Mark Richard Walsh, Associate Professor, Political and Military Sciences
U. S. Army Peacekeeping Institute, U.S. Army War College, Carlisle, PA

Presentation at the Quaker Peace Roundtable at the State College Friends School, State College, Pennsylvania, Workshop #15, April 7, 2001

(NOTE: A series of PowerPoint slides which accompanied Mark Walsh’s presentation is here.)

I. Introduction

I would like to talk with you about my experience in East Timor in1999-2000, leading to the civilian relief effort to help the East Timorese recover from the devastation that followed their vote in 1999 for independence from Indonesia.

First, let me acknowledge that the "Army Peacekeeping Institute" in which I serve, may sound like a contradiction in terms, but I do believe that the Peacekeeping Institute shares some of the same goals that you have. However, my remarks will not be about the Religious Society of Friends; it is about crisis intervention, under the aegis of the United Nations. I want to share the recent experience I had in East Timor with you.

II. A Few Facts

This was my fifth peacekeeping assignment since I retired from the U.S. Army eight years ago. The assignment was launched when I received a phone call from a senior official in the United Nations' Office for the Coordination of Humanitarian Affairs on October 16-17, 1999, to ask if I could help with the emergency in East Timor. Within two weeks I arrived in Dili, the capital of East Timor to assist with the coordination of the international humanitarian assistance effort. Interestingly, the United Nations did not want me to go as a U.S. Army representative, and neither did the Army. The solution to this condition was to take a leave of absence without pay from my Army position at the Peacekeeping Institute and undertake my responsibilities in East Timor as a legitimate official in the U.N., as I had done on earlier assignments.

By way of a brief orientation, East Timor is the eastern part of the island of Timor, the western half of the island remained a province of Indonesia. There is also an enclave of East Timorese people in the western part of the island in West Timor. In terms of roads and other transportation considerations, paved roads on the island are mainly peripheral, and travel into the mountainous interior presented difficult problems, both for the military peace keepers and the civilian relief effort.

Overland movement was particularly challenging during the rainy season from October through March when many dirt roads are washed out and impassable resulting in the isolation of many East Timorese villages in the interior of the country.

Historically, Indonesia received its independence from the Dutch in 1949. In 1975, after Portugal gave up its colony in the eastern half of Timor [the western half had been colonized by the Netherlands], Indonesia immediately annexed East Timor. A 1999 referendum in East Timor, managed by the United Nations, offered two choices to the east Timorese: an autonomous province within Indonesia, or independence. Almost all of the voting population participated in what was referred to as a consultation and the choice, by 78% of the voters, was for full freedom. This result, which surprised the Indonesian government, was announced in early September. In response to the popular decision, from the fourth or fifth of September to about the twentieth, there was a strong, violent intervention by "militia" forces supported by the Indonesian government. The militia was responsible for killing many and destroying much in East Timor. In about 15 or 16 days of calculated purposeful havoc, the militia moved from east to west, pushing upwards of 250,000 East Timorese before them, into West Timor. The rest of the East Timorese population fled their villages into the nearby mountains which are very rugged and which approach 10,000 feet in altitude.

U.N. observers who had participated in the administration of the vote in late August, had to leave because of the threat posed by the militia activity. The United Nations responded very quickly, with a peacekeeping force of twenty-two nations led by Australia, to protect East Timor.

III. Planning

A military force of approximately 12,000 soldiers requires a very large support component and extensive planning. Such a force has a robust, well resourced planning element. Conversely, the civilian relief operation because of the urgency of the crisis, we thought required much less planning, a consideration which was undoubtedly our first mistake.

I got there in the third or fourth week of the emergency phase of the response to the crisis to organize and facilitate the civilian humanitarian relief effort, which is always a challenging enterprise given the immediacy of fulfilling an extensive, diverse array of requirements. The humanitarian assistance operation became even more daunting around the middle of November. About three weeks after I had arrived, the monsoon season began in earnest. I had thought from my experience in Vietnam and from television documentaries and related reading that I understood what a monsoon was all about, but it took Dili, East Timor in November and the following several months to sharpen my understanding of the term.

Since we needed to get relief items [food, water, shelter, medicine] into the mountains where many of the people were, and where during this time of year there were no roads, we found ourselves convening a "road working group" of civilians and military personnel to tackle the problem of overland movement of relief. Initially, there were no East Timorese engineers in at these meetings when we were assessing the problem and feasible courses of action. We were convinced that we had the necessary expertise and the technology to do the job. After a couple of frustrating weeks, we invited several East Timorese road engineers to our work group and asked them how they would solve the problem.

Their answer was that in the main, they didn't construct or repair roads during the rainy season. Geography and technology conspired to prevent an efficient, cost-effective solution to East Timor's road problems. Indeed, for centuries upwards of sixty villages in the interior highlands of the country were isolated during the monsoon season. These small, remote population centers stocked up on what provisions they could to endure the wet months of the year. Consequently, the civilian international relief community was forced to rely upon helicopters, expensive as they were, to move relief items and, in some cases, people around the countryside.