> you can draw your own implications. mine are still pessimistic.
Well, no one's ever lost money betting on the evil intentions of the powers that be. And you are much better informed than I am, Angela, both by virtue of being you, and virtue of being Australian, where East Timor has been better covered for decades. But still and all, since it is in my nature, let me sketch an optimistic scenario.
East Timor might be the first place in the world where human rights activism proved to be compatible with realpolitik and where outcry induced the powers that be to do things slightly different than they would have otherwise. If this scenario turns out to be true, the reason would be that this is a situation where giving in doesn't actually endanger any of the major actors' strategic goals.
My overall understanding is as follows. Habibie offered East Timor independence back in January for no good reason, in real-political terms. There was no crisis that forced him to do it. For all the horrors in East Timor over the last 25 years, the threat it presented to the central government last January was as low as it's ever been. There were no international actors that forced him to do it; as has been often noted on this list, the US and Australia and everyone else has been perfectly happy to do business without giving a second thought to the East Timorese. There were no local powers that were pushing him to do it; the army, as we all know, was against it. And lastly, there were no key electoral constituencies that were clamoring for it and who would flock to him.
Instead, he did it on what would be considered in real political terms a whim. He was advised by a group of modernizing Muslim intellectuals that East Timor was just a burden and he should get rid of it. As a Catholic territory, it was alien to Muslim Indonesia. They told him it would earn him points internationally and establish that he was independent of the military. And lastly, that it was simply the right thing to do. It was, in their eyes, a win-win situation.
And so he did it. Unfamiliar with being the executive, he did something momentous on the international stage without doing any of the canvassing and politicking that is normally a necessary part of such action and took everyone by surprise. And the UN, to its credit, seized on the opportunity with was for it astonishing speed and started the international electoral machinery in motion.
Which brings us to the Army. My understanding is that at least some elements in the Army, like elements in the populace and intellectual classes, accepted the idea *at least theoretically* that East Timor could separate from Indonesia without endangering the unity of the country. That East Timor was different because it was never part of the original Dutch colony that defined the boundaries of this huge multinational state. Mind you, they had no intention of doing so any time soon, nor of just doing it for free. But if they were ever forced into it for some unforeseen reason, theoretically they regarded it as very different from Aceh or Ambon. So while they were shocked by Habibie's suggestion, and wished it had never been made, and wished that the election would go their way, there were elements in the central command (i.e., Wiranto) who could at least imagine accepting the loss of East Timor as a bad thing, but not the end of the world.
The people for whom the loss of East Timor was the end of the world were the local army commanders. Their businesses were there, and they weren't fungible. Losing East Timor meant losing everything they were worth. And for that, they would fight to the death. And pay thugs freely to fight to the death for them. (A side issue that I am not well informed on is Suharto forces in particular seem to have been very deeply entrenched there. Stratfor estimates that Suharto allies owned 40% of the land in East Timor -- all of which they would lose.)
So there was a bit of a conflict between the local commanders and the center, and a bit not. The central command didn't want East Timor to separate, and they didn't want their local commanders to lose their property. That they considered a bad precedent. They didn't want to be seen as leaving their loyal local minions in the lurch. The army's entrenchment in local businesses under Suharto has always had the potential for crumbling the army into local warlords, and with it the country. This is the doomsday scenario that the central command, the US and Australia all have before them.
But while the US and Australia considered the solution to clearly be the assertion of Indonesian central command, the central command was a bit more ambivalent. They would have been happiest if the problem could be solved to the mutual satisfaction of the local commanders and the central command: if they gave the local commanders their head, and the election went their way, and everything went back to the status quo ante. And they more or less agreed with the local commanders that the way to bring this about was to terrify the local population and make it clear they'd kill everyone that voted for independence. The only difference was that the terror had to be somewhat more restrained than usual. The territory was full of UN people, the world was watching. But I think they still hoped to win. They had good grounds for believing that the East Timorese were terrified of them. They have been terrifying them for a quarter of a century. Living in East Timor seems to have been like living Pol Pot's Cambodia, a completely totalitarian state, where the smallest resistance could be punished with death, and where surveillance was total. And they knew, and figured the East Timorese knew, that the outsiders would be gone soon, like they'd always been before. So their threats were extremely credible.
The problem was, that the East Timorese hated the occupation to the point of being ready to risk their lives. And the UN election organizing team constantly reassured them that this time would be different, seemingly out of a fateful combination of idealism and naivete. As the election grew nigh, it became more and more widely predicted abroad that the election would be followed by violence. And the UN had no troops at its disposal. But still they organized for the election, and still they reassured the locals. And in purely electoral terms, they were remarkably successful. The turn-out was enormous, the votes were counted accurately, and people said what they thought. An unbelievable event, in the light of a year ago.
And then came the backlash, as predicted. Some of it seems to have been clearly planned beforehand, i.e., the forced deportations, as a kind of Plan B. But if they'd really planned it all, it seems the better plan would have been to have gone on this murderous spree 6 months ago and stopped the election then. From the outside, this seems mostly to have been a murderous cry of rage a from a local ruling class that can't believe and won't accept that it's been deposed.
Given how little concerned the Indonesia military has ever been with the lives of East Timorese, and how normal massacres like this have been in the last 25 years, the first reaction of the central command seems to have been to let them run amuck for a couple of days, and then tell them to stop it, the game was up. But they found out they couldn't. That bothered them -- not that the East Timorese were getting slaughtered, but that local commanders were not listening to them. And this gave everything Wiranto and others said a weird tone, since they would never say such a thing in public, either to blame local commanders (against Army ethic) or to admit they'd lost control (unthinkable: loss of both face and real power). And the tone was made further weird by their clear callousness toward the fate of the East Timorese. But underneath it all, the prime concern of the central command was getting control and showing that they were in control. And in this, they were one with the US and Australia. The only difference was that they wanted to do it themselves.
What has happened over the last two weeks was that the central command has slowed switched positions from its maximal to its minimal goals. It's maximal goal was to reassert power over the local commanders and the province by themselves. It's minimal goal is to reassert central control by sacrificing the local commanders and the province and to accept outside help. And in this switch, international pressure seems to have been decisive.
My guess, however, is that it wasn't the pressure of sanctions so much as the pressure of incentive. We've already cut off most of our military aid (at least the above-board military aid), and the international loans are being held up by the Bank of Bali scandal. But what I think happened is that the US made it clear both through public (monetary and military) gestures and private consultations that (a) it was important to us that East Timor be let go, (b) that we would step up military cooperation thereafter, and (c) that our interests coincided with Wiranto's as far as keeping down rebellions in the rest of the country -- and that we would provide substantial aid in that direction.
And -- to come back to my original point -- the only reason for (a) was international outcry: the UN presence and the news cameras that are largely traceable to the long hard efforts of activists over many years to publicize the plight of the East Timorese. There have been few cameras in Angola as the UN-brokered agreement there has broken down and led to renewed slaughter. There was relatively little media coverage of the astonishingly large UN operation organizing the vote in Vietnam a few years ago. But in Indonesia, the combination of long Western involvement, strategic importance, UN involvement and tireless activists made it an issue. And seemingly, the result has been enough of a push to save tens of thousands of East Timorese and grant their country indepedence in a case were saving or losing the people and territory is a matter of strategic indifference to the global powers that be. And where keeping the territory in question is a desire but not a need of the country at hand. It doesn't stop any of them -- the global powers or the central national power -- from dominating anything they really care about. In fact the final settlement may help them do just that in the long run. And they think so, fine, if everyone else cares so much, we'll save the people. It doesn't cost much.
That's my optimistic scenario. This could all be premature of course. God knows what will happen after the cameras leave or later after the international troops leave. Or when the deportees will be allowed back. But I think there is some basis for hope, even on real political grounds.
Michael
__________________________________________________________________________ Michael Pollak................New York City..............mpollak at panix.com
"I'm an optimist because it's intellectually more challenging" __________________________________________________________________________