East Timor: Ten questions for which we need answers

[Harold F. Schiffman]

Ten questions about East Timor for which we need answers

by Richard Tanter
 June 09, 2006

The Nautilus Institute

The dominant characteristic of the coverage of East Timor in the past two
weeks has been utter confusion, both inside and outside the country. The
simple and clear narrative of the long hard decades leading up to
September 1999 of good Timorese seeking self-determination and bad
Indonesian military colonialists has been replaced by doubt and confusion
amongst both Timorese and outside observers. Even well-informed foreign
observers admitted their uncertainty about what was actually happening and
why -- though many of less well informed operated under no such restraint,
thereby adding to the confusion.

The violent events in East Timor in the past two weeks should not really
have been a surprise. There had been little explicit warning in the
foreign press prior to the army mutiny two months ago. Most critical
commentary outside the country to that date concentrated on just two
issues -- the tensions between justice and reconciliation over the crimes
of the Indonesian military and their Timorese militias leading up to
independence, and the protracted and unhappy negotiations between the
newly independent country and Australia over the division of oil and gas
revenues from the Timor Sea fields. Yet over the past half year or more
disturbing signs had been seeping through the generally benign but
uninforming portrayal of post-independence Timor Leste. Two were
particularly distressing. The first was the 2006 Human Development Report
for Timor Leste from the United Nations Development Program [1], showing
that that the poorest country in a poor region was becoming markedly
poorer and more desperate, with almost every indicator of health and
collective well-being in decline. After two and a half decades of the
depredations of Indonesian military colonialism, this was a bitter pill.
The second signal, with even worse connotations, was a report in April by
Human Rights Watch that carefully documented the use of torture and
serious mistreatment of detainees by East Timorese police. [2]

Even without more detailed knowledge, these were enough to set off alarms
that the hard-fought for self-determination was no more than a necessary
condition for peace and human security in East Timor, and that there was
more to the explanation of the misery of many thousands of people than the
continuing antipathy of the Indonesian military and the arrogance and
short-sightedness of the Australian government in the oil negotiations,
important as they undoubtedly were. This is a moment when we need to take
stock, to admit uncertainty, and carefully explore the underlying dynamics
of a situation that is as complex as it is dangerous. The media are full
of plenty of instant diagnoses, some from the usual suspects ("failed
states" and "Australian coup d'etat" are two popular lines that we hear a
lot of). But this is really a time for a little humility amongst the
foreign pundits and experts.

Here are ten questions to which we need some substantial answers and
preferably some serious debate.

1.  What inhibited the Alkatiri administration from effectively addressing
the army rebellion and the antagonisms between the army and the police?
Why were the divisive recruiting policies of the army and the police
allowed to take root?  The first public signs of rebellion were many
months ago. Insiders must have been aware of severe distress long before
that. Nothing about control of armed force in small weak states should
ever be allowed to drift. The only explanations offered to date have been
either in terms of personalities, both inside the Council of Ministers and
within the armed forces (FDTL) and the police (PNTL), or in overly simple
terms of "ethnicity" and region. The army recruited mainly ex-Falantil
guerrilla fighters, by default of their survival, mostly from the east of
the country. The police, disproportionately from the west, allowed in
former members of the Indonesian police force, and according to some,
substantial numbers of former militia. But the key question is not about
the policies, but why the Council of Ministers could not or would not
reverse these dynamics. To answer that, we need much more than just
caricatures of "bad Alkatiri, good Gusmao". To some degree these policies
were in place by UNTAET before the transition to independence, but the
question still remains as to why sophisticated and perceptive political
figures such as Mari Alkatiri and Jose Ramos Horta were unable to rein in
the Ministers of Defence (Roque Rodrigues) and Interior (Rogerio Lobato),
and the FDTL's chief, Major-General Taur Matan Ruak. For this we need a
clearer account of the politics of the administration, and not simple
abuse about "failing states".

2.     What have been the key political dynamics in East Timor
post-independence?

Remarkably little informed analysis has been available about the politics
of East Timor since the August 2001 parliamentary elections and the
subsequent presidential election in April 2002. As a result of the 2001
elections, Fretilin holds 55 out of 88 seats in the parliament, and its
leader Mari Alkatiri is prime minister. Much has been made by foreign
commentators of Alkatiri's unpopularity, but until the elections scheduled
for later this year or early next year, this is untested. More seriously,
here in Australia we have seen little careful analysis of the real state
of Fretilin, the role played by the party in Alkatiri's administration,
and the popularity and positions of the more substantial opposition
parties, such as the Democratic party. The less than democratic conduct of
the recent Fretilin Congress did not help matters either internally or
externally, leaving the party more vulnerable to charges of favouritism
and collusion and cover-up of the Council of Ministers' ineffectiveness.

Apart from Helen Hill's recent careful but brief review of the actual
characteristics and achievements of Alkatiri's policy approach [3], there
has been almost no serious Australian media coverage of policy debates in
East Timor in recent years, apart from the question of oil and gas
negotiations, questions of language policy, and the reconciliation vs.
justice for those accused of war crimes. Fundamental issues about
livelihood, poverty, health, the distribution of the benefits of oil and
gas revenues to the people of the country, and the actual effects of
government budget and foreign aid to the communities and infrastructure of
the country -- all of which are matters of great debate inside East Timor
and some careful analysis in Timorese and outside policy circles -- have
been left unreported in the wider media.

3.  Is the framework of "ethnic tensions" and "easterners vs.
westerners" the real key to the current political dynamics, or is there
some other organising factor behind the riots?  Long-time observers of
East Timorese society and politics are both sceptical and surprised about
the deep salience of this divide. This is an old split that appeared to
lose much of its salience during the war of resistance against a common
enemy. Helen Hill has argued that marriage patterns show a much more
complex, nuanced reality. [4] Moreover, as she has pointed out, most
political organisations in fact span this "divide", with members from both
regions. And whatever the case, the lazy use of "ethnic tensions" is
surely inappropriate in such an ethnically diverse country. If this is a
divide, real or manufactured, it is around matters of regional benefit and
deprivation.

Yet the army and police divisions have certainly expressed themselves in
part along this fault line. The accretion in the police of numbers of
people from the western part of the country who had closer relations with
the Indonesian occupiers show that it is not simply a matter of geography
or "ethnicity". Rather "east/west" became to some extent at least a
reflection of the unfinished business of the reconciliation vs. justice
debate, and the politics of patronage. This is not at all to say the
division is a mirage, but rather we need to look a lot harder at how
regional division has overlaid other lines of conflict with nothing to do
with region.

More importantly, we have almost no informed reports on the political
dynamics of the uses and promotion of this division either within the army
and the police or amongst the well-organised rioters. "Conflict
entrepreneurs" is a term well suited to those who are exploiting confused
situations like this. We know that text messages on mobile phones -- some
based on honest fears, some intended to manufacture fear based on false
information -- were skilfully used to cause terror, confusion and flight.
We also know that rioters and teams of young men targeting particular
individuals -- to burn houses, loot government departments and agencies,
intimidate and in some cases to murder -- have been coordinated by mobile
phone. Criminal gangs have also used mobile phones to coordinate lootings.
The key question is who was coordinating these destabilising political
actions? Is more than one elite group using such tactics? Who is
coordinating with whom? It appears to be a complex situation with more
than one set of oppositions as well as different opportunists involved.

4.     What does Australia know about the dynamics of violence in East
Timor this time?

While the Australian media has reported the violence in terms of roaming
bands of young men and odd groups of police and army personnel, divided
along 'east/west" lines, the Australian government certainly knows that
this media picture of aimless and apparently spontaneous violence is not
correct. Australian intelligence organisations -- especially our
electronic intelligence collection agency, the Defence Signals Division --
have the means to catch, decrypt and analyse all mobile phone and radio
conversations in East Timor. Undoubtedly the Australian Secret
Intelligence Service would have retained some of its earlier capacities in
East Timor. This is precisely what DSD did in 1999 and what gave InterFET
such a decisive advantage over the Indonesian military and its militia. As
in 1999, the Australian government would have had access to advance
warning that groups were planning some kinds of political intervention. In
their meeting this week, Mr Downer appeared to have intimated to President
Gusmao that Australia had such information on current planning of riots.
The key questions then are what did the Australian government know through
its intelligence sources in the run up to the eruption of violence, and
with whom did it share this knowledge? In 1999 the Australian government
kept its considerable forewarning of the conflagration being planned by
the TNI to come from its own citizens, from its American ally, and of
course, from the people of East Timor about to be its victims.

5.     Are there external factors at work -- Australian or Indonesian?

Those in Australia looking for evidence of an "Australian coup" will be
convinced by the likes of the Australian's Greg Sheridan:  "Certainly if
Alkatiri remains Prime Minister of East Timor, this is a shocking
indictment of Australian impotence. If you cannot translate the leverage
of 1300 troops, 50 policemen, hundreds of support personnel, buckets of
aid and a critical international rescue mission into enough influence to
get rid of a disastrous Marxist Prime Minister, then you are just not very
skilled in the arts of influence, tutelage, sponsorship and, ultimately,
promoting the national interest." [5] Undoubtedly the Australian
government would prefer someone other than the economic nationalist
Alkatiri to lead East Timor. The real question is whether such a
preference would lead it to support the murder and mayhem of the present
eruption, and the certain long run destabilisation of Timorese politics
that would now ensue. On balance, the answer is no.  Alkatiri and Fretilin
were due to face an election in a matter of months in any case. Australian
bullying and arrogance is undoubtedly the order of the day, but not, in
this case, coup-making.

On the other hand, given the swaggering stance of the Australian Prime
Minister and Minister of Foreign Affairs, it is not surprising that, as
Loro Horta said: "Many members of the Dili government are far more
concerned over Australian indentations than they are over Jakarta's. Many
believe that Australia and the U.S. are to some extent behind the crisis."
[6] While Horta regards this notion as bizarre, the front page blusterings
of the Sheridan camp feed the anxiety, and would appear to reflect some
strands of Australian government thinking -- thus at the very least
complicating the task of the ADF and AFP personnel on the ground.

A more serious question has to be asked about Indonesian intervention --
or more precisely, intervention by particular groups in Indonesia. When
Mari Alkatiri was reported -- incorrectly -- as having accused Indonesia
of being behind the riots, the Indonesian Foreign Minister denied any such
intervention, and his denial should be taken seriously. But that does not
mean taking it at face value. Much happens in the Indonesian state that is
no longer under the control of the president and his advisors. In
particular, recent events in Papua have demonstrated that the president's
pro-autonomy policy in Papua is being actively undermined by the military,
the most important intelligence agency and by the Ministry of the
Interior. [7] That is not to say that there is any proof that any of these
organisations -- or civil society organisations linked to them -- have
been involved in East Timor, but it certainly means that the Foreign
Minister's denial, honourable in intent though it may have been, is not
the last word on the matter. Moreover since the Indonesian invasion of
East Timor in 1975 began with intelligence agencies' destabilisation of
Timorese politics, history leads us to err on the side of caution, and
with an eye for links at one remove from the immediate action.

Possible Indonesian involvement in at least three elements of the present
violence and chaos need to be examined carefully. The first is the two
attacks on repositories of records of investigations and testimonies about
the crimes of the 1975-1999 period, both Indonesian and Timorese. The UN
Serious Crimes Unit office was looted, with files relating to Indonesian
army officers criminal actions stolen, and the Truth and Reconciliation
Commission Secretariat ( CAVR) building was attacked by about 100 armed
men. There are no copies of the CAVR materials held outside East Timor.
The second issue that needs careful examination for any trace of
Indonesian links -- official or otherwise -- is the behaviour of the East
Timorese police. Accused by Human Rights Watch of illegal detention and
torture, the ongoing links of senior police who began their careers in the
Indonesian police needs careful scrutiny -- especially in the "east-west"
context, and the abandonment of court actions for past crimes in favour of
reconciliation.

The third issue is both the most important and the most difficult to
assess: which groups are behind the organised rioting, looting, and
killing of the past two weeks. This was Alkatiri's actual question. Have
militia connections no salience? Have cross-border linkages beyond matters
of kinship no relevance? Have the intrigues of East Timorese politics no
connection to the ongoing activities of Indonesian-based former militia
leaders with longstanding Indonesian intelligence links such as Eurico
Guterres? Most importantly, the focus must be on the organization of the
chaos -- whether the East Timorese formateurs of violence are singular or
multiple, and whether they act entirely without outside links.



These are questions that have to be asked, and it is in the interests of
democrats in East Timor, Indonesia, and Australia that they be both asked
and answered. Given the past behaviour and ongoing behaviour of both the
Indonesian army and the Indonesian intelligence agencies, this is not a
time for taking offence just because the questions are put. And given the
arrogance of the Australian government's behaviour, the blind rush to the
status of regional mini-hegemon, and its misleading of its own population
about what its intelligence agencies knew last time, there is every reason
to scrutinize the long run intentions and assumptions behind Australian
intervention.



6.     Does Operation Astute have adequate -- and appropriate -- resources
for the job?

As in 1999 Australian armed intervention was an urgent necessity, whatever
the subsequent damage caused by Howard's triumphalism then and its echoes
now. But there are very real doubts about Australian capacities this time
round. Not only is the situation on the ground much more confused than in
the orchestrated chaos of 1999, but as many commentators have rightly
said, Australian military and policing resources are stretched much more
thinly over a very wide range of conflicts. Specialised Australian
military personnel suitable for such interventions are in fact always
small in numbers -- the three units that makes up the Special Operations
Command (the SAS and two commando groups) and the Army's Airborne battle
Group, with the 3rd battalion (parachute) Royal Australian Regiment (RAR).



Operation Astute is staffed by military personnel from Australia, New
Zealand, Malaysia, and Portugal, and the US has lent logistical
assistance. Both Australia and Portugal have deployed police groups, in
the Australian case, 57 Australian Federal Police officers. Australian
military personnel are mainly from 3 RAR -- some just back from Iraq
(others are still deployed in the Solomons) -- and a smaller number from 4
RAR. [8] Confusion about who to target, suitable rules of engagement,
strategy and simple lack of numbers inhibited the effectiveness of the
force for a time after landing. While a greater degree of physical control
was established, even now there is no comprehensive police protection
against looting and assault, as the raid on the CAVR building
demonstrated.



The CAVR looting demonstrates another side to the lack of capacity of the
intervention force. When the organised mass looting of the CAVR building
began -- only motorbikes were taken in the end -- CAVR Timorese staff
called the ADF, to be told that they did not have enough personnel to deal
with looters at that time. What is most disturbing about this is not so
much the lack of resources as the failure to recognize the political and
legal importance of those CAVR archives and the need to protect them as a
priority. This tends to confirm one suggestion that the ADF -- or at least
the part that had to carry out the rapid reaction role -- was prepared in
terms of intelligence and language preparation in the same way that they
were in 1999. It is important to remember that this is an international
force, with all the inherent problems of such formation -- including
arguments about command. [9] Present military and police and intelligence
commitments in Iraq, Afghanistan, the Solomon Islands and elsewhere have
stretched Australian capacity to contribute to as effective a force as may
be necessary in East Timor. Moreover, the ambiguities about Australian
longterm intentions mean that as soon as possible it would be wise to
widen the international character of the intervention and policing force.
Leaving aside any arguments about the desirability (or absurdity) of
Australian thoughts of regional hegemony and the dangerous and foolish
involvement in the Iraq catastrophe, the reality is that Australian
capacities are in fact quite small, and vulnerable to both breakdown and
discrediting.



This leads to questions about the desirability of Australian forces
staying in East Timor for an extended period, or whether it would be in
the interests of both East Timor and Australia for the Australian
government to press the Security Council for replacement forces from other
countries. This is 1999, and the chances for the hard-pressed and
over-extended forces of the ADF to make mistakes in a confusing situation
are that much higher -- with the political costs higher still. The fact
that the AFP is now to be supplemented by 100 officers drawn from state
police forces is clear evidence about the over-extension in terms of
numbers. Needless to say, the limits of the Howard government's Mini Me
notion of regional hegemony are much more evident in Southeast Asia than
they are in the Pacific.



7.     What is the likely and desirable future role of the United Nations?

Often it has seemed that critics of the UN role in East Timor have been
completely contradictory, some saying that the United Nations handed over
power to an independent East Timor too soon, others that it stayed too
long and weighed too heavily. Undoubtedly, despite its achievements there
were undesirable aspects to the prolonged UN presence in what was really a
new form of governance. But on the whole it would have to be judged a
success, if not in quite such glowing terms as some of its advocates have
suggested. Many of the problems attributed to the UN presence itself in
fact can be traced to the wider issues of the role and impact of large
numbers of foreign advisers in a diverse range of international government
and non-government bodies, and to policies of other international
agencies.



The dispatch of the experienced Ian Martin as the new Special
Representative of the Secretary-General is a welcome move, but it is not
now clear what the next move will be. Some have called for a resumption of
UN control; others have seen this as an external coup by another name. It
is most unlikely that there will be any relinquishing of formal
sovereignty by the government of Timor-Leste, but equally, there are a
myriad lines of leverage from both the UN and its important member
countries -- in this case, the US, Japan, with Australia leading the
charge. When Ian Martin reports to the Secretary-General, there may well
be important questions about how the UN should exercise its ongoing
responsibility to East Timor, the answers to which are not obvious.



The constitution of the new country was developed under UN tutelage, and
the questions arises as to what the attitude of the Security Council
should be to the constitutional forms of government in the face of the
assault on the government, as well as its inability to maintain order.



The reported agreement by Mari Alkatiri to accept a proposal by the UN
representative in East Timor, Hasegawa Sukehiro, that his role in events
leading up to the crisis should be the subject of investigation by
international prosecutors is important both politically and legally -- and
in both cases with both short-term and long-term implications. [10]
Assuming that such an investigation would have a wider brief than just the
role of Dr Alkatiri, and also assuming this involves a reactivation of the
UN Serious Crimes Unit or some similar successor body, this is an
important extension of the idea of the universal jurisdiction of the
Security Council with global implications. East Timor was the first
occasion of direct UN post-conflict governance, and much was learned. It
is now clear that that experiment in a new hybrid of global responsibility
and local sovereignty is not yet over.



8.     Where does the debate about "justice vs. reconciliation" now stand?

No leader of the Indonesian military or militia has had to face serious
consequences for their conduct in East Timor up until September 1999. The
Indonesian trials were a disgraceful and contemptuous farce, and the
United Nations Security Council has taken the necessary step to establish
an international tribunal. In East Timor itself, the president's strong
preference for a basically non-judgmental reconciliation process won out
over calls for comprehensive and effective justice. To some degree that
decision was motivated by pragmatism -- the need to get along with
Indonesia, lack of funds, and lack of firm international will to support
the process to the end. But without suggesting that that was an easy
choice to make at the time, it would now seem that there has been a price
to be paid: justice was not seen to be done, justified resentments
festered, confidence in policing and legal systems not fostered, and
possibly institutional legacies of Indonesian rule not adequately
challenged, for example in the police. Whatever the role in the current
crisis of those guilty in the events leading up to 1999 may turn out to
be, there are now very grave crimes committed by East Timorese against
East Timorese -- civilian, army and police. Moreover there are allegations
that the government itself either ordered or instigated murderous assaults
on its political opponents.



Does the political and legal system have the capacity to deal with these
crimes effectively? The apparently imminent reactivation of the UN Serious
Crimes Unit in East Timor will go some way towards resolving this matter,
but more serious thought needs to be given to repairing the damage in
public confidence done not only by the violence of the past months, but by
the failure to prosecute the crimes of the Indonesian period. The
consequences of the failure by the United States, Australia and Japan to
press for an international tribunal to do the work of the disgraced
Indonesian judicial system and the tiny overtaxed East Timorese legal
system are now evident.



Once again the East Timorese have paid the price of great power -- and I
use the term loosely -- realpolitik. With luck, the only Australian costs
will be in money and prestige. But it is now time to realise that the
documentation of human rights abuses and the application of universal
jurisdiction in matters of serious crimes against humanity is in fact in
matters of sheer political realism in the interests of all, and not an
optional extra in international politics.



9.     Is oil the answer or the curse?

Many both inside and outside East Timor have pinned their hopes for the
future on the revenues from the Timor Sea oil and gas fields.
Understandably many have been preoccupied with the urgent need to pressure
Australia to offer East Timor a large share of the revenues -- in its own
self-interest if not for reasons of justice. Important and necessary as
this process is and will continue to be, it does not in itself answer the
question as to just how these hopefully increased revenues will benefit
the country as a whole. This brings us back to perhaps the most unexplored
aspect of East Timor's post-independence political dynamics: the politics
of patronage. We should expect patronage politics to be one part of the
normal political modus operandi of East Timorese society given its
economic and social structure. While there is a built-in tendency to what
western and industrial capitalist societies view as simple matters of
corruption and nepotism, this need not always be so. However, there have
been many allegations of corruption in East Timor, but little hard
evidence and serious analysis. But there are three key variables that make
the patronage politics of Timor at present somewhat dangerous.



The first, and much remarked on, is the relatively large impact of
external aid and foreign advisers. This is one subject on which a lot has
been written, but not -- to my knowledge at least -- on the intersection
of these external flows and the structure of domestic patronage, and the
political intersection of "traditional" and "modern" economic sectors.



The second is the political nature of oil itself. Thirty years ago the
Polish journalist Ryszard Kapuscinski put the Janus promise of oil well:



"The concept of oil perfectly expresses the eternal human dream of wealth
achieved through a kiss of fortune, and not by sweat, anguish, hard work.
In this sense, oil is a fairy tale, and like every fairy tale, a bit of a
lie."



The lesson of almost every case is that oil brings smelly politics,
especially at the intersection of government and business. We know little
about the details of East Timor's oil politics beyond the dispute with
Australia. The role of oil money -- or hopes for it -- in the present
dispute or set of disputes has not been talked about, but it is
potentially so large a basis for political capital that it must be looked
at, especially given the mysterious character of the inner dynamics of the
present crisis.



With both police and army using their advanced small arms on a freelance
basis in alliance with different groupings, and 1500 Glock pistols and
their ammunition looted from the police arsenal, the faceless but
undoubtedly active and well resourced conflict entrepreneurs still have
plenty of fuel to play with.



10.  What kind of war?

The question of the social and political and economic relations that lie
behind this outbreak of violence in Timor leads to a question about the
nature and form of that war itself, with implications for Australian
security policy. Until the questions already discussed about the nature of
the current political dynamics of East Timor and the intersection of
patronage politics, foreign linkages, and the possible manipulation of
regional identity are answered we cannot be sure of the kind of conflict
the Timorese and those who would help them at risk of their lives are
facing. We know enough to be sure that this is not 1999, and that it is
highly confused and confusing.



The best guide to the worst possible answer to this question comes from
Mary Kaldor's evolving analysis over the last decade of the new kind of
conflict she labels "new wars". Some aspects of her summary description
bear uncomfortably on the current crisis in East Timor and its ugly
possibilities. Let me finish with an extended quotation from one of her
early formulations in the hope that it turns out to be inappropriate:



"It is the lack of authority of the state, the weakness of representation,
the loss of confidence that the state is able or willing to respond to
public concerns, the inability and/or unwillingness to regulate the
privatisation and informalisation of violence that gives rise to violent
conflicts. Moreover, this 'uncivilising process', tends to be reinforced
by the dynamics of the conflicts, which have the effect of further
reordering political, economic and social relationships in a negative
spiral of incivility.



"I call the conflicts 'wars' because of their political character although
they could also be described as massive violations of human rights
(repression against civilians) and organised crime (violence for private
gain). They are about access to state power. They are violent struggles to
gain access to or to control the state.



"Privatised violence and unregulated social relations feed on each other.
In these wars, physical destruction is very high, tax revenues plummet
further, and unemployment is very high. The various parties finance
themselves through loot and plunder and various forms of illegal trading;
thus they are closely linked into and help to generate organised crime
networks. They also depend on support from neighbouring states, Diaspora
groups, and humanitarian assistance.



"In the majority of cases, these wars are fought in the name of identity
-- a claim to power on the basis of labels. These are wars in which
political identity is defined in terms of exclusive labels -ethnic,
linguistic, or religious -- and the wars themselves give meaning to the
labels. Labels are mobilised for political purposes; they offer a new
sense of security in a context where the political and economic
certainties of previous decades have evaporated. They provide a new
populist form of communitarian ideology, a way to maintain or capture
power, that uses the language and forms of an earlier period. Undoubtedly,
these ideologies make use of pre-existing cleavages and the legacies of
past wars. But nevertheless, it is the deliberate manipulation of these
sentiments, often assisted by Diaspora funding and techniques and speeded
up through the electronic media, that is the immediate cause of conflict."
[11]




Richard Tanter is Senior Research Associate at Nautilus Institute for
Security and Sustainability and Acting Director of the Nautilus Institute
at RMIT. His most recent books on East Timor are Masters of Terror:
Indonesia's Military and Violence in East Timor in 1999, [co-edited with
Gerry Van Klinken and Desmond Ball -- new edition forthcoming] and Bitter
Flowers, Sweet Flowers: East Timor, Indonesia and the World Community
[edited with Mark Selden and Stephen Shalom]. Email: rtanter at nautilus.org.



Endnotes

Author's note: Thanks to Gerry Van Klinken, Glenda Lasslett, David
Bourchier, and Helen Hill for helpful comments on an earlier draft.



[1] UNDP, Timor-Leste faces development challenges, March 8, 2006. The
full report: " The Path Out of Poverty".



[2] Human Rights Watch, Tortured Beginnings: Police Violence and the
Beginnings of Impunity in East Timor, April 2006.



[3] Helen Hill, " Stand up, the real Mr Alkatiri", The Age, June 1, 2006.



[4] Helen Hill, "Regional tensions", East Timor Mailing List, May 28,
2006.



[5] Greg Sheridan, Throw troops at Pacific failures, The Australian, June
3, 2006.



[6] Loro Horta, " Caution over Timor Leste", Jakarta Post, June 7, 2006.



[7] Richard Chauvel, Australia, Indonesia and the Papuan crises, Austral
Policy Forum 06-14A, 27 April 2006.



[8] The Wikipedia article on Operation Astute is, at least at the time of
writing, an excellent source on the international military intervention
force. To date, Nick Dowling has been its main contributor.



[9] Portugal refuses Australian command in E Timor, ABC News, June 3,
2006.



[10] Alkatiri agrees to UN investigation, Peter Cave, ABC News, June 7,
2006.



[11] Mary Kaldor, Cosmopolitanism and organised violence, Paper prepared
for Conference on 'Conceiving Cosmopolitanism', Warwick, 27-29 April 2000.
And see her New and Old Wars: Organised Violence in a Global Era, 1999.

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