East Timor's Tortured March to Statehood: A Tale of Legal Exclusion & the Vagaries of Realpolitik

Abstract

In 1976, without effective local opposition, Indonesia absorbed and annexed East Timor as its twenty-seventh province, but the integration remained controversial at the international level. In the course of the next three decades and in the face of heavy-handed tactics by Indonesian forces keen to wipe out a guerrilla resistance and effectively "pacify" East Timorese battle raged killing thousands. Indonesian police forces regularly detained and tortured innocent civilians and brutally suppressed peaceful protests. Massive violence committed by Indonesian backed militia forces on East Timor increasingly hardened the international community's support for East Timor's independence. The turning point was the Dili Massacre in 1991 in which over 250 unarmed youth were mowed down by Indonesian military personnel at the Santa Cruz Cemetery. This Article has as its modest aim an exploration of the nexus of the principle of self-determination and the geopolitics that contributed to East Timor's tortured march to independence. In particular the Chapter will seek to examine the tenets of self-determination and its practical dynamics which yielded little protection to the aspirations of the East Timorese.