Moralpolitik: The Timor Test

December 1, 1999 Regions: Asia Tags: BusinessSociology

Moralpolitik: The Timor Test

Mini Teaser: In our last issue, Charles Krauthammer declared the idea of humanitarian intervention one whose time has come and gone. A trip to East Timor persuaded this author otherwise.

by Author(s): Donald K. Emmerson

On August 30, 1999, the United Nations Mission in East Timor (UNAMET) held a referendum on the territory's future. Voters were asked whether they wished their homeland to remain inside Indonesia. The government of President B.J. Habibie in Jakarta had tried to make continued integration more palatable locally by calling it "special autonomy"--a status elaborated in a fifty-nine article document that few East Timorese bothered to read.

They did bother to vote, however, despite widespread intimidation by Jakarta-backed militias. Out of a population of perhaps 850,000, more than 400,000 had registered to take part in the referendum, and of these, a stunning 98.6 percent went to the often considerable trouble of voting. Many walked miles from their homes to polling stations and back. Of the ballots cast, 78.5 percent--nearly four out of every five persons--rejected continued ties with Indonesia.

I was in East Timor to observe the balloting for the Carter Center. The night before the vote, my co-observer, Annette Clear, and I had camped on a bluff at the easternmost tip of the province. We had hoped to stay with a local notable in Los Palos, but two nights before, men with machetes had slashed him to death and torched his house. He had favored independence. From the evidence we saw or heard, he appeared to have been murdered by pro-integration militiamen, or by soldiers from the Indonesian army, or both, possibly at the behest of the Indonesian-appointed head of the district. At his funeral, his distraught younger sister voiced her misery in a stream of Portuguese (Lisbon ruled East Timor from the sixteenth century to the mid-1970s). Possibly mistaking me for a UNAMET official, she threw herself at my feet, as if I could relieve her grief.

Not just on this occasion, but repeatedly throughout my stay in East Timor, I was infuriated by feelings of powerlessness in the face of injustice. The night I arrived in East Timor, two close relatives of one of the Carter Center's East Timorese drivers were murdered. On the day after the vote, we visited a town, Quelicai, whose inhabitants had fled to the hills to escape the militias and their Indonesian backers. Later that same day, entering Dili from the east, we were forced to negotiate five roadblocks manned by militias looking for pro-independence Timorese. Our only recourse was to stop and make assuaging displays of our harmlessness and deference. We smiled, waved and politely requested permission to proceed--permission from thugs who for months had been killing and coercing those who favored independence.

While approaching the first of these roadblocks, my initial urge was to ask our driver to do a U-turn. A nephew of pro-independence leader Xanana Gusmao, his safety was at far greater risk than ours. But clearly he felt comfortable going ahead, so we did. My second and wilder impulse, at the roadblock itself, was to arrest these punk vigilantes and turn them over to the authorities. But the authorities--Indonesian soldiers and police--were already there, lounging with their weapons just yards away, obviously complicit in the activities of the roadblockers.

Following the announcement on September 4 that the plebiscite had overwhelmingly rejected integration with Indonesia, hell broke loose. Most of Dili, among other towns, was looted and destroyed by militias and soldiers alike. In the course of this rampage, hundreds of thousands of East Timorese were forced to flee their homes. More than a month later, the whereabouts of many of these refugees were still unknown. Our driver, we later learned, escaped to safety in Bali. Reports of massacres and discoveries of grave sites, however, made it clear that some would never return.

Humanitarianism With Teeth

I strike this personal note to signal a larger argument: As long as outrages are committed, outrage will be felt. Democracy necessarily includes and preserves the chance to translate anger into policy--moral revulsion into humanitarian intervention. In polity after polity since the Cold War, democratization has enlarged and entrenched this opportunity.

To be sure, people who rationally estimate and compare the costs and benefits of humanitarian intervention may well conclude that it should not be tried, especially if clear-cut success has eluded such efforts in the past. Outright failures or compromised outcomes in Cambodia, Haiti, Somalia and Yugoslavia come readily to mind. Humanitarian war is also oxymoronic, in a sense exemplified by the notorious case of Ben Tre, the village in Vietnam that had to be "destroyed" in order to be "saved."

But people are also moral and emotional beings. A rational choice theorist who pictures the act of voting as risking a little in exchange for a low return would have learned a lot on referendum day in East Timor from the crowds who braved bodily harm to create a mandate that resulted in the veritable decolonization of their homeland. Nor does the greater insulation of most foreign policy elites from physical danger necessarily make them more dispassionate. One could argue that the presumption of safety actually encourages risk, including letting anger trigger action.

In this light, Charles Krauthammer's recent epitaph for military intervention on behalf of humanitarian ends appears, if not premature, impermanent. Globalization's assault on barriers to communication has enlarged the scope for empathy, and with it the potential legitimacy of moralpolitik. Televised images of the corpses of American soldiers being dragged through Mogadishu's streets may supersede footage of malnourished and maltreated Somalis. But just as the Vietnam syndrome did not endure long enough to prevent that disastrous African intervention, so should one wonder whether, in Washington, the triumph of realpolitik can ever be more than temporary. I doubt that humanitarian war is, as Krauthammer concludes, "an idea whose time has come, and gone." And even if he is right, its passing may be less a disappearance into oblivion than the swinging of a pendulum whose oscillation is far from complete.

Certainly, as a test case of the advisability of forceful intervention on humanitarian grounds--moralpolitik with teeth--East Timor's time has come, and will not soon go away. For several years, possibly longer, diplomats and analysts will be watching and judging the United Nations Transitional Administration in East Timor (UNTAET) as it tries to accomplish a daunting set of tasks: rebuilding East Timor while funding, managing and tutoring its 850,000 people into a viable and democratic independence.

UNTAET personnel will comprise up to 8,950 soldiers, 1,640 police, 200 military observers and a large number of civilian officials, who will administer virtually all public services in the territory, and UNTAET's troops will be free to use force if necessary. The UN hopes to keep costs for the first year below a billion dollars, but the need to rebuild infrastructure could push the actual tab higher. Once the force is fully deployed, a third of all 29,000 blue helmets posted abroad could find themselves in East Timor.

The Security Council created UNTAET and authorized its mission on October 25. Britain's chief delegate, who had drafted the resolution and its sweeping terms, promptly announced "the dawn of a new era for both the United Nations and East Timor." He urged the mobilization of "the resources of the entire UN system" on behalf of UNTAET, in whose "every step" the East Timorese people "must be fully involved." Such phrases are well meant. But they also bind a global body to a tiny, faraway place and whatever happens there. So recently a killing ground, East Timor has now become a proving ground for the proposition that humanitarian intervention to rescue and build a new nation from the bottom up is a sound and feasible idea.

As a test case for moralpolitik, intervention in East Timor is distinctive in several respects. These include the territory's size and proximity to Indonesia; the basically non-American auspices of the rescue effort; and the key role of Western activists in shaping perceptions of East Timor and pressuring Western governments to intervene. A look at these aspects of the "Timor test" can help to clarify its implications for the future of humanitarian intervention.

East Timor is small, about the size of Connecticut. That could be good news for UNTAET. Other things being equal, one would expect external intervention to be more successful in a smaller place. Potentially, however, the territory's shape and location negate this advantage. East Timor consists of two noncontiguous parts: a main portion covering the eastern half of the island of Timor, and a much smaller enclave on the north coast of western, that is, properly Indonesian Timor. These two chunks of land are not only embedded in the southeastern flank of the world's fourth most populous country, Indonesia. Communications and transportation links between the two parts of East Timor, separated as they are by Indonesian soil, cannot be maintained without the tolerance of the Indonesian government.

It would be difficult to exaggerate the importance of Indonesia to East Timor, and therefore to UNTAET's success or failure. Without Indonesia, UNTAET would in fact not exist. Blue-helmeted peacekeepers are being inserted into East Timor to clean up a mess created in large measure by the insertion of Indonesian troops into the territory nearly a quarter century before. And without Jakarta's willingness to hold the referendum and involve the UN in the outcome, no second intervention would have occurred. Even at the height of the violence in East Timor in September, no foreign country seriously contemplated dispatching troops to the territory against Indonesia's will.

Malign Neglect

Indonesian relations with East Timor have been more or less catastrophic since the mid-1970s. In Lisbon in 1974-75, democratization gutted the Portuguese appetite for empire. But centuries of malign neglect by Portugal had left East Timor unprepared to manage its own future by democratic means. Inside the territory, diverse local forces quickly formed to contest the newly opened political space.

Abetted by Jakarta, one faction advocated joining Indonesia. Another wanted to associate the territory with Portugal. A third urged independence. In 1975 East Timor slid into a civil war. The independistas won. But rather than seek reconciliation, they declared the formation of a sovereign "democratic republic."

In 1975 the Cold War was on, and the thought that the Berlin Wall could fall to democracy was still a fantasy. Indochina had fallen to communism in April of that year. In this context, the situation in East Timor alarmed then-President Suharto and his anti-communist colleagues in the military. They had failed to entice the territory into Indonesia's embrace. They feared the use of a radical enclave by outsiders bent on disuniting the Indonesian archipelago. And they recognized that Washington would not intervene to rescue a leftist government from Jakarta's troops, not with the Cold War still under way and Americans still recovering from scenes of humiliation in Saigon at the hands of another "democratic republic."

So, on December 7, 1975, Indonesia invaded and occupied East Timor. In May of the following year, the Indonesian army convened a meeting of pro-integration East Timorese, who duly petitioned Suharto in Jakarta to let them join his republic. In July he obliged them by declaring East Timor the twenty-seventh province of Indonesia. In 1978 the largely appointed and politically compliant members of the People's Consultative Assembly in Jakarta unanimously ratified this annexation. By then, a cycle of repression and resistance that would last for nearly two and a half decades was well under way.

Later, Suharto's foreign minister, Ali Alatas, compared his country's discomfort over East Timor to feeling "grit in one's shoe." Some grit. From 1975 to 1999 Indonesia's war destroyed the lives and livelihoods of an unknown but certainly very large number of East Timorese. Thousands of Indonesian soldiers and their Timorese recruits also died. Meanwhile, the brutality of Jakarta's intervention, coupled with the popularity of the Timorese struggle for self-determination, prompted activists in Australia, the United States and Western Europe to denounce Suharto's regime and demand the imposition of sanctions against it. A watershed--and more bloodshed--occurred in Dili in November 1991, when Indonesian troops fired into a crowd of demonstrators, killing more than a hundred. The presence of Western journalists and activists at the scene of this massacre assured its rapid dissemination, in pictures and text, around the globe.

So long as General Suharto and his authoritarian regime remained in place, a change in the status of East Timor was not to be. It was his civilian vice president and successor, B.J. Habibie, who upset the status quo. In May 1998, whipsawed between financial collapse and spiraling unrest, the aging general resigned in favor of Habibie, who promptly announced a timetable for moving Indonesia toward democracy. That schedule turned out to include what Suharto had always withheld from the East Timorese: a fair chance to influence their own political future.

In January 1999, to the surprise and consternation of Indonesian military leaders in Jakarta and Dili, who were not consulted beforehand, Habibie proposed asking the East Timorese whether they wished to remain inside Indonesia. And if they wanted out, Habibie claimed, he would advise the People's Consultative Assembly to cancel its 1978 resolution and let them go. That Assembly was itself scheduled to be revamped along more democratic lines in the wake of another major innovation: competitive legislative elections, successfully conducted at polling stations throughout Indonesia on June 7.

By then, Indonesia, Portugal and the United Nations had agreed to implement Habibie's idea by holding a "popular consultation" in East Timor, whose results would be implemented with the cooperation of the UN. But Jakarta insisted on retaining sole responsibility for security in the run-up to the vote. That provision allowed the Indonesian army, in tandem with the pro-integration militias that it had sponsored and armed, to pursue a strategy of intimidation intended to win the vote for Jakarta, or at least to withhold a clear victory from the anti-Jakarta side.

The militias and their Indonesian sponsors apparently believed that if enough pro-independence Timorese could be frightened into voting for "autonomy", or into not voting at all, the outcome would favor Jakarta, or at least be inconclusive. The act of self-determination that took place on August 30 was thus doubly influenced by Indonesia. Had it not been for President Habibie, the referendum would not have occurred at all. And it likely would not have succeeded--the balloting was almost entirely free of disruption--had the Indonesian army and its militias not so grossly overestimated their capacity to intimidate.

In the end, though not without some kicking and screaming, Jakarta went along. In September, Habibie agreed to allow an Australian-led international force to enter East Timor and establish the security that Indonesia had promised and failed to provide. Asian contingents were included in this exercise, in deference to Indonesian sensitivity toward what some in Jakarta perceived as their nation's humiliation at the white hands of Canberra. Such feelings could be seen, for example, in Indonesia's decision to rip up its 1995 security agreement with Australia.

Aftermath

On October 20 in Jakarta, a newly and mainly democratically formed Assembly cancelled its 1978 approval of East Timor's absorption into Indonesia. In its new resolution, the Assembly also acknowledged the results of the August referendum. Possibly to avoid an embarrassing split in their ranks, the delegates did not actually vote on these questions. Instead, the Assembly chairman announced that agreement on the resolution had been reached, and no delegate contradicted him. A little-noticed provision of the resolution held that recognizing the vote against integration did not diminish the rights of the losing side--the large minority of East Timorese who had voted to remain loyal to Indonesia.

Indonesia has good reason not to upset the present balance in East Timor. Without the cooperation of Western governments and companies, and international financial institutions more or less under Western control, the Indonesian economy will not recover. Restoring Indonesia's economic health is one of the two highest priorities of its new president, familiarly known as Gus Dur. His other priority, however, is to preserve the territorial integrity of Indonesia now that East Timor has been lost.

It is likely that Indonesian officers and their counterparts in the militia destroyed East Timor's infrastructure in part to prompt the archipelago's other restive peoples to ask themselves: What price independence? And if this is so, it follows that the government of Gus Dur, too, may have an interest in the failure of East Timor as an independent country.

Meanwhile, Australia has the greatest stake in turning East Timor into a viable state. For it was Canberra, not Washington, that took the initiative to intervene. That impetus had many sources. But the most decisive of them was the extraordinary media-driven mobilization of Australian public opinion against Indonesian cruelty and in favor of East Timorese self-determination. Again the causal link between outrages and outrage in a democracy should be clear: As the violence and destruction mounted on their doorstep, the Australians had to act, even though their army numbers a mere twenty-four thousand. "No Australian government", in the judgment of two expert local observers, "could have survived if it stood by and did nothing."

What this means for Krauthammer's epitaph for humanitarian intervention is this: "Compassion fatigue" and a growing aversion to stepping into potential quagmires in far-off places may well have made the Clinton administration less eager to enlist American power on behalf of humanitarian aims. A case in point has been the almost audible relief in Washington at Canberra's willingness to act out the conscience of the "international community" in East Timor.

At the same time, however, Australia's willingness to engage in moralpolitik suggests that humanitarian intervention does, after all, have a future. In a globalized world, moral indignation may be instantly ignited by media coverage of crimes that, in earlier times, might have remained obscure. Democratization has made governments more subject to pressure from activists not to stand idly by in the face of evil. Even if the international rescue of the East Timorese should fail or fall short, the temptation to engage in humanitarian intervention will not soon disappear. Rather, at different rates and in different countries, the pendulum between moralpolitik and realpolitik will continue to swing.

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