SIT-REP 9-7; Tuesday, September 7, 1999

In This Report: Timor Intervention Alert; Dagestan, Kosovo

- Sidney Smith (1771-1845), Anglican clergyman; on compassion fatigue, c. 1820

(My thanks to Mike L. in Washington, DC, for today's quote on compassion fatigue.)

Here we go again. Indonesia is the new bad boy and the world community is on the verge of another armed intervention. The problem is, this one does make sense. But it is also the result of incompetent foreign policy management by the Clinton Administration, the UN and others.

In East Timor, pro-Indonesian terrorists went wild in the wake of last week's vote, which appears to have favored independence by a margin of around 78%. Hundreds have died, thousands have fled --30,000 have been displaced according to the latest estimates, including Nobel Laureate, Bishop Ximenes Belo, who flew to Darwin, Australia. Are those Indonesian troops in Dili escorting evacuees to ships or forcing them onto the out-bound vessels? The fog of war is thickening.

Neighboring Australia has put 2000 troops on standby (one private report indicates some Aussie SAS commandos slipped into Dili to protect the foreign community). The US has two ships (part of a US Marine MEU?) prepared to evacuate the diplomatic community and an ultimatum has been delivered to Jakarta "you have 48 hours to suppress the violence or the international community will step in."

It is ironic that Australia was the only country to openly recognize Indonesia's sovereignty over East Timor when it annexed the former Portuguese colony in December 1975. Today, though, Canberra is more prepared than anybody else. At the White House, Joe Lockhart was being coy about a US commitment, but you know the US will participate as the initiator and "indispensable nation."

The problems today are letting the media sell the intervention, while figuring out how to get Russia and China to sign off on a UN resolution. President Jiang Zemin, in Australia on his way to the APEC (Asian Pacific Economic Conference) trade meeting in Auckland, appears to be interested, as Beijing gets closer to entry into the World Trade Organization. Is it coincidence that Britain, Australia and even Taiwan have endorsed Beijing's entry into the WTO? Is it a coincidence that USS Tippicanoe has been allowed a port-of-call visit to Hong Kong today?

There are a few thousand terrorists to suppress and most are armed with machetes and primitive home-made muskets. But some militiamen have modern weapons and witnesses confirm they have joined in, as have some army personnel on the ground. Violence has been directed at UN workers --several have been killed-- as well as natives, reporters and foreign observers. Today, in response to international pressure, Jakarta decreed martial law and a shoot-to-kill curfew; but are there enough troops present, and enough disciplined officers and NCOs? There is not much time to fly reliable reinforcements into a province that is well over 2000 miles east of the capital city.

I now believe this international intervention will take place, but it will take about two weeks to pull it together, during which time, thousands more could die, thanks to international carelessness and the Indonesian Army's casualness. Thailand, which now has a light aircraft carrier and an amphibious landing group, has already offered to join the international force, which will be led by Australia. Where Australia goes, New Zealand usually follows, so expect some Kiwis in the picture. The Pentagon assures our media, that at this time, US personnel will only play a supporting role as staff and support specialists to an Asian-oriented multi-national task force.

Lots of conflicting estimates are circulating around, with some experts forecasting a need for 25,000 --even 50,000-- troops. Frankly, though a force of 25,000 might be nice to have, the terrorists and militia are not well armed nor well-trained, they are merely vicious. A couple of airmobile task groups and three battalions of British-trained Ghurkas could handle the job; but trained Ghurkas are now in short supply, with a battalion now in Kosovo and most others disbanded. In the 1950s and 60s, though, it was the Ghurkas who cleaned up an Indonesian guerrilla attempt to conquer part of Malaysia.

An associate of SIRIUS who has extensive military contacts in Indonesia and I have been discussing this crisis since it began to emerge a month ago. As of his most recent visit to Jakarta four months ago, my source told me that the army's attitude was to let Timor go, but to not expend scarce funds on security during the interim: Indonesia has that Muslim secessionist rebellion in the oil-gas fields of northwest Sumatra's Aceh Province. What the generals and others wonder about, my source suggests, is the appearance of meddling across-the-board by the Clinton Administration. With the Aceh rebellion growing in size and the IMF bailout package ($71 Billion) behind schedule, there are many powderkegs in the archipelago.

The Timor referendum was scheduled to fall in the wake of Indonesia's presidential-Parliamentary elections, which created an extended "lame duck" vacuum, and interim President BJ Habibie has been stuck with a situation that looks like one that will only weaken him in the face of the army. Indonesia has a population of 200 million, against which, Timor's 900,000, including 150,000 immigrants, is a rounding error. At the time, accepting an independence vote, in exchange for US and international support for reviving the economy, seemed intelligent and reasonable; but that was the situation a few months ago.

President Habibie has openly accepted the referendum as legitimate and expects to honor Timor's independence. But his rival for the presidency, Megawati Sukharnoputri, is vague about whether she would accept the referendum if she is elected president by the parliamentary election in November. Hard ball politics in Jakarta are making the Timor question take on new meaning. That outsiders in the western media (such as the New York Times last Sunday) are already speculating about other breakaways from Jakarta --the collapse of the nation-state into ethnic mini-states-- only serves to increase concerns in Jakarta's ruling elites. They look at what Western policies have done for the Soviet Union and Yugoslavia and wonder why they are being picked on.

I believe the West was right to respect Indonesia's sovereign rights in preparing for the referendum, but did not do a good job of making progress on its economy and other issues. Diplomats did not get the issue of security right, as events show. Now we have another of those extended messes to clean up, rather than a more discrete problem of a polite divorce.

Dagestan:

Rebellions, Revolutions and insurrections are almost never crushed, if the other side is lucky and wins the military part of the game, they fizzle out after a long time --often a generation or more. Russia won the first round in Dagestan by repelling the Chechen invaders, but then did something that is hard for an outsider to understand. Government forces widened the fight by attacking a new group inside Dagestan, a district of Islamic Wahabi fundamentalists who had been running their villages by Islamic Sharia law.

It seems axiomatic that you do not pick a fight you do not have to pick and none of the reports I have read indicate that there was a strong immediate security reason for attacking the Wahabis. But Russia attacked and Chechen guerrillas re-entered the western mountain villages, even as the Russians were attempting to humble the Wahabis in the center of the province.

This will get ugly and nasty; the bomb that hit officer housing the other day, killing more than 50 military and dependents, is a sample of what can be expected. The odds remain in Russia's favor, as the Wahabi population is relatively small and concentrated, but the last thing Moscow needs is to create further provocations.

You wonder if this is another "wag the dog" adventure to distract attention from the corruption within the Yeltsin circle. Hmmm·.

Kosovo:

The US, NATO-K-for and the UN have found ways to cheat on just about every term of the Kosovo ceasefire agreement; that document is dead as far as Yugoslavs are concerned. The latest nail in the coffin is an agreement to let the KLA form a military force of at least 3,000 which will be armed and trained by its K-For partners in this great crime.

The US has gratified Mr DioGuardi and Mr. Dole by empowering a drug-dealing mafia and terrorist band with almost all the trappings of sovereignty, at the expense of more moderate Kosovo Albanians as well as Serbs, Gypsies, Gorani and the other minorities. The final cleansing of non-Albanians and those who oppose Hashim Thaci is all but complete --it is just a matter of time before the remaining minorities flee for their lives.

The pro-Albanian propaganda spin remains strong, despite all the glaring evidence of the KLA's rabid xenophobia and lawlessness. Not only governments, but editors and intellectuals need to cover their tracks. For example, in Tuesday's Wall Street Journal David Reiff, a expert on the law of war and war crimes, advocated the deliberate creation of "Greater Albania." He explains it thus: "only a Greater Albania --albeit one brought into being over a fairly long period of time and after an extended effort at economic development in both Kosovo and Albania proper-- has the slightest chance of ushering in an era of lasting peace. Alone, neither Kosovo nor Albania is viable; at least together, with suitable safeguards and a commitment from the West to ensure their economic viability, they stand some chance." Sorry, a country run by gangsters will never be economically viable, stable or one that will subject itself to reorganization by foreign bureaucrats. And the Western powers are too weak to stnd up to the armed gunmen of the KLA.

© Copyright 1999 by Benjamin C. Works --SIRIUS

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