The United Nations Security Council and War:The Evolution of Thought and Practice since 1945 (62 page)
Authors: Adam Roberts,Vaughan Lowe,Jennifer Welsh,Dominik Zaum
As for the Special Committee and the Portuguese government, an official at the UK Permanent Mission in New York summed up their supine stance some six months after the invasion:
There will probably be some discussion of Timor in the Committee of 24 during August [1976], [but] there is no enthusiasm for it whatsoever as it is widely recognised that the clock cannot be turned back.… Portugal remains quiet. They indicate privately that they will accept anything that is acceptable to the UN as a whole. [But] they are not trying to get anything done.
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The one UN body which might have been able to make a difference at this time was the Security Council. As the most powerful organ in the UN system charged with maintaining peace and security between nations and the only body within the UN capable of imposing sanctions, it has the power to make decisions which UN member states must carry out under the UN Charter.
Under
Chapter VI
of the Charter (Pacific Settlement of Disputes), the Council may investigate disputes and recommend appropriate steps to end them. But these recommendations are not legally binding on member states unless they include sanctions. Under
Chapter VII
(Action with Respect to Threats to Peace, Breaches of the Peace and Acts of Aggression), the Council has broader powers to decide what should be done to address aggression and take action. It is generally agreed that
Chapter VII
resolutions are binding. Only two
Chapter VII
resolutions were passed on East Timor in this whole twenty-four-year period, namely Res. 1264 (15 September 1999) which authorized the establishment of InterFET (International Force in East Timor),
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and Res. 1272 (25 October 1999) which established UNTAET. We will consider the background to these momentous decisions in the second part of this chapter.
In the immediate aftermath of Jakarta’s 7 December invasion, the Council only debated East Timor twice. On both occasions resolutions were passed calling on Indonesia to withdraw its troops, and on both occasions Indonesia failed to comply, its representative asserting that it only had ‘volunteers’ in the territory and that by mid-April 1976 these were already withdrawing.
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The first (SC Res. 384 of 22 December 1975), adopted unanimously under UK chairmanship, censured Portuguese colonialism and ‘deplor[ed] the intervention of the armed forces of Indonesia’, but made no reference to aggression, breach of international law, or military occupation. It upheld the ‘inalienable right’ of the people of East Timor to ‘self-determination and independence’ but suggested no practical steps to bring this about. It called on Indonesia ‘to withdraw its forces without delay’, and urged the government of Portugal and ‘all states and other parties’ ‘to cooperate fully with the UN so as to enable the people of East Timor to exercise freely their right to self-determination’, but was not prepared to place any sanctions on Indonesia if it failed to comply. The only practical measure envisaged was to request the Secretary-General to send a Special Representative (SRSG) to Indonesia and East Timor to make ‘an on-the-spot assessment of the existing situation’ and establish ‘contacts with all the parties in the Territory and all States concerned in order to ensure the implementation of the present resolution’.
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The second resolution, Resolution 389, was adopted exactly four months later on 22 April 1976, by twelve votes to none with two abstentions (US and Japan, Benin did not participate in the voting). Its contents were essentially the same as the first except for two significant omissions: the paragraphs ‘regretting’ Portugal’s failures as administering power in the territory, and ‘deploring’ Indonesia’s armed intervention were dropped.
By its actions, Indonesia was guilty of a serious breach of international law. But the Council must also accept some of the responsibility for failing to respond to this challenge to international order. Unlike Vietnam at the time of its Christmas Day 1978 invasion of Cambodia, Indonesia was not threatened with expulsion from the international body nor were any Western sanctions imposed. Instead, the Council resorted to a game of diplomatic ‘hide-and-seek’, most graphically illustrated by the useless peregrinations of the SRSG, Vittorio Winspeare Guicciardi in January-March 1976, to which we return shortly.
During the discussions which preceded the vote on that second resolution, Japan’s permanent representative, Ambassador Kanazawa, introduced an amendment (not eventually accepted by the Council) which spoke of Indonesia being called upon ‘to withdraw all its
remaining
forces’ arguing that the Indonesian representative’s assertion that ‘armed volunteers are already leaving the Territory’ should be accepted as fact.
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The US and the UK went along with this deception. Of the major powers, only China did the right thing, but even then Beijing was going through the motions (‘firing paper bullets’ in the words of the Chinese Ambassador) rather than applying any significant pressure on Jakarta.
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The US representative, Daniel Patrick Moynihan, was later to boast in his memoirs that ‘the US Department of State desired that the United Nations prove utterly ineffective in whatever measures it undertook [on East Timor]. This task was given to me and I carried it forward with no inconsiderable success.’
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The problem for East Timor was that, unlike the situation which later pertained with regard to the Falklands/Malvinas (April 1982) and Kuwait (August 1990) following the Argentine and Iraqi invasions, none of the P5 had any strategic interests in the territory’s political survival. Portugal, the former colonial power, which was still recognized by the UN post-December 1975 as ‘the administering power’, was also in disarray due to the political turmoil which had followed the overthrow of the Salazar-Caetano dictatorship.
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Compared with Indonesia, then a key Western ally, a respected member of the Non-Aligned Movement (NAM), and a country experiencing record economic growth under the autocratic rule of President Suharto (in office, 1966–98), the former Portuguese territory counted for nothing. This was particularly the case in 1975 – that ‘plausible apex of Communism’s strange parabola of power in the modern world’
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– a year when all the Indochina states fell like dominoes to the triumphant Communist forces. There could hardly have been a moment when Indonesia’s value as a pro-Western and staunchly anti-Communist ally straddling some of the world’s most important sea lanes was more significant.
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The Council did nothing more on East Timor until the 5 May 1999 agreement between Portugal and Indonesia. Starting on 7 May 1999, there were to be no less than six resolutions on East Timor in the space of five months culminating in the mandating of UNTAETon 25 October 1999.
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In the intervening twenty-three years, however, the situation in East Timor was apparently not deemed a sufficient ‘threat to international peace and security’ to involve the Council further. The UN Secretariat, in particular the Secretary-General, remained apprised of the issue, though the character and commitment of those filling the highest UN post very much determined how much energy was put into finding a political resolution.
Kurt Waldheim was Secretary-General (in office, 1972–81) at the time of the Indonesian invasion and the two Council resolutions. He did little about East Timor. Indeed, his only practical initiative was that mandated by Resolution 384, namely the dispatch of an SRSG to make contact with the key governments and parties. The man chosen for this thankless task was the Director General of the UN Office in Geneva, Vittorio Winspeare Guicciardi. His mission was a complete failure. After being given the run around by the Indonesians, who proceeded to bomb the four airfields designated by Fretilin as appropriate entry points for him,
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he submitted two reports
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concluding that ‘under the circumstances… it was not possible to assess accurately the prevailing situation in East Timor, particularly as regards the implementation of SC Resolutions 384 (1975) and 389 (1976).’
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By the time Guicciardi filed his last report, the Indonesian-sponsored ‘Provisional Government’ in East Timor had established a ‘People’s Assembly’ which had ‘resolved’ on 31 May 1976 that East Timor should be integrated with Indonesia. On 7 June, a petition expressing that decision was presented to President Suharto and the Indonesian parliament, who responded by sending a mission for the express purpose of ‘making an on-the-spot assessment of the real wishes of the people [of East Timor] as formally expressed in the integration petition’
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While this charade was taking place, Waldheim conided to Evan Luard, the Parliamentary Under-Secretary of State at the Foreign and Commonwealth Office, that
He could envisage some kind of act of self-determination under UN auspices, but it was not clear what form it would take. The Indonesians clearly wish to legalise their
anschluss
… A process similar to that employed in West Irian [in August 1969] could be considered if the Indonesians would accept it.
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Horta, then Fretilin’s representative at the UN (in office, 1975–85), was scathing about the role of the international body at this time,
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coniding bitterly in his memoirs that
No effort was made by Waldheim to have Guicciardi return to East Timor. I was not invited again for any consultations.… It was obvious that neither Waldheim nor the major powers were interested in resolving the Timor question.… They all wished the issue would simply fade away.
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This was corroborated by Richard Dalton, a member of the UK Permanent Mission to the UN, who reported to his FCO superiors on 11 June 1976 that
[Waldheim] has indicated that he is available if the parties wish to talk to him, but he is not making any efforts to bring them together. If challenged as to why he has not followed up SC Res. 389, he is quite prepared to argue that it is because none of the members of the Council have urged him to do so.
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Although the Council and the Secretary-General took no effective action, the East Timor issue continued to come before the General Assembly, at that time a rather more significant body than it was to become in the post-Cold War era.
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Every year between 1975 and 1982, the ‘Question of Timor’ was debated and every year the resolution to support ‘the inalienable right of the people of East Timor to self-determination and independence’ was voted on, although the numbers in favour steadily declined.
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The content of the resolution was also ineluctably watered down: in 1976 the reference to Portugal as ‘the administering power’ was dropped, and the following year all reference to the demand for Indonesia ‘to withdraw all its forces from the Territory’ went as well. Indeed, by time of the last General Assembly Resolution (37/30) of 23 November 1982, even the clause ‘reaffirming the inalienable right of the people of East Timor to self-determination and independence in accordance with GA resolution 1514 (XV)’ had been replaced by a more anodyne general reference to ‘the inalienable right of all peoples to self-determination and independence in accordance with the principles of the charter of the United Nations’
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By then, Indonesia’s Ambassador to the UN, Ali Alatas (in post, 1982–8; subsequently Foreign Minister, 1988–99), could scarcely contain his delight at the numbers voting. With just over 30 per cent of member states supporting the resolution, he looked forward to the ‘so-called Question of East Timor’ being dropped completely from the UN agenda.
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Horta referred to the 1982 General Assembly Resolution as ‘a devastating blow’,
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but stated that his ‘greatest contribution’ to the cause of East Timor was his drafting of Resolution 37/30 which called on the Secretary-General, then Javier Péirez de Cuéillar (in office, 1982–91), to initiate consultations with all parties to ‘achieve a comprehensive settlement of the East Timor issue’. As member states could not be seen to oppose dialogue, it made it very difficult for them to say no to this seemingly innocuous proposal. Horta believes that if that vote had been lost the East Timor cause would never have recovered.
38
In that situation, the territory might have suffered a similar fate to the former Spanish colony of Western Sahara where the failure to hold a referendum in the decade after 1991 had led to a proposal (May 2001) to give de facto recognition to Morocco’s claims to the territory for a five-year period.
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HE
E
AST
T
IMOR
I
SSUE IN THE
1990s
The 1990s were a remarkable decade in the history of the UN and the Security Council in particular. Mikhail Gorbachev’s celebrated
Pravda
and
Izvestia
articles of 17 September 1987, which called on the P5 to become ‘guarantors’ of international security and urged the wider use UN military observers and UN peacekeeping forces in disengaging the troops of warring parties, foreshadowed a new era of P5 cooperation.
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As the 1990s wore on, the Council’s position as the key UN organ in all matters concerning peace and war far out-shadowed the previously influential General Assembly. Vetoes in formal debates became much rarer, and the adoption of fixed positions, which had so stymied the pre-1990 body, became less salient. Here was a Council making serious decisions and involved in decision-making on an unprecedented scale: 93 per cent of all
Chapter VII
resolutions passed between 1946 and 2002 were adopted in this post-Cold War period, and the total number of resolutions agreed (most unanimously) moved from roughly one per month to one per week. This was a dramatic change indeed.
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