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Speech

Australian Minister for Foreign Affairs, Alexander Downer

International Crisis Resolution: The Example of East Timor

Oxford, 26 January 2000

(Check Against Delivery)

Thanks very much, Lucy, for your introduction - and first can I say to all of you who are not Australians, a happy Australia Day all the same. And Lucy, congratulations on putting our national flag up there.

I am particularly delighted to come along here to the Oxford Union on Australia Day, because Lucy is the first female Australian ever to be the President of the Oxford Union. And she tells me she is only the second Australian to hold such an illustrious position. Now many people who have been Presidents of the Oxford Union have gone on to be leaders in political life, so Lucy I am going to have to have a talk with you later about a possible political career for you.

I am sorry I won't be here tomorrow to hear your debate because its focus - humanitarian interventions in international relations and the boundaries of national sovereignty - has become a very large issue particularly during the course of 1999; where you here in Britain saw the bombing of Yugoslavia and the attempt to restore human rights in Kosovo; and in our part of the world, whilst we watched that closely on television and we didn't have any direct involvement in it, we had the destruction of East Timor in September of 1999, and the organisation of an international force to go in and restore peace and security and protect human rights in East Timor.

Now I am not going to spend my time today as a Foreign Minister comparing those two interventions because that would be an invidious thing for a Foreign Minister to do. In the case of the Kosovo war, the Australian Government gave diplomatic support to the United States, Britain and NATO. In the case of East Timor that was very much reciprocated.

What I thought I would do is use the example of East Timor as what you might call a model of international intervention for the cause, if you like, of human rights or humanitarianism. But when I say a model, that doesn't mean that it can be easily replicated, and if you are later going to ask me questions about other areas of conflict internationally and whether this model will apply, I am probably going to answer that the circumstances are entirely different and may be the model won't apply. It nevertheless remains a very good model of what, in at least an ideal (if you can call it ideal) environment, can be put together to help restore human rights.

Now you remember what happened at about this time during 1999, around 12 months ago to the day. On 27th January last year, then-President Habibie of Indonesia announced that Indonesia would be prepared to have before Christmas 1999 what amounted in the end to a referendum in East Timor, where the people of East Timor would be able to determine whether they wanted to accept an Indonesian Government of what they called wide-ranging autonomy or whether, on the other hand, the people of East Timor would like full independence from Indonesia.

Now that is a simplification because the offer that was made at that time was a little more nuanced, a little more qualified than that. But, as you know, that's ultimately what the offer became.

The United Nations was to supervise the referendum, which it did under a Tripartite Agreement reached between Portugal, the former colonial power, Indonesia, the then existing power, and the United Nations. And on 5 May 1999 the details of how this referendum would take place were more or less agreed. A United Nations mission known as UNAMET led by a Briton called Ian Martin, who was formerly the head of Amnesty International, went to East Timor and they registered people to vote which was an extraordinarily successful process. The vote took place at the end of August and the vote took place also in a remarkably peaceful environment.

Now I say it took place in a peaceful environment and the registration worked, but I also have to tell you that during the course of the period leading up to that vote there was a great deal of intimidation and violence in East Timor. There were many who questioned whether the registration process to vote would work and whether the actual ballot could be held in a free and fair environment. So I think one of the great miracles of last year in East Timor was that the registration process did work and that the ballot was, let's face it, more or less held in a free and fair environment. The result of that ballot was that 78.5% of people in East Timor voted for independence.

Now you will recall on the 4th September when the result of the ballot was announced, then violence in East Timor erupted, militia groups went wild. There is no doubt, to put it in its most qualified way and you can put this a lot more strongly, there is no doubt that the Indonesian military and police failed to bring the militias under control and it is of course alleged, and there is certainly evidence of this, that the Indonesian military were complicit in the violence that took place. East Timor was more or less trashed. It was sacked to use an old-fashioned expression. We're not yet sure how many people died, perhaps somewhere between 500 and a thousand, possibly slightly more - we may never know how many people died. Many people were basically shipped out of East Timor: something like 200,000-300,000 people were just pushed out of East Timor by the military, by the militias, by the police. It turned into what could only be described as a human rights disaster and the international community, particularly ourselves as a neighbouring country, really felt very strongly that something had to be done to stop this humanitarian disaster before us.

So why was this a model? I will tell you why I think that this was a model of how a humanitarian response can work. First of all we - and I don't just mean Australia although importantly Australia, but the international community - made the decision that we wouldn't go to war with Indonesia, that we wouldn't intervene without the agreement of the Indonesian Government. Now that wasn't popular with everybody. There were many people who said we should have intervened regardless of the views of the Indonesian Government. That would have constituted an act of war and our judgement was that the humanitarian "benefits" of that wouldn't have been there. It would have been a very bloody, and a very disastrous, conflict if it had ever come to that. We absolutely ruled out that option. We made that clear to the Australian public, other governments did the same thing.

As a consequence what we had to do was internationally persuade the Indonesians to accept an international force into East Timor to restore law and order. Initially the Indonesians were very resistant to that but, by using a number of methods (in particular the United States threatening the Indonesians with economic measures against Indonesia, but also with those other countries - Britain, the European Union, Australia of course, New Zealand - which are so important to Indonesia's economy, threatening to take still further measures against Indonesia, particularly economic measures), Indonesia eventually, after something like seven or eight days, relented, and said that they would allow an international force.

So this is the first thing - we didn't go to war with Indonesia, we said that what we wanted was the Indonesians to agree to the insertion of an international force.

The second thing we said was that we wanted the United Nations to authorise the insertion of that force. While not saying it would have been illegal, we didn't want it to be outside, if you like, the ambit of international law. So a number of governments went to New York and worked on getting the United Nations Security Council to agree to a resolution to authorise an international military intervention into East Timor - which as you know the Security Council did. And let it be remembered that it was the British Government that actually wrote the resolution and the British Government gave tremendous support to the diplomacy that led to the passage of that resolution.

The third, and important, thing was that before we got the resolution passed we wanted a resolution which would be decisive. Some of you will remember the failed United Nations involvement in Bosnia. Long before the current international force went into Bosnia, its predecessor, the United Nations force that was there, was in many respects humiliated. You will be familiar with the in-the-end failed effort of the United Nations in Somalia. What we wanted with the East Timor resolution was a resolution which would give this military force decisive power. That is unequivocal power to restore law and order. We didn't want the hands of the military to be tied.

Now that is a tough thing to say. But I put it to you that if you tie the hands of the military then you shouldn't be using your military at all. It is a very very big decision for any government to decide to use its military - its army, its air force and its navy - its not a decision any government should ever consider taking lightly. But if you make that decision, then you have to be decisive about it and we didn't want an ambiguous, an equivocal, United Nations mandate - we wanted a decisive mandate, and we got from the United Nations what is called the Chapter VII mandate - which is, some people put it rather crudely, a mandate which gives the right to open fire on people who are resisting the mandate.

So when the international force went in it had the strength of that mandate. It could act militarily, quite decisively to fulfil its mandate; which at the end of the day was to restore peace and security in East Timor.

The fourth thing that I would say about this exercise was that we didn't want to participate in an intervention that was endless. We thought it was going to be vitally important for there to be an exit strategy. One day this international force would have to leave - it has gone in there to do a job, it will have to leave - and when it leaves there will have to be political stability left in its place. Otherwise, if you send in a force and you withdraw and there isn't political stability in place, then clearly you will go right back to where you began. If, on the other hand, you are concerned about that and aren't prepared to withdraw, then your military could remain there indefinitely, and obviously you will appreciate that that is also an unsatisfactory outcome.

So we were asked to lead this international force, known as INTERFET. We made the judgement, as did the other countries (including Britain) which have participated in this international force, that we would be able to do the job fairly quickly (within a matter of months) - that is, to restore law and order in East Timor and in time to pass over the responsibility for law and order, firstly to a more modest United Nations peace keeping operation and finally to the East Timorese themselves. And we are nearly at the end of the first phase now. By the end of February this international force will be replaced by a more traditional United Nations peace keeping operation which in many respects will be a lower level operation than INTERFET, and then finally replaced by just a more traditional East Timorese based policing and paramilitary operation for peace and security in East Timor.

Now I can say to you since that international force went into East Timor, peace and security has been restored to East Timor and the United Nations has taken over the administration of the place. A process of reconstruction is now under way and we are now winding down the number of soldiers we, Australia, have involved.

What I said at the very beginning was that this has, of course, been a very tough exercise and a very expensive exercise. But this is an example of the international community being able to restore peace and security where human rights have simply broken down, and where there were gross human rights abuses. We did judge that we couldn't stand by and do nothing. And I think that has become very much the sentiment of the world today.

You know with globalisation, with information technology being what it is, we all know pretty much what is going on everywhere. We in Australia may be a long way away, but we only need to watch the TV news to know what is going on in say Northern Ireland, just across the water from you and part of your polity. You know, and you knew particularly back in September, what was going on in East Timor just across the water from Australia and in our, if you like, strategic environment. And this is true all around the world; there is what some people call the power of CNN.

Nowadays public opinion can hold a very strong view about international situations, and in particular about death and destruction, about abuses of human rights. Thirty, forty, fifty, particularly sixty or more years ago, going back to the 1930s people didn't necessarily know what was going on in Germany at that time. Yes, there were stories in the newspapers, if you bothered to read the newspapers, but there wasn't a mass sentiment in the community about what was going on in Germany at that time. The elites obviously had a view, but there wasn't a mass sentiment about it at least until the late 1930s. nowadays there can be mass sentiment about human rights abuses anywhere in the world because of information technology. And you know the communities of the world demand that action be taken against cruelty, against human abuse. And governments have to work out ways of doing that and my point is that in the case of East Timor we did find a way of doing so. In the case of Kosovo a different method was chosen, a way of addressing that issue was certainly found, and there will be debate in both cases about the merits of the methodology chosen, but I would just say to you that I thought in the case of East Timor it was constructive and in the end it has proved to be successful.

As the Australian Foreign Minister I can say that we in Australia are very proud of the leading role that we have played in that. Now that our leading role is coming to an end we are in the process of the next task we have, which is not only helping East Timor with its reconstruction and its development as a new nation and as the first new nation of the new century, but also restoring our relationship with Indonesia which is of course an important priority to us now.

Indonesia has become the world's third largest operating democracy during the course of the last year. That has largely been forgotten by people because of what has happened in East Timor, but I don't think any of us who are supporters of democracy, and surely everyone in this room is, we can be anything but delighted at what eventually has happened in East Timor by the end of 1999 and during the course of this year so far and anything but delighted about the advent of democracy in Indonesia, which we hope will remain in place and last indefinitely.

Thank you again, particularly Lucy for having me here at the Oxford Union, again it is great to see an Australian as the President. I hope Australians get to hear about your Presidency.

All of us enjoyed reading about you today in the British newspapers. I actually didn't enjoy terribly because I saw that you preferred to have different kinds of people from politicians coming and addressing the Union nowadays but I am with you, I think it is very important to get a diversity of people, make sure you connect with the mainstream of the British public, not make it too narrow and introverted as an institution, so it is great to see an Australian giving that progressive leadership to the Oxford Union and I congratulate you. It is good to have a woman as well - typically a progressive Australian initiative this.

Thank you very much.

ENDS

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