ISSUE 42: JUNE-AUGUST 2006

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COMMENT

East Timor crisis due to multiple defense forces

By Ramesh Thakur

Almost half of all peace agreements collapse within five years into armed violence. Australian troops are back in East Timor four years after the country became independent following an international intervention force introduced in the wake of the brutal 1999 killings by Indonesia-backed militias.

What used to be Indonesia's headache is now Australia's. Richard Woolcott, a former Australian ambassador to Indonesia, writes of a Bush administration official telling him in 2000 that "East Timor will be your Haiti." Both crisis-torn countries illustrate the pathology of long-running conflicts in deeply traumatized societies scarred by decades of strife and armed violence where the border between criminality and the struggle for political power is easily blurred.

Australian Prime Minister John Howard has been uncharacteristically blunt in attributing the resurgence of violence in East Timor to bad governance.

The immediate spark to the crisis is fighting between the country's security forces. The state has the monopoly on the legitimate use of violence. The military has the most concentrated heavy firepower in any society. That is its strength, but from that also comes the most danger in many infant nations. The development of any national defense force must therefore always take place with full awareness of the costs, risks, constraints and opportunity costs for other critically important national development goals.

After East Timor's independence, Australia reportedly advised the new government to create either an army or a police force, but not both. The advice was ignored, and the government established a 3,000-strong army with 1,500 regular troops, in addition to a police force with its own ready reaction force and border police. But the role of the army was never clear, and inevitably in a poor and resource-scarce new nation, it and the Defense Ministry competed for budgetary allocations with the police force, which came under the Home Affairs Ministry.

A national defense force serves several purposes, starting with the defense of the country. This requires an accurate and in-depth assessment of the threats to territorial integrity, political independence and national sovereignty. It also requires a solid analysis of the probability of such threats, and the severity of the threats. Thus, a national security analytical capability is an integral component of a defense force. Given that East Timor would never be in a position to repel an invasion by either of its two powerful neighbors, should it simply abandon the idea of a national defense force?

National defense is never the only role for military forces. Military forces are also symbols of national sovereignty, with the attendant pomp and pageantry. They are often called upon to render aid and assistance to civil authorities, in such circumstances as natural disasters and emergency relief or the maintenance of law and order.

Sometimes the creation of military forces is justified by the need to transform armed national liberation movements, which are often the repository of nationalism, into a new national defense force. While this can help to integrate former fighters and combatants into the new structures of the state, the example of war veterans in Zimbabwe offers a caution on their disruptive and destructive potential.

Participation by the country's soldiers in U.N. peacekeeping operations can help to repay the debt to the international community. The military can also help in the development of a society's skills base, for example through engineering regiments, leadership and management skills, and the instilling of collective discipline.

Once a decision is taken to create a national defense force, decisions have to be made and systems put in place for training people as professional fighting soldiers, procuring the necessary equipment, deciding on the appropriate force structure in the light of the assessed likely threats, developing doctrines of national security and war fighting, and so on.

The most important issue, if a country is not to abandon the path of good governance, is that of establishing and maintaining the supremacy of the political leadership and control of civilian sectors of government over the military. It is the task of governments to decide on the answers to the above questions at the policy level, and the task of soldiers to execute the decisions made. Equally, it is the responsibility of governments to decide when to call the military out of the barracks and when to return them there; professional soldiers carry out the orders of democratic governments. This also involves developing policy and guidelines on the relationship between the military and police forces, establishing oversight structures, and satisfying the legitimate demands of the military without pampering them to the point of unbalancing the development of other sectors of state.

East Timor's Prime Minister Mari Alkatiri is perceived by many Timorese as arrogant, authoritarian and rigid. His authority is suspect also because he leads the Mozambique clique of Fretilin ideologues. Ostensibly a democracy, in reality East Timor is a one-party state under the dominance of the Fretilin party. Alkatiri recently survived a challenge to his leadership of the party by changing the voting rules at the last moment to demand a show of hands instead of the secret ballot. This is not the way to restore authority or to quell restiveness in the ranks.

The traditional east-west divide in East Timor that shapes Timorese social identity is an important factor in the current crisis. The long resistance struggle against the Indonesians was waged by Falantil fighters based in the eastern region. Earlier this year 595 soldiers were sacked. Unfortunately, most of them were disaffected Loromonu or Westerners. (The easterners are known as Lorosae.) Alkatiri proved incapable of listening and responding to the disgruntled soldiers' grievances. He is also known to have differences with the still very popular president, the charismatic but ailing Xanana Gusmao.

On the one hand, the sacked soldiers must somehow be reconciled, financially compensated and given gainful employment. No country can prosecute and imprison one-third of its soldiers. On the other hand, the army must be downsized if not eliminated. Australia's original advice was sound: East Timor cannot afford both an army and a police force with paramilitary pretensions.

Australia is quickly becoming the South Pacific's sheriff, with a security stabilization role in the Solomon Islands as well as East Timor, as well as underwriting security across the whole arc of instability to its north. Its authority will be enhanced with appropriate authorizing and supporting resolutions from the U.N. Security Council, just as its capacity will be strengthened with appropriate logistical and intelligence support and diplomatic backing from the United States.

The outbreak of lawlessness and savage killings also underlines the critical importance of the new U.N. Peacebuilding Commission to oversee and underwrite the transition from violent conflict to sustainable peace.

Ramesh Thakur is senior vice rector of the United Nations University. This article, published in the May 31 edition of The Daily Yomiuri is an updated version of his presenation at an international symposium on U.N. peacekeeping operations in Dili in April 2005 on The Development of National Defense Forces. These are his personal views.

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