Sexton was evacuated to Darwin, Australia, last week. But like any witness to atrocity, she’s haunted. “Where do you put a tourniquet on a person who has been sliced all over the body, cut to the bone, absolutely to the bone?” she says. “We wrapped him in a sheet and put him in the car but… within minutes the whole white sheet was covered in blood.” Sexton drove the wounded man to a clinic run by Carmelite sisters. The next day, marauding militiamen torched the clinic. But by then, the man Sexton had aided was dead anyway. “I am ashamed that I don’t know his name,” she says, crying. “He has a name, and all the people who have been treated in this way have names.”
To many people around the globe, East Timor is a remote and unfamiliar place. Perhaps the island’s greatest claim to fame is that it served as the landfall where Captain Bligh, of “Mutiny on the Bounty,” found haven after 41 days adrift in the South Seas. Indonesia invaded the territory in 1975, after Portuguese colonial authorities withdrew, and its military has been fighting insurgents ever since. Few outsiders had paid attention to the territory until Aug. 30, when an overwhelming majority of East Timorese voted under U.N. auspices for independence. Then pro-Indonesian militias, backed by Army units, went into a frenzy of murder, forced expulsions, looting and mayhem. Nobody would mistake East Timor for a major strategic asset, and nobody can argue that the vital interests of any major power are threatened. But does that make the nameless people there any less important, say, than those in Kosovo?
That was the question facing world leaders last week, President Clinton foremost among them. It was only a few months ago that Clinton was talking about a new foreign-policy paradigm. Fresh from the success of the NATO air war over Kosovo, Clinton saw an opportunity to shape his legacy. When asked on CNN if there was a Clinton Doctrine, the president seemed eager to respond: whenever there is ethnic or religious conflict, he said, “if the world community has the power to stop it, we ought to stop genocide and ethnic cleansing.” He repeated that formulation in a speech to NATO troops on June 22; in neither case did he limit intervention to places where American interests were at stake.
Now comes East Timor, where upwards of a quarter of the territory’s 850,000 people were on the run last week. The capital Dili was an apocalyptic landscape. “The downtown core has been burnt, looted, pillaged,” said David Wimhurst, a U.N. spokesman. “One of the largest banks has been burnt down. The radio station has been burnt. The university has been burnt and our workshop and cars are going up in flames.”
Thousands of East Timorese tried to take refuge in churches. “We are facing another genocide, a genocide that does not spare the Catholic Church,” said the Vatican foreign minister, Archbishop Jean-Louis Tauran. Rampaging militiamen, mostly Timorese who have benefited from the corrupt and repressive 24-year Indonesian occupation, killed at least 14 nuns and priests. Terrified refugees arriving in West Timor reported that all 40 local staff of the Roman Catholic aid agency Caritas were dead, and U.N. officials said there were unconfirmed reports that attackers killed roughly 100 people who took refuge in a church in Suai in the southwest.
Bishop Carlos Filipe Ximenes Belo, who won the Nobel Peace Prize in 1996, fled to Darwin under the assumed name Louis Rochetta after his home and church were destroyed. With the open assistance of Muslim Indonesian troops, militiamen stormed the grounds of his residence in Dili and a nearby compound of the International Committee of the Red Cross, and rounded up at least 7,000 people. Chilling video footage showed uniformed Indonesian soldiers herding the terrified people, hands held high over their heads. Some of the captives were put on military trucks and taken away–presumably to West Timor. Then militiamen set the bishop’s house on fire with Molotov cocktails.
Australian doctor Michael Tyquin, who ran a clinic in Dili, refused to abandon his patients. But eventually the militias destroyed his facility. “Anyone who’s moving they kill, everything that’s standing they burn,” he said after evacuating to Darwin. Another Australian doctor in the nearby Don Bosco clinic said he’d been told by the United Nations to get the last flight out. “There’s a great mass of people here [sheltering in the clinic],” he told Australian Broadcasting by satellite phone. “Everybody smiles; they forgive us [for leaving them], but it’s fairly emotional.”
For much of the week, world powers mulled, fretted and demanded that Indonesia stop the violence. The government in Jakarta promised to restore order, but the atrocities continued. To some analysts, there was a method to the madness: military units had been beefing up the militias for months. “This is an organized effort to turn back the [independence] process,” said Marzuki Darusman, chairman of the National Human Rights Commission and deputy leader of the ruling Golkar Party. “They are prepared to do anything to keep the territory as part of Indonesia.”
The international community was outraged, but also paralyzed for days, while reports of atrocities multiplied. The United Nations withdrew all but about 80 of its staff, and the United States, in particular, was initially hesitant to act. That’s partly because Indonesia, the world’s fourth most-populous country–with more Muslims than any other nation–has been moving uneasily toward democracy and economic reform after decades of corruption under the dictator Suharto, who was nudged from power in 1998. Parliamentary elections were held in June, and a new president is to be elected in November. Indonesia also is important to Asia’s fragile economic health: international donors have pledged $47 billion since 1997 to resuscitate the economy, and just pledged $5.9 billion more in July. American policymakers, it seems, didn’t want to save East Timor only to “lose” Indonesia by pushing it into another round of economic collapse and political disintegration.
There were also signs of what might be called intervention fatigue. At one point, U.S. national-security adviser Sandy Berger said that U.S. action in East Timor would be analogous to cleaning up his daughter’s dirty room at college. He later apologized: “It was a clumsy way of saying that we can’t obviously go everywhere, do everything.”
But with the whole world watching, a superpower had to do something. “I don’t know one head of state of a democratic country who, when confronted with the news, editorials, TV coverage, can say, ‘I don’t care’,” says Bernard Miyet, head of peacekeeping operations for the United Nations. Antonio Monteiro, ambassador to the United Nations from Portugal, was one of those pushing hardest for intervention: “East Timor is tiny, poor and unimportant,” he says. “But for these same reasons, it is seen the world over as a just cause–something worth fighting for.”
Not quite. But it was hoped that the threat of force–together with sanctions–could pressure Indonesia to invite peacekeepers to the territory. Just before departing for an Asian economic summit in New Zealand, Clinton finally took the mostly symbolic step of cutting military relations with Indonesia. He also indicated that economic aid would not be restored if Jakarta did not invite outside help to restore order. The International Monetary Fund had earlier canceled plans to send an economic-review team to the country–a prerequisite of the next tranche of aid. “The difficulties in East Timor would make it very difficult for us to continue dispersing to Indonesia,” IMF deputy managing director Stanley Fischer told NEWSWEEK.
The pressure increased after militiamen attacked the U.N. compound in Dili on Friday. Clinton canceled $40 million in military sales and U.N. Secretary-General Kofi Annan, who isn’t given to ultimatums, declared that Indonesia would have to accept peacekeepers or face responsibility for “what could amount… to crimes against humanity.”
Australia was prepared to lead a multinational force to restore order, and had 2,500 troops on standby. But Indonesia had at least 26,000 troops in East Timor, and peacekeepers wanted an invitation, not an invasion. Late last week Indonesian military commander General Wiranto said a peacekeeping force had to be “considered as an option,” and Clinton told reporters in Auckland that he expected a “development” within a “couple of days.” Suddenly, U.S. officials were discussing how American forces could support such an intervention. The Clinton Doctrine, such as it was, seemed to be in play.
