East Timor is not Palestine

Oct 11, 2024
Close-up view of East Timor National flag waving. The Democratic Republic of East Timor is a country in Southeast Asia. Fabric textured background. Selective focus. 3D illustration render

Peter Job’s article in P&I, ‘Palestine – The Lessons of East Timor’, is an interesting foray into the link between international law and moral condemnation as offering a possible insight into the future of Palestine. As Job argues, one generally does need international law to be on one’s side if a just resolution is to be possible.

International law is on the side of Palestine; international law also never recognised Indonesia’s territorial incorporation of East Timor, although there the similarities end.

There is no doubt that there was growing public protest about East Timor, especially following the 1991 Santa Cruz massacre which put the cause back on the global map, after it had largely slipped from international consciousness. Similarly, there is global condemnation of Israel’s slaughter in the Gaza Strip, if less so its demolition of Hamas or its responses to third party attacks by Hezbollah, Yemen’s Houthis and their backer in Iran.

But what tipped in favour of East Timor’s eventual independence was not international law or public outrage, but the handy confluence of two more prosaic events. The first was the end of the Cold War, the creation of a unipolar moment and, when it counted, the compliance of the UN Security Council’s Permanent Five members.

Needless to say, a new Cold War is now upon us, that unipolar moment is long past and the P5 is anything but compliant.

The second key factor was the Asian Financial Crisis of 1997-98, which saw the Indonesian economy tank and it go cap in hand to the International Monetary Fund for bail-out funds. The US, conveniently, held the whip hand at the IMF.

The US was at that time no longer feeling obliged to support odious but compliant political leaders and was having one of its rare fits of concern for human rights (which it could then afford being the world’s only superpower). Then long simmering tensions in Indonesia’s body politic boiled over and strongman President Suharto was tapped on the shoulder and told to resign (the long-running intrigues of which are a book in their own right).

In stepped Suharto’s technocratic if malleable Vice-President and political numpty, Bacharuddin Jusuf Habibie, inheriting Indonesia’s economy in meltdown. Despite having close to the lowest standard of living in Indonesia, occupied East Timor soaked up more of the national budget, per capita, than any other province. Habibie was looking for a quick IMF fix and, at the suggestion of his advisor, Dewi Fortuna Anwar (who was, more than coincidentally a PhD graduate of Monash University), settled on cutting profligacy in East Timor while addressing, once and for all, global human rights concerns. It seemed a neat solution to two vexing problems.

Thus East Timor’s UN-supervised ballot on whether it would remain as part of Indonesia or become independent was born. Then Prime Minister John Howard’s celebrated letter to Habibie was a late irritation, but not a driver of events and, indeed, the Australian government wanted East Timor to remain within Indonesia to the last (Foreign Minister Alexander Downer told Australians assembled in Dili just a couple of weeks before the vote this exact thing).

The Indonesian military had its own heavy-handed plans which, with the full glare of the international spotlight, tipped international condemnation. John Howard, under domestic pressure, asked US President Bill Clinton to step in. But Clinton replied that the US was busy in Bosnia and that, as the US ‘deputy sheriff’ in the region, Australia had to take the lead. The US would apply economic pressure.

True to its word, the US told Habibie that if Indonesia would not allow in an international peace-keeping force it would ensure that the IMF withheld its next tranche of funding, upon which the teetering Indonesian economy relied. The UNSC P5 complied and the rest is history.

However, for there to be an equivalence with Israel and Palestine, Netanyahu would have to be pushed from office (Israel’s economic collapse is not on the horizon) and the US would have to force the hand of his successor. The US would be unlikely to do this, for two reasons.

The first reason is that this is not the unipolar 1990s with a failing Israel and a compliant UNSC P5. The second reason is that the US retains a major strategic interest in Israel’s survival and, indeed, success, even if it sometimes gets squeamish about the deaths of tens of thousands of civilians.

Of course, international condemnation is handy for keeping the matter in the public eye (although one wonders where public outrage was between 1967 and October 2023). That international law would allow a change of the status quo is a necessary condition. However, the usefulness of the former is overstated by its adherents and the value of the latter is, alone, far from sufficient.

There is no doubt that all successful resolution processes (of which there are relatively few) teach us something about how wars can be sustainably ended. But they also teach us that every successfully resolved conflict had its own specific dynamic and is located within its own strategic, political, economic and historical context.

If it needs to be said, East Timor is not Palestine.

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