I have a soft spot for Marxist academics, especially those who remain, well, Marxists. My favorite is Perry Anderson, whose London Review of Books essays are consistently some of the best written and best argued long pieces on international politics. Well, not surprisingly, his brother Benedict, a historian who specializes in Indonesia, is similarly fantastic. And so, since we’re talking about the history of Indonesia, I couldn’t help but point yall to Anderson’s essay in New Left Review “Exit Suharto: Obituary For a Mediocre Tyrant.”
Here’s a bit on Timor:
Suharto tried everything he could think of, but nothing really worked. The land of East Timor, famously arid, had no mineral resources and scarcely any forests; its people were desperately poor and largely illiterate. Teachers hated being assigned there, as did bureaucrats. Attempts to settle migrants from other islands failed in the face of popular hostility and intermittent sabotage. The territory’s one high-class export, coffee, became a military monopoly. The deeper problem was that in East Timor, Indonesians, often half-realizing it, were in the position of colonialists. Hence the regular colonial complaint that the East Timorese were ‘so ungrateful’, language that would have been taboo anywhere in Indonesia itself. Furthermore, East Timor could not be accommodated in the standard ‘our centuries-long struggle against the Dutch’ narrative of nationalist ideology and school textbooks. Worse still, they were Catholic in a 90 per cent Muslim national population. Irritatingly, the Vatican refused to merge East Timor’s priests into the pliant and often cowardly Indonesian Catholic hierarchy.
Read the whole thing, of course.
