| Subject: UN Official In
E Timor Says World Community Miscalculated Associated
Press November 18, 1999
UN Official In E Timor Says World Community Miscalculated
DILI, East Timor (AP)--The outgoing head of the U.N.
mission to East Timor said Thursday the international community was wrong in counting on
Indonesia's concern about its reputation to head off bloodshed after the East Timorese
voted for independence.
The nature of Indonesia's agreement to hold the Aug. 30
referendum on independence from Indonesia made it impossible to provide proper security,
Ian Martin said on the eve of his departure.
Indonesia probably wouldn't have agreed to hold the
U.N.-sponsored referendum with an international security presence, and the Security
Council wouldn't have forced Jakarta to do so, he said.
Still, the international community did miscalculate, he
said.
The mission knew that certain military and militia elements
favored a "scorched-earth policy," but everyone counted on Indonesia's desire to
protect its reputation.
So they relied on commitments from the government and
military to keep the peace.
"I think that the calculation we made was that, yes,
there would be trouble, but there was sufficient concern by the government and the (army)
in Jakarta that the consequences for Indonesia's international reputation, that there
would be an interest in checking that," he said. "That was wrong."
The campaign was marked by violence and intimidation by
militiamen backed by elements in the military. After the vote, militias rampaged, burning
and looting and forcing hundreds of thousands of people into hiding or forced refuge in
Indonesian West Timor.
Martin was to leave East Timor on Friday, with the U.N.
mission in the hands of another veteran diplomat, Brazilian Sergio Vieira de Mello.
The 52-year-old veteran of U.N. missions in Haiti and the
former Yugoslavia described his work in East Timor as "probably the most worthwhile
thing I've done so far."
He suggested that the self-determination process was in the
end more important than the violence that wracked the territory.
"Despite the terrible nature of what followed, I think
if you go out there and ask the people who have the best right to judge - which is the
people of East Timor - whether they would rather it had happened even in these
circumstances, or not at all, they'd still tell you that despite one further cycle of
suffering, they've achieved what they've been struggling to achieve," he said.
----- The man who organized the Timor vote looks back with
few regrets
DILI, East Timor, Nov 19 (AFP) - The violence which
destroyed East Timor and turned it people into refugees was not expected by the United
Nations mission which organized the referendum on the territory's future, the UN's
outgoing mission chief says.
"No, we didn't anticipate the degree of violence in
general that would break out after the ballot, after the announcement of the result,"
Ian Martin said in an intervierw with AFP.
"We expected there to be violence but we thought it
would be more limited, more localized and that there would be greater efforts to check
it," said Martin who leaves East Timor Friday.
As head of the United Nations Mission in East Timor
(UNAMET), Martin was in charge of implementing the May 5 international agreement that
would give East Timorese a historic vote on their future.
The vote, twice delayed for security and logistic reasons,
was finally held on August 30, when 98.5 percent of the electorate cast ballots.
Almost 80 percent voted to move towards independence and
reject an offer of autonomy under Indonesia which invaded the former Portuguese colony in
1975.
Martin's annnouncement of the result on September 4 sparked
a militia rampage that left hundreds of East Timreose dead, forced hundreds of thousands
of people to flee their homes and nearly drove UNAMET itself from the territory.
"I think that there were two things that we were wrong
about, in retrospect," Martin said.
The first misconception was, as voting day neared, the
Indonesians had come to accept their autonomy proposal would likely be rejected.
"I think we've learned since that there was a lot of
genuine shock, that there was a significant section of Indonesians - including people in
the TNI (Indonesian military) - who still thought that they were going to achieve a
pro-autonomy vote."
Martin said UNAMET also over-estimated the degree to which
officials in Jakarta would control any post-vote violence out of concern their country's
international image would suffer.
"In that sense we under-estimated the determinationm
of some people, in the TNI to carry out the scorched earth policy."
Even before September's orgy of destruction, violence and
intimidation by Indonesian-back armed miltias marred the months leading to the ballot.
The violence led to increasing internaional condemnation
and forced Martin to make repeated calls for Indonesian police to take action, as a May
5th agreement required them to do.
At the same time, in talks with Martin, Indonesian
officials denied links between their military and the militias.
"It was the fundamental untruth that the militia were
a self-organized East Timroese phenomenon, rather than an extension of the TNI. The real
nature of that relationship was never acknowledged. It was occasionally, privately,
acknowledged by the police."
As fires burned and gunshots rang out across the territory
in the days after Martin announced the ballot results, UNAMET's Dili headquarters came
under seige, which led to a major departure of local staff on September 10.
"That was the moment when we were close to having to
leave completely." At the time it was unclear whether a peacekeeping force would be
sent, Martin said.
He and other staff eventually left Dili temporarily, but 10
UNAMET staffers remained at the more secure Australian consulate.
Martin said he hoped future investigations would reveal who
was behind the planning for the destruction of East Timor.
He said he knew from the start of his missiomn the security
situation would be the essential issue.
"It was clear that the agreement was going to be an
extremely difficult one to implement," said Martin, who often wore a smile and a
safari suit.
Despite the violence, which claimed the lives of at least
five UNAMET staffers from East Timor, Martin said he is comnforatable with the decisions
he made to procede with the ballot.
Had it not gone ahead: "Perhaps the one opportunity
the people of East Timor had to express themselves would disappear," he said.
"I feel that something extremely important has been
accomplished and the East Timorese people have exercised their right to self-determination
and nothing can take that away from them.
"Despite all the suffering they've been through, it is
a suffering that has had an outcome," he said.
Back to November Menu
World Leaders Contact List
Human Rights Violations in East Timor
Main Postings Menu
Note: For those who would like to fax "the
powers that be" - CallCenter V3.5.8, is a Native 32-bit Voice Telephony software
application integrated with fax and data communications... and it's free of charge!
Download from http://www.v3inc.com/ |
