Timorous invasion: when the UN stopped a genocide in East Timor in 1999, liberals hoped it would be a watershed moment for the cause of humanitarian interventionism. It was, instead, the movement's high-water mark.

• Author: Kurlantzick, Joshua
• Position: On political books - "If You Leave Us Here, We Will Die": How Genocide Was Stopped in East Timor - Book review

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"If You Leave Us Here, We Will Die": How Genocide Was Stopped in East Timor

by Geoffrey Robinson

Princeton University Press, 340 pp.

When I arrived in Dili, capital of the new nation of Timor Leste (East Timor), in early 2006, much of the town still looked like a war had just ended. Shells of burned-out buildings lined the roads, some still pocked with bullet holes. In the hills outside the capital, where groups of displaced people lived in shacks, young children begged for food whenever my friend and I stopped our 4x4. At night, Dili turned into a menacing ghost town, its empty streets patrolled by young men armed with knives and makeshift guns.

That Timor had not yet recovered was hardly surprising. Seven years earlier, in 1999, after the former Portuguese colony occupied by Indonesia since 1975 had voted in a referendum for its independence, pro-Indonesia militias razed the tiny half island. The campaign of slaughter would not have been out of place in the Rwandan genocide or the brutal West African wars: gangs of militiamen wielding machetes and automatic weapons hacked, disemboweled, and beheaded known independence supporters, aid workers, journalists, and anyone who happened to be in their way at the wrong time. Thousands died, 70 percent of Timor's infrastructure was destroyed, and nearly half the population of East Timor fled their homes and wound up as refugees.

And yet, as longtime Timor observer and former United Nations official Geoffrey Robinson shows in his meticulously researched and powerful new book, "If You Leave Us Here We Will Die": How Genocide Was Stopped in East Timor, for all the blood spilled on the tropical half island in 1999, East Timor then also seemed like a watershed. Despite having minimal strategic interests in East Timor, major powers like the United States and the United Kingdom backed an armed humanitarian intervention that, under the auspices of the United Nations, ultimately stemmed the violence and, in the long run, allowed Timor to finally break from Indonesia and build its own state. Robinson suggests that the armed intervention might even have prevented an all-out genocide in Timor in 1999. "There was an unusual openness [at the time] to the idea of international humanitarian intervention and--particularly after the NATO operation in Kosovo in mid-1999--a sense that such interventions could succeed," he recalls.

In fact, at the time many human rights activists and liberal policymakers in the West thought that Timor, like the humanitarian intervention in Kosovo earlier in 1999, would be just the first of many such missions. With the Cold War over and superpower conflict seemingly on the wane, new technology bringing coverage of abuses to a wider audience in the West, and a new alliance between liberals and conservatives over the need for aggressive humanitarian intervention, the era of Western powers standing by as massacres like Pol Pot's Cambodia, Rwanda, or Srebrenica took place could be over.

Ten years later, unfortunately, those hopes seem almost quaint. Turns out East Timor wasn't a watershed moment in humanitarian interventionism so much as its high-water mark. As great power conflict once again has emerged, the war in Iraq has soured liberal politicians--and much of the American public--on the use of force, and the war on terror has forced governments to make serious compromises with autocrats once again, the 1999 Timor intervention now seems like a long, long time ago.

The violence that exploded in East Timor in 1999 was hardly unexpected. At the time, Robinson was serving as a political affairs officer for the United Nations Mission in East Timor, and in the months before the August 30, 1999, referendum, he and his coworkers saw many signs that the powerful Indonesian military, working with and clandestinely arming Timorese who did not want independence, were preparing for a massacre if the population did not vote for integration with Indonesia. In one of many similar incidents Robinson remembers, before the vote pro-integration militias surrounded a group of people sheltering in a Catholic church in the Timorese town of Liquica, and then rushed inside, hacking and shooting people; at least fifty died.

That the independence side would triumph also seemed assured. After hundreds of years as a sleepy backwater of Portugal's colonial empire, in the mid-1970s, as Lisbon released its last colonial possessions, a Timorese independence movement sprung up, led by men such as Xanana Gusmao, who would become a guerilla leader during the era of Indonesian rule and, later, the first president of an independent East Timor. But in 1975, Indonesia invaded, with the tacit consent of the United States and other powers, including the regional power, Australia. In a meeting with the Indonesian dictator Suharto at the time, President Gerald Ford and Secretary of State Henry Kissinger made clear they would not stand in the way. "Whatever you do," Kissinger told Suharto, according to documents later released through the freedom of information process, "we will try to handle it in the best way possible." After taking tiny East Timor by force, Indonesia launched a brutal military occupation. According to Robinson's estimate, as many as 200,000 East Timorese died from the occupation in the late 1970s, close to half of the population at the time. But with the world divided by the Cold War, Indochina just having fallen to Communists, and Suharto accusing...