The United Nations Security Council and War:The Evolution of Thought and Practice since 1945 (64 page)

At no stage in the period up to the ballot, when evidence of Indonesia’s bad faith was becoming ever more evident, was Jakarta given a direct warning by the Council of the consequences of reneging on its agreements. This only came later during the post-ballot turmoil when the Council mission visited Jakarta and Díli, by then ‘a hell on earth’ in Greenstock’s words.
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On two separate occasions, the UK permanent representative and the mission leader, Martin Andjaba (Namibia), were able to talk directly with General Wiranto.
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But even then it is likely that the pressure coming from the US, in particular the 8 September meeting of the Commander-in-Chief of US Forces in the Pacific, Admiral Dennis Blair, with Wiranto,
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and the messages delivered to the Indonesian government from World Bank President James Wolfensohn as well as the State Department about the likely impact of the continuing violence on international support for the Indonesian financial recovery programme, carried greater weight.
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Perhaps the Council’s greatest service was to strengthen Habibie’s hand against the TNI top brass and against members of his own government who were less than happy with his 12 September announcement to accept a multinational peacekeeping force. It is possible that if the Council mission had not taken place when it did, the Indonesian government would not have reached consensus and other options might have been considered including a military coup.
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In Greenstock’s view, Habibie showed himself ‘a brave and a wise man’ to take the decision to invite international intervention. It was a high risk decision for him. Besides the authority of the international community, the mission also brought two other pressures to bear on Jakarta: the voice of the developing world in the person of Andjaba, whose role in Namibia’s own fight for independence (1969–89) gave him unimpeachable credibility; and the power of the international media, who had been invited to accompany the mission and whose presence helped to shame Wiranto into a climbdown.
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This press role was duly noted by the UN Secretariat, which ensured that all subsequent Council missions – and there were no less than thirteen between 2000 and 2003 – had UN press officers attached.
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‘Snatching victory out of the jaws of defeat’ might be a suitable epitaph for the role of the Security Council and the UN more generally in East Timor. True, the territory did win its independence with the help of the UN. True, the Council did act with remarkable dispatch once it had become clear that Indonesia would not honour its international obligations. It also ensured that its key decisions to dispatch InterFET and establish UNTAET were taken under a robust
Chapter VII
mandate. But it is hardly a success story when perhaps a quarter of the original pre-1975 population of a territory have to die, and when the survivors have to live through no less than two major destructions of their homes and communities within the space of a single generation just to exercise their right to self-determination.

The Council failed the East Timorese in 1975–6 and nearly did so again in 1999. That it was able in the end to do the right thing by the territory in what the Timorese now know as ‘Black September’
(September kelabu
) was perhaps more due to good fortune than to astute planning. It was fortunate, for example, in the role played by the Secretary-General during the crisis. Annan’s focus on the Timor issue, his backing for the Core Group, his tireless energy in getting the support of the key members of the Council – the US and UK – in putting through the
Chapter VII
Resolutions, and his willingness to speak bluntly to the Indonesians, all stand him in sharp contrast with his predecessors, in particular Waldheim. Whereas Waldheim had just sat on his hands in 1975–6 and hoped the Timor issue would fade away, Annan was seized of the problem from the first, evincing impressive consistency and initiative. Here was a Secretary-General who made a real difference. He showed what could be done by an engaged UN secretariat in resolving an issue which touched the conscience but no longer the strategic interests of the great powers. If ever there was the case of a Secretary-General and his key staff, in particular Under-Secretary for Political Afairs, Kieran Prendergast, leading and the Council following this was it, but it was done in such a way that the Council’s powers were never impugned. Whether Waldheim could have achieved anything comparable in 1975–6 had he shown similar energy and purpose is moot given the constraints of the Cold War. But the fact is he never tried.

The presence of a ‘coalition of the willing’, in particular Australia, a militarily significant regional power which had the financial, diplomatic, and political commitment to intervene, was essential. A ‘blue helmet’ UN force would have taken months to assemble, and no other regional power or organization – certainly not the Association of South East Asian Nations (ASEAN) then paralysed by internal wrangling between Malaysia and Thailand over force leadership and its policy of non-intervention in the internal affairs of member states – was prepared to shoulder this burden. During the post-4 September crisis, Australia acted in Greenstock’s phrase as a ‘loaded spring’ which put a powerful resource at the disposal of the UN.
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The Council was also fortunate that there were no cross-cutting concerns on the part of those P5 members, Russia and China, who might have opposed intervention on the grounds that it would create a precedent for similar interventions in Chechenya and Tibet. China, which was perhaps the most sensitive here given East Timor’s location in the Asia-Pacific region, actually had a rather cool relationship with Jakarta at this point due to the TNI-orchestrated attacks on the Indonesian Chinese population at the time of the May 1998 riots preceding Suharto’s fall.
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Similarly, there were no intra-turf conflicts at this stage between the various UN agencies, in particular the DPA and DPKO, which might have complicated the planning process.
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The timing of the Council’s engagement with East Timor between May and September, especially during the period of crisis following the 4 September ballot announcement, was likewise propitious in that there were no other really pressing international issues – such as Kosovo and Iraq – which might have forced East Timor down the Council’s agenda. Although Indonesia’s friends on the Council (Malaysia and Bahrain) and some non-aligned members did feel that the UN body was according too high a priority to East Timor at the expense of other crises, particularly in Africa, and a number were upset about the double standards of the concern for the Christian Timorese and the comparative indifference to the plight of the Muslim Palestinians, their voices did not carry weights.
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The complexity of Indonesian politics in the challenging transition phase from Suhartoist autocracy to multiparty democracy and the vulnerability of the transitional president always meant that a resolution of the East Timor issue was going to be fraught with difficulties. The Core Group’s goal of righting a historical injustice in East Timor while ensuring that Indonesia proper was not destabilized was never going to be easy. At its heart lay the paradox that only a weak Indonesia could open the way for a settlement in East Timor, but that this very weakness would make it an exceptionally difficult state to deal with. In the aftermath of the UN intervention, many goals not least in the human rights field (i.e the prosecution of those guilty of crimes against humanity in both East and West Timor post-4 September) had to be abandoned.
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Indonesia’s importance as an ally in the post-11 September ‘war on terror’ and newly independent East Timor’s (then Timor Leste’s) concern to build a harmonious relationship with its former occupier were both too pressing.
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When he came before the Security Council in January 2006 to reject the need for an International Tribunal to deal with the post-4 September crimes or the extension of the Special Panels for Serious Crimes to investigate and try all offences between 1975 and 1999, President Xanana Gusmão remarked:

Barely four months after President Xanana had uttered these emollient words in New York, Australian and other foreign troops
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were back on the streets of Díli at the request of the Timorese government following a mutiny by a third of the Timorese army (Falintil-Forças de Defesa Timor Leste/F-FDTL) and the collapse of the forces of law and order. The crisis revealed deep popular dissatisfaction with the Fretilin-dominated government and in particular with the person of the Prime Minister, Dr Mári Alkatiri, a Timorese of Hadhrami Arab origin who had been one of the pro-independence party’s founding fathers. His administration’s inability to address army grievances, in particular the blighted promotion prospects of recruits from East Timor’s western areas in a military controlled by eastern-born commanders, betrayed a chronic problem of political engagement. In part this was personal: Alkatiri is by nature a bureaucrat and backroom politician rather than a charismatic communicator like President Xanana. But it also had much to do with the prime minister’s years of Mozambiquan exile and his neo-Marxist adherence to a one-party state ideology which owed more to the bipolar politics of the mid-1970s than the pluralist democracy envisaged by UNTAET.

Timor’s post-independence crisis has exposed the limitations of the UN experiment in state building. The hugely costly but all too brief UN Transitional Administration (February 2000-May 2002) and its much smaller successors (UN Mission of Support in East Timor (UNMISET)) (2002–5) and (UN Office in Timor Leste UNOTIL) (2005–6) failed to bequeath fully functioning state institutions, particularly in the justice and law-and-order sectors. Furthermore, UNTAET’s decision to disband the National Council of Timorese Resistance (CNRT), albeit at Fretilin’s urging, and to legislate for political parties (16 March 2001)
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effectively delivered the country into the hands of the pro-independence party. Although new political associations were founded, they had no influence over the legislative process nor access to government following Fretilin’s victory in the constituent assembly elections of August 2001.
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From the outside, independent Timor may have looked like a functioning democracy, in reality it was a one-party state with power concentrated in the hands of the prime minister and a tiny Fretilin elite. This was all a far cry from the sort of independence which Xanana and others had fought for, and which many more thoughtful leaders – Horta amongst them –
envisaged coming only after a lengthy ten-year transition period. Whether the UN will be able to help put East Timor back together again and secure its future as an independent state remains to be seen. What East Timor needs more than anything is effective joined-up government and a more deeply rooted culture of democratic pluralism. Failure now will condemn the world’s youngest nation to continuing violence on a scale more destructive than either the August 1975 civil war or the scorched earth Indonesian withdrawal of ‘Black September’ 1999.

CHARLES TRIPP

T
HE
Iran–Iraq war ended in 1988 when both Iran and Iraq accepted UN Security Council Resolution 598 as the basis for a ceasefire and for the beginning of negotiations. Satisfactory as this might seem, it must be set against the knowledge that the war had been grinding on by that stage for eight long years. It had started with a well-planned, if indifferently executed, Iraqi invasion of Iran, followed by years of bloody conflict in which hundreds of thousands of people died, chemical weapons were repeatedly used by Iraq, civilian areas in both Iran and Iraq were routinely bombarded, and commercial shipping in the waters of the Gulf was targeted by both sides.

In none of these situations was the UN Security Council prepared to act other than to issue statements hoping that the belligerents would desist. Furthermore, regardless of the formal commitment of the Security Council to the preservation of international peace and security, the five Permanent Members (P5) spent most of the war years supplying arms, materiel, dual-use items, and financial credits to one or other of the belligerents, sometimes to both, in ways which materially helped their war efforts. Finally, it can plausibly be argued that Iran only accepted UN Security Council Resolution 598 in 1988 because its leadership was convinced by then that one of the P5, the United States, had entered the war as a belligerent on the side of Iraq.

Reflecting, therefore, upon the role of the Security Council in the Iran–Iraq war raises questions about the causes of this unilateralism and partisanship – how far was it due to the nature of this war in particular, and how far to the systemic weaknesses of the UN Security Council? Equally, it is useful to scrutinize the eventual coming together of the five Permanent Members of the Security Council to agree on Resolution 598. This has been taken by some to signal a radical shift in favour of the founding UN idea of collective security, whilst others have seen it simply as the outcome of a fortuitous combination of events connected to shifts in the domestic politics of the USSR and the US, generating modified ideas of self-interest. At the same time, there is the question of the relationship of the two belligerents to the UN and to the Security Council in particular, and the degree to which the governments of Iraq and Iran tried to encourage it to take a more active role. Given the tensions, confrontations, and wars which have marked the region’s politics in the two decades after the end of the Iran–Iraq war, it is also worth reflecting upon whether these were in part a consequence of the ‘omission or commission’ of the UN Security Council during the 1980s.