On the wrong or the right side of history
Leiden, November 5, 2005
Every year Indonesia is celebrating its independence on the 17th of August, last summer for the sixtieth time. Fifty-nine times the Dutch government boycotted this celebration which attitude may be considered as a remnant of colonial arrogance.
This year, in August, for the first time a representative of the Dutch government attended the celebration. It was Mr. Bot, the minister of foreign affairs who went to Jakarta. There, in Jakarta, he declared that during the colonial war in Indonesia, the Dutch government was putting itself on the wrong side of history.
We may ask ourselves some questions about this declaration.
First, have there been at that time, immediately after the Second World War, in the Netherlands people and political organisations on the right side of history?
Second, on which side of history was the Dutch government after the colonial war, let us say during the period between 1949 and the year 2000?
And third, did they learn something from their own colonial history, which could be helpful to be on the right side in the international political situation of the present-day?
The first question has already been answered by the speech of Joop Morriën.
Now the second question.
Mr. Bot did not explain why the government was on the wrong side. If he does not know that, or when he does not want to know that, it will be impossible to make valuable political analyses of the years after 1949. We are in the position to help him a lot. Dutch capital, which was substantially founded on colonial exploitation, has ultimately to be hold responsible for the tens of thousands of victims of the colonial war. When you don’t mention this fundamental cause of the colonial war and when you are unwilling to draw conclusions from it, it will be impossible to be on the right side in times that follow.
The colonial war resulted in the Round Table Conference of December 1949. The former leader of the Communist Party of the Netherlands, Paul de Groot, declared about that time in the Dutch parliament, and now I am quoting:
‘The conclusions of the Round Table Conference not only do not ensure national independence for Indonesia, but aim on the contrary to enforce the domination of a disguised colonialism by dividing the forces of the Indonesian people”. End of the quotation.
Indonesia became a semi-colonial nation, the struggle between the people and the old and new colonialists, supported by puppets as a malicious cancer in the newly formed national body, remained undecided. This stalemate resulted in the massacres of 1965 and afterwards. Unfortunately the people did not have arms to defend themselves.
The Dutch capitalists and politicians of the big parties welcomed the Suharto-putch. The Dutch-British company Unilever reported happily from Jakarta that the workers moderated their demands after the demolition of the Indonesian trade unions. Dutch ministers headed all the time the Inter Governmental Group for Indonesia (the IGGI), which co-ordinated the neo-colonial development aid for Suharto and he got always more money than he requested.
What is Mr. Bot thinking about this part of Indonesian history? Is he on the wrong or on the right side? We don’t know.
Our Indonesian friends call the massacres of 1965 and thereafter the forgotten genocide and Mr. Bot also keeps silent. As a matter of fact, the genocide was not forgotten but ignored. But we know that the successive Dutch governments, before and after 1965, are at least partly accountable for the atrocities and the exploitation committed by the Suharto regime on the Indonesian people.
Perhaps there will be a trace of consciousness of guilt in Mr. Bot’s mind about 1965. In that case we want to make a request to him. In the first place he ought to condemn the massacre as a crime against humanity as it was. The Asian Legal Resource Centre already presented a petition with the same content to the general secretary of the United Nations.
Second, the Dutch government is in a position to offer to the Indonesian government assistance in order to identify the thousands and thousands of bodies buried in mass graves in the Indonesian soil. The identification will enable the relatives and friends to render the necessary funeral honours to them. The Dutch government has a modern forensic laboratory to its disposal to do the job, provided with sophisticated methods of DNA analysis. These are only humanitarian requests.
Now we have to answer the third question: Did the Dutch government learn something of its own colonial history which could be useful to chose the right side in the political turmoil of the present-day? The answer is obvious. This new century has hardly begun and Dutch troops were and are already involved in three imperialist wars: Yugoslavia, Irak and Afghanistan.
Some weeks ago the Dutch government decided to buy thirty tomahawk cruise missiles. Up till now only the United States and the United Kingdom are in possession of these arms and the missiles are uttermost appropriate in wars of aggression as we have seen in the three already mentioned countries. The decision of the government is also symbolic. Dutch capitalism and therefore Dutch politics is to a large extend subordinate to American power.
But imperialism is in crisis. This crisis is economic in its origin, but the political consequences are obvious and perceptible. We have to explain this.
American imperialism invented neo-colonialism. Neo-colonialism can be defined as the new form of colonialism in the imperialist era by which former colonial and semi-colonial territories only obtain formal independence, the national economy is subordinate to the profits of international capitalist companies, the politics are dominated by puppets and the military and police protect the neo-colonial exploitation and oppress the people.
The origin of the rise of neo-colonialism is multifarious. In the first place neo-colonialism is cheaper than colonialism. Direct occupation is expensive. Neo-colonialism enables the imperialist powers to deny for instance responsibility for the social welfare of the people. Here we can make a comparison with slavery. Slavery is not compatible with modern capitalism and the old colonialism is not compatible with modern imperialism.
At last we have to mention a historic reason of a specific nature. When the United States emerged as an industrial and economic worldpower some hundred years ago their number of colonies was limited. West European powers as Great Britain and France, and also the Netherlands, dominated most of the colonial territories. The Second World War caused a shift in the balance of power within the imperialist camp. Europe had suffered destruction on a large scale and was substantially weakened. This situation offered the opportunity to the United States to replace the old European colonialism by their new colonialism.
We can take Indonesia as an excellent example of this process. The government of the United States was opposed to the re-colonisation of Indonesia by the Dutch after the Second World War and also condemned the colonial war. Meanwhile the US strengthened their influence within the Indonesian liberation movement and manipulated the peace process. It was not merely symbolic that on the 17th of January of 1948 a provisional agreement between the two struggling parties was signed on the American warship Renville. Never in modern history the relations between the Dutch and the US government became tenser than in that period.
The same can be said about the Middle East. Historically the British and the French dominated this part of the world in a more or less direct way after the decline of Ottoman power in the region. This domination was challenged by US imperialism during and after the Second World War. The last convulsive movement by the old powers took place in October 1956 when British and French troops raided the Suez Canal in Egypt. The troops had to been withdrawn after strong American pressure. The relations between the United States and the two main European powers drifted to its lowest point. For the first and the last time the British interposed their veto in the UN security counsel against an American proposal. American neo-colonialism prevailed in the Middle East and since this British defeat the United Kingdom is submissive to the US.
In present-day the US is predominantly interested in the Middle East. Therefore we have to talk a while about oil. First of all a historic observation. In 1947 the American foreign policy library, related to the department of foreign affairs of the US published a book which was titled ‘The United States and the Near East”. And now I’ll quote:
“But so strategic a centre cannot long be abandoned to its own devices. It will be condemned and expropriated for public use by the powers that be. Hence the Near East had seldom had real privacy and it cannot expect much of it in the future. Of a sudden the region finds itself fabulously rich in treasures for which the whole world has been searching. It cannot hope to enjoy this boon by itself”.
“Our economic interest in the equitable allocation of the oil resources of the Near East has suddenly been seen to involve questions of national security”.
Here the US imperialists are putting their intentions quite plainly. Far more plainly than the Bush administration which almost exclusively is speaking about the promotion of democracy in the Middle East. Their democracy is nothing but the ideological vehicle of imperialist domination.
The recent occupation of Irak is saddling us with a conceptual problem. Why are the US abandoning their politics of neo-colonialism and chose for an expensive, direct occupation? One may say: ah, because Saddam Hussein did not have nuclear weapons which the US government undoubtedly knew. This may be true. Or: the annihilation of the Soviet Union made it possible. That may also be true.
But there is a more fundamental question. Apparently the instrument of neo-colonialism cannot guarantee the domination of US imperialism anymore and they have to use their military power in the inner-imperialist struggle, which is going on. Consequently neo-colonialism only operates well when only one superpower is dominating the capitalist world. At the same time the display of military power demonstrates the weakening of US imperialism, above all in economic sense. To put it the other way: lack of economic power has to be compensated by military power, by the use of arms.
US imperialism of the present-day resembles British imperialism about a hundred years ago. During the last decades of the 19th century British imperialism was declining, above all by the growing economic power of Germany and the United States. But at the end of the same century the British Empire disposed of the most powerful army the world ever had seen. This army tried to occupy in October 1899 the two Boer republics Transvaal and Orange Free State provided with rich gold and diamond mines. The Boer war had begun. The British government expected it to be over by Christmas of the same year 1899 but it proved to be the longest, the costliest, the bloodiest and the most humiliating war for Britain between 1815 and 1914. More than 22.000 British soldiers died in guerrilla warfare against the Boers.
Irak is the American Boer war. The wars in the Middle East will weaken the American power even more as the Boer war did with the British.
Five years ago I wrote an article about the third imperialist wave. The first imperialist wave preceded the First World War and may be characterised as classic. The second wave, which culminated in the Second World War, was more specific because one of the clashing imperialist powers made use of a fascist gang.
Before and during an imperialist wave the international balance of power is moving, is shifting. We do not yet know the outcome of the third wave, which is going on, it may be classic or specific in some way. But we know that all the imperialist waves are accompanied by severe exploitation, also in the developed world, violation of human rights, attacks on democratic and social rights, chauvinism and xenophobia, and a permanent risk of major wars.
In these international and national circumstances we have to be on the right side of history. There would be not a more valuable way to honour the millions of victims of imperialism, also the hundreds of thousands in Indonesia.
I thank you all.