Commentary No. 24, Sept. 15, 1999
"East Timor: Why Are We Concerned Only Now?"
As little as two weeks ago, the world's newspapers had hardly ever mentioned East Timor. Suddenly, it became the lead story in the world's media for days on end. What has happened? It cannot be the brutal terrorization and killing of the population of East Timor. However terrible it is now, East Timor has suffered worse at least twice in the last twenty-five years. Better late than never? No doubt, but it does inspire reflection. The "international community" - that headless monster - has intervened in conflicts in major ways at least twice during the decade of the 1990's: the United States and others fought the Persian Gulf War with U.N. blessing; the United States and NATO fought a war in Kosovo without U.N. blessing.
Is the East Timor situation similar? When I discussed the beginning of the war in Kosovo (Comment No. 13, April 1, 1999), I said we should look at it in three ways: juridically, morally, and politically.
Juridically, the situation is that Indonesia invaded East Timor in late 1965, without legal or moral justification. Most of the world protested verbally and refused to recognize Indonesian sovereignty over East Timor, but did absolutely nothing about it (unlike for example when Iraq invaded Kuwait in 1991).
East Timor had been a Portuguese colony for several hundred years, just as Indonesia had been a Dutch colony. Indonesia became a state aspiring to be a nation in the course of its struggle for independence. East Timor had not been part of that struggle. Instead it was conducting its own struggle in alliance with movements from other Portuguese colonies. Indonesia achieved its independence in 1949, a process no doubt speeded up by the fact of Japanese occupation during the Second World War. East Timor was in the process of receiving its independence in 1975 in the wake of the Revolution in Portugal. Indonesia interrupted this process and sent troops in.
Why did Indonesia do this? Simply expansive nationalism of half an island that adjoined Indonesian territory, fueled by a military regime that maintained national unity of an extremely heterogeneous state by a combination of force and corruption. We need to remember that the regime, that of Gen. Suharto, had come to power by overthrowing the elected and still popular government of Sukarno, the hero of Indonesian independence. The United States had encouraged and supported this coup d'etat (in 1965) because Sukarno was aggressively Third Worldist in his foreign policy and because the legal Indonesian Communist Party was the strongest Communist party in the world at the time outside of Communist-bloc countries. Suharto's first achievement was the bloody slaughter of virtually the entire Communist party.
Hence, the Suharto regime was a favorite of the U.S. government, in a country that was geopolitically crucial and extremely large in population. Henry Kissinger, U.S. Secretary of State when Indonesia invaded East Timor, reputedly sniffed that he was scarcely going to sacrifice U.S. friendship with the Suharto regime on behalf of East Timor with a minuscule population and a national liberation movement, Fretilin, that mouthed pseudo-Marxist anti-imperialist rhetoric.
So the Indonesians moved in, the U.N. ritually condemned the move, and the U.S. gave massive support to the Indonesian military, who used it, among other things, to massacre so many East Timorese, twice before now, that it is calculated that no other country, during the Second World War or since, has lost as large a proportion of its population in warfare. The East Timorese of course had no army, not even a puny guerilla. That they were largely Catholic, because of the long Portuguese colonial period, added fuel to the Indonesian, largely Muslim, reckless disregard for their feelings or rights.
After decades of corrupt dictatorial rule, the Suharto regime finally ran into serious internal struggle during the Asian financial crisis, and Suharto resigned. The successor interim regime of Habibie has been weak, effectively sharing power with the army. It sought to unload ballast. It held elections for a new legislature which the government party lost, is looking forward to a presidential election which, if honest, it will probably lose. And, for the first time since Indonesia had invaded East Timor, the government (against army sentiment) consented to a referendum among East Timorese on independence. The vote in favor was overwhelming.
Although somehow mysteriously the Indonesian government had managed to ensure absolute peace during the voting, they equally mysteriously have been unable to prevent violence ever since. It is quite clear now what happened. The Indonesian military dressed up at night as civilian "militia" and began to burn, kill, and loot, attacking not merely all East Timorese they suspected of having voted for independence (which of course was almost everyone) but anyone who protected them (the churches, the Red Cross, the United Nations observers).
It has been scandalous, and finally enough pressure was put upon the United States so that it in turn put enough pressure on Gen. Wiranto, the Indonesian army commander, so that Indonesia is now in the process of agreeing to allow an international force to come in. As of this writing, the exact terms of this new phase are not yet settled, and in the meantime the slaughter of East Timorese continues, even though independence now seems inevitable within months. But will there be East Timorese left?
The juridical case for intervention by outsiders was at least as good in East Timor ALREADY IN 1975 as it was in Kuwait and infinitely better than in Kosovo (where there was no juridical legitimacy whatsoever). The moral case was the strongest of the three, and the destruction of the East Timorese population far exceeds what occurred in the other two areas. It is obviously only the political situation that has been different.
The United States in particular, and the Western powers in general, never appreciated the Milosevic regime, and they had had ambiguous relations with the Saddam Hussein regime. But they positively adored the Suharto regime. What do a few poor East Timorese matter when one is trying to preserve a friendly corrupt, dictatorial regime in a key country?
No doubt the Indonesians have some real problems of their own. They are trying hard to maintain the state intact against secessionist movements on many of their thousands of islands, in a state whose population has little in common culturally except the heritage of Dutch rule and contemporary history. They are genuinely afraid that independence for East Timor will be taken as a precedent in other regions. And the fear is no doubt justified. But, then, they didn't have to invade East Timor in the first place.
[Copyright by Immanuel Wallerstein. All rights reserved. Permission is granted to download, forward electronically or e-mail to others and to post this text on non-commercial community Internet sites, provided the essay remains intact and the copyright note is displayed. To translate this text, publish it in printed and/or other forms, including commercial Internet sites and excerpts, contact the author at iwaller@binghamton.edu; fax: 1-607-777-4315.
These commentaries, published twice monthly, are intended to be reflections on the contemporary world scene, as seen
from the perspective not of the immediate headlines but of the long term.]
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