Interventions (14 page)

Over the next forty-eight hours, a delegation of Security Council envoys, led by Namibian ambassador Martin Andjaba and including UK ambassador to the United Nations Jeremy Greenstock, arrived in East Timor along with the top Indonesian military official, General Wiranto. It was clear that Wiranto was embarrassed by the lawlessness that was taking place under his officers' command. From Jakarta, Greenstock called me: “This place is surreal,” he said. “The president is not in charge. The people who are in charge are telling a lot of lies. There is absolutely no doubt that the violence is orchestrated.” Greenstock's analysis was further confirmed later that day by a single but symbolic killing: the murder of Xanana's eighty-two-year-old father by pro-Jakarta militiamen.

In one of the most difficult telephone conversations I had to make as secretary-general, I immediately called Xanana to offer my condolences. His response to my words of sympathy was that his father was one of far too many civilians who had died in East Timor. He quickly returned to the wider cause and conflict: “I know you are doing everything for us, but I can't help feeling that the situation is getting worse. I don't know how many more days martial law will prevail. I want to ask you to define a time for martial law. It is very difficult to accept martial law in East Timor.” I replied that I had given Habibie forty-eight hours, after which he would have to accept an international force. As we ended the call, he spoke about his father: “He was a small part of East Timor's people. Thank you so very much for your solidarity.”

Our solidarity, of course, was not enough. To convert the pressure on Indonesia into a shift in policy, I decided it was time now for me to turn from private dialogue to public diplomacy. At a press conference in New York, I laid out the same arguments to the attendant reporters, to take on board and relay to their audiences around the world what I had put to Habibie. “Before the eyes of the world,” I said, the East Timorese were being subjected to an orgy of looting, burning, and killing for participating in a UN-organized ballot. The time had clearly come, I emphasized, for Indonesia to seek help from the international community, to fulfill its responsibilities for ensuring the security of the people of East Timor. I warned Jakarta that unless it allowed international troops into the territory, it could not escape responsibility for what could amount to crimes against humanity.

When a journalist asked me why the international community was still seeking the consent of Indonesia for going in, I used the occasion to remind the press—and our own team in the UN—of the realities of this intervention: “The question of just going in is very simple. To go in, you must have a force, and governments must be prepared to go in. We all talk of the United Nations and the international community. But the international community is made up of governments—governments with the capacity and will to act. They have made it clear that it will be too dangerous for them to go in.” I went on to stress, “They will not do it without the consent of Indonesia. That is why Indonesia must be pressured to change its mind.”

The turning point, at long last, came two days later, early in the morning on September 12, when I received a call from Habibie. Exhausted, concerned, but also resolved, he began by recalling the agreement we had made a few days earlier that he would call on our help if he concluded that martial law would not succeed in restoring peace to East Timor. “As a personal friend of mine and the friend of Indonesia that you are,” he began, “I am now calling you to ask for your advice and assistance in efforts to restore peace and security in East Timor.” This was the signal I needed to authorize the UN force. He agreed to send his foreign minister that night to New York to negotiate with me the deployment of the force. I thanked him for his important and courageous decision—which it was, given his position—and I assured him, once again, that the force would not be an imposition, but rather there to cooperate with Indonesia. He ended the call with a startling confession of his failure to restore order and his government's acceptance of our terms: “There are no concessions or conditions from my side: I have full confidence in you and in the United Nations.”

On September 15, the Council unanimously passed a resolution authorizing the multinational force, to be known as INTERFET. And five days later, the first Australian troops landed on the beaches of East Timor in a force that, crucially, included Malaysian and Thai troops. After the swift restoration of order by the international force, the United Nations Transitional Administration in East Timor (UNTAET) was established in October 1999 with a mandate to rebuild the devastated country and prepare it for independence. I visited East Timor six months later, in February 2000. As I drove into town with my special representative Sergio Vieira de Mello, I saw the remains of burned-out buildings and the wanton destruction wrought by the Indonesian forces and their militias. My team and I then traveled by helicopter to the town of Liquica, where the postreferendum killing had been the most extensive. Nane and I went to the village church where hundreds had been massacred, and laid a wreath. As we were standing there, one Timorese after another came up to us in silent embrace. Later that afternoon, even as a crowd of some five thousand people gathered to hear their independence leader, Xanana Gusmão, and me speak of a peaceful future in freedom, I could not help thinking back on the terrible price paid by the Timorese for their freedom.

When the UN Transitional Administration was established in East Timor following the postreferendum violence, almost every structure—homes, shops, government buildings, churches—had been looted, gutted, or torched. In this wreckage we were tasked with building a whole new government where there had been none before. For this difficult undertaking I turned again to my trusted senior humanitarian official Sergio Vieira de Mello, to lead the UN's mission in the war-torn country. On arrival, Sergio spoke to the press about the approach we would apply in governing East Timor and preparing it for independence. Reflecting the debates around the culture and practice of peacekeeping and intervention that had been consuming the UN, Sergio's words indicated that we were determined to avoid the traps and trials of the past: “This time we chose not to opt for the usual and classical peacekeeping approach: taking abuse, taking bullets, taking casualties, and not responding with enough force, not shooting to kill,” Sergio said. “The UN had done that before and we weren't going to repeat it here.”

When I returned two years later, in May 2002, to celebrate East Timor's independence by lowering the UN flag and raising the Timorese one, I recalled in my words to the crowd the excitement and optimism that we had felt at my own country's independence day forty-five years earlier. At the midnight independence ceremony at the main stadium in Dili, Xanana then spoke in powerful terms on the prospects ahead: “We gained our independence to improve our lives. I remind everyone, especially the leaders: discipline to affirm our power, tolerance to affirm democracy, reconciliation to affirm unity.” For the United Nations, this day marked a genuine and important achievement, a testimony to our ability to alter the course of nations under siege—when we could summon the will of the international community behind the principles of human rights and self-determination—and then guide them to self-rule.

We had honored our word to the people of East Timor; stood with them in their hour of greatest peril through a diplomatic campaign that secured the agreement of Indonesia and the support of the international community; stopped the killing, looting, and burning; and brought the country back from the brink of collapse and onto a path of self-determination. The cost to the people of East Timor had been staggeringly high. But in a world with too few examples of the vindication of the just demands of a people for security and self-determination, we had won a rare victory.

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The turnaround in Jakarta was the dramatic, but ultimately hopeful, backdrop to the United Nations General Assembly of September 1999. Over the previous eighteen months, the world had confronted two separate crises—Kosovo and East Timor—that had triggered a global debate on intervention and sovereignty, the rights of peoples and the responsibilities of states. I had combined my own intense diplomatic engagement on both crises—with the UN playing a central role in the case of East Timor—with a determination to reframe the question of intervention, and restore the United Nations to a central place in setting the boundaries for what states could do within their own borders. Throughout this period, I had sought to acknowledge the complexity and conflicting demands of this issue of intervention—both as matters of principle but also given the context of a diverse global community with deeply held views on both sides.

Ultimately, the success of our efforts on the question of intervention should not be measured in wars launched or sanctions imposed but in lives saved. Truthfully, therefore, if we can succeed in changing the behavior of potential conflict protagonists before intervention becomes necessary then we will save far more lives. Prevention is complex and can take many forms. One form is sustained and dedicated diplomacy in response to an evident fault line of potential conflict. It was this philosophy of preventive intervention that I later applied to a more submerged—but still very real—crisis over the Bakassi Peninsula, a territory claimed by both Nigeria and Cameroon. This was a long-standing cause of hostility between these two countries, and a ruling on the status of the territory by the International Court of Justice (ICJ), expected in 2002, could inflame communities on both sides, including the inhabitants of Bakassi, thus threatening significant internal violence of some form as well as interstate hostility. I had seen too many times how complicated such conflicts could become once they began, and long before the ICJ ruling was given, I took steps to ensure a set of diplomatic structures and avenues for dialogue between the parties so that this contentious issue could be managed peacefully. And over the years of diplomacy that followed and the breakthroughs in Nigerian-Cameroonian dialogue that we brokered, we succeeded in maintaining peace and stability—an important success in this alternative form of intervention.

But there is a harder side to prevention in the global system that is more contentious: the deterrent effect created by an international system that includes the threat of a military response to gross violations of human rights. As secretary-general, I believed strongly that the credibility of the UN in the minds of the citizens of poor and rich states would depend on where we stood on this issue of humanitarian intervention: the question of whether we were dedicated not to the power of states but to saving lives and defending the human rights of individuals. If states bent on criminal behavior knew that frontiers were not the absolute defense—if they knew that the Security Council would take action to halt crimes against humanity—then they would not embark on such a course of action in expectation of sovereign impunity. As I warned in the September 1999 speech to the GA, “If the collective conscience of humanity cannot find in the United Nations its greatest tribune, there is a grave danger that it will look elsewhere for peace and for justice.”

Having posed a series of questions, I did not wish to leave anyone in any doubt about where I stood: “This developing international norm in favor of intervention to protect civilians from wholesale slaughter will no doubt continue to pose profound challenges to the international community,” I observed. “Any such evolution in our understanding of state sovereignty and individual sovereignty will, in some quarters, be met with distrust, skepticism, even hostility. But it is an evolution that we should welcome. Why? Because, despite its limitations and imperfections, it is testimony to a humanity that cares more, not less, about the suffering in its midst, and a humanity that will do more, and not less, to end it.”

The last year of the twentieth century—the bloodiest century in the history of humanity—was ending, it seemed with these developments in international relations, on a hopeful note. The new century would, of course, have its own wars and conflicts. That we knew. It would confront the oldest enemies of peace and coexistence, and encounter new challenges from emerging powers and unimagined conspiracies of hatred. And even where governments continued to repress ethnic groups and minority populations, we knew that the ideal of intervention would be balanced by the reality of power, capability, and political will.

In September 2000, the government of Canada, in the figure of Lloyd Axworthy, took up the baton that I had presented in my intervention speech to the UN General Assembly in 1999. It assembled a distinguished group of scholars and diplomats led by the dynamic former foreign minister of Australia Gareth Evans, and Mohamed Sahnoun, the distinguished Algerian UN diplomat, to draft a report on the implementation of the new norm that I had charted. Its most lasting contribution, however, would be in the title of its report and reframing of the issue from a right of intervention on the part of the international community to a “responsibility to protect” that had to be accepted by governments as well as the international community.

At the same time as the Canadian commission was carrying out its deliberations on a doctrine for the international community, a culture of humanitarian intervention seemed to be growing also in the actions of many of the global powers. This was evident in the determination of some of the more impressive international leaders during my time as secretary-general to respond to this call. After a deeply troubled period for the UN peacekeeping mission in Sierra Leone in 1999 and early 2000, in which the entire mission looked set to collapse due to the intransigent and brutal intentions of the factions to the conflict there, I was able to call upon the staunch support of the UK prime minister Tony Blair. Rather than watch Sierra Leone fall into another bout of atrocious civil war of the kind that had devastated the country throughout the 1990s, what followed in May 2000 was a decisive military intervention by a British military task force that routed the rebel factions and returned the balance to Sierra Leone's political system. The UN operation was saved, as was Sierra Leone, in large part through the courageous leadership of Tony Blair, and this ushered in a from-then-on stable peace process that endures to this day.