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Double-standard for mass murders >> A McGill prof, recently returned from Indonesia, decries the slow pace of Western reaction
by JACQUIE CHARLTON Photo by Jason Felker
El Obaid Ahmed El Obaid, a McGill professor who was there as an international observer with the Asian Network of Free Elections, doesn't know why this mysterious peace reigned for one day, but speculates it may have been a conceit by the militias that their intimidation tactics had worked. Or it may have been just a gearing up for the violence to come. El Obaid, who is from Sudan and teaches human rights, Islamic law and public international law, left East Timor on September 2, mere hours before all hell broke loose. He remembers being stopped three times by militias, one of whom belligerently prodded his minibus driver's assistant with a screwdriver. Another young soldier--El Obaid says militia men in East Timor tend to be very young, poorly educated and visibly without a lot of prospects in life--pointed a gun at the assistant's head.
Voting under terror But El Obaid remembers some rather thrilling things about the trip as well--like the people who were lining up at polling booths in Dili at 5 a.m., one-and-a-half hours before they opened, already restless to vote. He met people who had literally descended from their hideouts in the mountains, ignoring their terror for a day, to participate in the electoral process. Seeing what has happened in East Timor since that day, are some decolonized peoples perhaps not ready for democracy quite yet, as certain Western thinkers have argued? The notion makes El Obaid, who saw people risk their lives to vote, visibly angry. "There's a lot to be said about the human will when you see people, who are being pushed so much, say, 'We're going to perish in the process of voting so we might as well do it and keep that dream alive.'" A visit with independence leader Xanana Gusmao, under house arrest since 1992, was also a highlight. The former teacher and surveyor was "one of the most decent human beings you're likely to encounter in your life," El Obaid says. Gusmao's party, the National Council of Timorese Resistance, was competing against three pro-Indonesian parties, had its offices ransacked and had to campaign while its leader was under house arrest--but still managed to win nearly 80 per cent of the vote.
Send in the troops El Obaid sees the decision on whether to send troops to East Timor as a moral test for Western nations who adore economically powerful Indonesia and don't particularly care about brown-skinned people being murdered. (The United Nations is currently assembling an international force, but has yet to decide when, or even if, the force will be deployed; the question also remains of whether the UN will initiate war-crimes proceedings against Indonesian officials.) He decries the arrogance of the western nations who bombed Kososvo illegally, but at the same time he finds it difficult to take an anti-interventionist stance when it means people will be killed. And above all, he asks for consistency: we were willing to invade Kosovo, why not Indonesia? "There are certain expectations created amongst the population," El Obaid says, referring to the East Timorese who had been assured by Western nations that they could vote and that the vote would be respected. "These people summoned up an extraordinary amount of courage casting their vote amidst all the violations. I think there's a moral obligation to live up to those expectations. They've done more than their fair share." East Timor, half of a small island with a population of 800,000, is not a place that will take a lot of forces to defend, he adds. "If you count 20 per cent of that--160,000 people--as the pro-Indonesian minority: 160,000 people with machetes, sticks and homemade guns. How much would it take to stop that?" But even if we were to create a rapid-reaction peacekeeping army that dwarfed every dictator in the world, events like those in East Timor would still happen. The best way of preserving peace is for the countries that produce arms "to perhaps stop," El Obaid says delicately. Figures provided by the Coalition to Oppose the Arms Trade bear him out: from 199097 Canada sold over $3-million worth of arms to Indonesia. "Everywhere in the world people are killed by guns," he says. "On the one hand you want to keep the peace, and on the other hand you want to make a lot of money selling arms." |
On the day before the vote for independence in East Timor, there was an eerie calm on the streets of Dili. For months previously there had been a campaign of terror from pro-Indonesian militia who were making every effort to dissuade the largely pro-independence East Timorese from voting, and it had intensified in the weeks before the vote.