Mon, 27 Sep 1999

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.