East Timor, the United Nations, and the International Community: Force Feeding Human Rights into the Institutionalised Jaws of Failure

Abstract

The United Nations General Assembly and Security Council passed a total of ten resolutions on East Timor from 1975 to 1982. Taken together, these resolutions criticised Indonesia's invasion of the territory, called for the withdrawal of Indonesian troops, and affirmed the right of the East Timorese people to self-determination. While East Timorese independence now seems imminent, it is occurring largely in spite of the United Nations. As the case of East Timor demonstrates, the United Nations is an organisation whose very structure favours its most powerful member states and their allies, and largely insulates them from serious pressure to respect international law. Certainly, elements of the United Nations, and a number of national governments and NGOs have played an important role in helping to advance the cause of East Timor in the international community. But the fact that the Indonesian military still had a presence in the territory and, along with so-called militia groups, was in a position to engage in a campaign of terror and destruction after East Timorese voters overwhelmingly opted for independence exposes the serious shortcomings of international legal and security mechanisms. It demonstrates the need to challenge the international structural factors that allowed Indonesia's invasion to take place in the first place, and that permitted the occupation to continue for so long with almost total impunity. To prevent comparable situations from recurring it is necessary to rethink international institutions charged with sustaining international law and human rights, and also to rethink international human rights advocacy.