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Timorous policies risk democracy, life

ONE MILLION in Rwanda. Ten thousand in Kosovo. A few hundred in East Timor. These are the estimated death tolls of intra-state war in the 1990s.

Rwandans got no state-sanctioned assistance from foreign powers despite atrocities occurring there; Kosovars received aid after a few months of genocide; East Timor now calls for help. Will anyone intervene before the body count grows?

In Rwanda, United Nations forces pulled out under political pressure. When Hutu troops killed several Belgian peacekeepers, the United States saw flashbacks of Somalia. Memories of the murder and public display of American peacekeeping soldiers are dying hard, especially since they were caught on video and shown to the world. Belgian diplomats used the example of Somalia and Rwanda to achieve a U.N. retreat. The Rwandans were left on their own.

Only one month later, 1 million Tutsis were dead. In retrospect, the United Nations acknowledged that a small, well-armed force could have stopped the genocide. Unfortunately, the politics of the Security Council and the coincidence of Rwanda's presence on that same council prevented action. While diplomats walked on eggshells and spoke in undertones, the massacre continued.

Fast forward to 1998. Slobadan Milosevic orders Serbian troops to "cleanse" Kosovo of Albanians. Deportation of women and children and murder of men begins. Once again the United Nations was incapable of action due to internal Security Council politics. This time, however, the crisis was too close to home or homeland, depending on your address, for the United States to ignore. NATO took the burden of stopping this massacre before Rwanda happened again.

No, the crisis in Kosovo was not handled in a diplomatically sound way. No, the mission was not the best thought-out operation in modern warfare. (Half the Serbian "tanks" Jamie Shea reported destroyed turned out to be decoys - seems Milosevic was thinking ahead.) The bottom line is this: Someone stepped in before 10,000 became 1 million.

Fast-forward to the present day. In East Timor, governmental forces enact a different type of cleansing - one far more offensive to the democratic values the western world holds so dear. Today people are dying not because of centuries-old ethnichatred, but because they voted.

In a government-sponsored referendum, three-fourths of the people of East Timor voted for independence from the rest of Indonesia. With the referendum's results came violence unheard of in stable democracies. Pro-Indonesian militia groups reportedly are working with government military forces to remove thousands of pro-independence Timorese and kill hundreds of other resistors. These people are being murdered because they exercised what we consider a fundamental human right: the right to liberty.

Intervention is necessary and not unprecedented, and should be undertaken by any capable coalition. The United Nations would be an ideal actor, but they are all but incapacitated. Their intervention would require not only Security Council approval, but also that of the Indonesian government. Other countries have committed to a peacekeeping force, but Indonesian governmental approval is unlikely, considering that these are the same forces rumored to be sponsoring the marauding militias. The only politically correct action that the United Nations can take now is informal pressure; the Security Council is sending diplomats from Britain, the Netherlands, Namibia, Malaysia and Slovenia to Jakarta to do some heavy-handed talking.

Still, talk is cheap and slow among politicians, as anyone who has ever sat in a government class can testify. If troops roam lawless on the streets of East Timor while diplomats sit and talk for hours, then more must be done.

The United States wouldn't be out of line by using its influence to intervene. We can act on moral grounds even more easily than we did in Kosovo. As a state based on the idea that all men have the right to decide their system of government, we would be justified in backing a publicly-mandated independence movement. Separatist leaders would have to invite our assistance, but once they do, we would be free to help them just as France and Spain came to the aid of the nascent United States in our own war of independence. We could do the same for East Timor.

United States intervention also is justified by national interest arguments. The United States long has sought allies in the Pacific - any stopping point on the long trip to Asia aids our military. East Timor's proximity to China, India, Pakistan and North and South Korea make it a potentially valuable asset to the United States.

Once our leaders pledged to make the world safe for democracy. Today we, as the only world superpower, have the opportunity to make the world not only safe for democracy, but to make it safer for life.

(Emily Harding's column appears Fridays in The Cavalier Daily.)

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