Aceh was hit at point blank range, because it is less than 100 miles from the epicenter of the earthquake that launched the tsunami.

As devastating as the waves were, however, their impact is magnified many times in Indonesia and elsewhere by underdevelopment and rule by capitalist regimes, which are corrupt as all such governments are. Fifty-five years after winning independence, Indonesia, the world’s fourth most populous country, remains a semicolonial country dominated by the billionaire rulers of the United States, Australia, Japan, and other imperialist powers.

Photos of the tsunami’s aftermath dramatically show this underdevelopment. The tsunami faced little resistance from shacks, houses, and feebly constructed buildings in Banda Aceh, the capital—let alone from the ramshackle structures of many smaller towns and villages. Untold thousands of people were trapped in collapsed buildings or felled by swirling debris.

The few well-constructed buildings had a better chance of surviving the impact. Photos of Banda Aceh and Meulaboh township on Aceh’s West Coast showed mosques standing in seas of mud where other structures had been smashed to the ground.

As they begin to clear the wreckage, working people and aid workers now have to contend with the region’s poor road system and the fact that Aceh, a province of 5 million people, has only one small airport. Meanwhile, trained elephants are being used in the clean-up “because there [are] few trucks and other heavy equipment,” reported the Associated Press.

The waves also destroyed the sparse health system. In Banda Aceh, only the hospital constructed for the tens of thousands of Indonesian troops stationed in the area remained standing. In the first days, surgeons there operated on the wounded using local anesthesia only and unsterilized instruments. Reporting on a visit to the hospital one week after the tsunami, Australian Associate Press reporter Rob Taylor wrote, “In a white tiled emergency room devoid of almost all equipment but stretchers, four people died in a matter of minutes.”  
 
Capitalism, imperialist domination
All this is taking place in an oil- and gas-rich province whose natural wealth and human labor has for 30-plus years provided massive revenues for ExxonMobil in partnership with Pertimina, the state oil company. The government in Jakarta and its local political and military representatives—who act as agents for the imperialists while fattening their own pockets—have also taken a smaller, but handsome, share of the pickings over time.

Across Indonesia, the same investors from abroad and local capitalists have blocked national development. The industrialization that has occurred is tailored to meet the needs of imperialist investors. For them, Indonesia is a source of lucrative commodities from rubber to palm oil, petroleum, and gold. In addition, capitalists have taken advantage of Indonesia’s 100-million strong labor force to make the country a low-wage export platform for light industrial products, including shoes made for a pittance and sold for exorbitant prices in stores from New York to Frankfurt to Auckland.

Among Indonesia’s chief attractions for foreign capitalists are its minerals. U.S., Canadian, and Australian mining companies are hauling out gold, copper, and other minerals from Sumatra, West Papua, and other islands. Such products provided 19 percent of the country’s export revenue in 1998.

U.S., Canadian, and European firms also exploit gas fields off West Papua and in the Maduras Strait, as well as in Aceh and elsewhere. The country also produces palm oil and rubber on plantations, many of which date from the period of Dutch colonial rule.  
 
From colony to independence
The widespread group of islands that eventually became Indonesia was first cobbled together as part of the Dutch East Indies in the 19th century. After plundering the country’s spices and other resources, as well as the labor power of its people, the Dutch colonial rulers were defeated in an independence struggle after World War II.

Fearing the militancy and combativity of the Indonesian workers and peasants who had gained self-confidence through the anti-colonial struggle, Washington, now the dominant imperialist power, took a hostile stance toward the new government of Sukarno, and backed a bloody military rebellion launched by General Suharto and other officers in 1965. Workers and peasants were left defenseless in face of the onslaught, instructed by the mass-supported Communist Party of Indonesia to place political trust in the bourgeois Sukarno government. Hundreds of thousands were killed.

Through three decades, imperialist governments from the United States to New Zealand gave support to Suharto’s military-dominated regime, including its 1975 invasion and occupation of East Timor. In the 1980s and ’90s, however, Suharto’s iron grip began to loosen. In 1998 working people and youth poured into the streets to protest the government’s imposition of austerity measures in the wake of the Asian financial crisis of the previous year. Backed by the imperialists, local ruling-class figures shoved Suharto aside.

Since then, working people have tried to use the political space they have won to advance their interests, while a succession of governments in Jakarta has tried to put a lid on the social ferment. The imperialist powers, meanwhile, have continued to interfere in the country’s affairs.

Recently, Washington and its allies have had increasing success in working with the new government of Susilo Bambang Yudhoyono in the “war on terrorism,” pressing it to pursue “Islamic” groups it accuses of bombings in Bali and elsewhere.

A key mechanism for transferring the wealth created by Indonesia’s workers and peasants is the never-ending obligation to pay interest on the debt owed to foreign banks and imperialist institutions.

As in other semicolonial countries, Indonesia is forced to largely export raw materials and light industrial goods, usually at low prices, and import heavy industrial goods, technology, machine tools, and other manufactures, which are expensive. To make up the difference it has to borrow funds from the IMF and other imperialist institutions, which puts it in a perpetual state of debt slavery. Its foreign debt stands at $136 billion. In 2002 the World Bank estimated that payments on this debt would take 44 percent of that year’s national revenue.

Indonesia today bears other marks of its domination by imperialism. More than 40 percent of the population lives under the official poverty line—an official statistic that understates the real level of deprivation. Other aspects of underdevelopment can be illustrated by a comparison with Australia, the imperialist power closest to it geographically.

To cite one example, Indonesia produced 96 billion kilowatt hours of electricity in 2001. In the same year, almost double that amount—198 kWh—was produced in Australia, a country of around 20 million people, not even one-tenth Indonesia’s population.

There is one phone line—on average—for every 100 people in Indonesia, and one for every two in Australia. The figure is roughly the same for cell phones.

Indonesia has less than one-half the length of highways of Australia, and half the number of airports with paved runways—a major barrier to the delivery of food and other supplies to outlying regions.

The lack of roads and airfields is not the only obstacle to the transport of aid in Aceh, however. The province has been the scene of a series of military offensives under both Suharto and more recent regimes, as the rulers have moved to crush the pro-independence Free Aceh Movement (GAM), founded in 1976, and to suppress sentiments for independence or greater autonomy. AP reports that at least 13,000 people have been killed in Aceh in the last 30 years.

Following the December 26 catastrophe, GAM leaders declared a unilateral cease-fire. According to the British daily Independent, however, GAM spokespeople said in early January that the Indonesian military was sending in soldiers “under guise of the relief effort. Indonesian commanders confirmed that counter-insurgency measures were continuing but insisted that two-thirds of troops had been reassigned to coping with the aftermath of the disaster. ”  
 
 
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