Global Policy Forum

By Helena Cobban*

The 800,000 people of East Timor (Timor Leste) have once again been plunged into a maelstrom of political violence —and for the second time in seven years the United Nations bears a large degree of responsibility for this. With the Bush administration shockingly silent on the whole crisis in Timor, can the U.N. be trusted to try to solve the country's problems this round? I believe so. But to see why, we need to examine the record more closely.

Back in 1999, after intensive international negotiations, the U.N. organized a national referendum that asked the East Timorese whether they wanted independence from Indonesia, whose military was then ruling over them. The Timorese massively voted "Yes." The Indonesians then unleashed a torrent of anti-Timorese violence—and the unarmed U.N. poll-watchers simply walked away.

Ten days later the U.N. Security Council voted to insist that Indonesia vacate the territory and make way for a U.N. intervention force, led by Australia. That force was then bolstered by a U.N. "Transitional Administration for East Timor" (UNTAET) that governed the territory while preparing its people for independent statehood. Two further U.N.-administered votes—for a parliament and a president in 2001 and 2002—went well. In May 2002, East Timor was declared independent. The U.N. started pulling its administrators and peacekeepers out, and by June 2005 the last of them had left.

In 1999, the U.N. had been totally ill-prepared for the Indonesian occupiers' reactions to the referendum. Its more recent failure was to skimp and hurry on UNTAET's mission from late 1999 onwards. East Timor, we should recall, was an extremely needy society, mired in generations of economic backwardness and reeling from 25 years of Indonesia's extremely oppressive military rule.

To his credit, U.N. Secretary-General Kofi Annan has recently admitted that the U.N. may have rushed its nation-building work in Timor. He told journalists May 31: "There has been a sense that we tend to leave conflict areas too soon ... When we get into these situations, we should be in for the medium to the longer-term."

There were, certainly, many things UNTAET did wrong. Almost anywhere the U.N. and non-governmental aid organizations have big missions these days, they inflict large distortions on the local economy and society, not least because "international" workers have high salaries, pay high rents and work with high-end vehicles and other tools that create an apartheid-like effect in the targeted societies. Timor was no exception.

But much that UNTAET did was very valuable indeed. It provided a basic structure of public security in which East Timorese could start to rebuild lives shattered by the events of August-September 1999. It helped in the return and resettlement of thousands of East Timorese who had been forcibly relocated by the Indonesian military to inside Indonesian territory. It helped the East Timorese freedom fighters establish their country's first national governance structure.

In light of the most recent events, it seems clear that much has been flawed about that governance structure. Several reports indicate that before the most recent round of violence erupted, tensions had festered for some time between different ranks in the army, between the army and the national police, and between Timorese from the eastern and western ends of their country. The U.N. University's Ramesh Thakur has written that, earlier, there were questions whether East Timor needed a national army at all. "Given that East Timor would never be in a position to repel an invasion by either of its two powerful neighbors [Indonesia and Australia], should it simply abandon the idea of a national defense force?"

This week, as in the aftermath of the 1999 debacle, it has been Australia that stepped in, sending a stabilization force into East Timor with informal U.N. approval—even before the Security Council has adopted any formal resolution on the Timor crisis. It is expected to do that sometime next week.

As the Security Council prepares its third major intervention in East Timor in less than seven years, how can we make sure this one turns out better than the other two? Here are the guidelines I recommend: