For those interested in the kinds of things I have been doing at the UN University...
How well has the causality of the conflict in East Timor been reflected in its UN peacebuilding experience?
Ai Chaobang (a.k.a. John Ashton), 11 February 2012
Introduction
1 – 1975-1999: The Causes of Conflict in East Timor
2 – 1999-2012: Peacebuilding
a) Security
b) Governance
c) Justice
Conclusion
Introduction
In December 1975, the world turned its back on East Timor. Twenty-four-years of Indonesian occupation visited brutality of demonic proportions upon its people: one of the worst genocides of the late twentieth century, in which over two hundred thousand Timorese, a third of the population, were killed.1 It was answered, extremely belatedly, with the largest, furthest reaching and most committed international response in the history of United Nations (UN) peacebuilding.
The UN is now thirteen years into its intervention in East Timor, or in what, to the intervention's credit, became in 2002 the independent state of Timor-Leste. However, despite considerable success against astonishing odds, peacebuilding in East Timor has not been an unmitigated success. Today the outlook for Timor-Leste remains uncertain, its stability and prospects still appearing to hinge on the continued UN presence.
This analysis has two parts. In the first I explore the background to the East Timor conflict, in search of the causes of its traumatic violence in both the original conflict and the persisting unrest which still brings strife to its pursuit of peace. In the second I consider the UN peacebuilding exercise in depth, and ask whether it has sufficiently taken those roots of conflict into account. Through this I advance that the experience in East Timor offers lessons by which the UN might improve its peacebuilding exercises in future; but that the obstacles have been less due to faults in the UN organization, and more the responsibility of its member states and the international paradigm they yet uphold. For indeed, it was this paradigm, of states which choose to act on the world only in terms of their own "national interest" calculations, and which struggle to see through value frameworks other than their own, that was ultimately responsible for East Timor's nightmares; and this choice of paradigm which, although the UN's foundational principles reject it, made East Timor all the more challenging to raise from the wreckage to which the very same choices reduced it.
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