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C h a p t e r S e v e n East Timor One of the most vicious and long-running wars of independence during the twentieth century was waged by the people of East Timor. This small island nation, with a population of about 1 million people, was invaded and occupied by Indonesia in December 1975, just as it appeared to gain its independence from its European colonial master, Portugal. For the next twenty-four years, the Indonesian military (ABRI/ TNI) was ruthless in its efforts to destroy the East Timorese independence movement , led predominantly by the Marxist guerrilla group Fretilin.1 No conclusive tally of the number of East Timorese killed during the long Indonesian occupation exists, but estimates have ranged from 33,000 to more than 200,000 killed.2 While some prominent exiled East Timorese struggled to keep the plight of their people on the international agenda, East Timor—known also as Timor Leste in Portuguese—was effectively abandoned by much of the international community until the Indonesian government unexpectedly agreed to a UN-backed referendum on the status of the country in 1999. This decision set the stage for a dramatic vote for independence, followed by a brutal crackdown by Indonesian army units and an Australian-led UN peace enforcement mission to help East Timor restore security and build a functioning state. The security situation in East Timor, which followed the withdrawal of Indonesian military forces after the crackdown in 1999, was marked by two distinct phases: (1) the immediate post-conflict period (1999–2002), in which relatively little strategic violence occurred but crime increased gradually; and (2) the post 2003-era, in which the factions of the former pro-independence forces realigned as competitors inside and outside the government, leading to violent bargaining between factions, riots, and a second Australian-led intervention. Through tracing this within-case temporal variation, including the post-conflict period and some events afterward, this case demonstrates that the ability of the original combatants to maintain internal control over their factions inside and outside their ranks is essential to preventing high levels of strategic violence from emerging via the indirect pathway. In the first two years 228 Five Case Studies of Post-Conflict Violence of the post-conflict period, an umbrella group including all of the pro-independence factions in EastTimor (the Conselho Nacional de Reconstrução de Timor, or CNRT) was able to maintain internal control over potential factions, using a combination of patronage (through the provision of jobs in government), pensions, the charismatic leadership and influence of Xanana Gusmao, and subtle coercion to keep the most violent factions from undermining the peace. Because of their success in domestic rewards and ingroup policing, East Timor became a relatively soft post-conflict environment , marked by only occasional bursts of strategic violence. By 2002, this unity government began to suffer from resource constraints, internal rivalries, and corruption , which undermined its ability to strike these complex bargains. Because of these pressures, the pro-independence coalition began to decay and fracture, as the main political players tried to establish their own power bases in the military and police forces. As this happened, an array of militias, security forces loyal to different political players, and veterans’ associations began to generate unrest, and strategic violence began to escalate. This violence was not directed against Indonesians, or even those Timorese loyal to Indonesia, but rather emerged along an entirely new east-west regional divide, which was exploited by local political players for their own purposes. In this respect, East Timor represents a compelling test of the indirect pathway, as the violence in its post-conflict period was a product of local bargaining games between factions of the victors to the long struggle for independence. Post-Conflict Period (1999–2004) From 1975 to 1999, the Indonesian military fought a brutal counterinsurgency campaign against the Marxist pro-independence party of East Timor, Frente Revolutionaria de Timor-Leste Independente (Fretilin), and specifically its armed wing, Falintil (Forcas Armada de Liberacao Nacional de Timor-Leste).3 Under the leadership of Xanana Gusmao, Falintil fled to the mountainous interior of the country after the Indonesian invasion and conducted a “people’s war, “ while ABRI forces and their militias, largely drawn from the East Timorese population, repressed any pro-independence activity and established a network of local administrators across East Timor’s thirteen districts. By the early 1990s, EastTimor’s hopes for independence were dim, as Falintil was outmatched and outgunned...

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