On Wed, 16 Feb 2000, Brett Knowlton wrote:
> This continued for about 2 weeks after the referendum until Australian
> pressure prompted the US to call off the Indonesian generals.
> The most striking thing about this is US influence - when the US wanted the
> atrocities to stop, it stopped. Intervention was never required - a simple
> phone call from Clinton to Wiranto would have sufficed.
>
> Does everyone agree with this verison of events?
Actually no. American pressure at the beginning of those two weeks -- cutting off loans and military cooperation -- was pretty much the same at the end. The atrocities stopped with the arrival of Australian troops. (Or rather they stopped in East Timor. They continued a bit longer in the camps in West Timor, which were and are themselves a bit of an atrocity.)
I think Chomsky's account, both here and in his writing during the events, have been a bit stuck in the past. A phone call would have made the difference in 1976 when the Indonesian goverment and military were tightly hierarchical and under the control of one man who was our boy. But this time the chain of command was much looser at all levels. In 1976 we would have encouraged an army coup at this point, or earlier, due to the real threat of Indonesia breaking up, which is still there. But we haven't done that this time. It's not clear how much we care. Where during the cold war there would have no question that security concerns over those damned precious sea lanes would have outweighed any human rights concerns.
The 1976-9 massacre in East Timor played a defining role in Chomsky's (and Herman's) book _The Political Economy of Human Rights_, and I think it's still a touchstone for him. I think if Chomsky's commentary on the recent events East Timor had a fault, it was a tendency to dismiss the all complications and uncertainties of the post-cold war world as epiphenomena.
> Since then, the US has delayed the arrival of forensic experts,
> presumably to make the task of uncovering the scale of atrocities more
> difficult.
I'm a little baffled by this assertion. There were forensic scientists on the ground right off the bat. You can find a steady stream of articles on their work in the news archives at www.easttimor.com.
The real surprise has been how few bodies they have have found -- it's still less than 200 so far I believe. Don't get me wrong. 200 dead people is an awful terrible thing, especially when coupled with all their houses burnt to the ground, terror and displacement. Not to mention the 25 years of terror that preceded it. But as Chomsky would be the first to tell you, all of that barely rates a headline in today's world. The 1500 that died last year in the Moloccas have barely made the news. The vast exaggeration of the number being killed in East Timor was a sine non qua of anyone coming to help them, just as it was in Kosovo. Here it was definately a case of the good guys -- solidarity groups and non-governmental activists, mainly -- winning the propaganda war. But it was a propaganda war, no doubt about it. And without it, none of countries involved would have intervened. Looking at it from the perspective of a phone call misses all that.
It also misses the irony that the much maligned UN's presence was probably decisive for there being sufficient attention paid for an intervention to take place. The combination of the UN and activists and pack journalists primed with the Kosovo outlook probably all combined to cause something none of them had been able to previously cause alone by themselves. Had the UN not jumped on it, there probably never would have election -- Habibe's suggestion would have been lost in stalling as the violence gave excuses to postpone it until he was gotten rid of. Had there not been an election, there wouldn't have been a focal point for activists to set up a hue and cry about that journalists would have cared about. And had there not been a hue and cry, this would probably have passed as uncommented on as the East Timor massacre of 1991.
In short, the big thing about East Timor is not how predictable it was, but how unpredictable -- not how it is a continuation of the past, but how it represented a change we still don't entirely understand. Did any old East Timor watcher, like Chomsky, expect, when the massacres began, to see the East Timorese get their independence a month later? And did anyone expect to see Wiranto stepping down from power to go on some sort of a trial 8 months later? I don't think so. I think this defied our expectations. This is still a cynical damn world. But it's different than the cold war world, and those differences should be brushed off as same old same old.
Michael
__________________________________________________________________________ Michael Pollak................New York City..............mpollak at panix.com