![Sample our Politics & International Relations journals, sign in here to start your FREE access for 14 days]({"type":"image" , "src" : "/sda/5947/TOC-Subject-Sample-2021-Politics-International-Relations.jpg"})
ABSTRACT
The paper challenges the theoretical and empirical orthodoxy surrounding the debate on international military intervention and mass atrocity endings, via an evidence-based analysis of the situation in East Timor in 1999. By combining existing but under-explored data on mass atrocities with eye-witness accounts, new key informant interviews, and a detailed review of secondary sources, we demonstrate that the wave of militia-perpetrated violence in September 1999 was extinguished prior to the arrival of international military forces. We demonstrate the unique effect of national political factors, when combined with the pressures of international diplomacy, which combined to end mass atrocities in this particular case. We find that the Indonesian regime was not a uniformly recalcitrant regime opposed to ending the atrocities, and demonstrate how factors operating across the national and sub-national levels combined to force the Indonesian leadership to bring the militia perpetrators of this brutal episode of violence under control. Through our new empirical analysis, and the alternative explanation we present to explain endings of mass atrocities in this case, we challenge the tendency to focus on international military intervention as the means by which mass atrocities come to an end.
Acknowledgements
Thanks to Nowrin Hussein, John Mellors and Daisy Posumah for research assistance. Thanks to Nina Caspersen, Liam Clegg, Bridget Conley-Zilkic, Alex De Waal, and Tony Heron for comments on an earlier draft. An earlier version of this paper was presented as Smith, C. Q., & Jarvis, T. (2015). Contested politics, democratization and intervention: The ending to mass atrocities in East Timor, at the workshop ‘States of Peace: The comparative politics of peacebuilding in Asia’, University of Yangon, 29–30 June 2015.
Disclosure statement
No potential conflict of interest was reported by the authors.
About the authors
Claire Q. Smith is a Lecturer in Politics in the Department of Politics at the University of York. Her research focuses on the comparative politics of peace-building, civil war and political transition in Southeast Asia, in particular in Indonesia and Timor-Leste, and with a special interest in illiberal peace-building. She has published in this field with Third World Quarterly, Nations and Nationalism, Cambridge University Press and ISEAS. Her research has been funded by the World Peace Foundation, the ISRF, the ESRC, and The Asia Foundation.
Tom Jarvis is a Doctoral Researcher at the International Development Department of the University of Birmingham. His research focuses on the effects of armed conflict on corruption at the local level, and in particular on the relationship between these phenomena in the wake of the 1996–2006 armed conflict in Nepal. His doctoral research is funded by the ESRC. He has also worked as a researcher on the Indonesia and Timor-Leste cases for the World Peace Foundation-funded “How Mass Atrocities End” research project.
Notes
1 We define mass atrocities as the, “widespread and systematic violence against civilians, largely characterised by killing”, in line with the definition used by Conley-Zilkic, How Mass Atrocities End, 1.
2 Ibid.
3 Paris, “Responsibility to Protect,” 570–2.
4 Wheeler and Dunne, “New Humanitarian Interventionism.”
5 Seybolt, Humanitarian Military Intervention; Wheeler and Dunne, “New Humanitarian Interventionism”; Wertheim, “A Solution from Hell.”
6 MacGinty, International Peacebuilding; MacGinty and Richmond, “The Local Turn”; MacGinty and Richmond, “Constructing Hybrid Political Orders.”
7 Paris, “Responsibility to Protect,” 570.
8 Moore, “Deciding Humanitarian Intervention”; Peksen and Lounsbery, “Beyond the Target State”; Kuperman, “A Model Humanitarian Intervention?”
9 De Waal, Meierhenrich, and Conley-Zilkic, “How Mass Atrocities End.”
10 Conley-Zilkic, ed., How Mass Atrocities End.
11 Evans, The Responsibility to Protect, 7.
12 Ibid.
13 Sampford and Thakur, “From the Right to Persecute,” 38.
14 Blair, “Doctrine of the International Community.”
15 Wheeler and Dunne, “New Humanitarian Interventionism.”
16 Cotton, “Against the Grain.”
17 Wheeler and Dunne, “New Humanitarian Interventionism.”
18 Pattison, Humanitarian Intervention.
19 Wertheim, “A Solution from Hell,” 161.
20 Perez and Elizabeth, “Beyond Good Intentions.”
21 Wheeler and Dunne, “New Humanitarian Interventionism.”
22 Bellamy, “Realizing the Responsibility to Protect”; Sampford and Thakur, “From the Right to Persecute.”
23 Downes, “Desperate Times”; Wood, Kathman, and Gent, “Armed Intervention.”
24 See Smith, “Indonesia.”
25 Conley-Zilkic, How Mass Atrocities End.
26 Strauss, Making and Unmaking Nations; Valentino, Final Solutions; Wood, Kathman, and Gent, “Armed Intervention.”
27 Conley-Zilkic, How Mass Atrocities End; De Waal, Meierhenrich, and Conley-Zilkic, “How Mass Atrocities End”; Paris, “Responsibility to Protect”; Smith, “Indonesia.”
28 MacGinty, International Peacebuilding; MacGinty and Richmond, “The Local Turn in Peacebuilding”; MacGinty and Richmond, “The Fallacy of Constructing Hybrid Political Orders.”
29 See Silva and Ball, “Human Rights Violations.”
30 Dunn, Crimes Against Humanity; Robinson, “East Timor 1999.”
31 CAVR, Chega!, 488.
32 Ibid.
33 Dunn, Crimes Against Humanity, 28.
34 Achmad, “East Timorese Refugees,” 201.
35 Robinson, “East Timor 1999”; 49. CAVR, Chega!, 300; Dunn, Crimes Against Humanity, 28.
36 Greenlees and Garran, Deliverance, 198.
37 Carter Centre, Postelection Statement.
38 Carter Centre, 1999 Public Consultation.
39 Schimmer, Violence by Fire.
40 UNSC, Security Council Mission, 5.
41 Cristalis, East Timor, 229.
42 Breen, Mission Accomplished, 28.
43 Ibid., 35.
44 The incident in Becora was amongst the most tense, but was “resolved after confrontation but without violence”. Kingsbury, East Timor, 75.
45 Breen, Mission Accomplished, 34.
46 Film documentary footage of interviews with Australian troops in Dili, archive number MDV-99-0041 (dated 25/09/99), viewed by the author at the Centre Archives Max Stahl (CAMS), Dili, 3 May 2014.
47 Breen, Mission Accomplished, 70.
48 Kilcullen, Counterinsurgency, 127.
49 Smith and Dee, Peacekeeping, 46.
50 Interview with Lambang Triyono, Universitas Gadja Mada, Yogyakarta, 12 November 2015.
51 Lloyd, “Diplomacy on East Timor,” 84.
52 Interview with Dewi Fortuna Anwar, Jakarta, 16 November 2015.
53 Ibid.
54 Virgoe, “Impunity Resurgent,” 99.
55 Army Strategic Reserve Command.
56 Kingsbury, Power Politics, 117.
57 Ibid., 180.
58 Purdey, “Victims in Reformasi Indonesia,” 614.
59 Gledhill, “Competing for Change,” 67.
60 Schulze, “East Timor Referendum Crisis,” 80.
61 Ibid.
62 Wandelt, “Prabowo, Kopassus, and East Timor.”
63 Robinson, “People's War.”
64 Schulze, “East Timor Referendum Crisis,” 140; Kingsbury, Power Politics, 117.
65 CAVR, Chega!
66 Kingsbury, Power Politics, 121.
67 Kingsbury, Power Politics, 121.
68 Van Klinken and Bourchier, “Crimes Against Humanity,” 146.
69 Kingsbury, Power Politics, 122.
70 Lloyd, “Diplomacy on East Timor,” 94.
71 CAVR, Careers of Selected Officers, 2.
72 Lowry, “Timor Timur,” 88.
73 Moore, “Deciding Humanitarian Intervention,” 43.
74 Crouch, “East Timor,” 165.
75 Interview with Ian Martin, former UN Special Representative to East Timor – commenting on reports from the UN Military Liason Officer based within the TNI's HQ in Dili – London, 2 July 2014.
76 Ohnishi, “Coercive Diplomacy,” 67.
77 Ibid.
78 Interview with Martin, 2 July 2014.
79 Lowry, “Timor Timur,” 91.
80 Robinson, “East Timor 1999,” 47.
81 Interview with Anwar, 16 November 2015, Jakarta; Jago, “INTERFET.”
82 Lloyd, “Diplomacy on East Timor,” 93.
83 Kingsbury, Power Politics, 117.
84 Robinson, “People's War.”
85 Kingsbury, Power Politics, 121.
86 Lowry, “Timor Timur,” 90.
87 Lane et al., IMF-Supported Programmes.
88 Jago, “INTERFET,” 387.
89 Robinson, How Genocide Was Stopped, 191; Greenlees and Garran, Deliverance, 246.
90 Soderlund and Briggs, “East Timor,” 251.
91 Jago, “INTERFET”; Dee, “Coalitions of the Willing.”
92 UNSC, Security Council Mission.
93 Lloyd, “Diplomacy on East Timor”; Jago, “INTERFET.”
94 Honna, Military Politics, 174.
95 Kingsbury, Power Politics, 166.
96 Ibid.
97 Schulze, “East Timor Referendum Crisis.”
98 Nixon, “Indonesian West Timor,” 169.
99 Crouch, “East Timor,” 177.
100 Mydans, “Jakarta Concedes.”
101 Honna, Military Politics, 175.
102 Wheeler and Dunne, “New Humanitarian Interventionism.”