Networked Governance of Freedom and Tyranny: Peace in Timor-Leste (review)

This is a very ambitious work from the Australian National University's Centre for International Governance and Justice, Regulatory Institutions Network, where John Braithwaite (a noted criminologist) and Hilary Charlesworth (a noted international lawyer) are faculty and Adérito Soares is a doctoral student. Soares, an independence activist and former Timorese politician, also currently fills the role of Anti-Corruption Commissioner for Timor-Leste. The ANU group is engaged in an ambitious two decade project entitled "Peacekeeping Compared."¹

The work proceeds on two levels as a history and as an exploration of theories of sovereignty and governance.

On one level, it is a sophisticated political history of Timor-Leste, focusing on the years since the 1999 referendum, which led to widespread destruction and the departure of the illegal Indonesian occupiers who had been there since 1975, while still providing plenty of good information on the earlier period. After some three centuries of neglect as a Portuguese colony, Timor (usually referred to in the literature at this time by its English title, "East Timor") was heading towards independence after the Portuguese Carnation Revolution when its neighbor, Indonesia, invaded it in December of 1975 in a flagrant act of aggression.² Perhaps a third of the population died as a result of the war and dislocation that followed, largely unnoticed by most of the world. A small military force ("Falintil")³ continued to defy the invaders, even after the 1992 capture and imprisonment (in Jakarta) of the charismatic military leader Xanana Gusmão.⁴ A realignment of forces in Indonesia enabled the negotiation of a plebiscite in which over 78 percent of the voters opted for Timorese independence. The Indonesian military went on a rampage. An Australian-led military force oversaw the Indonesian departure and the United Nations instituted a series of programs aimed at developing indigenous government. Independence came in 2002. The three main faces of the resistance, Xanana Gusmão (President), Mari Alkatiri (Prime Minister), and José Ramos-Horta (Foreign Minister) filled major roles in the new government. Gusmão had fought the military and political battle inside Timor and Indonesia, Alkatiri had been based mostly in Mozambique and fostered the support of the Lusophone states, keeping the cause visible in Africa, while Ramos-Horta, operating mostly out of New York and later Sydney, conducted a lonely, but ultimately brilliantly successful networking and diplomatic campaign to generate support. He was awarded the Nobel Peace Prize along with Bishop Belo in 1996, an event that gave significant visibility and legitimacy to the cause. While the UN had apparently achieved a major success in nation-building by 2002, all did not go well in the years that followed. Running a country proved to require a different set of skills from running a resistance.

Most of the institutions of government—legislative, executive, and judicial—had been dominated by Indonesians during the occupation and those functionaries departed in 1999, leaving a substantial vacuum to be filled by potentially able but untrained personnel. The depths of one corner of this problem became apparent to your reviewer at the end of 1999 when he took part in a week-long training session for about thirty fledgling Timorese judges. It was held in Darwin, Australia, because all the possible venues (and chairs) in the capital Dili had been destroyed by the departing Indonesians. Braithwaite, Charlesworth, and Soares note that at the time the UN had been able to identify about seventy Timorese with legal training in Indonesian universities, "few of whom had practiced law and none of whom had worked as a judge or prosecutor."⁵ Regrettably, "all 22 of the newly trained Timor-Leste judges failed their written exams in the law in May and September 2004."⁶ They were consequently suspended from hearing cases as were "all the local public defenders and prosecutors (including the Prosecutor-General)" who had also failed.⁷ No doubt...