On The Razor's Edge

The Timorese was a dead man walking when American teacher Pamela Sexton found him. The militiamen had used machetes on his arms, chopping repeatedly down to the bone. His stomach was slashed open. Blood covered his frame. "Where do you put a tourniquet on someone who has been sliced all over?" asked Sexton, a U.N. observer evacuated last week from East Timor. She took him to the Motael clinic in Dili, but he soon died. The militia later came back and burned the clinic to the ground.

Asia has a new killing field--East Timor. After a majority of the population voted for independence from Indonesia Aug. 30, pro-Jakarta militiamen rampaged through the territory, killing, burning and looting with impunity. Priests and nuns were among those singled out for execution last week as shops, churches, radio stations and clinics were torched. The Roman Catholic humanitarian agency Caritas said "a large part" of the 40-member Caritas team, "has been murdered." Some 200,000 people--about a quarter of the population--have fled the territory. By the end of the week, the militias seemed to be withdrawing, and on Sunday evening, amid boiling international pressure, Indonesian President B.J. Habibie agreed to allow U.N. peacekeepers into East Timor. A U.N. team had visited the town on Saturday and gave the world some inkling of what to expect: hundreds of thousands of refugees and a moonscape of devastation.

The tragedy is that everyone saw East Timor's violence coming, from U.N. officials on the ground to diplomats at U.N. headquarters in New York City. But it was a sign of the limits of international cooperation that while everyone saw it coming, no one knew what to do. As gruesome images piled up in newspapers and popped up on the nightly news, Americans were perplexed and worried. Why wasn't this like Kosovo? they asked in call-in shows and letters to Congress. The White House responded to the growing public anger with strong condemnations of its own. By Friday, President Bill Clinton was saying, "It is now clear that the Indonesian military is aiding and abetting the militia," and called for "an international force to make possible the restoration of security." But presidential advisers made it clear that realpolitik ruled: the U.S. had no plans to fight its way uninvited into a territory that supplies little more than a specialty coffee bean to Starbucks. "Because we bombed Kosovo doesn't mean we should bomb Dili," said National Security Adviser Sandy Berger.

But the U.S. did push hard for international peacekeepers. And it seems inevitable that American logistics expertise will gird the multinational force that descends on East Timor. The peacekeeping agreement came after a week of difficult diplomacy, led by U.N. Secretary-General Kofi Annan. Annan publicly tried to persuade Indonesia to invite an international peacekeeping force. Privately, he pushed other nations to issue an ultimatum to Jakarta: permit such a force or it will be sent in uninvited. A failure to permit peacekeepers into a killing zone like East Timor, he warned Jakarta, was perilously close to a crime against humanity. When Habibie called Annan at home in New York at 7:45 Sunday morning to announce his change of heart--Annan told aides he was "relieved" to get the call--the President said there would be no conditions. East Timor could have it's violently won freedom.