Vol. 17 No. 21 · 2 November 1995
pages 3-5 | 3718 words
Gravel in Jakarta’s Shoes
Benedict Anderson
- Generations of Resistance by Steve Cox and Peter Carey
Cassell, 120 pp, £55.00, November 1995, ISBN 0 304 33250 X
Oldest among its European competitors, the Portuguese transcontinental empire lasted the longest, collapsed the fastest, and left the most bloodshed and ruin behind it. It owed its durability to Portugal’s own backwardness and poverty – which ruled out the ambitious modernising colonialisms of industrial America, France, England and the Netherlands – and to its strategic position in Spain’s armpit, at the mouth of the Mediterranean, which earned it for centuries the backing of London’s naval might. It collapsed fastest because of the bizarre longevity of the Salazarist dictatorship, and its fanatical determination to fight three Vietnam Wars simultaneously – in Mozambique, Angola and Guinea-Bissau, thousands of miles apart from one another – with a half-mercenary pre-professional army and no prospect of success. Within a year of the April 1974 coup in Lisbon, engineered by disillusioned officers, the empire was gone. The bloodshed and ruin, however, were only indirectly the responsibility of Lisbon. The atrocious 12-year ‘civil war’ endured by Mozambique was orchestrated and financed by South Africa. Pretoria and Washington bear most of the blame for the 20-year conflict in Angola. But the holocaust in Portuguese East Timor, half a small island off the northern coast of Australia, was the doing of the Indonesian dictatorship of former general Suharto – with crucial support at the outset from the United States, and later, to lesser extents, of the Governments of the big EEC states, Japan and Australia.
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Letters
Vol. 18 No. 7 · 4 April 1996
From Julia Tennyson
In his review of Generations of Resistance (LRB, 2 November), Benedict Anderson finds a ‘close similarity’ between East Timor and Eritrea. One of the striking differences, however, is that the legitimacy of the Eritrean case was not formally acknowledged by the United Nations until it was clear, after thirty years, that Eritrea was about to win the war with Ethiopia, whereupon the UN agencies were all over the territory. Another is that European friends of African liberation were not always keen to defend the Eritrean struggle after the fall of Haile Selassie and the rise of the ‘progressive’ Mengistu Haile Mariam – in 1993, for example, the Guardian’s deputy foreign editor defended Africa’s only copy-book Stalinist in the New Statesman as ‘a brave fighter’. East Timor has been spared the UN’s ostracism and the laisser-crever attitudes of the rearguard Left: there is very little disagreement on the justice of its case.
The closer similarity is with Western Sahara, which was invaded by Morocco and Mauritania on the eve of its independence from Spain. Between the April 1974 coup in Lisbon and Franco’s death in November 1975, the outposts of the Iberian dictatorships which became sovereign states – Angola and Mozambique especially – fell among wolves. But Western Sahara was snatched by its neighbours before the handover tabled between Spain and the Polisario Front could take place. As Anderson shows, it’s too simple to blame the beleaguered successors of fascism in Portugal for the disasters that occurred in Africa and East Timor, but Western Saharans feel that the new metropolitan government in Madrid left them in the lurch.
The good news from Anderson is that East Timor is now ‘closer to real independence than at any time in the last two decades’. The bad news, which never even makes the news, is that Western Sahara is further from proper decolonisation than it was at the close of Spanish rule. Eighteen years of armed struggle by the Polisario Front, first against Spain, then Mauritania and Morocco, then Morocco alone, were concluded in 1991, with Mauritania out of the running and Morocco ready to negotiate a referendum under UN supervision. It has not taken place. The biggest obstacle is Morocco. The next is the susceptibility of the UN to obstruction by the occupying forces in Western Sahara, which has been heavily policed and ‘Moroccanised’ for twenty years.
The UN team which is supposed to prepare the referendum on Saharan independence or ‘allegiance’ to King Hassan II of Morocco has made little headway. The vexed task of drawing up a voter registration list in a territory from which thousands of potential voters were evicted by Moroccan bombing in 1976, and into which thousands of Moroccan settlers have poured, is at a standstill. Shortly, the Security Council will receive a lack-of-progress report from the head of the mission in Western Sahara, who may well recommend that the UN withdraw from the territory.
Perhaps it should. A former deputy chairman of the Identification Commission told a Congressional sub-committee on appropriations last year that the UN had become a pawn in ‘Morocco’s domination of the identification process’. Moroccan security forces in the occupied areas of the territory, he claimed, could choose whom to ferry to the mission’s offices for identification and then confiscate their endorsement slips. Other sources have reported that the mission’s phones are tapped and deliveries of supplies withheld. Intimidation, torture and disappearance are as common for Western Saharans as they have been for Moroccans. In 1991, with the referendum process under way, Morocco freed 310 Western Saharan nationalists from detention, but the whereabouts of many more are unknown. Outside the territory, a complex of miserable desert camps in western Algeria accounts for 150,000 Saharan refugees, to whom the promises of the UN sound more and more like another twenty years with their faces in the sand.
In March, Mandela decided to extend formal recognition to the Saharan ‘state-in-exile’. Boutros Ghali, whom Polisario regards with some suspicion, has asked him to delay this step, for fear of upsetting ‘delicate negotiations’ with Morocco. But Morocco has been playing the game of fragile sensibilities for five years. Perez de Cuellar was as craven as his successor in accommodating Moroccan wishes – which suggests that, in addition to their influence with the permanent members of the Security Council, where France runs their errands, King Hassan and his diplomats now have the hang of the Secretariat. A return to hostilities between Morocco and Polisario seems probable before the end of the year. It seems equally probable that, unlike developments in East Timor, which Cox and Carey, Anderson and others have documented well, the next move in Western Sahara will not get much attention in the British press.
Julia Tennyson
London NW5
