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"The dominant characteristic of
the coverage of East Timor in the past two weeks has been utter
confusion, both inside and outside the country, this is really a time
for a little humility amongst the foreign pundits and experts." Richard Tanter, Acting Director
of Nautilus Institute at RMIT
Original Source:
http://nautilus.rmit.edu.au/forum-reports/0618a-tanter.html
Alternative Source:
http://www.zmag.org/content/showarticle.cfm?ItemID=10391
Bahasa
Indonesia Translation by Rachman Jafar:
Sepuluh pertanyaan mengenai Timor Leste yang memerlukan jawaban
http://rajasidi.multiply.com/journal/item/106
The Nautilus Institute at RMIT
Austral Policy Forum 06-18A 8 June 2006
Ten questions about East Timor for which we need answers
by Richard Tanter
1. Introduction
2. Essay - Ten questions about East Timor for which we
need answers
3. Nautilus invites your response
1.
Introduction
Richard Tanter, Acting Director of Nautilus Institute at RMIT, argues
that since
"The dominant characteristic of the coverage of East Timor in the past
two weeks has been utter confusion, both inside and outside the
country, this is really a time for a little humility amongst the
foreign pundits and experts."
Tanter asks "ten questions to which we need some substantial answers
and preferably some serious debate."
The views expressed in this article are those of the author and do not
necessarily reflect the official policy or position of the Nautilus
Institute. Readers should note that Nautilus seeks a diversity of views
and opinions on contentious topics in order to identify common ground.
2.
Essay - Ten questions about East Timor for which we need answers
The dominant characteristic of
the coverage of East Timor in the past
two weeks has been utter confusion, both inside and outside the
country. The simple and clear narrative of the long hard decades
leading up to September 1999 of good Timorese seeking
self-determination and bad Indonesian military colonialists has been
replaced by doubt and confusion amongst both Timorese and outside
observers. Even well-informed foreign observers admitted their
uncertainty about what was actually happening and why -- though many of
less well informed operated under no such restraint, thereby adding to
the confusion.
The violent events in East Timor in the past two weeks should not
really have been a surprise. There had been little explicit warning in
the foreign press prior to the army mutiny two months ago. Most
critical commentary outside the country to that date concentrated on
just two issues -- the tensions between justice and reconciliation over
the crimes of the Indonesian military and their Timorese militias
leading up to independence, and the protracted and unhappy negotiations
between the newly independent country and Australia over the division
of oil and gas revenues from the Timor Sea fields.
Yet over the past half year or more disturbing signs had been seeping
through the generally benign but uninforming portrayal of
post-independence Timor Leste. Two were particularly distressing. The
first was the 2006 Human Development Report for Timor Leste from the
United Nations Development Program [1], showing that
that the poorest country in a poor region was becoming markedly poorer
and more desperate, with almost every indicator of health and
collective well-being in decline. After two and a half decades of the
depredations of Indonesian military colonialism, this was a bitter
pill. The second signal, with even worse connotations, was a report in
April by Human Rights Watch that carefully documented the use of
torture and serious mistreatment of detainees by East Timorese police. [2]
Even without more detailed knowledge, these were enough to set off
alarms that the hard-fought for self-determination was no more than a
necessary condition for peace and human security in East Timor, and
that there was more to the explanation of the misery of many thousands
of people than the continuing antipathy of the Indonesian military and
the arrogance and short-sightedness of the Australian government in the
oil negotiations, important as they undoubtedly were.
This is a moment when we need to take stock, to admit uncertainty, and
carefully explore the underlying dynamics of a situation that is as
complex as it is dangerous. The media are full of plenty of instant
diagnoses, some from the usual suspects ("failed states" and
"Australian coup d'etat" are two popular lines that we hear a lot of).
But this is really a time for a little humility amongst the foreign
pundits and experts.
Here are ten questions to which we need some substantial answers
and preferably some serious debate.
1. What inhibited the Alkatiri
administration from effectively addressing the army rebellion and the
antagonisms between the army and the police? Why were the divisive
recruiting policies of the army and the police allowed to take root?
The first public signs of rebellion were many months
ago. Insiders must have been aware of severe distress long before that.
Nothing about control of armed force in small weak states should ever
be allowed to drift. The only explanations offered to date have been
either in terms of personalities, both inside the Council of Ministers
and within the armed forces (FDTL) and the police (PNTL), or in overly
simple terms of "ethnicity" and region. The army recruited mainly
ex-Falantil guerrilla fighters, by default of their survival, mostly
from the east of the country. The police, disproportionately from the
west, allowed in former members of the Indonesian police force, and
according to some, substantial numbers of former militia. But the key
question is not about the policies, but why the Council of Ministers
could not or would not reverse these dynamics. To answer that, we need
much more than just caricatures of "bad Alkatiri, good Gusmao". To some
degree these policies were in place by UNTAET before the transition to
independence, but the question still remains as to why sophisticated
and perceptive political figures such as Mari Alkatiri and Jose Ramos
Horta were unable to rein in the Ministers of Defence (Roque Rodrigues)
and Interior (Rogerio Lobato), and the FDTL's chief, Major-General Taur
Matan Ruak. For this we need a clearer account of the politics of the
administration, and not simple abuse about "failing states".
2. What have been the key political
dynamics in East Timor post-independence?
Remarkably little informed analysis has been
available about the politics of East Timor since the August 2001
parliamentary elections and the subsequent presidential election in
April 2002. As a result of the 2001 elections, Fretilin holds 55 out of
88 seats in the parliament, and its leader Mari Alkatiri is prime
minister. Much has been made by foreign commentators of Alkatiri's
unpopularity, but until the elections scheduled for later this year or
early next year, this is untested. More seriously, here in Australia we
have seen little careful analysis of the real state of Fretilin, the
role played by the party in Alkatiri's administration, and the
popularity and positions of the more substantial opposition parties,
such as the Democratic party.
The less than democratic conduct of the recent
Fretilin Congress did not help matters either internally or externally,
leaving the party more vulnerable to charges of favouritism and
collusion and cover-up of the Council of Ministers' ineffectiveness.
Apart from Helen Hill's recent careful but brief
review of the actual characteristics and achievements of Alkatiri's
policy approach [3], there has been almost no serious
Australian media coverage of policy debates in East Timor in recent
years, apart from the question of oil and gas negotiations, questions
of language policy, and the reconciliation vs. justice for those
accused of war crimes.
Fundamental issues about livelihood, poverty,
health, the distribution of the benefits of oil and gas revenues to the
people of the country, and the actual effects of government budget and
foreign aid to the communities and infrastructure of the country -- all
of which are matters of great debate inside East Timor and some careful
analysis in Timorese and outside policy circles -- have been left
unreported in the wider media.
3. Is the framework of "ethnic tensions"
and "easterners vs. westerners" the real key to the current political
dynamics, or is there some other organising factor behind the riots?
Long-time observers of East Timorese society and
politics are both sceptical and surprised about the deep salience of
this divide. This is an old split that appeared to lose much of its
salience during the war of resistance against a common enemy. Helen
Hill has argued that marriage patterns show a much more complex,
nuanced reality. [4] Moreover, as she has pointed
out, most political organisations in fact span this "divide", with
members from both regions. And whatever the case, the lazy use of
"ethnic tensions" is surely inappropriate in such an ethnically diverse
country. If this is a divide, real or manufactured, it is around
matters of regional benefit and deprivation.
Yet the army and police divisions have certainly
expressed themselves in part along this fault line. The accretion in
the police of numbers of people from the western part of the country
who had closer relations with the Indonesian occupiers show that it is
not simply a matter of geography or "ethnicity". Rather "east/west"
became to some extent at least a reflection of the unfinished business
of the reconciliation vs. justice debate, and the politics of
patronage. This is not at all to say the division is a mirage, but
rather we need to look a lot harder at how regional division has
overlaid other lines of conflict with nothing to do with region.
More importantly, we have almost no informed reports
on the political dynamics of the uses and promotion of this division
either within the army and the police or amongst the well-organised
rioters. "Conflict entrepreneurs" is a term well suited to those who
are exploiting confused situations like this. We know that text
messages on mobile phones -- some based on honest fears, some intended
to manufacture fear based on false information -- were skilfully used
to cause terror, confusion and flight. We also know that rioters and
teams of young men targeting particular individuals -- to burn houses,
loot government departments and agencies, intimidate and in some cases
to murder -- have been coordinated by mobile phone. Criminal gangs have
also used mobile phones to coordinate lootings. The key question is who
was coordinating these destabilising political actions? Is more than
one elite group using such tactics? Who is coordinating with whom? It
appears to be a complex situation with more than one set of oppositions
as well as different opportunists involved.
4. What does Australia know about the dynamics
of violence in East Timor this time?
While the Australian media has reported the violence
in terms of roaming bands of young men and odd groups of police and
army personnel, divided along 'east/west" lines, the Australian
government certainly knows that this media picture of aimless and
apparently spontaneous violence is not correct. Australian intelligence
organisations -- especially our electronic intelligence collection
agency, the Defence Signals Division -- have the means to catch,
decrypt and analyse all mobile phone and radio conversations in East
Timor. Undoubtedly the Australian Secret Intelligence Service would
have retained some of its earlier capacities in East Timor. This is
precisely what DSD did in 1999 and what gave InterFET such a decisive
advantage over the Indonesian military and its militia. As in 1999, the
Australian government would have had access to advance warning that
groups were planning some kinds of political intervention. In their
meeting this week, Mr Downer appeared to have intimated to President
Gusmao that Australia had such information on current planning of
riots. The key questions then are what did the Australian government
know through its intelligence sources in the run up to the eruption of
violence, and with whom did it share this knowledge? In 1999 the
Australian government kept its considerable forewarning of the
conflagration being planned by the TNI to come from its own citizens,
from its American ally, and of course, from the people of East Timor
about to be its victims.
5. Are there external factors at work --
Australian or Indonesian?
Those in Australia looking for evidence of an "Australian coup" will be
convinced by the likes of the Australian's Greg Sheridan:
"Certainly if Alkatiri remains Prime Minister of
East Timor, this is a shocking indictment of Australian impotence. If
you cannot translate the leverage of 1300 troops, 50 policemen,
hundreds of support personnel, buckets of aid and a critical
international rescue mission into enough influence to get rid of a
disastrous Marxist Prime Minister, then you are just not very skilled
in the arts of influence, tutelage, sponsorship and, ultimately,
promoting the national interest." [5]
Undoubtedly the Australian government would prefer
someone other than the economic nationalist Alkatiri to lead East
Timor. The real question is whether such a preference would lead it to
support the murder and mayhem of the present eruption, and the certain
long run destabilisation of Timorese politics that would now ensue. On
balance, the answer is no. Alkatiri and Fretilin were due to face an
election in a matter of months in any case. Australian bullying and
arrogance is undoubtedly the order of the day, but not, in this case,
coup-making.
On the other hand, given the swaggering stance of
the Australian Prime Minister and Minister of Foreign Affairs, it is
not surprising that, as Loro Horta said:
"Many members of the Dili government are far more
concerned over Australian indentations than they are over Jakarta's.
Many believe that Australia and the U.S. are to some extent behind the
crisis." [6]
While Horta regards this notion as bizarre, the
front page blusterings of the Sheridan camp feed the anxiety, and would
appear to reflect some strands of Australian government thinking --
thus at the very least complicating the task of the ADF and AFP
personnel on the ground.
A more serious question has to be asked about
Indonesian intervention -- or more precisely, intervention by
particular groups in Indonesia. When Mari Alkatiri was reported --
incorrectly -- as having accused Indonesia of being behind the riots,
the Indonesian Foreign Minister denied any such intervention, and his
denial should be taken seriously. But that does not mean taking it at
face value. Much happens in the Indonesian state that is no longer
under the control of the president and his advisors. In particular,
recent events in Papua have demonstrated that the president's
pro-autonomy policy in Papua is being actively undermined by the
military, the most important intelligence agency and by the Ministry of
the Interior. [7] That is not to say that there is
any proof that any of these organisations -- or civil society
organisations linked to them -- have been involved in East Timor, but
it certainly means that the Foreign Minister's denial, honourable in
intent though it may have been, is not the last word on the matter.
Moreover since the Indonesian invasion of East Timor in 1975 began with
intelligence agencies' destabilisation of Timorese politics, history
leads us to err on the side of caution, and with an eye for links at
one remove from the immediate action.
Possible Indonesian involvement in at least three
elements of the present violence and chaos need to be examined
carefully. The first is the two attacks on repositories of records of
investigations and testimonies about the crimes of the 1975-1999
period, both Indonesian and Timorese. The UN Serious Crimes Unit office
was looted, with files relating to Indonesian army officers criminal
actions stolen, and the Truth and Reconciliation Commission Secretariat
( CAVR) building was attacked by about 100 armed men. There are no
copies of the CAVR materials held outside East Timor.
The second issue that needs careful examination for
any trace of Indonesian links -- official or otherwise -- is the
behaviour of the East Timorese police. Accused by Human Rights Watch of
illegal detention and torture, the ongoing links of senior police who
began their careers in the Indonesian police needs careful scrutiny --
especially in the "east-west" context, and the abandonment of court
actions for past crimes in favour of reconciliation.
The third issue is both the most important and the
most difficult to assess: which groups are behind the organised
rioting, looting, and killing of the past two weeks. This was
Alkatiri's actual question. Have militia connections no salience? Have
cross-border linkages beyond matters of kinship no relevance? Have the
intrigues of East Timorese politics no connection to the ongoing
activities of Indonesian-based former militia leaders with longstanding
Indonesian intelligence links such as Eurico Guterres? Most
importantly, the focus must be on the organization of the chaos --
whether the East Timorese formateurs of violence are singular or
multiple, and whether they act entirely without outside
links.
These are questions that have to be asked, and it is
in the interests of democrats in East Timor, Indonesia, and Australia
that they be both asked and answered. Given the past behaviour and
ongoing behaviour of both the Indonesian army and the Indonesian
intelligence agencies, this is not a time for taking offence just
because the questions are put. And given the arrogance of the
Australian government's behaviour, the blind rush to the status of
regional mini-hegemon, and its misleading of its own population about
what its intelligence agencies knew last time, there is every reason to
scrutinize the long run intentions and assumptions behind Australian
intervention.
6. Does Operation Astute have adequate --
and appropriate -- resources for the job?
As in 1999 Australian armed intervention was an
urgent necessity, whatever the subsequent damage caused by Howard's
triumphalism then and its echoes now. But there are very real doubts
about Australian capacities this time round. Not only is the situation
on the ground much more confused than in the orchestrated chaos of
1999, but as many commentators have rightly said, Australian military
and policing resources are stretched much more thinly over a very wide
range of conflicts. Specialised Australian military personnel suitable
for such interventions are in fact always small in numbers -- the three
units that makes up the Special Operations Command (the SAS and two
commando groups) and the Army's Airborne battle Group, with the 3rd
battalion (parachute) Royal Australian Regiment
(RAR).
Operation Astute is staffed by military personnel
from Australia, New Zealand, Malaysia, and Portugal, and the US has
lent logistical assistance. Both Australia and Portugal have deployed
police groups, in the Australian case, 57 Australian Federal Police
officers. Australian military personnel are mainly from 3 RAR -- some
just back from Iraq (others are still deployed in the Solomons) -- and
a smaller number from 4 RAR. [8] Confusion about who
to target, suitable rules of engagement, strategy and simple lack of
numbers inhibited the effectiveness of the force for a time after
landing. While a greater degree of physical control was established,
even now there is no comprehensive police protection against looting
and assault, as the raid on the CAVR building demonstrated.
The CAVR looting demonstrates another side to the
lack of capacity of the intervention force. When the organised mass
looting of the CAVR building began -- only motorbikes were taken in the
end -- CAVR Timorese staff called the ADF, to be told that they did not
have enough personnel to deal with looters at that time. What is most
disturbing about this is not so much the lack of resources as the
failure to recognize the political and legal importance of those CAVR
archives and the need to protect them as a priority. This tends to
confirm one suggestion that the ADF -- or at least the part that had to
carry out the rapid reaction role -- was prepared in terms of
intelligence and language preparation in the same way that they were in
1999. It is important to remember that this is an international force,
with all the inherent problems of such formation -- including arguments
about command. [9] Present military and police and
intelligence commitments in Iraq, Afghanistan, the Solomon Islands and
elsewhere have stretched Australian capacity to contribute to as
effective a force as may be necessary in East Timor. Moreover, the
ambiguities about Australian longterm intentions mean that as soon as
possible it would be wise to widen the international character of the
intervention and policing force. Leaving aside any arguments about the
desirability (or absurdity) of Australian thoughts of regional hegemony
and the dangerous and foolish involvement in the Iraq catastrophe, the
reality is that Australian capacities are in fact quite small, and
vulnerable to both breakdown and discrediting.
This leads to questions about the desirability of
Australian forces staying in East Timor for an extended period, or
whether it would be in the interests of both East Timor and Australia
for the Australian government to press the Security Council for
replacement forces from other countries. This is 1999, and the chances
for the hard-pressed and over-extended forces of the ADF to make
mistakes in a confusing situation are that much higher -- with the
political costs higher still. The fact that the AFP is now to be
supplemented by 100 officers drawn from state police forces is clear
evidence about the over-extension in terms of numbers. Needless to say,
the limits of the Howard government's Mini Me notion of regional
hegemony are much more evident in Southeast Asia than they are in the
Pacific.
7. What is the likely and desirable future
role of the United Nations?
Often it has seemed that critics of the UN role in
East Timor have been completely contradictory, some saying that the
United Nations handed over power to an independent East Timor too soon,
others that it stayed too long and weighed too heavily. Undoubtedly,
despite its achievements there were undesirable aspects to the
prolonged UN presence in what was really a new form of governance. But
on the whole it would have to be judged a success, if not in quite such
glowing terms as some of its advocates have suggested. Many of the
problems attributed to the UN presence itself in fact can be traced to
the wider issues of the role and impact of large numbers of foreign
advisers in a diverse range of international government and
non-government bodies, and to policies of other international
agencies.
The dispatch of the experienced Ian Martin as the
new Special Representative of the Secretary-General is a welcome move,
but it is not now clear what the next move will be. Some have called
for a resumption of UN control; others have seen this as an external
coup by another name. It is most unlikely that there will be any
relinquishing of formal sovereignty by the government of Timor-Leste,
but equally, there are a myriad lines of leverage from both the UN and
its important member countries -- in this case, the US, Japan, with
Australia leading the charge. When Ian Martin reports to the
Secretary-General, there may well be important questions about how the
UN should exercise its ongoing responsibility to East Timor, the
answers to which are not obvious.
The constitution of the new country was developed
under UN tutelage, and the questions arises as to what the attitude of
the Security Council should be to the constitutional forms of
government in the face of the assault on the government, as well as its
inability to maintain order.
The reported agreement by Mari Alkatiri to accept a
proposal by the UN representative in East Timor, Hasegawa Sukehiro,
that his role in events leading up to the crisis should be the subject
of investigation by international prosecutors is important both
politically and legally -- and in both cases with both short-term and
long-term implications. [10] Assuming that such an
investigation would have a wider brief than just the role of Dr
Alkatiri, and also assuming this involves a reactivation of the UN
Serious Crimes Unit or some similar successor body, this is an
important extension of the idea of the universal jurisdiction of the
Security Council with global implications. East Timor was the first
occasion of direct UN post-conflict governance, and much was learned.
It is now clear that that experiment in a new hybrid of global
responsibility and local sovereignty is not yet over.
8. Where does the debate about "justice
vs. reconciliation" now stand?
No leader of the Indonesian military or militia has
had to face serious consequences for their conduct in East Timor up
until September 1999. The Indonesian trials were a disgraceful and
contemptuous farce, and the United Nations Security Council has taken
the necessary step to establish an international tribunal. In East
Timor itself, the president's strong preference for a basically
non-judgmental reconciliation process won out over calls for
comprehensive and effective justice. To some degree that decision was
motivated by pragmatism -- the need to get along with Indonesia, lack
of funds, and lack of firm international will to support the process to
the end. But without suggesting that that was an easy choice to make at
the time, it would now seem that there has been a price to be paid:
justice was not seen to be done, justified resentments festered,
confidence in policing and legal systems not fostered, and possibly
institutional legacies of Indonesian rule not adequately challenged,
for example in the police. Whatever the role in the current crisis of
those guilty in the events leading up to 1999 may turn out to be, there
are now very grave crimes committed by East Timorese against East
Timorese -- civilian, army and police. Moreover there are allegations
that the government itself either ordered or instigated murderous
assaults on its political opponents.
Does the political and legal system have the
capacity to deal with these crimes effectively? The apparently imminent
reactivation of the UN Serious Crimes Unit in East Timor will go some
way towards resolving this matter, but more serious thought needs to be
given to repairing the damage in public confidence done not only by the
violence of the past months, but by the failure to prosecute the crimes
of the Indonesian period. The consequences of the failure by the United
States, Australia and Japan to press for an international tribunal to
do the work of the disgraced Indonesian judicial system and the tiny
overtaxed East Timorese legal system are now evident.
Once again the East Timorese have paid the price of
great power -- and I use the term loosely -- realpolitik. With luck,
the only Australian costs will be in money and prestige. But it is now
time to realise that the documentation of human rights abuses and the
application of universal jurisdiction in matters of serious crimes
against humanity is in fact in matters of sheer political realism in
the interests of all, and not an optional extra in international
politics.
9. Is oil the answer or the curse?
Many both inside and outside East Timor have pinned
their hopes for the future on the revenues from the Timor Sea oil and
gas fields. Understandably many have been preoccupied with the urgent
need to pressure Australia to offer East Timor a large share of the
revenues -- in its own self-interest if not for reasons of justice.
Important and necessary as this process is and will continue to be, it
does not in itself answer the question as to just how these hopefully
increased revenues will benefit the country as a whole. This brings us
back to perhaps the most unexplored aspect of East Timor's
post-independence political dynamics: the politics of patronage. We
should expect patronage politics to be one part of the normal political
modus operandi of East Timorese society given its economic and social
structure. While there is a built-in tendency to what western and
industrial capitalist societies view as simple matters of corruption
and nepotism, this need not always be so. However, there have been many
allegations of corruption in East Timor, but little hard evidence and
serious analysis. But there are three key variables that make the
patronage politics of Timor at present somewhat
dangerous.
The first, and much remarked on, is the relatively
large impact of external aid and foreign advisers. This is one subject
on which a lot has been written, but not -- to my knowledge at least --
on the intersection of these external flows and the structure of
domestic patronage, and the political intersection of "traditional" and
"modern" economic sectors.
The second is the political nature of oil itself.
Thirty years ago the Polish journalist Ryszard Kapuscinski put the
Janus promise of oil well:
"The concept of oil perfectly expresses the eternal
human dream of wealth achieved through a kiss of fortune, and not by
sweat, anguish, hard work. In this sense, oil is a fairy tale, and like
every fairy tale, a bit of a lie."
The lesson of almost every case is that oil brings
smelly politics, especially at the intersection of government and
business. We know little about the details of East Timor's oil politics
beyond the dispute with Australia. The role of oil money -- or hopes
for it -- in the present dispute or set of disputes has not been talked
about, but it is potentially so large a basis for political capital
that it must be looked at, especially given the mysterious character of
the inner dynamics of the present crisis.
With both police and army using their advanced small
arms on a freelance basis in alliance with different groupings, and
1500 Glock pistols and their ammunition looted from the police arsenal,
the faceless but undoubtedly active and well resourced conflict
entrepreneurs still have plenty of fuel to play with.
10. What kind of war?
The question of the social and political and
economic relations that lie behind this outbreak of violence in Timor
leads to a question about the nature and form of that war itself, with
implications for Australian security policy. Until the questions
already discussed about the nature of the current political dynamics of
East Timor and the intersection of patronage politics, foreign
linkages, and the possible manipulation of regional identity are
answered we cannot be sure of the kind of conflict the Timorese and
those who would help them at risk of their lives are facing. We know
enough to be sure that this is not 1999, and that it is highly confused
and confusing.
The best guide to the worst possible answer to this
question comes from Mary Kaldor's evolving analysis over the last
decade of the new kind of conflict she labels "new wars". Some aspects
of her summary description bear uncomfortably on the current crisis in
East Timor and its ugly possibilities. Let me finish with an extended
quotation from one of her early formulations in the hope that it turns
out to be inappropriate:
"It is the lack of authority of the state, the
weakness of representation, the loss of confidence that the state is
able or willing to respond to public concerns, the inability and/or
unwillingness to regulate the privatisation and informalisation of
violence that gives rise to violent conflicts. Moreover, this
'uncivilising process', tends to be reinforced by the dynamics of the
conflicts, which have the effect of further reordering political,
economic and social relationships in a negative spiral of incivility.
"I call the conflicts 'wars' because of their
political character although they could also be described as massive
violations of human rights (repression against civilians) and organised
crime (violence for private gain). They are about access to state
power. They are violent struggles to gain access to or to control the
state.
"Privatised violence and unregulated social
relations feed on each other. In these wars, physical destruction is
very high, tax revenues plummet further, and unemployment is very high.
The various parties finance themselves through loot and plunder and
various forms of illegal trading; thus they are closely linked into and
help to generate organised crime networks. They also depend on support
from neighbouring states, Diaspora groups, and humanitarian assistance.
"In the majority of cases, these wars are fought in
the name of identity -- a claim to power on the basis of labels. These
are wars in which political identity is defined in terms of exclusive
labels -ethnic, linguistic, or religious -- and the wars themselves
give meaning to the labels. Labels are mobilised for political
purposes; they offer a new sense of security in a context where the
political and economic certainties of previous decades have evaporated.
They provide a new populist form of communitarian ideology, a way to
maintain or capture power, that uses the language and forms of an
earlier period. Undoubtedly, these ideologies make use of pre-existing
cleavages and the legacies of past wars. But nevertheless, it is the
deliberate manipulation of these sentiments, often assisted by Diaspora
funding and techniques and speeded up through the electronic media,
that is the immediate cause of conflict." [11]
Richard Tanter is Senior Research Associate at Nautilus Institute for
Security and Sustainability and Acting Director of the Nautilus
Institute at RMIT. His most recent books on East Timor are Masters of
Terror: Indonesia's Military and Violence in East Timor in 1999,
[co-edited with Gerry Van Klinken and Desmond Ball -- new edition
forthcoming] and Bitter Flowers, Sweet Flowers: East Timor, Indonesia
and the World Community [edited with Mark Selden and Stephen Shalom].
Email: rtanter@nautilus.org .
Richard Tanter Bio: http://nautilus.rmit.edu.au/staff/richard-tanter.html
Endnotes
Author's note: Thanks to Gerry Van Klinken, Glenda Lasslett, David
Bourchier, and Helen Hill for helpful comments on an earlier draft.
[1] UNDP, Timor-Leste faces development challenges,
March 8, 2006. The full report: " The
Path Out of Poverty"
[2] Human Rights Watch, Tortured Beginnings:
Police Violence and the Beginnings of Impunity in East Timor, April
2006.
[3] Helen Hill, " Stand
up, the real Mr Alkatiri", The Age, June 1, 2006.
[4] Helen Hill, "Regional tensions", East Timor Mailing
List, May 28, 2006.
[5] Greg Sheridan, Throw
troops at Pacific failures, The Australian, June 3, 2006.
[6] Loro Horta, " Caution
over Timor Leste", Jakarta Post, June 7, 2006.
[7] Richard Chauvel, Australia,
Indonesia and the Papuan crises, Austral Policy Forum 06-14A, 27
April 2006.
[8] The Wikipedia article
on Operation Astute is, at least at the time of writing, an
excellent source on the international military intervention force. To
date, Nick
Dowling has been its main contributor.
[9] Portugal
refuses Australian command in E Timor, ABC News, June 3, 2006.
[10] Alkatiri
agrees to UN investigation, Peter Cave, ABC News, June 7, 2006.
[11] Mary Kaldor, Cosmopolitanism
and organised violence, Paper prepared for Conference on
'Conceiving Cosmopolitanism', Warwick, 27-29 April 2000. And see her
New and Old Wars: Organised Violence in a Global Era, 1999.
3.
Nautilus invites your response
The Austral Peace and Security
Network invites your responses to this essay. Please send responses to
the editor, Jane Mullett: austral@rmit.edu.au. Responses will be considered for
redistribution to the network only if they include the author's name,
affiliation, and explicit consent.
Produced by the Nautilus
Institute at RMIT,
Austral Peace and Security Network (APSNet). You can review the 2006 archives. You might like to subscribe to the free bi-weekly newsletter
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