Reconciliation a must in East Timor

Reconciliation a must in East Timor

By Olle Tornquist

This is the first of two articles analyzing the historic
changes unfolding in East Timor.

OSLO (JP): When President B.J. Habibie announced his second
option for East Timor in January this year, the National Council
of East Timorese Resistance (CNRT), bravely, and the United
Nations, finally, took the opportunity to make decisive advances.

All parties who have not recognized Indonesia's annexation of
East Timor, including scholars, agreed that it was an opportunity
not to be missed, despite the obvious limitations in the deal in
the May 5 agreement primarily regarding the full
military/security authorities resting with the Indonesian
Military (TNI) and police and the high risks involved.

The crisis in East Timor is a ramification of the ongoing
crisis in Indonesia, which in some respects went from bad to
worse following the relatively free but not entirely just and
very shallow elections in June.

The military is granted 38 nonelected seats in the House of
Representatives (DPR), while 34 percent of the delegates in the
People's Consultative Assembly (MPR), which shall appoint the new
president, are not elected but appointed in a way that makes the
military and money politics decisive.

During the elections, moreover, many basic issues and
interests were swept under the carpet, including grievances in
several provinces and in East Timor, and not allowed to be voiced
and represented within the new political framework. Hence, they
were instead bound to appear outside that relatively orderly
framework, extra-legislature.

Also, the most genuine and propelling democratic forces -- the
students and the long-established prodemocratic movement of non-
governmental organizations et al -- were marginalized by
neotraditional elite politics.

Consequently, a political vacuum developed between the
elections of the members of the House of Representatives (DPR)
and the People's Consultative Assembly (MPR) election of the new
president. This lack of political leadership has boosted the role
of the military, with all major parties involved needing its
support and votes.

Meanwhile, all the major parties are depending on and/or
affected by money politics. Although Habibie has been badly hurt
by the Bank Bali scandal, his Tim Sukses (success team) may still
have enough money to buy enough votes in the MPR. Genuine
democratic forces remain marginalized.

Altogether, this has given the military, and the police,
increasingly more space to undermine the East Timor agreement, of
which they were very skeptical in the first place.

The logic was to create semicivilian counterparts to the CNRT
in negotiations; further develop and empower the militias to
promote the proautonomy side in the
referendum by creating fear among the immigrants of what would
happen if East Timor became independent and among the East-
Timorese for terror in the future in case they did not accept
Indonesian dominance; display for protesting people in other
Indonesian provinces what kind of problems and horror they are
likely to face in case they go ahead.

In the event of losing the referendum, the additional aspect
of the logic was to create a mini civil war in order to, first,
further eliminate, if possible, the Falintil, and, second, not
lose face but be able to say "we invaded East Timor in 1975 to
save the country from a civil war and when we leave there will
again be a civil war".

Meanwhile, the CNRT impressively kept its promise to keep a
low profile and did not allow itself to be provoked by
consistently stressing reconciliation. However, it encountered
difficulties in simultaneously shaping a backup in case things
did go wrong.

At the same time, the UN proceeded with the referendum,
although to my knowledge without any serious backup. And to my
knowledge, both those parties felt that they would have given in
to the militias' intimidation and given up the unique opportunity
if they had not gone ahead with the referendum despite the risks.

In my own analysis at the time, a high turnout and more than
two-thirds victory for the independence side would mean the least
risk for violence. The pro-Indonesian side would realize that
they had lost and after some face-saving, including in terms of a
mini civil war, the unrest would peter out as the central army
leadership would abandon most of their local thugs.

However, for the second time since the crisis in Indonesia
became obvious in mid-1997, I was wrong. The first time being in
April 1998 when I said that the Soeharto regime was likely to
remain at least for a few months because the International
Monetary Fund (IMF) and the World Bank had given up much of its
pressure. Instead, Soeharto implemented even harsher measures on
May 4 than prescribed by the IMF and thus generated the riots and
demonstrations that brought him down.

I was wrong this time, too, because the central military
leadership lost the control I thought it was capable of
upholding.

So, while people bravely resisted intimidation and terror, and
the military respected the very electoral operation -- just like
during the Indonesian elections -- the local militias of the
military began to follow their own logic. And even after having
proven its point -- that some kind of civil war would follow if
East Timor went for independence -- the central military command
was unable to do much about it. Apparently a monster had been
created that now ran wild.

In this situation, the CNRT could not do much more than
refrain from being provoked and thus eliminated, which must have
been difficult enough.

In this situation, moreover, the UN was rather helpless. Of
course, immediate UN strengthening of its local representatives
in order to maintain its presence would have been in full
accordance with the May agreement (Article 7), but that was not
done.

Besides, most people would, of course, have liked the UN to be
capable of doing much more than that, but it was simply not
realistic.

This was particularly unrealistic in the Asian framework where
powerful states are eager to preserve their powers against any
form of intervention, where the only successful intervention
against state-terror and murder -- the Vietnamese intervention in
Cambodia -- was resisted by the West itself, and where there is
not even the poor African capacity of sending in local troops
from neighboring countries, as in the case of Sierra Leone.

If there had been armed intervention anyway, the risks of
making things worse would have been high:

* the unity between the local militia and the local police and
military would have been further cemented, plus strengthened by
full-scale support from Jakarta -- we would have had a
combination of a civil war and Indonesian struggle against
foreign intervention;

* this support from Jakarta would then also have included the
entire political elite, mass media and so on;

* this in turn might well have totally derailed the already
weak process of democratization in Indonesia (not to speak of its
economic recovery).

The writer is professor of politics and development at the
University of Oslo, Norway.