The History of Peace-building in East Timor: The Issues of International Intervention comprehensively analyses various international responses during the pre- and post-independence eras and perspectives in the process of peace-building after the referendum in the country. The book assesses the legitimacy of each response and policy, how these influenced East Timor as a newly independent state, and what the international society expects in the future for the country in turmoil for so long.

This book consists of three sections; sections detailing the history of the crisis, policy analysis and comparative analysis. Section 1 consists of Chapter I, East Timor in the Cold War Period, and Chapter II, Pro- Indonesian Militia Campaigns and the International Response in 1999. Chapter I deals with, initially, the origins of the East Timorese problems, how the political parties in Portuguese Timor were fragmented and the subsequent civil wars generated, and then why and how Indonesia invaded East Timor in December 1975. This chapter also focuses on UN Security Council Resolution 385 (1975) surrounding East Timor at the UN, and the voting behaviour on East Timor in the General Assembly between 1975 and 1982. There is a discussion about the consistency or otherwise in the policies of member states towards the issue of self-determination of East Timor from the Security Council debate in 1975 through the series of votes in the General Assembly up to 1982.

Since the middle of the nineteenth century, Muslims have been deeply concerned with the idea of modernity and its place in Islamic thought. In the Muslim world the term modernity itself was taken from languages like English, French or German and translated into some version of two Arabic roots describing the contemporary and the novel, for instance the abstract nouns contempor aneousness (asriyyat) and novelty (jadidiyyat), both nineteenth-century neologisms. These words still retain the memory of their translation, so that Muslim debates on the modern continue to occur within narrative spaces bounded by markers like East and West, Islam and Christianity.

In a recent appraisal of the nature of the enterprise of intellectual history, it was remarked, not for the first time, that the “the only history of ideas to be written are histories of their uses in argument”. Though perhaps not in such a self-conscious manner, the essays in this issue consider the transformative capacity of ideas. Modern intellectual history in the European and American context grew out of a critique of the dominance of social history; by contrast, it has received little or no attention in the field of colonial and modern South Asia. Despite the vibrancy of the field in general, the two major works in Indian intellectual history were written almost half a century ago. Eric Stokes's English Utilitarians and India and Ranajit Guha's A Rule of Property for Bengal were both concerned with the making of the regime of colonial political economy. These two important books took the major site of the generation of ideas to be the colonial state and the major actors to be its official intellectuals. Interestingly, both these historians later moved away from intellectual history to social history and the experience of the peasantry. It is an ironic tribute to their books that the subsequent focus of much South Asian historical scholarship has been on the nature of the colonial state and its relation to politics, economy and society. However, the emphasis on the power and the work of ideas, in Stokes's and Guha's initial formulations, slowly but surely gave way to “ethnographies of the state”.

Introduction

This chapter will deal with the United Nations Mission of Support in East Timor (UNMISET). As stated in the previous chapter, UNTAET virtually formed ‘an interim government’ until East Timor officially became independent. In April 2002, a presidential election was conducted in East Timor and the independence leader Xanana Gusmao captured 82.7 per cent of the vote. East Timor officially became independent on 20 May 2002 when the mandate of UNTAET as ‘transitional administration’ was implemented. However, this nascent state needed the continuing presence of a UN operation. Security was still fragile. A lot of East Timorese refugees still remained in West Timor. Defence and police forces required external training. The social structure in East Timor was still unstable. Above all, East Timor still required international assistance to build its capacity as an independent state. Therefore, UN, Security Council Resolution 1410 (2002) of 17 May 2002 was adopted by the Security Council, and UNMISET was established to replace UNTAET.

UNMISET had three elements in its mandate: (a) to provide assistance to core administrative structures critical to the viability and political stability of East Timor (b) to provide interim law enforcement and public security and to assist in the development of a new law enforcement agency in East Timor, the East Timor Police Service; and (c) to contribute to the maintenance of the external and internal security of East Timor.

“The earth is thirsty, it demands blood, but of whom? Of the Muslims,” Abul Kalam Azad (1888–1958), the leading pro-Congress Indian Muslim nationalist, had rued in the late summer of 1913. As far as he could see, Tripoli was soaking with Muslim blood as were the plains of Persia and the Balkan Peninsula. Now Hindustan too was athirst for Muslim blood. In an egregious display of British arrogance and brute power in Kanpur in August 1913, Muslims protesting the demolition of a lavatory attached to a mosque were fired upon indiscriminately, leaving several dead.

Militia Intimidation during the Ballot Period

In accordance with the 5 May Agreement, 1999, the Indonesian and the Portuguese governments entrusted the UN Secretary-General with organising and conducting a ‘popular consultation’ in order to ascertain whether the East Timorese people accepted or rejected special autonomy for East Timor within Indonesia. To carry out the consultation, on 11 June 1999, the Security Council established the United Nations Mission in East Timor (UNAMET), whose main mission was to set up and monitor the referendum. However, as Geoffrey Robinson puts it, UNAMET started ‘with the almost impossible aim of holding the popular consultation in August, less than three months away.’

This difficulty stemmed mainly from pro-integration militia activities. Most of the militiamen were the uneducated and unemployed flotsam of society. Many of them were coerced into joining or were bribed with food, money or alcohol and had no strong ideological commitment to their cause. Among them, the two pro-integration militias, ‘Red and White Iron’ and ‘Thorn’ were radical. In fact, in April 1999, the two militia groups gathered in front of the Governor's residence to hold a rally to publicise their belief that the majority of East Timorese wanted the territory to remain a part of Indonesia. At that time, leader of the Thorn militia told the crowd: “I command all pro-integrationist militia to conduct a cleansing of all those who betrayed integration.

General Introduction to Justice for War Crimes in East Timor

On 20 May 2002 East Timor became a newly independent state following 24 years of Indonesia's illegal occupation. However, the state paid the cost of a huge anti-independence militia campaign which was launched in East Timor during the pre- and post-referendum periods. There is a significant difference in the crimes against humanity committed in East Timor between during the Cold War and during the referendum period in 1999. The latter events had been committed with much more attention from the international community than the former events. In particular, they were conducted in circumstances where UN contingents, namely UNAMET, were part of the selfdetermination process in East Timor. In consequence it was anticipated that international law would be fully applied to bring justice to the victims of the atrocities.

However, justice for war crimes in general has many problems. Gerry J. Simpson pointed out two problems in war crime trials; the problems of partiality and legality. Realpolitik is always evident at war crime trials, and it leaves war crime law open to accusations of bias, selectivity and partiality. Simpson claimed that each war crimes trial is an exercise in partial justice to the extent that it reminds one that the majority of war crimes remain unpunished. If Yugoslavia, why not Somalia; if Rwanda, why not Guatemala? The problem of legality in war crimes trials includes the issues of generality, vagueness, procedural fairness and defence.

This issue has been concerned with two problems. First, all the contributors have considered how ideas travelled to, from and within nineteenth- and twentieth-century India. It examines how these ideas were received and reinterpreted by India's English-influenced intelligentsia in the light of its own intellectual histories. Second, the volume is intended as a contribution to an emerging global and transnational history of ideas that attempts to set the sophisticated traditions of European, Atlantic, Islamic and Asian intellectual history in a world context.

Intellectual historians have long been concerned with the question of how ideas formulated in one society are appropriated, domesticated and even rejected in others. Histories of the Muslim world, notably Albert Hourani's Arabic Thought in the Liberal Age, showed how representative government, which was a relatively new concept over much of nineteenth-century Europe itself, was received and adjusted to existing ideologies in Egypt and the Ottoman Empire. Some authorities found an analogy to popular representation in the ancient Islamic concept of shura or consultation. Others claimed that modern institutions and knowledge represented a resurfacing of divine revelation and reason (ilm) that had been vouchsafed to humanity by the tradition of Prophecy (cf. Devji, above, for South Asia).

Another classic illustration of how ideas travel is to be found in J. G. A. Pocock's The Machiavellian Moment. In this case, ideas of civic republicanism, deriving from Aristotle and formalized by Machiavelli and the Venetians, were domesticated in England and later the American colonies, apparently far from their intellectual home.

It seems romantic to write of the self when by the turn of the twenty-first century many commentators have declared its death. A hundred years ago, however, the self had a different fortune altogether. Whether it was in India or France, political and social thought was transfixed on the issue of the self, not only redefining its place in the world but also identifying it as a source of endless potential.

It has often been argued that British orientalist research in India during the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries served to consolidate and authorize the rule of the colonial state, and contributed to an emerging European-authored narrative of global history. While it is now evident that orientalism served principally to construct forms of European power, it is often unrecognized that orientalist scholarship in India drew much of its authority from the cultural standing and intellectual expertise of the “traditional” guardians of Sanskrit-based knowledge, the brāhmaṇ paṇḍits (“learned men”).

East Timor and the theory of UN operations

East Timor (renamed Timor-Leste in 2002) is a tiny tropical state with the population of about one million, located in Southeast Asia, northwest of Australia. It was not until the 16th century that Portuguese and Dutch merchants started contacting Timor for sandalwood and spice trading. After the battle for influence over Timor between the two European states, the present border was created in 1906; West Timor was colonised by the Dutch, and East Timor by the Portuguese. Although East Timor was occupied by Japan from 1942 to 1945, Portugal resumed ruling East Timor following Japan's defeat in World War II.

The international community has paid a vast amount of attention to East Timor. This is partly because it is one of the newest members of the United Nations (UN). In retrospect, East Timor has received a variety of responses and assistance; military and economic, from the regional and international organisations. East Timor's case also indicates the lesson that inaction in the past might later require a huge intervention in resources from the international community. For example, in the 1970s, who would have expected that a tiny Portuguese colonial island in Southeast Asia, namely, East Timor, would receive one of the biggest UN assistances, including the financial cost of hundreds of million US dollars, thirty years later?

There are several reasons for East Timor's focus in the international affairs.

The Limit of a Sequence

The reader must have seen in an elementary course of real analysis that the study of convergence of real sequences is carried out primarily to analyse the convergence of several types of infinite series of real numbers which, in turn, occur as solutions of differential equations occurring in many practical applications. As a further application, the notion of continuity of a function is characterised in terms of sequences, viz., a function f is continuous at x if and only if every sequence 〈xn〉 converging to x implies that 〈f(xn)〉 converges to f(x). In metric spaces, the notion of convergence of a sequence plays an enhanced role. We have already seen several metric spaces of sequences. The notion of convergence of a sequence in a metric space has been introduced in Section 2.6. To study it in greater detail, we make it explicit in the following definition.

Definition 3.1.1 Let (X, d) be a metric space, and 〈xn〉 be a sequence in X. Then 〈Xn〉 is said to converge to a point x∈X if for each real number ε>0, there exists an m∈ℤ+ such that d(xn, x) <ε for all n≥m.

The point x in the above definition is called a limit of the sequence 〈xn〉, and we write lim xn = x or simply as xn → x, or as 〈xn〉 → x.