Hands off East Timor!
East Timor Solidarity Committee Auckland
Once again Australia and New Zealand are organising a major military
intervention in East Timor. Australia will send up to 1,300 troops, and a
smaller number of Kiwi troops at Burnham base near Christchurch are preparing
to join them.
The new intervention is being planned because the East Timorese government faces a popular rebellion which it has struggled to suppress on its own. In February nearly half of the East Timorese army went on strike to protest at poor pay and conditions and the brutality of military commanders and the East Timorese police force. On April the 28th the rebel soldiers staged a peaceful march on the East Timor capital Dili, where they were joined by four thousand civilians at a protest rally. On the orders of Prime Minister Alkatiri, the police opened fire on the protesters and killed at least five of them. Since April the 28th the police have been hunting down rebel soldiers and their supporters. Reports suggest that scores of these opponents of the Alkatiri regime have been killed.
Australia and New Zealand want to prop up the government of Alkatiri and his
Fretilin party. They want Alkatiri to stay in power because he protects
Australasian business interests in East Timor. In recent years a series of
one-sided deals with Fretilin's corrupt leaders have given Australia control
of the oil and gas reserves under the Timor Strait. Aussie companies earn
billions a year from these resources, but East Timor receives only a pittance
in royalties and its people remain very poor.
Plans for an intervention in
East Timor are supported by the United States. John Howard is George Bush's
most loyal ally in the Asia Pacific region, and Australia has been pushing
Bush's policies aggressively in this part of the world. Howard has already
organised a military intervention in the Solomon Islands, and deployed Aussie
cops across Papua New Guinea. Like Bush, Howard believes in using the military
to impose extreme right-wing policies on Third World countries.
The vast majority of New
Zealand workers oppose the war Bush and Howard are waging in Iraq. The Council
of Trade Unions voted to oppose any Kiwi involvement in the military
intervention in Iraq. We should oppose the same sort of intervention in our
part of the world. If it's wrong in Iraq, it's wrong in East Timor!
The people who need our solidarity are not Alkatiri and Howard but the workers and peasants of East Timor, who are waging a just struggle against a brutal government and its supporters in Canberra, Wellington, and Washington.
For some background to the crisis in East Timor, see this article:
http://readingthemaps.blogspot.com/2006/05/east-timor-on-brink-of-civil-war-whos.html
The view from
Green Left Weekly
May 2006
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