On History: Tariq Ali and Oliver Stone in Conversation

by Ali, Tariq;Stone, Oliver

  Suharto, as we know, was working very closely with the United States, and began to prepare a coup d’état. In the preparation of a coup d’état they usually have a provocation. Some event happens, which is seen as a provocation, and then the military strikes. They organized that pretext in Indonesia, and the military struck. They were totally prepared. Sukarno was put under house arrest. The entire Communist Party leadership was arrested. They had lists. Vigilantes were set up, mainly Islamist fundamentalist vigilantes, who went from house to house on the beautiful island of Bali, saying, that’s a communist family living in that house, bring them out, kill the women.

  There were lists provided by—

  —The CIA and the local intelligence. One of the things the CIA used to do in every country, as Philip Agee informed us, was to prepare lists of the subversives, the communists, the guerrillas. Often they compiled these names by grabbing people and torturing them. In Iraq, they worked with people inside the Baath Party, such as Saddam Hussein, who supplied them with the lists of communists to wipe out, which Hussein did. Similar lists were provided to Suharto.

  Many of the people killed in Indonesia in 1965 were Chinese, am I right?

  And many of the poorest—

  Was there a racial component to this?

  Well, after the victory of the Chinese Revolution, many of the local Chinese were very sympathetic to the revolution, and that made them sympathetic to the Indonesian Communist Party. So in Jakarta, and places where you had a large Chinese population, even in Vietnam; by the way, in Saigon, the United States utilized this fact to encourage xenophobia toward Chinese minorities. They’d say, we are defending South Vietnamese interests against the Chinese who live in Cholon, or we are defending the Indonesian interests against these wicked evil foreign Chinese. But the main objective was to wipe out the Indonesian Communist Party as a political force. This was the largest Communist Party in the world outside the official communist countries. And Indonesia was the largest Muslim country in the world. When they wiped the party out, they created a big political vacuum.

  One million people were killed?

  One million people.

  Men, women, children?

  Men, women, children. And the descriptions of that are horrendous—

  Across the whole country?

  Across the whole country, in villages, including this idyllic island of Bali, where communists were quite strong. I’ve read the most horrendous descriptions of these massacres. The men who were killed were disemboweled, and their genitals were hung out on display in certain areas to create fear. There were descriptions of the rivers running red with blood for days, packed with corpses.

  And this was viewed by the United States, the CIA, and the government as a great victory at the time?

  This was regarded by the United States as a tremendous victory because empires historically tend to be very short-term in their thinking. They rarely think ahead strategically.

  If they’re willing to dispense with Sukarno, who is a major non-aligned leader, why weren’t they willing to go after Nehru in India?

  They were not prepared to go after Jawaharlal Nehru in India because India was a country that commanded a lot of respect in those days, particularly throughout the Western world and especially by the Europeans. Nehru was seen as a sort of social-democratic leader. He was elected, there was an opposition, and the Indian army was independent. It would have been very difficult for the United States to manipulate the Indian army. So they couldn’t do anything about India, but what they could do was transform Pakistan into a US base in October 1958, by organizing a coup d’état and making the Pakistani military heavily dependant on them. Links between the Pakistani military and the Pentagon date back to the 1950s, to the Cold War period, when the ruling elites used the military to prevent a general election from taking place that they were fearful might produce a government that would take Pakistan out of all the US security pacts. The United States knew they couldn’t do much about India, so they concentrated on Pakistan.

  Pakistan becomes a key component in our Southeast Asia Treaty Organization.

  Yes, and the Pakistani military henceforth becomes a very valued asset of the United States, with direct links to the Pentagon. Large numbers of Pakistani officers are sent for training to Fort Bragg and other American military academies. And links are established between the Pakistani military in the United States to create a special commando unit inside the Pakistani army for emergency actions. And the Indians know all this.

  Who was a political threat in Pakistan at this point?

  There was no immediate individual leader as a threat, but you had political parties in both West Pakistan and East Pakistan whose manifesto said we will take Pakistan out of the US security pacts if we win the election scheduled for April 1959. We should be a non-aligned country like India. And that was the fear. A totally crazy fear in many ways, but it was the fear.

  Your own life was marked by coup in 1958, was it not? You were fifteen then. Were you still in Pakistan at the time?

  Yes.

  Your life could not be the same again.

  It wasn’t the same again. It was changed. We were very angry. And I was very active against the military leadership. We were organizing study circles and cells on campuses. I also organized the first demonstration of the time. When the military takes over, all political parties and trade unions are banned, all public demonstrations, all public gatherings of more than four people are not allowed. And once news came through to us, I think it was 1961, that Patrice Lumumba, the leader of Congo, had been killed—by the Belgians, or by the United States, or by both, we didn’t know—Nehru in India said this is the biggest crime of all, the West will pay for this crime, having killed an independence leader. But our government remained silent. So at my university I said we have to have a meeting on the campus to defend Lumumba and demand something. So we put our little leaflets all over the campuses saying Patrice Lumumba is dead. Half the students didn’t know who he was, but we explained it to them, and we had about five hundred students who assembled in this big hall. I spoke and said, look, Congo has produced its first independent leader, and they’ve killed him because they found him a threat. We can’t sit still, so let’s go out onto the streets. So they said, let’s. And so we marched, we just marched out of the university to the US consulate general and said, you know, who killed Lumumba? We want answers. “Long live Lumumba!” The police were totally taken by surprise. This was the first public demonstration, defying all the military law. And then, on the way back from the US consulate in Lahore, as we approached our college, the first slogans we chanted were “death to the military dictatorship, down with the military”—and nothing happened to us. So Lumumba’s assassination was one of the things that then triggered a big student movement in the country.

  When did you leave Pakistan? You’re now basically in exile?

  I live in London. I came to study at Oxford in 1963, and then I wasn’t allowed back by two different Pakistani dictators. I became an exile.

  So 1958 to 1965 is a defining period if your life, and you’re cut off from your roots.

  I was nineteen when I came to study at Oxford.

  I was around sixteen when Kennedy was killed in the same year, 1963. I think that was a turning point for me, too, because I don’t think I would’ve gone to Vietnam if Kennedy had been in office.

  Well, that war might not have developed to that extent.

  I don’t think it’s possible.

  These things are formative.

  And in the same sense I don’t think that Roosevelt would have dropped the bombs on Hiroshima and Nagasaki, but that’s speculation. Certainly Wallace would not have.

  Wallace certainly wouldn’t have dropped the atomic bomb. So, these events which happen do change people’s lives. They’ve changed our lives, and they’ve changed the lives of millions.

  I was on the colonialist side of the picture. I was in New York City. I didn’t have an
y concept of what we were doing around the world in your country, in Pakistan. We were interfering in all these countries, and your life—it’s your life—would be different now. Perhaps it’s been improved by the turbulence and exile, and the social movement was created. But if you had been born in Indonesia, you would’ve had the same issue. Your life would’ve been like an earthquake.

  Well, if I’d been born in Indonesia, and I had the same political views, I’d be dead.

  An entire generation of people were shaken by US policy.

  Including American citizens. Let’s go back to the Vietnam War. That was probably the most formative event for an entire generation. It changed people, even people who supported the war, and many who fought in it, it changed them forever. They couldn’t be the same again. I mean, it made them think. And it brought about this shift that the United States would never be able to fight a conscript war again, because if you conscript people, it affects the whole country. So the war in Iraq is a war is later fought largely by a voluntary army and mercenaries recruited from abroad.

  It’s ironic. The British Empire has been perhaps the most influential in terms of culture in Pakistan. You speak with an English accent. But, in reality, the American Empire is the one that changed your life by trying to determine politics in your country.

  It’s absolutely true. I find it difficult to imagine what life would have been like in Pakistan had there not been a military coup, had that first general election taken place. Would Pakistan have split up in 1971? It’s one of those interesting counterfactuals that will remain with us forever. I mean, you know, these counterfactuals sort of intrigue me more and more. The older you become, the more you think of how these moments in history have changed your life and those of others.

  We don’t think about this when we’re young.

  No, when we’re young, we don’t think about these things. You know, you’re prepared to do anything. I remember when I was in North Vietnam during the war, and the bombs were dropping on us every day, I just said once to the Vietnamese, we feel really bad. You know, I’m in my twenties. Can’t we do something to help you? Can we help man the anti-aircraft battery? And the Vietnamese general Pham Van Dong took me aside and he said, I’m really touched you say that, but this is not the Spanish Civil War, where people from abroad can come and fight, and die. This is a war being fought between us and the most technologically advanced nation in the world. Having foreigners coming in to fight with us would require a great deal of effort keeping you people alive, which would be a distraction from the war. So please don’t make this request of us.

  Chapter 3

  The Soviet Union and Its Satellite States

  Oliver Stone: We’ve talked about some of the cataclysmic events after World War II when the West expressed itself aggressively in changing governments. And we mustn’t forget what happened in Greece in 1947. Could you talk about that?

  Tariq Ali: Well, the Greek civil war was a very vicious, bloody war involving virtually every single family in Greece. Families were divided, families split up.

  Like the Spanish Civil War?

  Like the Spanish Civil War. The Greeks still call it “Churchill’s War” because Churchill was so attached to the Greek right and to the Greek royal family that he did not want that country to be changed in any way after the war. The Russians had done the deal at Yalta, deciding that Greece was to be part of the Western sphere of influence. And Stalin was anything if not daft-minded when sticking to his deals. So he told the Greeks you have to behave yourselves. But a group of independent Greeks—they were communists, but more sympathetic to Tito and the Yugoslavs than to Stalin—led by a legendary leader, Aris Velouchiotis, said, we’re going to continue on fighting. So, the war continued. The Russians couldn’t do much about it, but Churchill did. And it was prosecuted with real viciousness and vigor until they defeated the communists.

  That war still has echoes today. Recently I was in a part of Greece called Pelion, near Salonika. We were walking through a village, and a Greek friend said there was a big massacre in this village during the civil war, and this is the cemetery for all the communists who died. These events don’t go away, you know. They stay. People remember them. Then something else happens, an eruption totally unrelated to that war, and all these things come up again. A police officer who ordered police to fire on student protesters, his father fought for the right in the civil war. History never goes away, which is why, when I’m speaking especially to younger people, I always say to them that history is present. You may not know it, but almost everything that happens is related to something in the past. You can’t understand the present otherwise.

  In Greece didn’t Churchill nakedly hand over British military power to the Americans, saying you finish the job?

  Exactly. Though to be technically accurate, the handover was conducted by his Labour Party successor, Clement Attlee, who was under left-wing pressure on this issue from his own party and was relieved to hand over the baby and the filthy bathwater to Truman. The same thing happened in Greece as happened in Saudi Arabia, as happened in other parts of the world where decaying empires handed over their functions to the United States. The United States took over the Greek civil war, and they regard that as a victory. They won that civil war. And many of the officers who carried out the coup d’état in Greece in 1967, imposing a military dictatorship, had fought in the civil war on the side of the West and had been friends ever since.

  We’ve been talking about the Western reaction to World War II, and America’s expansion as an empire afterward, displacing the British. Can we talk about the Soviet expansion of that era? Did Soviet aggressiveness provoke a Western response?

  The Soviet leadership, Stalin and his successors, were tough on their own populations, but, by and large, they were very careful not to provoke the West. They kept to the deals they had made, both during and after the war. Churchill, Stalin, and Roosevelt had agreed at Yalta that Eastern Europe, with the countries named on a piece of paper, would be a part of the Soviet sphere of influence, and the Russians then took that seriously. Whether this piece of paper should have been signed at all is another question, but it was. Then the Russians said, Eastern Europe is ours, we were attacked by the Germans through Poland, through Czechoslovakia, so we’re going to control these countries now. That’s been agreed to. And then they did something really foolish and shortsighted. The United States made big strategic mistakes, and so did the Russians. To impose the Soviet system on countries like Czechoslovakia, Poland, Romania, and Bulgaria was unnecessary and wrong. In Czechoslovakia, there actually was an election held in 1948, and the Czech Communist Party emerged as a very large political force in its own right, with the Social Democrats only marginally stronger. Now it should have been perfectly possible to maintain Soviet influence within a social democratic and communist coalition in Czechoslovakia. I think the Czech Social Democrats would have agreed to such an arrangement, but this wasn’t the way Stalin operated. Instead, you had to have a one-party state with the central committee, with a politburo, with a general secretary. That model was imposed on Eastern Europe. It was imposed on East Germany, where you also had a strong social-democratic party, which could have continued. Forcible mergers took place. So, sooner or later, people in these countries said, we don’t like this whole style of government, and you had rebellions. The first in East Berlin, the worker’s uprising in East Berlin, soon after Stalin’s death, crushed by Soviet tanks. Then you had the uprising in Hungary in 1956, crushed by Soviet tanks.

  The revolt in East Berlin in 1953 was called the worker’s uprising because it was mainly the working class that said we don’t like this system and the way it’s organized. We’d like to be in power, but we’re not in power. And after the East Berlin worker’s uprising was crushed, Bertolt Brecht wrote this wonderful ten-line letter in the form of a poem to the central committee of the East German Communist Party. The poem is called “The Solution.” He said, dear comrades, it seems to me that
the problem is the people:

  Would it not be easier

  In that case for the government

  To dissolve the people

  And elect another?

  And that question of Brecht’s can be applied to many situations. Both sides of the Cold War imposed governments they liked and deposed governments they didn’t like.

  So the East Berlin uprising was crushed. Then the Hungarian uprising of 1956 was crushed. Then came, of course, the Soviet invasion of Czechoslovakia in August 1968, when Czechs were experimenting with what they called “socialism with a human face.” Big debates opened up on Czech television. For the first time you had a television network and a press that was freer than many outlets in the West. I’ll never forget seeing Czech political prisoners on a special television program confronting the prison guards and the officials who had ordered their arrest. Why did you do it? The effect this had on popular consciousness was staggering. In Czech newspapers, you had endless debates. Does socialism have to be a gray one-party state? Don’t we want socialist democracy, where people can say what they want, say what they feel? And these debates were then beginning to be smuggled in underground publications from Czechoslovakia, samizdat, into the Soviet Union itself. When print workers in the Ukraine published some of the Czech manifestos on socialism and democracy, the Russians panicked. They said, this disease must be stopped. It’s like a cancer, it could kill us unless we deal with it, and they intervened. The Soviet entry into Prague in August 1968 was, I think, the death knell of the Soviet Union itself. Many people gave up hope. Alexander Solzhenitsyn, the great Soviet novelist, someone who is regarded as being very right wing, and nationalistic, was asked once, when did you give up hope that the Soviet system could be reformed? And he said on the twenty-first of August, 1968, when Leonid Brezhnev and his central committee decided to invade Czechoslovakia. For me, that was the end. And he was right. And it was the end not only for Solzhenitsyn, but for the whole system. The Soviet bureaucracy didn’t realize it then, because they never think ahead, but what they did meant that the system was bound to implode sooner or later.