The Limits of Humanitarianism

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Why did the U.S. go to war over Kosovo but not East Timor? Yes, Australian and other troops are going into Timor, ferried and supported by the U.S. military. But the difference with Kosovo is striking:

--The peacekeepers did not bomb their way into Timor as they did in Kosovo. They waited for permission from Jakarta.

--Before intervening in Kosovo, the West had championed the case of the Kosovars. The Rambouillet peace conference tried to force Belgrade to turn Kosovo over to NATO. East Timor, on the other hand, has been championed by no one. Bill Clinton is the fifth consecutive American President to ignore its struggle for independence. It was the Indonesians themselves who set the current train of events into motion by unexpectedly allowing a referendum on independence.

--There will be no American infantry in Timor. The U.S. will help others go in. But we will not be baby-sitting the Timorese as we are the Kosovars.

Why the extraordinary American exertions for Kosovo and not East Timor?

The cynical answer is race. The Kosovars had the foresight to be born white and European.

But on this issue, the Clinton Administration, which at home is irreproachably antiracist and which abroad intervened forcefully in Haiti and Somalia, deserves the benefit of the doubt.

A second explanation is proximity. Kosovo, it is said, is a lot closer to the U.S. than is Timor. As National Security Adviser Sandy Berger put it, Kosovo is "in the middle of Europe," while East Timor is "in Asia."

Well, Kosovo is not in the middle of Europe. It is at the periphery of Europe. And both Kosovo and East Timor are more than 4,000 miles away from the U.S. (East Timor being about 1,500 miles farther away).

Let's try a third rationale: strategic. East Timor, said Berger, is nothing more than "a humanitarian problem," while Kosovo involved "strong security and strategic consequences."

But this too is nonsense. Yes, East Timor is purely a humanitarian problem. But so is Kosovo. It matters not a whit to the U.S. whether Kosovo is ruled by Serbs or Albanians or Tartars. It has no economy to speak of, no industry, no military. It doesn't even have a seacoast. It is a destitute, landlocked geopolitical wasteland. East Timor is much the same, except for the beaches.

So why one and not the other? The answer has nothing to do with the strategic importance of the victim and everything to do with the strategic importance of the victimizer: Serbia does not count for us. Indonesia does.

We blithely bombed our way into Yugoslavia because the country we needed to bludgeon is of no strategic significance. We did not bomb our way into Indonesia because that country is of immense strategic significance.

Serbia could disappear tomorrow without the U.S. even noticing. But the U.S. would notice greatly if Indonesia were to disappear. The real reason we stayed our hand and stifled our righteousness there was to make sure that it doesn't.

Indonesia controls the Strait of Malacca. It is the great southern bulwark against the rising Chinese challenge. It has the largest population in the Muslim world and practices a tolerant Islam that we hope will influence its more militant co-religionists.