Bitter Lessons for Kosovo, East Timor

Situated off the northern coast of Australia, East Timor, an island province under Indonesian rule, is six time zones away from Kosovo. But they have much in common. The international community is trying to stop a year-old civil war and 10 years of Serbian oppression in Kosovo and, at the same time, U.N.-sponsored talks also are in progress over how to put an end to 24 years of Indonesian oppression and armed struggle in East Timor.

Both are provinces inhabited mostly by people whose religion, language and ethnicity differ from those of the powers trying to dominate them. In Serbian-ruled Kosovo, less than 10% of the 2 million inhabitants are Serbian and, coincidentally, in Indonesia-ruled East Timor, less than 10% of the 900,000 are Indonesian.

Both Indonesia and Serbia have installed authoritarian rules that have given rise to armed separatists and also led to internal divisions among dissidents and insurgents in their respective provinces. In the case of Kosovo, Belgrade’s security forces bullied and mistreated the pacifist local Albanian population for 10 years. The international community knew about it and did next to nothing until the standoff turned into an armed conflict, although by Balkan standards, the death toll of 2,000 is relatively small.

Meanwhile, in East Timor, the death toll of 200,000 is proportionately perhaps one of the highest ever: One in every three East Timorese was killed or has died from starvation since the Indonesian invasion. Jakarta has some 20,000 soldiers stationed in East Timor who bully and mistreat the local population and, it was recently reported, Jakarta is arming the loyalists. International law is entirely on the side of the East Timorese because Indonesia simply invaded the place. The U.N. never recognized its occupation, although it has not done much to reverse it.

The most phenomenal similarity between the two situations is the mutual hatred between the local population and the colonizers. I have seen it for two years working in Kosovo’s capital, Pristina, and I saw it again last month in Dili, the capital of East Timor. Given these parallels, it is no wonder that the solutions for the two crises are almost identical: “autonomy plus” for an interim period (from two to five years) after which the situation will be revisited. The difference is that the Indonesian government of B.J. Habibie suggested it may grant East Timor independence, whereas Yugoslav President Slobodan Milosevic (and with him, alas, most of the international community) still thinks independence for Kosovo is a no-go.

Beyond the more or less elegant academic gymnastics, the parallels between the two situations can be put to use as a checklist of do’s and don’ts:

* For the Indonesian government: Let the East Timorese decide their own fate before even more bloodshed and/or attacks from right-wing nationalists make it impossible to do so without the Indonesians losing face. In Serbia, Milosevic could have given up Kosovo at much less political cost a year ago.

* For the U.N.: Go beyond the resolutions and help the East Timorese people organize, get approval for and monitor the vote on their own fate. An unsupervised vote will be contested and a rigged vote could lead to increased violence (see what happened in Algeria). If East Timor decides to go its own way, it will need to be a U.N. protectorate for some time, and no effort should be spared to help, even if peacekeeping forces are required. It is easier to be peacekeeping than war-stopping, as we learned the hard way in Kosovo.

* For the Clinton administration: After meeting with Habibie about East Timor, Stanley Roth, U.S. assistant secretary of state for East Asian and Pacific affairs, reportedly declared: “This is not an American issue; this is an Indonesian issue.” No, it is not just an Indonesian issue. It is an international issue just as the Iraqi invasion of Kuwait was an international--and even American--issue.

During his presidential campaign, Bill Clinton declared about East Timor: “We have ignored it so far in ways that I think are unconscionable.” Now is the time for the Clinton administration to get engaged in a conscious way. Postponing the decision to step in will make it more costly politically (see Bosnia, see Kosovo).

Until August, there is a window of opportunity to act on East Timor: President Habibie is ready to consider independence. His administration needs the international community to help it move forward on this without losing face. After the June 7 elections in Indonesia, another government may be installed in Jakarta that could be either tougher on letting East Timor go or not strong enough to let it go. The time to act is now, before we are forced to act by headlines on some new atrocity.