are too heavy and the hopes of the
masses too high to do anything less.
For more information, contact: BCM RIM / London WC1N 3XX / UK.
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