Sexton was evacuated to Darwin, Australia, last week. But like any witness to atrocity, she’s haunted. “Where do you put a tourniquet on a person who has been sliced all over the body, cut to the bone, absolutely to the bone?” she says. “We wrapped him in a sheet and put him in the car but… within minutes the whole white sheet was covered in blood.” Sexton drove the wounded man to a clinic run by Carmelite sisters. The next day marauding militiamen torched the clinic. But by then, the man Sexton had aided was dead anyway. “I am ashamed that I don’t know his name,” she says, crying. “He has a name, and all the people who have been treated in this way have names.”
To many Americans, East Timor is a remote and unfamiliar place. (Perhaps the island’s greatest claim to fame is that it served as the landfall where Captain Bligh, of “Mutiny on the Bounty,” found haven after 41 days adrift in the South Seas.) Indonesia invaded the territory in 1975, after Portuguese colonial authorities withdrew, and its military has been fighting insurgents ever since. But few Americans had paid attention until Aug. 30, when an overwhelming majority of East Timorese voted under U.N. auspices for independence. Then pro-Indonesia militias, backed by Army units, went into a frenzy of murder, forced expulsions, looting and mayhem. Nobody would mistake East Timor for a major strategic asset, and nobody can argue that U.S. national interests are threatened. But does that make the nameless people there any less important, say, than those in Kosovo? That was the question facing world leaders last week, President Clinton foremost among them. After much hand-wringing, the answer seemed to be: the world had to intervene, but Americans this time would play a support role.
It was only a few months ago that Clinton was talking about a new foreign-policy paradigm. Fresh from the success of the NATO air war over Kosovo, Clinton saw an opportunity to shape his legacy. When asked on CNN if there was a Clinton Doctrine, the president seemed eager to respond: whenever there is ethnic or religious conflict, he said, “if the world community has the power to stop it, we ought to stop genocide and ethnic cleansing.” He repeated that formulation in a speech to NATO troops on June 22; in neither case did he limit intervention to places where vital American interests were at stake.
Now comes East Timor, where upwards of a quarter of the territory’s 850,000 people were on the run last week. The capital, Dili, was an apocalyptic landscape of charred ruins. “The downtown core has been burnt, looted, pillaged,” said David Wimhurst, a U.N. spokesman. “One of the largest banks has been burnt down. The radio station has been burnt. The university has been burnt, and our workshop and cars are going up in flames.”
Thousands of East Timorese tried to take refuge in churches. “We are facing another genocide, a genocide that does not spare the Catholic Church,” said the Vatican foreign minister, Archbishop Jean-Louis Tauran. Rampaging militiamen, mostly Timorese who have benefited from the corrupt and repressive 24-year Indonesian occupation, killed at least 14 nuns and priests. Terrified refugees arriving in West Timor report that all 40 local staff of the Catholic aid agency Caritas are dead, and U.N. officials said there were unconfirmed reports that attackers killed roughly 100 people who took refuge in a church in Suai, in the southwest. Estimates of the overall death toll ranged into the thousands.
For much of the week, world powers mulled, fretted and demanded that Indonesia stop the violence. The government in Jakarta promised to restore order, but the atrocities continued. The United Nations withdrew all but about 80 of its staff, and the United States, in particular, was initially hesitant to act. That’s partly because Indonesia, the world’s fourth most populous country, has been moving uneasily toward democracy and economic reform. Parliamentary elections were held in June, and a new president is to be elected in November. International donors have pledged $47 billion since 1997 to resuscitate the economy, and just pledged $5.9 billion more in July. American policymakers, it seems, didn’t want to save East Timor only to “lose” Indonesia by spurring another round of economic collapse and political disintegration.
There were also signs of what might be called intervention fatigue. At one point, national-security adviser Sandy Berger said that U.S. action in East Timor was analogous to cleaning up his daughter’s dirty room at college. He later apologized: “It was a clumsy way of saying that we can’t obviously go everywhere, do everything.”
But with the whole world watching, a superpower had to do something. “I don’t know one head of state of a democratic country who, when confronted with the news, editorials, TV coverage, can say, ‘I don’t care’,” says Bernard Miyet, head of U.N. peacekeeping operations. Just before departing for an economic summit in New Zealand, Clinton took the mostly symbolic step of cutting military ties with Jakarta. He also indicated that economic aid would not be restored unless Indonesia invited outside help to establish order. The pressure increased after militiamen attacked the U.N. compound in Dili on Friday: after his arrival in New Zealand, Clinton announced that he would stop $40 million in pending military sales; U.N. Secretary-General Kofi Annan, who isn’t given to ultimatums, declared that Indonesia would have to accept peacekeepers or face responsibility for “what could amount… to crimes against humanity.”
Australia was ready to lead a multinational force to restore order, and had 2,500 troops on standby last week. But Indonesia had 26,000 troops in East Timor, and peacekeepers wanted an invitation, not an invasion. Late last week Indonesian military commander General Wiranto said that peacekeeping forces had to be “considered as an option,” and Clinton told reporters in Auckland that he expected “a development” within “a couple of days.” Suddenly, U.S. officials were discussing how American forces could help; a senior administration official confirmed that a “small contingent” of U.S. soldiers for East Timor was under discussion, but added “they will not be combat troops.” The Clinton Doctrine, such as it is, seemed to be in play.
