East Timor and the new humanitarian interventionism

The fate of East Timor provides a barometer for how far the normative struc ture of international society has been transformed since the end of the Col d War. In 1975, the East Timorese were abandoned by a Western bloc that pla ced accommodating the Indonesian invasion of the island before the protecti on of human rights. Twenty-five years later, it was the protection of the c ivilian population on the island that loomed large in the calculations of t hese same states. Australia, which had sacrificed the rights of the people of East Timor on the altar of good relations with Indonesia, found itself l eading an intervention force that challenged the old certainties of its 'Ja karta first' policy. The article charts the interplay of domestic and inter national factors that made this normative transformation possible. The auth ors examine the political and economic factors that led to the agreement in May 1999 between Portugal, Indonesia and the UN to hold a referendum on th e future political status of East Timor. A key question is whether the inte rnational community should have done more to assure the security of the bal lot process. The authors argue that while more could have been done by Aust ralia, the United States and officials in the UN Secretariat to place this issue on the Security Council's agenda, it is highly unlikely that the inte rnational community would have proved capable of mobilizing the political w ill necessary to coerce Indonesia into accepting a peacekeeping force. The second part of the article looks at how the outbreak of the violence in early September 1999 fundamentally changed these political assumptions. Th e authors argue that it became politically possible to employ coercion agai nst Indonesian sovereignty in a context in which the Habibie government was viewed as having failed to exercise sovereignty with responsibility. By fo cusing on the economic and military sanctions employed by Western states, t he pressures exerted by the international financial institutions and the in tense diplomatic activity at the UN and in Jakarta, the authors show how In donesian political and military leaders were prevailed upon to accept an in ternational force. At the same time, Australian reporting of the atrocities and how this prompted the Howard government to an intervention that challe nged traditional conceptions of Australia's vital interests, is considered. The conclusion reflects on how this case supports the claim that tradition al notions of sovereignty are increasingly constrained by norms of humanita rian responsibility.