East Timor - Back to Square One

It is commonly said that the debacle in Iraq has suddenly called into question the great white hope of state-building. Where prior efforts at humanitarian intervention and restoring states, in places like Somalia, Haiti, East Timor and Kosovo, are supposed to have fared better, it is Iraq that has given a black-eye to an otherwise noble commitment. And the main failure in Iraq, according to the administration’s critics, is the lack of planning, not the idea of building states itself.

The return of foreign ‘peace-keeping’ troops to East Timor, including 120 military police from Portugal, East Timor’s former colonial occupier, Thursday reminds us that the problem in Iraq was not just a matter of hubris and lack of foresight, but something more profound in the nature of state-building. East Timor was one of the flagship state-building projects of the 1990s, in which, under the auspices of the United Nations Transitional Administration In East Timor (UNTAET), the UN was given an unlimited mandate to reconstruct the newly independent country, and to prevent full-scale civil war. The UN describes its mission in the following way:

‘On 30 August 1999, the people of East Timor voted by means of a direct, secret and universal ballot to begin a process leading towards independence. UNTAET was established on 25 October 1999 to administer the Territory, exercise legislative and executive authority during the transition period and support capacity-building for self-government. East Timor became an independent country on 20 May 2002. Also that day, UNTAET was succeeded by the United Nations Mission of Support in East Timor (UNMISET) established by Security Council resolution 1410 of 17 May 2002 to provide assistance to core administrative structures critical to the viability and political stability of East Timor.’

One immediate fact springs out, even from the UN’s own description: if the UN created a state, why was it necessary to replace one horrible acronym with another? Why should the ‘viability and political stability of East Timor’ have been a question once UNTAET gave back control to the East Timor government? The echoes of the 'hand over of sovereignty to Iraq' are unmistakable.

If we turn to more independent assessments of the UN in East Timor we discover that this sensible, liberal alternative to the Bush-style, shoot-first-build-states-later, was in fact nothing of the sort. When the UN entered, it gave its representative there, Sergio Vieira de Mello, ‘near-dictatorial powers’ to rebuild the country from scratch. (This pattern has been repeated elsewhere, with the UN High Representative in Bosnia earning the title ‘European Raj’). Francis Fukuyama, writing about state-building projects in various Third World polities, notes
‘In these countries, sovereignty had ceased to exist, and governance functions were displaced to the United Nations or other aid agencies and nongovernmental organizations (NGOs) - in the case of East Timor, located on a ship floating in the harbor outside of the capital of Dili.’*

As one former district administrator for UNTAET, Jarat Chopra, observed, they did not hesitate to use their powers undemocratically, with UNTAET actively opposing elections in the country during its stint there.

‘The real barrier to elected bodies turned out not to be their achievability, but rather stinging opposition from UN bureaucrats within a centralized organizational hierarchy. They stated openly that since UNTAET was not a representative government, it could not tolerate other bodies in the country being more representative…Ultimately, the UN refused to accept local elections. An accommodation was eventually reached in which the World Bank would in fact conduct local elections, and present them to the population as such, but UNTAET Regulation 2000/13 passed for the purpose would use the words ‘democratic selection’.’**

Bush, it appears, does not have a monopoly on the Orwellian use of language. If anything, it was operations with missions like ‘peace-building’, ‘peace-maintenance’, ‘state-building’ and ‘democratic selection’ that introduced into international affairs a vocabulary so phenomenally disconnected from reality that only figures entirely removed from the chain of democratic accountability could invoke them with any seriousness.

The end result of the UNTAET mission in East Timor was not a pristine, independent state, but a disaster. Chopra, again, notes what really happened:

‘Indeed, on 20 May 2002, East Timor achieved its full independence and became the newest state of the twenty-first century. The UN Development Programme published its human development index for ‘the poorest country in Asia’, with indicators comparable to the most severely collapsed places in the world. In statistical terms, UNTAET had given birth to a failed state’***

The major failure, as Chopra notes, was the way UNTAET ‘undermine[d] indigenous forms of political legitimacy without establishing a reliable alternative and functioning administrative structure.’**** In other words, it isn’t just a technical matter of planning, or whether state-building takes place under unilateral or multilateral auspices. Whether liberals or neoconservatives, the United States or the United Nations, runs the show, the fundamental problem is the same. Internationally directed state-building strips institutions of any basis in the needs, demands, and (most importantly) will of local populations. There is no substitute for local control – you cannot hand a community its self-determination.


* Francis Fukuyama (2004) State-Building: Governance and World Order in the Twenty-First Century (London: Profile Books), pp.131-132
** Jarat Chopra (2003) ‘Building State Failure in East Timor’ in Jennifer Milliken (ed) (2003) State Failure, Collapse & Reconstruction (Oxford: Blackwell Publishing), p.236.
*** Chopra p.242
**** Chopra p. 239