Sander Thoenes Award - ArticlesIt was naive faith in the United Nations that persuaded 98.6 per cent of East Timor’s eligible voters to risk their lives by voting in last week’s referendum on independence from Indonesia.
They were not naive in trusting the commitment of UN staff and volunteers, who organised the plebiscite at short notice and in hostile surroundings. Rather, the Timorese were naive to believe that the UN would ensure they got what they voted for.
The poll went smoothly and within five days the UN had counted and verified almost 450,000 ballots. The result: 78.5 per cent in favour of independence as opposed to expanded autonomy within Indonesia.
Driving journalists across East Timor in an ambulance - the car least likely to come under attack from pro-Indonesian militias - Manuel, a health worker, asked: “If there is trouble, the UN will send in peacekeepers, right? Because there will be trouble.”
Wrong. The UN Security Council yesterday would not comment on whether it would send a peacekeeping force to the island, although diplomats say the topic is being debated, so far inconclusively, among the council’s permanent members. Instead, the Security Council chided Indonesia for failing to stem “uncontrolled violence” in East Timor, and sent a team to meet President B.J. Habibie.
Don McKinnon, New Zealand’s foreign minister and a proponent of foreign intervention in East Timor, told Radio New Zealand yesterday that even if the UN signalled its approval, it would take at least two months to assemble an international peacekeeping force - by which time, it is feared, many thousands of Timorese might be dead.
“The diplomatic initiative just has to be stepped up,” Mr McKinnon said.
The UN’s procrastination is frustrating. Australia reportedly has 5,000 troops in Darwin who could be moved at short notice, while US military is holding exercises in the vicinity.
But Australia is also the only country which recognised Indonesia’s annexation of East Timor in 1976, and John Howard, the prime minister, is unwilling to send foreign troops to the island without Jakarta’s consent. This, in turn, is unlikely to happen before Indonesia’s legislature votes to annul the annexation in November.
Even security council members that do not recognise the annexation, such as the UK, have said they are not prepared to send a peacekeeping force if it has to face hostile Indonesian troops.
The attitude of the Indonesian military will be critical in this debate, for without its co-operation the chances of restoring peace to the island are minimal.
In theory, the military reinforcements sent to East Timor before the referendum were meant to guarantee a peaceful vote. In practice, diplomats and UN observers say, they have aided and abetted the violence unleashed by pro-Indonesian militia.
The UN’s latest resolution condemned the “uncontrolled violence” on the island. But to call the breakdown of law and order uncontrolled is profoundly misleading.
“It’s authorised anarchy,” says one European diplomat in Jakarta. “The military is organising it.”
Indonesia’s armed forces had long been suspected of providing covert training for the militia. But at the weekend, witnesses say the police and military openly joined paramilitary groups in an attack on a UN office in Liquica, near Dili, the capital of East Timor, where an American staff member was shot in the stomach. Diplomats say Indonesian soldiers also led a raid on the offices of the Red Cross and the residence of Carlos Belo, the Roman Catholic Bishop of Dili. At least 20 Timorese who had sought sanctuary there were killed.
There are also disturbing, although as yet unconfirmed, reports that soldiers have rounded up Timorese sheltering in churches and Red Cross shelters, forced them on to trucks, and taken them to West Timor, a part of the island which has always been ruled by Indonesia and which therefore did not vote in the referendum. There, according to a witness account, independence supporters were shot. Those who were not killed were press-ganged into joining the militia. They were told their families would suffer unless they returned to East Timor as fighters for the pro-Indonesian cause.
Diplomats are at a loss to explain the military’s behaviour in East Timor. Some believe it could be an attempt by renegade officers to undermine the authority of General Wiranto, the commander-in-chief. Others believe the general himself let his troops wreak havoc to sound a warning to other separatist movements in Indonesia. The fall of General Suharto and the referendum in East Timor have encouraged groups in the territories of Aceh and Irian Jaya to demand their own plebescites. The response has been a brutal military repression. In recent months, Gen Wiranto’s men have cracked down on an incipient rebellion in the territory of Aceh, and the commander-in-chief has been unapologetic about civilian casualties there.
The armed forces fear that if they lose East Timor, the unity of the archipelago nation will be undermined. But this domino theory is flawed. East Timor is very different from the rest of the country, sharing none of
Indonesia’s colonial history, and little of its culture. Most Indonesians are indifferent to its likely secession.
“Initially, they [the army] wanted to create trouble to show they were still needed,” one European diplomat says. “But East Timor is the wrong place for this. Nothing they will do will prevent East Timor from becoming independent. So if they can’t win it they want to destroy it.”
Against this backdrop, it has become increasingly difficult for UN officials on the ground to maintain a neutral stance. Jamsheed Marker, the UN secretary general’s special representative to East Timor, refused yesterday to lend credence to reports of military support for the militia. But leaked documents from his own staff in Dili clearly point to the involvement of soldiers in the unrest.
The UN has little to gain from acknowledging failure in East Timor, for it bears responsibility for agreeing to organise the ballot in a highly volatile political climate. The UN welcomed President B.J. Habibie’s decision in January to hold a snap referendum despite the misgivings of even the most ardent pro-independence leaders, such as Xanana Gusmao, who argued for a transitional period of autonomous rule to prevent the very bloodshed that has now come about.
Australia, the US and others made little effort to urge caution when it became clear that neither the local elite, nor the Indonesian armed forces, supported the referendum. At the very least, human rights groups say, there should have been negotiations to post UN troops alongside Indonesian police and soldiers. Mr Habibie, however, insisted that only his forces would be responsible for maintaining order.
The UN and Portugal, East Timor’s former colonial ruler, agreed on those terms well after reporters and other observers had reported how Indonesian police cheered an attack on the home of Manuel Carrascalao, a pro-independence leader in Dili. He was not at home, so the militia killed his teenage son instead.
Soldiers also escorted militia in attacks on other towns and trained gangs on military bases. The UN twice delayed the ballot, hoping the soldiers would mend their ways. Little had changed on the ground by the time the final date was set. Just days before the plebiscite, the UN’s electoral commission warned that intimidation was too widespread to allow for a free and fair vote.
“Everybody conceded too much,” one diplomat says. “Portugal jumped on the bandwagon too eagerly. Mr Marker gave in too easily, perhaps because he sympathises with Indonesia’s distaste for separatists. But this was a take it or leave it opportunity.”
Indeed, nobody knew at the time whether Mr Habibie would be in charge beyond November, when he stands for re-election against Megawati Sukarnoputri, a popular opposition leader who was against East Timor’s referendum. Ms Megawati grudgingly conceded to honour the outcome of the vote, but many doubted whether she would have let it happen if she had been in charge.
It was a window of opportunity not just for the people of East Timor, but also for the UN, which had long been eager to get the obligatory annual condemnations of its fourth largest member country off the agenda. Other than Israel, few territories this small have had so much impact on the interaction of the world’s leading nations.
But the risks of failure reach well beyond East Timor. Australia, under public pressure to condemn the behaviour of Indonesia’s armed forces, risks alienating its largest neighbour. The US is likely to encounter Chinese opposition if it pushes for a UN intervention in East Timor. And at the back of the Security Council’s mind is the fear that its actions may further destabilise Indonesia as it gears up for presidential elections. These will test the country’s ability to break with more than 30 years of military rule.
“The credibility of the UN is certainly on the line now,” Mr McKinnon said yesterday. “What one hopes comes out of the Security Council of course is that you can somehow ‘cordon off’ those UN-related people over there [in East Timor] and give some kind of protection for them which they don’t appear to be getting at the present time.”
Mr McKinnon forgot what is on the line first of all: the lives of some 800,000 Timorese who trusted the UN to bring them not just a ballot, but a future.
