On Aug. 31, the day after the East Timorese voted overwhelmingly for independence from Indonesia, Muna Ndulo, a visiting professor at Cornell Law School, returned to Ithaca from East Timor, narrowly escaping the chaos and violence that followed the referendum.
Ndulo went to East Timor this June as a legal adviser to UNAMET, the United Nations Mission in East Timor, which administered the voting. He met four Cornell graduates on the U.N. team, as well. In addition, Walter Dorn, a senior research fellow with Cornell's Einaudi Center, was a U.N. electoral officer in East Timor. They were among the 1,000 staff members who set up polling places, registered voters and administered the vote. During the campaign period, their poster declared "UNAMET is with you" -- assuring the East Timorese that they had U.N. protection from reprisals for voting their conscience.
Ndulo faulted the U.N. Security Council with failing to anticipate the current violence and, once it began, with dragging its feet. The international community has been slow to prevent the slaughter, Dorn agreed. He and Ndulo praised the East Timorese for their bravery in going to the polls, despite fierce intimidation from armed militias.
Ndulo said that the militias were a highly visible presence during his stay in East Timor, openly bullying the East Timorese, tearing up people's voter registration cards, burning villages and routing entire communities to prevent them from voting. Because of such acts, the U.N. was forced to change the rules to allow people to vote without registration cards if they showed identity cards and proved they had registered to vote.
Far from the ragtag bands of armed guerrillas one might imagine, the militias are organized like small armies, said Ndulo. There are five major militia groups and many smaller ones, each with its own leader. Members are easily identifiable by the color of their shirts -- the Aitarak (translation: thorns) wear black, the Mahidi (death or life with Indonesia) wear red, and so forth. Most members are recent immigrants from Indonesia who first were organized in East Timor this past January, after Indonesia President Habibie's January 1999 call for a vote.
The Indonesian army has about 15,000 soldiers stationed in East Timor charged with maintaining order there. Ndulo attributes their failure to do so to the army's leftover loyalty to General Suharto, Habibie's predecessor, who fiercely opposed independence.
Even before the voting the U.N. workers were openly despised by the militias and weren't safe in East Timor, according to Ndulo. "The militias attacked the U.N. center in Mariana and injured a worker from South Africa," he related. Was the Cornell law professor himself ever afraid during his stay? "There were risks, there's no doubt," said Ndulo. "I was apprehensive before I got there, but once I was there I became so involved in [developing the framework for the referendum] that I didn't have time to be fearful. It became a challenge.
"What moved me most," he said, "was the dignity of the East Timorese people, their kindness and their gratitude, despite what they were going through. No matter how poor they were, they wanted to feed us. They would bring food to the U.N. district offices and refused to take money for it."
It's hard to understand why Indonesia -- the world's fourth most-populous nation -- wants East Timor, a tiny country with fewer than 800,000 people and few resources, said Ndulo. While there are underwater oil reserves in the Gulf of Timor just east of the island nation, no one will be able to develop them until the violence is quelled and the country's sovereignty resolved, he said.
This semester Ndulo will remain on campus teaching a seminar at the Law School titled "The U.N., Human Rights and Elections," but if his services are needed in East Timor, he said he would be willing to return to help, provided a return trip fits in with his teaching commitments.
"I believe that East Timor will eventually win its independence," he said, "but because of the delay it will be at a very high cost to human lives." Such bloodshed might have been avoided, declared Ndulo, "if the international community had chosen to act faster."
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