Yesterday was one of the most humiliating and depressing days in the annals of the United Nations, when it announced the withdrawal of its mission to East Timor. Despite the announcement last night that it is to try to keep a token presence on a voluntary basis to protect people in its compound, effectively the UN has renounced responsibility for the territory whose inhabitants' vote for independence it oversaw only last week. The campaign of murder and intimidation mounted by militias and directed by the Indonesian army has culminated in a declaration of martial law imposed against the advice of the country's cabinet and house of representatives. This directly threatens its emerging democracy just as it flies in the face of world opinion.
The United Nations is an inter-governmental organisation subject, crucially, in crises such as this, to the will of its most powerful and influential member-states, especially those with permanent seats on the Security Council. There has not been a willingness among them to mount a collective rescue attempt for the East Timor mission - and to protect the remarkable popular decision last week - by assembling an intervention force under Chapter VII of the UN Charter. As a senior UN official said yesterday, that would be tantamount to declaring war against Indonesia. It would take months to mount such an operation. Hence the repeated calls for its government to approve a voluntary UN operation, which was categorically refused yesterday by its foreign minister, Mr Alatas.
He said such a decision could not be taken before the new elected assembly meets in November. But now it must be gravely doubted whether it will indeed meet and, even if the assembly does meet, that it could remove the army from the commanding position these events have given it in the country's politics.
The immediate question facing the international community is whether there is the will to bring alternative means of pressure to bear on Indonesia's leaders. They are clearly vulnerable to economic sanctions but also adept at turning such threats back against international organisations such as the IMF and the World Bank, the many banks and multinational companies with a stake in Indonesia and the governments that support them. There is a great fear that too much pressure would tip the country back into deep recession and political turmoil, endangering Asia's economic recovery from the crash of 1997.
But such selfish interests should not be allowed dictate the response to this tragedy. Those states which now refuse to act were the very ones that supported the East Timor referendum, inviting its people to stage the act of self-determination that has now been so cruelly and cynically betrayed. The credulity of these states, and of the UN Secretary General in allowing the Indonesian military take responsibility for security, has been starkly exposed by the careful long-term planning that has gone into this subversion of international law.
Angry denunciation of the betrayal, as we heard yesterday from the Minister for Foreign Affairs, Mr Andrews, and other political representatives, is entirely appropriate. The maximum political, economic and moral pressure must now be directed on the Indonesian government and military to reverse their actions. It must also squarely address the grave structural and decision-making shortcomings that have so humiliated the UN on this occasion.