| Subject: Economist: Review of A
Not-So-Distant Horror
The Economist
September 3, 2005 U.S. Edition
BOOKS & ART
A savage road to peace; East Timor
THIS is a powerful and moving reminder of the horrors visited on East
Timor, a tiny scrap of land that was exploited and neglected by its
Portuguese colonisers for 420 years, repeatedly butchered and raped by the
Indonesians from 1975 on, and now enjoys a precarious independence as the
newest, and one of the poorest, countries on earth. The slaughter that was
visited on East Timor after the Indonesian invasion was, in proportionate
terms, one of the bloodiest ever. As many as 200,000 people died, a third
of the territory's population.
The memory of the killing haunted the occupation. Indonesians tried
harder to develop Timor than the Portuguese ever did, but their guilt made
them uneasy. Any attempt by the East Timorese to assert their right to
justice, let alone to self-determination, was met with brutal responses,
culminating in a massacre in the Santa Cruz cemetery in 1991. When the
Indonesian dictator Suharto fell in 1998, his successor offered the
Timorese a vote on independence. They seized the opportunity, but the
Indonesian army with the Timorese militias it had spawned left only
scorched earth and ruined buildings behind.
All of this is well recounted by Joseph Nevins, an assistant professor
of political geography at Vassar College in New York state. Where Mr
Nevins moves on to more troublesome ground is when his book attempts to
enlarge the circle of blame for all three atrocities, 1975, 1991 and 1999,
beyond where it most obviously belongs with the Indonesian armed forces
and government. He accuses all western governments, but principally those
of America, Australia and Britain, of "complicity" in the
carnage. Complicity is a slippery word, but there is a degree of truth in
what he says. America, in particular, could have done much more to put
pressure on the Indonesians to rein in their dogs of war, and America in
effect gave Suharto the green light to move in 1975. All three countries
clearly should have raised their voices in angry condemnation but failed
to do so. In 1975 the British ambassador in Jakarta cabled London advising
British diplomats to "keep our heads down" when the matter was
debated at the UN.
What niggles when reading Mr Nevins, though, is that he never attempts
to explore reasons why the West felt it necessary to support Suharto in
his occupation. One would not guess from his pages that when East Timor
was invaded, it had shortly before been taken over by a communist-leaning
government: that Saigon, Phnom Penh and Vientiane had all fallen to the
communists earlier that year; that Suharto himself had come to power
following dreadful misgovernment and a flirtation with communism in
Indonesia, by far the largest country in South-East Asia. Alone, such
considerations may not counter the charge of "complicity", but
Mr Nevins should at least have tried to grapple with them.
By 1991, and especially by 1999, these explanations anyway carry far
less weight. Mr Nevins's accusations are particularly powerful when it
comes to the lack of action following the Santa Cruz massacre in 1991. He
understates the depth of world concern in 1999, which did, after all, lead
to speedy UN resolutions and the mustering of a peacekeeping force under
Australian command. It should, of course, have acted much faster, but that
has much more to do with bureaucratic inertia than complicity.
[For more info or to order book see etan.org/resource/booksetc.htm
]
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