Will UN 'interventionism' work?

By Muhammad Takdir and Sunu Soemarno

JAKARTA (JP): Just hours after an Australian-led multinational force touched down in East Timor on Sept. 20, 1999, the UN Secretary-General Kofi Annan issued an appeal to world leaders to be prepared for what he called "a new era of UN interventionism".

Annan made that statement before the heads of state and government which are gathering in New York for this year's session of the UN General Assembly.

The substance of the appeal is very much related to the perception of a growing need for international interventions in humanitarian crises and the required changes in peacekeeping work for the next century.

"There are a great number of peoples who need more than just words of sympathy from the international community," Annan said.

"They need a real and sustained commitment to help end their cycles of violence and launch them on a safe passage to prosperity." (The Washington Post, Sept. 21, 1999).

No doubt, Annan's speech is questioning the concept of state sovereignty -- as its most basic sense, Annan said, is being redefined by the forces of globalization and international cooperation.

The notion remains debatable and would bring difficulties on how the UN may activate its function in peacekeeping work by relying on "interventionism", while state sovereignty has been at the core of UN survival for the last five decades. It seems that Annan is trying to take lessons from developments in East Timor which have come soon after the Kosovo tragedy.

In fact, the two cases are not really similar, and they have presented us with two different scenarios of interventionism as applied on the ground.

In Kosovo, a group of states intervened and violated the internationally recognized territory of the Federal Republic of Yugoslavia without seeking any authority from the United Nations Security Council. What we later saw in Kosovo, instead, was a use of military force against the sovereign state of Yugoslavia.

However much we oppose the actions of the Yugoslav government, we cannot accept the use of force in blatant violation of international law, and in this case, the sovereignty of an independent country which is also a member of the UN. Of course, the UN Charter does not preclude the use of force as long as it is agreed by the UN Security Council based on consideration over world order and peace.

NATO's military action against Yugoslavia was a decision solely based on consideration of NATO powers.

Although much of the international community cannot condone Slobodan Milosevic, it would be wrong to violate a state's sovereignty, especially if it is based on a unilateral decision of a military alliance.

As they say in the West, two wrongs do not make a right.

In East Timor, we all know that the Council has authorized the sending of a multinational force, known as the International Force in East Timor (Interfet), but only after obtaining an invitation from Indonesia.

In that territory, we are dealing with a psychological barrier in maintaining local security and order in which the people are vulnerable to threats and violence among themselves. This is an area where East Timorese are highly politicized, polarized and emotionally charged.

Indeed, the recent security situation resulting from the self- determination vote on Aug. 30, 1999, which decided against autonomy within Indonesia, was cited as the reason behind Indonesia's decision to invite the UN peacekeeping force to come to East Timor.

To be sure, East Timor -- with its ingrained culture of violence and revenge -- was never easy to govern. Jakarta opens its door to the UN on purpose in order to return to normal the security situation in East Timor, not because we submit to interventionism.

The precedents of Kosovo and East Timor are neither acceptable to most people of the two countries concerned nor satisfactory as a model of peacekeeping work for the new millennium in the future. In the former, you can easily find an element of interventionism carried out by NATO that exists in a large part of the conflict.

But in the latter, the involvement of the UN is more likely -- and supposed to be -- the peace-building role of demobilization and reintegration.

Hence, demobilization and reintegration are indeed priorities in post-conflict peace building. The problem is, the presence of some elements in the multinational force in East Timor has been suspected of politicking for the interest of a certain country or countries with a hidden agenda in that territory.

As written by Kees Kingma, demobilization is, however, not a "magic bullet" that automatically takes care of a large set of development and security problems.

Kingma emphasized that one cannot force peace through demobilization and reintegration. "Politics" has to come first. Only then, on the basis of a real political solution of the conflict, will demobilization, resettlement and reintegration support be natural -- and often inevitable -- components of postwar rehabilitation and human development.

We should note that in several cases, such as Angola, Eritrea and Ethiopia, big egos of leaders and their unwillingness to change their militaristic thinking were behind the failure or reversal of demobilization efforts (Kees Kingma, 1999).

Annan's appeal for interventionism might attract discussions about how the UN responds to humanitarian crises; why states are willing to act in some areas of conflict but not in others where death and suffering can be found with bad or worse situations; who will be responsible for illegitimate uses of force without a UN mandate; and which ways and means might the UN use in bringing the concept of interventionism into its global mechanism? Those are relevant parameters that would help us to determine whether interventionism is workable under the UN.

Since state sovereignty is arguably one of the most fundamental principles within the UN global mechanism, the idea to lay down interventionism as the basic need in implementing worldwide peacekeeping work is not viable.

The UN must focus its preference on conflict prevention, as it was introduced in the early 1990s, to respond to an unprecedented growing number of violent conflicts in developing countries.

While in the beginning conflict prevention was primarily perceived as a means of preventive diplomacy, in the years to follow other elements were added which reflected short and long- term needs of post-conflict situations, such as humanitarian and emergency aid, reintegration of refugees, rehabilitation of physical damage, social and economic infrastructure, social sustainability programs and others.

Annan may not see interventionism as a result of the shift of international conflict from an overriding concern with interstate conflicts to a concern with intrastate or internal conflicts. It is, of course, misleading to claim that intrastate conflicts are something new and qualitatively different with others.

Kal Hosti said throughout the long history of liberation struggles and guerrilla warfare, the continued pattern of civil war in the postindependence period and the persistence of what during the cold war was called "low-intensity conflict", all testify to the long heritage of internal conflict (Kal Hosti, 1996).

Besides, we have to remember that the vast majority of the world's ongoing conflicts are internal and the majority of international peace and security operations, of the UN's or otherwise, have involved conflicts in places such as Somalia, Angola, Kosovo and now East Timor.

Interventionism in terms of enforcing peace by almost all definitions can not touch on the root cause of the conflict. The imposition of peace is geared toward incapacitating the conflicting parties to express the conflict in armed or physical terms. At best, such interventionism can try to mold a local balance to the perceived necessity of the interventionist force. Besides, bringing interventionism into areas of conflict is just prolonging the cycles of violence and threats among the local conflicting parties, and it could enlist the victims as mostly civilians and innocent people.

Is this the purpose of what the UN stands for?

Muhammad Takdir is an alumni of the International Law Department at Hasanuddin University and Sunu Soemarno is an alumni of the International Relations Department at the University of Indonesia. Both work at the Ministry of Foreign Affairs. The views expressed here are their own.