I don't know how far back the lbo archives go.
Ok, so "taking the decision to hold the election as a given, the violence that predictably followed, the independence that ensued, and the weakening of Indonesia's military that resulted at least in part from the same crisis, do you still think things would have worked out better had the Australians had not intervened?"
Yes. Of course, we're playing something of a 'what if' game now, and it should be read as such. But it does bear thinking about in relation to what is occuring now in East Timor and Indonesia.
So, yes -- for a number of reasons:
a) the Australian military and Government did not intervene to halt the violence but rather to placate the Australian public (which included daily escalating bans on trade, tourism and shipping);
b) it delayed this intervention as much as possible, that is, until after much of the violence had accomplished much of its purpose and which the Australian Govt had definitive information about as far back as April, but with such information in hand, argued against an armed UN presence. If there was a time when armed intervention might have meant something in terms of lives lost, it was during the ballot, not well after.
c) the Indonesian military was already weakened by the financial crisis (even a kleptocracy has to pay its way in the corporatist arrangements of Indonesian politics, esp in the archipelago) and increasingly so by the movements of 1998. Its continuing power relies on the escalation of imagined and real conflicts around the Indonesian archipelago against which it simultaneously posits itself as the line between fragmentation and order. The presence of either an Australian or US military on what was deemed Indonesian soil was and is a boon to the Indonesian military's legitimation in Indonesia. It has always seen and presented itself as a revolutionary, nationalist and anticolonial army. It's real existence, though, has always been to fight its own population. But it can only do so effectively if it can present this as a fight against some version of a fifth column, preferably powerful outsiders -- the cold war was no longer available.
d) the independance of East Timor was definitively on the agenda post-1989, ie., post-cold war. After the financial crisis, it became an imperative for everyone other than those with interests in coffee and oil (ie., the Indon military). Whether this would have occured last year, or later is open to question, but I don't doubt it would have occured. The Australian Government decided to switch from supporting autonomy to supporting independance in the midst of what can only be described as an attempt to resolve the 'refugee crisis' -- with an independant ET, the thousands of asylum-seekers, many who had been here for over a decade, will be sent back, with as minimal interruption to the good relations between Indonesia and Australia as possible. I think even Habibe regarded East Timor as a burden, both diplomatically and in terms of expenditures. The responsibility for conrolling this 'surplus population' now falls on the CNRT, and they will be expected to do a good job by the WB etc. I don't think that's better -- it removes the basis upon which East Timorese opposition was organised, and makes it into a conduit of IMF, WB policy.
"Or that the East Timorese are going to come out of the current UN protectorate worse off than they were under the Indonesians?"
This is certainly a 'what if'. I would call ET an IMF/WB statelet. I don't know that this is what would constitute independance, nor that it might constitute the kind of independance had it been won by an alliance between the ET independance m/ment and the Indonesian reformasi m/ment. I think the latter was definitely a real prospect, and the way in which events unfolded entailed a (perhaps momentary) setback for the latter m/ment and a restructuring (or conservatisation) of the former.
A few other remarks:
ET human rights activists -- most of them students -- in Dili are claiming that the CNRT is deliberately dragging its feet over the investigation of atrocities as it seeks to establish trade and diplomatic relations with Indonesia. It seems the accusation is not only being made against the US.
There's a hellavu shitfight going on in the Australian Federal Police over the fact that whilst some of their number were hiding in the UN compound, another lot of them were in Jakarta working with Indonesian police.
There are at least two brief reports that aid agencies in Dili after the Australian intervention established a system of work-for-rice. Something about ending a culture of entitlement. I've been trying to chase more up about this. Perhaps this is no longer the case, since more recent reports suggest that the UN and aid orgs are using the CNRT as a food distribution agency -- with not a few allegations of the establishment of a system of patronage and exclusion.
It's still not clear what the CNRT's land redistribution programme entails. There seems to be quite a battle over whether land ownership returns to pre-Indonesian occupation titles or not. If the former, then does this mean that it returns to titles under Portugese colonisation, for instance: the Carrascolao family -- who aligned with Fretilin in the formation of the CNRT a couple of years ago -- holdings would amount to over 40% of East Timor, or most of the arable lands.
Australian Foreign Affairs have been leaking like a sieve. In part, due to an attempt to unseat the so-called Indonesia Lobby who spent much of their time premising Australian security on good relations with Indonesia; in part, because East Timor is widely seen as an abysmal failure of Aust foreign policy, congratulatory flag-waving of our boys in ET aside.
Angela