Overseas Perspectives                                    
by S. Giovanna Giacomazzi 


East Timor with Kosovo

What the international community is witnessing in East Timor is yet another example of the new evil with which the world of international relations is confronted at the end of the century:  conflicts within nations rather than among them.  Somalia, the Caucasus - first Chechnya and now Dagestan, and Rwanda, to mention only a few.

Many have been pointing their finger at the West for hesitating to intervene against the violence taking place in the Indonesian province which recently voted favorably on a referendum to grant its independence.  With outcries that smack of an appeal to populism, they ask:  Why the double standard?  Why yes, in Kosovo, but no, in east Timor?  The same question was asked for years about the former Yugoslavia.  Why save Kuwait and not Bosnia?  However, many of those who are accusing the United States and the West of responsibility for the horrors in East Timor by way of their passivity are those very contenders who were against NATO intervention in Kosovo only a few months ago.  Do they mean, then, that if  we’re willing to make war on Milosevic, we should be willing to make war on Ecevit in Turkey for the situation of the curds, with Russia over Chechnya and Dagestan, and with Habibie in Indonesia for East Timor?  Or is their point just the opposite, that we shouldn’t intervene at all, anywhere?

Certainly there are many similarities between the situtation in the region of East Timor in Indonesia and that of Kosovo in Yugoslavia.  Both are inhabited by oppressed ethnic groups which represent the overwhelming majority in their regions, but which are minorities within their respective countries.  Both suffered a conflict brought on by differences of religion and culture. Both have been victims of grave violations of human rights.  But Timor is not Kosovo in three very different ways.

The first difference is juristical and should make intervention easier than it was in Kosovo. When, in 1975, Portuguese Timor declared its independence as East Timor, it was invaded and forcibly annexed by Indonesia, a move which was not recognized by the United Nations. Guerrillas fought the Indonesian army into the 1990s, but the army responded brutally in an attempt to crush resistance.

In Kosovo, the international community had struggled with choosing between two very important norms of international relations:  the respect for state sovereignty and the protection of human rights.  The principle of human rights prevailed, generating new expectations in peoples with aspirations of liberty and independence.  It was not perceived as fortuitous, but as a promise, both radical and innovative.  A promise by which international law would protect human rights even it meant drastically limiting the sovereignty of nation states.  A new world order reminiscent of Kant’s cosmopolitan republic, still deprived of a proper police force and court of law, but present in the yearnings of the oppressed and becoming manifest in the action of some governments.

For the international community at large this juristic dilemma, between human rights and state sovereignty, does not exist in East Timor, since its annexation by Indonesia has never been officially recognized.  However, it does exist for the United States and Australia, both of which had given precedence to cold war principles in accepting General Suharto’s regime which at the time represented a rampart against communism in a very crucial part of Asia.
 
The second difference, which should also facilitate intervention when compared to Kosovo, is the relative political importance of Indonesia.  A bankrupt state with a repressive military, a weak President, and very feeble democratic institutions, the West hardly needs to walk on tiptoes.  It is not a major power capable of turning any external military intervention into something beyond a regional war.  It’s not like complaining to the Russians about their dealings with the rebels in Dagestan or to the Chinese about their oppression of Tibet.

It’s the third difference that makes intervention difficult.  What is missing in Asia is a regional organization like NATO which could fill the lacuna left by the United Nations, ever present with its good intentions, but unable to defend its transnational values.  Kosovo was an affair of the Interior for Europeans, and by the Atlantic extension, for the United States.  East Timor has no regional equivalent to NATO to offer it protection from the bad guys on the Asian block.

The East Timorese can only put their hopes in the persuasive power of the horrors we witness on our television screens, in the promise of collective consciousness moved to action embodied by the experience in Kosovo, and in the sense of responsibility of the United Nations which had guaranteed its protection after the referendum, only to flee when it proved unable to fulfill that obligation.

 Nevertheless, the enormous political and strategic difficulties of the intervention in Kosovo should be evidence enough of how much more difficult military intervention in East Timor might be.  Whoever honestly has the human rights of others at heart must understand that those rights can be defended with force only when such defense lies within the limits of what is truly possible, and not by adventuring quixotically into any sort effort for the sake of nobility, even if that effort is destined to fail. S

September 1999

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