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7. Excuses and Paramilitary Violence in East Timor and Indonesia 1999–2005
- University of Pennsylvania Press
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7 Excuses and Paramilitary Violence in East Timor and Indonesia 1999–2005 On August , , in a referendum that made history, the people of East Timor voted on the question of self-determination. When the ballots were counted that evening, more than percent of the population had voted for independence from Indonesia. The election ended East Timor’s twenty-fouryear struggle and seemed to finally reward the huge network of solidarity organizations in Asia, Europe, and the United States that had, for decades, raised issues of justice and human rights, mobilized world opinion, and pressured governments and international organizations (Simpson a). But the election was soon overshadowed by militia violence. Members of paramilitary organizations, armed with machetes and traditional and automatic weapons, rampaged through the capital city of Dili, destroying key administrative buildings and provoking a mass flight from East to West Timor. The reframing of East Timor from a case of self-determination to one of human rights proved to be crucial for achieving self-determination in the first place. Solidarity and human rights organizations had long argued that gross and systematic human rights violations justified reversing East Timor’s integration into Indonesia. Their argument eventually prevailed, because, as we saw in Chapter , the Suharto government and the military could not make credible their counterclaim that easing repression in East Timor would strengthen the self-determination movement and eventually lead to the loss of East Timor, which would then trigger the disintegration of Indonesia. The premise of human rights and democracy groups inside and outside Indonesia had been that making Indonesia democratic would prevent precisely that sequence of events. Provinces would opt to voluntarily 200 Chapter 7 stay within Indonesia once repressive practices ended. After the referendum , human rights pressures continued to account for referendum-related violations committed by the Indonesian military. The United Nations Security Council briefly considered setting up a criminal tribunal on East Timor. Domestic constituents in Indonesia took advantage of these pressures to further a human rights agenda. This chapter compares East Timor to two similar cases, Aceh and Irian Jaya. The province of Aceh, part of the island of Sumatra, has a long history of self-determination movements, as does Irian Jaya (also called Papua or West Papua by pro-independence Papuans), the western part of New Guinea. In , Irian Jaya was integrated by Indonesia’s first president, Sukarno, after the Dutch withdrew from their colonial possession. UN-mediated negotiations led to a historic compromise, establishing Indonesian sovereignty over the territory after a UN-assisted popular consultation in . Since then, an active self-determination movement called Organization for a Free Papua (Organisasi Papua Merdeka [OPM]) had been trying to reverse what it regarded as unfair treatment of the population, which had not been consulted properly. In Aceh, the Free Aceh Movement (Gerakan Aceh Merdeka [GAM]), focused on self-determination, was founded in the mid-s and has since struggled for independence from Indonesia. In , media reports revealed Aceh’s long history of harsh military repression and abuse, targeting members of the self-determination movement but ultimately victimizing the whole population. A report by the National Commission on Human Rights estimated that more than , people had died during the military struggle against the insurgency. Despite this revelation of abuse and repression and despite the existence of a transnational human rights network, the outcomes were quite different in these two cases. In both cases, international actors quickly converged on the position that Indonesia’s territorial integrity was at stake, and they stopped mobilizing. This decision was consequential. In both provinces, the military began extended military operations, including the declaration of martial law in , that again victimized the civilian population. At the end of , human rights groups estimated that at least , Acehnese had died in the conflict. They also saw undeniable evidence of torture, involuntary disappearances , and extralegal executions of civilians. Some outspoken human rights lawyers disappeared. The self-determination movement in Papua was equally suppressed by the military, forestalling a peaceful resolution of the [3.236.18.23] Project MUSE (2024-03-19 14:24 GMT) Excuses in East Timor and Indonesia 201 conflict, which continues as of early (International Crisis Group a, b; Amnesty International ). In combination, these three cases raise important questions about the influence of international human rights norms. First, why did similar struggles in Aceh and Irian Jaya not provoke the international mobilization against abuses that we saw in East Timor? This question directly addresses one of the questions raised in the introduction...