1999 Violence in East Timor

The 1999 Violence in East Timor is presented as the culmination of a long campaign of Indonesian violence sustained by outside support, and as a stark demonstration that the United States could have exerted decisive pressure much earlier. The reversal came only after mass killings, extensive displacement, and mounting pressure on Bill Clinton: within days of Washington’s message to Indonesian generals, they announced a withdrawal and permitted United Nations peacekeepers to enter without resistance.

Background and Foreign Support

The account places the 1999 crisis within roughly twenty-five years of Indonesian crimes in East Timor. The United States and Britain, along with other governments, continued to support Indonesia even though, the author states, Indonesian actions had already eliminated about one-third of the population with decisive outside assistance. In 1978, at the height of the terror, successive United States administrations and their allies chose military and diplomatic support for the perpetrators rather than using their influence to stop the violence.

The author connects this record to the Indonesian president Suharto, whom the Clinton administration called “our friend.” That phrase sharpens the contrast between public language of friendship and the decades of support described in the passage. In the author’s reading, responsibility for the continuing violence cannot be separated from the governments that helped sustain Indonesia’s campaign.

Violence and Displacement in 1999

The crisis intensified in 1999, before the battles in early September. Thousands had already been killed. In the fighting that followed, 85 percent of East Timor’s inhabitants were driven from their homes, and 70 percent of the country was destroyed. The figures place the episode not as an isolated outbreak but as a renewed wave at the end of a much longer period of near-genocide.

On September 8, while the worst atrocities were known, the Clinton administration maintained that responsibility rested with the Indonesian government and that Washington did not want to take that responsibility away from it. The statement, as the author presents it, made nonintervention sound like respect for Indonesian sovereignty even as the violence continued. The passage emphasizes the gap between this public position and the influence Washington would soon demonstrate.

The Reversal and Peacekeeping

Clinton faced intense pressure to act, primarily from Australia and also from Americans. A few days later, his administration signaled to Indonesian generals that the campaign was over. The generals immediately changed course. Although they had repeatedly insisted they would never withdraw from East Timor, they announced that they would leave and would allow a United Nations peacekeeping force led by Australia to enter.

The change was consequential precisely because it required no confrontation with the Indonesian army: the forces did not resist the peacekeepers. The episode thus supplies the author’s central evidence about Washington’s leverage. A message from Clinton was enough to alter the generals’ declared policy, suggesting that the United States had possessed power that might have been used to prevent the preceding decades of violence, not merely to end its latest escalation.

Responsibility and Significance

For the author, the intervention came too late to erase the history that preceded it. The new violence culminated a quarter-century of crimes, and their consequences continued in impoverished refugee camps in Indonesian West Timor. The closing reference to those camps prevents the withdrawal from serving as a clean resolution: departure from East Timor did not end the displacement or close the account of responsibility.

The episode also challenges claims that Western governments’ record in East Timor demonstrated a new commitment to humanitarian intervention, or justified NATO’s bombing of Serbia. The author instead treats the history as evidence of selective action: governments that could exert decisive influence had supported Indonesia during years of violence, then acted when pressure mounted in 1999. The sudden reversal makes the earlier failure to use that influence all the more visible.