Moralpolitik: The Timor Test

National Interest, The, Winter, 1999 by Donald K. Emmerson

ON AUGUST 30, 1999, the United Nations Mission in East Timor (UNAMET) held a referendum on the territory's future. Voters were asked whether they wished their homeland to remain inside Indonesia. The government of President B.J. Habibie in Jakarta had tried to make continued integration more palatable locally by calling it "special autonomy" -- a status elaborated in a fifty-nine article document that few East Timorese bothered to read.

They did bother to vote, however, despite widespread intimidation by Jakarta-backed militias. Out of a population of perhaps 850,000, more than 400,000 had registered to take part in the referendum, and of these, a stunning 98.6 percent went to the often considerable trouble of voting. Many walked miles from their homes to polling stations and back. Of the ballots cast, 78.5 percent--nearly four out of every five persons--rejected continued ties with Indonesia.

I was in East Timor to observe the balloting for the Carter Center. The night before the vote, my co-observer, Annette Clear, and I had camped on a bluff at the easternmost tip of the province. We had hoped to stay with a local notable in Los Palos, but two nights before, men with machetes had slashed him to death and torched his house. He had favored independence. From the evidence we saw or heard, he appeared to have been murdered by pro-integration militiamen, or by soldiers from the Indonesian army, or both, possibly at the behest of the Indonesian-appointed head of the district. At his funeral, his distraught younger sister voiced her misery in a stream of Portuguese (Lisbon ruled East Timor from the sixteenth century to the mid-1970s). Possibly mistaking me for a UNAMET official, she threw herself at my feet, as if I could relieve her grief.

Not just on this occasion, but repeatedly throughout my stay in East Timor, I was infuriated by feelings of powerlessness in the face of injustice. The night I arrived in East Timor, two close relatives of one of the Carter Center's East Timorese drivers were murdered. On the day after the vote, we visited a town, Quelicai, whose inhabitants had fled to the hills to escape the militias and their Indonesian backers. Later that same day, entering Dili from the east, we were forced to negotiate five roadblocks manned by militias looking for pro-independence Timorese. Our only recourse was to stop and make assuaging displays of our harmlessness and deference. We smiled, waved and politely requested permission to proceed--permission from thugs who for months had been killing and coercing those who favored independence.

While approaching the first of these roadblocks, my initial urge was to ask our driver to do a U-turn. A nephew of pro-independence leader Xanana Gusmao, his safety was at far greater risk than ours. But clearly he felt comfortable going ahead, so we did. My second and wilder impulse, at the roadblock itself, was to arrest these punk vigilantes and turn them over to the authorities. But the authorities--Indonesian soldiers and police--were already there, lounging with their weapons just yards away, obviously complicit in the activities of the roadblockers.

Following the announcement on September 4 that the plebiscite had overwhelmingly rejected integration with Indonesia, hell broke loose. Most of Dili, among other towns, was looted and destroyed by militias and soldiers alike. In the course of this rampage, hundreds of thousands of East Timorese were forced to flee their homes. More than a month later, the whereabouts of many of these refugees were still unknown. Our driver, we later learned, escaped to safety in Bali. Reports of massacres and discoveries of grave sites, however, made it clear that some would never return.

Humanitarianism With Teeth

I STRIKE this personal note to signal a larger argument: As long as outrages are committed, outrage will be felt. Democracy necessarily includes and preserves the chance to translate anger into policy--moral revulsion into humanitarian intervention. In polity after polity since the Cold War, democratization has enlarged and entrenched this opportunity.

To be sure, people who rationally estimate and compare the costs and benefits of humanitarian intervention may well conclude that it should not be tried, especially if clear-cut success has eluded such efforts in the past. Outright failures or compromised outcomes in Cambodia Haiti, Somalia and Yugoslavia come readily to mind. Humanitarian war is also oxymoronic, in a sense exemplified by the notorious case of Ben Tre, the village in Vietnam that had to be "destroyed" in order to be "saved."

But people are also moral and emotional beings. A rational choice theorist who pictures the act of voting as risking a little in exchange for a low return would have learned a lot on referendum day in East Timor from the crowds who braved bodily harm to create a mandate that resulted in the veritable decolonization of their homeland. Nor does the greater insulation of most foreign policy elites from physical danger necessarily make them more dispassionate. One could argue that the presumption of safety actually encourages risk, including letting anger trigger action.