JOUP

Journal of International Peacekeeping 16 (2012) 282–305 brill.com/joup

Evaluating the Timor-Leste Peace Operation

John Braithwaite*
Regulatory Institutions Network
Coombs Extension Building
Fellows Rd
ANU College of Asia and the Pacific
Australian National University
Canberra ACT 0200
Australia
John.Braithwaite@anu.edu.au

Abstract
We might evaluate not so much what a peace operation accomplishes itself, but how it succeeds
or fails in enriching a network of action that sustains peace. Framed in this way, Diehl and
Druckman’s1 evaluation model proves successful in application to peace and conflict in East
Timor/Timor-Leste between 1975 and 2012. Its evaluation goals capture most of the crucial
aims in play in Timor-Leste and most relationships among them. No model can capture all goals
that become contextually important. The Diehl and Druckman approach proves useful as a
sensitizing repertoire, but must be complemented by thinking in time and place about other
goals and their interactions.

Keywords
Timor-Leste; East Timor; reconciliation; peace operations

The plan of this essay is first to defend and tweak the systematic comparativ-
ism of the Diehl and Druckman model, then to describe the Timor-Leste
peace operation case, then to evaluate it in terms of the Diehl and Druckman
evaluation model.

*) John Braithwaite leads the Peacebuilding Compared project at the Australian National
University, a twenty year study of the major armed conflicts since 1990. The first four books
from the project are available as free downloads from the Peacebuilding Compared website.
1)
Paul F. Diehl and Daniel Druckman, Evaluating Peace Operations (Boulder, CO: Lynne
Rienner, 2010).
© Koninklijke Brill NV, Leiden, 2012 DOI 10.1163/18754112-1604005
 J. Braithwaite / Journal of International Peacekeeping 16 (2012) 282–305 283

For Systematic Comparativism

Comparativism in peace studies is an important endeavor for humankind. It

has suffered a want of systematic comparative frameworks. Paul Diehl and
Daniel Druckman2 advance an admirable option for filling that vacuum. It
will be one that we find to have great strengths through test-driving it against
the tragic conflicts in Timor-Leste (1975-2008). Yet we also spot weaknesses.
They are identified in a spirit of helping clarify the strengths of the model.
One weakness is noted by the authors themselves. It stems from a limita-
tion of the foundational conceptualizations in then UN Secretary-General
Boutros Boutros-Ghali’s Agenda for Peace.3 It inclines us to see ‘peacemaking’
as an activity that occurs first, or first after prevention has failed, enabling the
‘conflict settlement’ part of the Diehl and Druckman4 model. Then comes
traditional peacekeeping (if it occurs) to keep the peace that is settled. Then
follows peacebuilding, a more multidimensional activity to assemble key insti-
tutional components that will secure the peace as sustainable. This sequencing
is only true in the most trivial of senses. Not only have Diehl and Druckman
themselves worried before me about taking this temporality too seriously, Alex
Bellamy, Paul Williams and Jeremy Farrell in this volume address peacekeepers
always having a conflict prevention role as well as a core responsibility for
conflict abatement. Peacekeepers are both in the business of abating the last
conflict and preventing the next one.
Peacemakers often settle a peace agreement that permits a resumption of
‘peacebuilding’ that had been interrupted by that conflict. ‘Peacebuilding’ is a
‘postconflict’ activity that is at the same time about building sustainable peace
on the ashes of the last conflict and building capacity to prevent the next con-
flict. A prevention-peacemaking-peacekeeping-peacebuilding sequence only
makes sense as a set of activities ordered that way in relation to conflict X in a
society’s past. It is a temporal sense that must be fundamentally reordered in
reference to conflicts X + 1 and X + 2 in the history of that society. This is
important because we should want a peace operation at least as focused on
preventing the next conflict as on containing the last one. In the Timor-Leste

2)
Diehl and Druckman, Evaluating Peace Operations.
3)
Boutros-Ghali Boutros, An Agenda for Peace: Preventive diplomacy, peacemaking and peace-
keeping, A/47/277 - S/241111, 17 June 1992 (New York: Department of Public Information,
United Nations, 1992), http://www.un.org/Docs/SG/agpeace.html.
4)
Diehl and Druckman, Evaluating Peace Operations.
284 J. Braithwaite / Journal of International Peacekeeping 16 (2012) 282–305

case, only a tiny proportion of the resources of the UN peace operation was
directed at containing the conflict that took the UN there. Current Secretary-
General Ban Ki-moon has foreshadowed a ‘nexus approach’ that recognizes
this and rejects any necessary phasing from peacemaking to peacekeeping to
peacebuilding as in the Agenda for Peace.5
A second foundational limitation of the model that again is fingered by
Diehl and Druckman themselves, and in contributions of others to this vol-
ume, is that most prevention-peacemaking-peacekeeping-peacebuilding is not
done by ‘peace operations’. The best peace operations not only prefer to
enhance the governance of peace by ‘steering’ rather than ‘rowing’, they actu-
ally prefer ‘enabling’ indigenous actors to do their own steering, as opposed
running a peace operation that takes responsibility from locals for steering the
society. Evaluating peace operations is hard because at their best peace opera-
tions are accomplishments of networked governance.6 The test is whether dif-
ferent bits of a peace operation are useful nodes in invigorating the networked
accomplishment of peace. That facilitation can probably only be evaluated
qualitatively by peer review in lessons learned analyses that engage diverse
stakeholders in the evaluation.
There should be little interest on this view in splitting hairs in an evaluation
of a UN peace operation by saying that something was an accomplishment of
the World Bank, Oxfam or the Catholic Church rather than of the UN. If
these organizations are important to peacebuilding in a particular space, then
the UN should be evaluated according to the contribution it makes toward
facilitating, energizing, coordinating that nexus of contributors. The outcome
orientation of the Diehl and Druckman model, that also takes inputs and
processes seriously as paths toward outcomes, positions it well to adapt to the
challenge of evaluating peace operations in terms of their capacities to learn7
how to energise networks in which the peace operation, and indeed all the
international players, are bit players in a drama led by locals and continued by
locals after the internationals depart.

5)
Francesco Mancini, ‘The UN needs a new agenda for peace’, Global Observatory, 20 March
2012, http://www.theglobalobservatory.org/analysis/241-the-un-needs-a-new-agenda-for
-peace.html.
6)
Manuel Castells, The Rise of the Network Society (The Information Age series, The Information
Age: Economy, Society and Culture) vol. 1 (Oxford: Blackwell, 1996).
7)
Lise Morjé Howard, UN Peacekeeping in Civil Wars (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press,
2008).
 J. Braithwaite / Journal of International Peacekeeping 16 (2012) 282–305 285

The Case

I refer to East Timor as a colony of Portugal up to 1975, then of Indonesia up

to 1999, then a UN transitional administration until 2001, that became
today’s Democratic Republic of Timor-Leste. The invasion of East Timor by
Indonesia in 1975 occurred after the ‘Carnation Revolution’ democratized
Portugal but destabilized its colonies. The long war that followed from 1975
to 1999 cost the lives of some 10 per cent of the population of East Timor. It
was a result of a shocking failure of preventive diplomacy, regionally and glob-
ally.8 US President Ford, Secretary of State Kissinger and Australian Prime
Minister Whitlam were particularly culpable in failing to caution Indonesian
President Suharto that such an invasion would be a wasteful tragedy for
Indonesia that would cost thousands of young Indonesian lives and also
Indonesia’s reputation. They would have done better to have lobbied firmly
against invasion, making it clear that they would denounce it through the
UN. Ford, Kissinger, Whitlam and other western leaders not only failed to
deliver this preventive diplomacy or concerted condemnation through the
UN, they also acquiesced in the invasion with a diplomatic response that was
close to a nudge and a wink.9
This was by far the sharpest failure of peace advocacy in Timor. ‘Peace oper-
ations’ had nothing to do with it. A peace operation to enable sustainable
peace would never have been necessary in the absence of a network of actors,
national and international, who enabled war. So the first limitation of the
Diehl and Druckman model we note through the prism of Timor’s experience
is that the enablement of peace through peace operations can be less impor-
tant for peace than the disablement, through preventive diplomacy, of those
who encourage war.

8)
Desmond Ball, ‘Silent Witness: Australian Intelligence and East Timor’ in Hamish McDonald
(ed.), Masters of Terror: Indonesia’s Military and Violence in East Timor in 1999 (Canberra:
Strategic and Defence Studies Centre, The Australian National University Press, 2002); Clinton
Fernandes, The Independence of East Timor: Multi-dimensional Perspectives – Occupation, Resistance
and International Political Activism (Brighton: Sussex Academic Press, 2011), p. 26; Damien
Kingsbury, East Timor: The Price of Liberty (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2009); Bill Nicol,
Timor: A Nation Reborn (Jakarta: Equinox, 2002); Constâncio Pinto and Matthew Jardine, East
Timor’s Unfinished Struggle: Inside the Timorese Resistance (Boston: South End Press, 1997);
David Scott Last Flight out of Dili: Memoires of an Accidental Activist in the Triumph of East Timor
(North Melbourne, Vic.: Pluto Press Australia, 2005).
9)
John Braithwaite, Hilary Charlesworth and Adérito Soares, Networked Governance of Freedom
and Tyranny: Peace in Timor-Leste (Canberra: ANU E Press, 2012).
286 J. Braithwaite / Journal of International Peacekeeping 16 (2012) 282–305

While East Timor provided some surprisingly effective military resistance

for three years to the Indonesian invasion of 1975, ultimately the military
power of the fourth largest nation in the world was overwhelming. It was
a shift to tactics of nonviolence that finally won the independence victory
for Timor-Leste. The young people of Timor were prepared to brave Indone­
sian bullets in demonstrating against the legitimacy of the imposed regime.
The international networking of solidarity with their struggle became more
effective after it became primarily a nonviolent struggle under Xanana
Gusmao’s leadership, integrated with the international diplomacy network in
support of Timor led by José Ramos-Horta. A turning point was international
disgust at the gunning down of more than 200 demonstrators at the Santa
Cruz cemetery in 1991, an atrocity captured by a western film crew. Finally in
1999 Indonesia buckled under the international pressure and agreed to a
UN-supervised referendum that would allow the people of East Timor a vote
on whether they wished to stay with Indonesia.
Many in the Indonesian military leadership believed they could intimidate
independence supporters from voting by threats of violence and could deliver
sufficient carrots for supporters of Indonesia to turn out so that the independ-
ence ballot would be defeated. They had accomplished this after their military
push to acquire West Papua from the Dutch colonial power was vindicated by
a fraudulent UN-supervised ‘Act of Free Choice’ in 1969 (following the first
UN transitional administration, UNTEA).
Supporting the earlier point about the variability of temporal ordering of
the elements of the Diehl and Druckman model, the first element of the UN
peace operation in Timor was the work of unarmed election monitors, many
of whom were Australian police. This aspect of the peace operation was a
(highly qualified) success. The sense in which it was a success was that it dif-
fered from the UN ‘Act of Free Choice’ supervision in West Papua in that the
clear will of the people of East Timor was allowed to prevail in the referen-
dum. Most of the adult population of East Timor turned out to register; on
the day, 98.6 per cent of registered voters turned out; 78.6 per cent of them
voted for independence.
Just as weakness and duplicity had allowed the 1969 UN supervised ‘Act of
Free Choice’ to be a fraud against the people of West Papua, strength and
integrity allowed the 1999 referendum to be a genuine reflection of the will of
the people of East Timor. More than that, the election monitors of UNAMET
(The United Nations Mission in East Timor) showed great courage, for exam-
ple by standing unarmed between a Timorese independence supporter and an
armed member of an Indonesian military-backed militia who intended to
 J. Braithwaite / Journal of International Peacekeeping 16 (2012) 282–305 287

shoot. Such incidents of courage in 1999 count among the finest moments of
UN peace operations. Even so, we must not lose sight of the fact that it was
not primarily the actions of UN peacekeepers that rendered the 1999 ballot a
profound exercise of democratic will. It was more fundamentally the people of
East Timor who deserted their towns and villages to escape pre-election intim-
idation by hiding in the mountains. Then they courageously streamed down
from the hills to vote in droves on the day of the ballot. Notwithstanding the
fact that the key agency in securing the democratic outcome was the devious-
ness and courage of Timorese civil society in outwitting the plans of the
Indonesian military to pay Timorese militias to coerce the election result, in
the absence of UNAMET, this democratic accomplishment could never have
happened.
Even so, the election facilitation and monitoring part of the peace opera-
tion was only a partial success. This was because the UN and key national
interlocutors with the Indonesian government - the United States, Portugal
and Australia - failed to override Indonesian resistance to allowing a large
contingent of armed peacekeepers to supervise the poll.10 As a result of this
error, the UN was powerless to prevent the Indonesian military from imple-
menting its plan B after losing the election. This involved unleashing its mili-
tias, with military backup, to slaughter any independence supporters it could
find and burn their villages, towns, churches and public buildings. This in
turn, they hoped, might draw the East Timor insurgents, Falintil, out of can-
tonment, allowing Indonesia to argue that the ham-fisted UN ballot had
caused a civil war. This, many of the generals thought, would then justify
sending the Indonesian military back in with overwhelming force to restore
order.
Notwithstanding the peace operation’s failure to deploy troops sufficient to
secure the ballot, again Timorese civil society saved the day, outwitting the
Indonesian military and intelligence strategists a second time. As quickly as
the Timorese people returned to their towns and villages to vote, they fled
straight back to the mountains to hide from the post-election wave of violence
that they feared from the Indonesian military. This was the main reason that
only around a thousand people were killed11 in the post-election politicide,
less than 0.1 per cent of the population. 75 per cent of the undefended build-
ings across the nation, however, were burnt when the scorched earth policy

10)
William Maley, ‘The UN and East Timor’, Pacifica Review, vol.12, no.1, 2000, pp. 63-71.
11)
The Commission for Reception, Truth and Reconciliation in East Timor, Chega! The Report
of the Commission for Reception, Truth and Reconciliation in East Timor (Dili: CAVR).
288 J. Braithwaite / Journal of International Peacekeeping 16 (2012) 282–305

was unleashed. Orders dated 17 July 1999 from João da Silva Tavares,
Commander-in-Chief of pro-integration forces, in the event of defeat at the
ballot, were to kill ‘those 15 years and older, including both males and females,
without exception.’12
Falintil held in cantonment watching out at the smoke as their homes and
churches went up in flames and fearing that their families were being butch-
ered. That cantonment was negotiated by UNAMET to prevent the very civil
war scenario that Indonesian intelligence strategists sought to create. The UN
therefore deserves credit in playing its part. Yet overwhelming credit for hold-
ing the cantonment together in the face of extraordinary provocation rests
with local Timorese actors.
In the aftermath of such a shocking betrayal of the people of East Timor
who had been promised that they would be safe in exercising their right to
vote, the United States found the strength to threaten the Indonesian military
leadership to allow armed peacekeepers (INTERFET – the International
Security Force for East Timor) to deploy quickly to prevent further slaughter,
to demobilize the militias and supervise repatriation of the Indonesian mili-
tary back to Indonesia so the referendum decision could be implemented.
Only then did the ‘core goal’ sequence of the Diehl and Druckman model of
‘violence abatement’, ‘conflict containment’ and ‘conflict settlement’ swing
into play. The Indonesian parliament voted to cut East Timor adrift from the
nation and facilitated handover to the UN Transitional Administration of East
Timor (UNTAET). With the authority of the US Pacific Fleet standing
behind it, the Australian-led military peacekeepers of INTERFET were able
to negotiate adroitly with the Indonesian military to withdraw peacefully, and
with the remaining Timorese militias to demobilize and surrender their weap-
ons, though most fled across the border to Indonesian West Timor. UNTAET
was quickly established to replace INTERFET with a multidimensional
peacebuilding mandate to create the institutions of a new state in East Timor.

Evaluating a Distinctive Sequence

Evaluating the sequence of UN peace operations that served from 1999 to the
present is a daunting task in a short essay. A book that diagnoses war and peace
in Timor-Leste with 20 times as many words and citations was released after

12)
Jarat Chopra, ‘The UN’s Kingdom of East Timor’, Survival, vol. 42, no. 3, 2000, p. 27.
 J. Braithwaite / Journal of International Peacekeeping 16 (2012) 282–305 289

the first draft of this essay.13 That project, though having a very different focus,
has been influenced by the Diehl and Druckman model.14 It codes more, over
700 variables about each peace process, though many of these are more speci-
fied versions of the Diehl and Druckman variables, and some have been pla-
giarized in toto from Diehl and Druckman.
The evaluation literature on peace operations in Timor-Leste is staggering
in the amount that is available to cite. I joke to the dozens of students of my
own institution who have done PhDs on Timor-Leste that there seem to be
more young Australians who have written PhDs on Timor than have com-
pleted PhDs on Australia. One of the strengths of the Diehl and Druckman
model that is well illustrated by this volume is that it lends itself to a discursive
evaluation in a few pages that treats hundreds of earlier research projects as
resources that are only cited indirectly through the citation of more synoptic
literature reviews. The model requires an evaluator who has attended to a great
deal of fine-grained quantitative and qualitative data. But it is splendidly con-
ductive to short, non-technical summaries of the successes and failures of
peace operations.
Table 1 summarizes with a broad brush the early phases of this sequence of
peace operations as a failure of preventive diplomacy, a successful referendum,
followed by a post-referendum peacekeeping disaster until INTERFET
landed.
Table 1 is a nice example of the every which way temporal ordering of Diehl
and Druckman’s model can swing into play. In this case an election (referen-
dum) process and a cantonment with international monitoring preceded
peacekeeping in the sequence of events.

Table 1. The Contrarian Sequence and Success of Peacebuilding in

Timor-Leste
Prevention of illegal invasion Failure
Enduring War Failure
Ceasefire and referendum agreement Partial Success
Resumption of war Failure
Cantonment Success
Peacekeeping Success
UN Transitional Administration Partial success

13)
Braithwaite, Charlesworth and Soares, Networked Governance.
14)
Diehl and Druckman, Evaluating Peace Operations.
290 J. Braithwaite / Journal of International Peacekeeping 16 (2012) 282–305

Before moving on to diagnose the successes and failures of the peace opera-
tion after 1999 according to the Diehl and Druckman framework, I want to
emphasize what a remarkable accomplishment it was to prevent a much more
dreadful slaughter by holding the cantonment of those Falintil fighters who
were weeping for their families. All the other successes that follow were trivial
in comparison. It illustrates the fact that the UN often accomplishes great
things without doing much. In this case, it was Timorese leaders, particularly
Ramos-Horta, who persuaded the Falantil leaders to hold the cantonment to
give him more time to make diplomacy work. He was actually bluffing his
own military commanders when he said he was confident he would persuade
the UN to protect their families by sending in armed peacekeepers. At that
point President Clinton was against getting involved. This was before he
received robust calls from the Prime Ministers of Australia and Portugal argu-
ing that his hands off approach was a betrayal of his allies in Australia and
Portugal, as well as of the people of Timor and the UN.
The peace enforcement power of the UN, like any form of deterrence,
mostly does not depend on the UN doing anything, on any actions of peace-
keepers. We see this again later in our narrative when units of fighters turn
their trucks around in 2006 when they see naval vessels loaded with peace-
keepers sailing toward Dili harbour. In other peace operations combatants
have even handed in most of their weapons on an announcement that inter-
national peacekeepers would arrive (e.g., Solomon Islands15). In the case of
holding the Falintil cantonment, peace prevailed on a UN ‘promise’ being
invoked by Ramos-Horta that the UN actually did not see as a promise it had
an obligation to keep at that point. At times, the UN advances peace because
it exists as a promise rather than a reality of peace operations. Peacekeeping
troops achieve deterrence by adroit positioning more than by any actual mobi-
lization of force. It might be that this is harder to do in more violent environ-
ments than Timor-Leste. Yet even in the Democratic Republic of Congo,
most commentators I interviewed felt that highly visible UN peacekeepers
were deployed to the right places to head off mass violence during and after a
messy election in 2011.

15)
John Braithwaite, Sinclair Dinnen, Matthew Allen, Valerie Braithwaite and Hilary Charles­
worth, Pillars and Shadows: Statebuilding as Peacebuilding in Solomon Islands (Canberra: ANU E
Press, 2010).
 J. Braithwaite / Journal of International Peacekeeping 16 (2012) 282–305 291

Highs and Lows of Transitional Administration

Once the Indonesian military departed, the militias were quickly pacified.
There were some minor conflicts in the border areas with Indonesia. But for
the most part, the transition from peacekeeping to peacebuilding was rapid in
1999-2000. The peacebuilding challenge was large as a state had to be built for
the first time and all infrastructure had been decimated by the Indonesian
military’s scorched earth policy. Yet part of the weakness of UNTAET was that
its leaders tended to construe East Timor as tabla rasa when resistance, church
and village governance structures abounded and fused a strong society together.
A Constitution was settled by a Constitutional Assembly that morphed
into an interim parliament. Parliamentary, presidential and local elections
were eventually held and successfully repeated. Democracy and new parties
consolidated. Humanitarian assistance got through. In the 13 years since the
referendum, Timor-Leste has made steady progress up the UN Human
Development Index indicators for health, education and other indicators,
including human rights. Local security improved compared to the violence
of 1998-2000. Police, courts and prisons were established and a rule of law
slowly seemed to consolidate. DDR seemed to have proceeded well. While
there was conflict over who was and was not selected to move from Falintil to
Falintil –FDTL (the Defence Force of Timor-Leste), the research indicated
that those who missed out were mostly pleased at the end of the day that they
had taken the reintegration package, handed in their weapons and returned to
civilian life.16
A crowning achievement of the peace was the Commission for Reception,
Truth and Reconciliation in East Timor17 run by an all Timorese Commission
with assistance from international staff. The Reception part related to the
strength of a local process of acolihimento (reception-welcome-reintegration)
that chose to give emphasis to the reception, reintegration and forgiveness to
militia leaders and followers who had fled to West Timor, welcoming them to
return to rebuild their lives after engaging with traditional processes of apol-
ogy and compensation. The 2006 CAVR report of over 3500 pages was as
thorough and insightful a documentation of the memory of a conflict and the
struggle of a people for self-determination that a nation could hope for. A
hybrid national-international tribunal was established in Dili to prosecute

16)
John McCarthy, Falintil Reinsertion Assistance Program Final Evaluation Report (Dili: Interna­
tional Organization for Migration, 2002).
17)
The Commission for Reception, Truth and Reconciliation in East Timor, Chega!
292 J. Braithwaite / Journal of International Peacekeeping 16 (2012) 282–305

serious crimes of 1999, but not of 1975-1999. Eighty-four defendants were

convicted. These were mostly mid-level Timorese militia leaders, with the sen-
ior militia commanders and all the indicted Indonesian alleged war criminals
fleeing to impunity in Indonesia. Indonesia was pressured to conduct its own
trials.18 These were shams that produced only one conviction, of a Timorese
militia commander.19
While criminal accountability for crimes against humanity was overall
mostly a failed part of the peace operation, CAVR also co-ordinated a
Community Reconciliation Process which was largely a success. It processed
1,371 defendants using traditional lisan reconciliation processes ‘on the mat.’20
This was a kind of local restorative justice. It allowed pro-independence and
pro-militia families to live together without fear of each other and to work
together in rebuilding their villages and restocking their farms.
The UN had put its A team into the UNTAET leadership21 and heavier
resourcing than previous peace operations. By 2006 this seemed to have paid
off in the long list of qualified successes outlined above and summarized in
Table 2. Timor-Leste was repeatedly hailed as a pin-up story of the new mul-
tidimensional UN peacekeeping/peacebuilding. Then violence broke out in
the capital Dili in May 2006. There was a mutiny in the army, firefights
between the police and the army, ten unarmed police killed while surrender-
ing to the army under a UN flag, with a number of UN staff seriously wounded
in the process. Gang warfare took over the streets.22 The Prime Minister and
President were hiding in fear of their lives. UN military peacekeepers, who
had departed by 2006, were rushed back in.
For a second time, the peacekeepers had an immediate positive impact in
abating violence and re-stabilizing the new democracy. Armed gangs who were
headed to Dili in trucks to escalate the violence turned around when they saw
the Australian Navy ships steaming toward Dili loaded with peacekeepers. The
2006 violence abatement was not quickly followed by conflict containment

18)
David Cohen, Justice on the Cheap’ Revisited: The Failure of the Serious Crimes Trials in East
Timor (Hawaii: East-West Center, 2006).
19)
David Cohen, Intended to Fail: The Trials before the ad hoc Human Rights Court in Jakarta
(New York: International Center for Transitional Justice, 2003).
20)
Ben Larke, ‘“… And the Truth Shall Set You Free”: Confessional Trade-offs and Community
Reconciliation in East Timor’, Asian Journal of Social Science, vol. 37, no. 4, 2009, pp. 646-76.
21)
Samantha Power, Chasing the Flame: One Man’s Fight to Save the World (New York: Penguin,
2008).
22)
See James Scambary, ‘Anatomy of a Conflict: the 2006-2007 Communal Violence in East
Timor’, Conflict, Security & Development, vol. 9, no. 2, 2009, pp. 265-288.
 J. Braithwaite / Journal of International Peacekeeping 16 (2012) 282–305 293

Table 2. Achievement of Peace Operation Goals, Timor-Leste

1999–2012
Dimension Component Assessment
Core Goals
Violence abatement Peacekeeper operations – Mostly successful
reduced deaths, stranger
rapes.
Village lisan justice and Mostly successful
reconciliations working
with police reduce
violence – reconciliations
completed without violence
Conflict Peacekeeper operations – Mostly successful; failed
containment passive deterrence in the May 2006
collapse
Village lisan justice and Mostly successful even in
reconciliation working 2006-08 in rural
with police – reconciliation areas, but not in Dili
completed that reach a local
peace agreement before
conflict escalates
Conflict settlement UN diplomacy, Mostly successful;
diplomacy of the failed 2006-2008
independence leaders,
village diplomacy of
traditional elders
New Mission Goals
Election Overcoming fear of voting Successful
supervision Voter registration Successful
Voter turnout Successful
Delivering safety to those Failure in 1999;
who vote successful thereafter
Democratization Undominated voting Successful, but with
setbacks
Fair elections Successful
Formation of parties Resisted at first, but
more successful over
time
Humanitarian Delivery Success
assistance
Reaching most vulnerable Qualified success
(Continued )
294 J. Braithwaite / Journal of International Peacekeeping 16 (2012) 282–305

Table 2. (Cont.)
Dimension Component Assessment
Quality of life Qualified success; people
still very poor but
Human Development
Index improvement
DDR Demilitarization Failure
Numbers of armed soldiers Failure till 2008; success
who desert and destabilize thereafter
the country
Human rights Preventing atrocity Qualified success, even
protection in 1999 when only
1000 were killed
Progress on gender equality Qualified success
especially on numbers
of women in
parliament
Progress on other rights Qualified success but
large numbers of
people with their land
rights denied
Peacebuilding goals
Local security Local protection Success in rural areas;
failure in Dili
2006-08
Freedom of movement Success; failure in Dili at
night 2006-08 when
few people and no
taxis risked the streets
Violent crime Success in rural areas
except for high rate of
domestic violence;
failure in Dili
2006-2008.
Rule of law Legal framework Only a formal success
because laws written
in Portuguese, rather
than in Tetum or
Indonesian, the
languages most
Timorese understand
 J. Braithwaite / Journal of International Peacekeeping 16 (2012) 282–305 295

Table 2. (Cont.)
Dimension Component Assessment
Judicial operation Improving but mostly a
failure, especially in
delivery of courtroom
justice to rural areas
Traditional lisan justice Restored to provide
90 per cent of the
justice (Asia
Foundation
2004,2005,2008),
mostly successfully,
with problems of
equal justice for
women, though
progress on gender
equity
Prison system Mostly irrelevant to
justice or
rehabilitation;
convicted offenders
wander in and out
Policing Failure: desertions,
firefights with the
military in Dili, but
positives where it
works collaboratively
with village elders in
rural areas
Local governance Control of military Failure; fear of arresting
deserters; proposals
for a coup discussed
by military and
political leaders in
2006
Government capacity Mixed, with many
failures and pockets
of success such as
health system
development

(Continued )
296 J. Braithwaite / Journal of International Peacekeeping 16 (2012) 282–305

Table 2. (Cont.)
Dimension Component Assessment
Corruption Mixed; rampant
corruption, but not as
bad as in Indonesian
times, and progress in
establishing credible
institutions to regulate
corruption (Soares
2011)
Restoration, Serious crimes prosecutions Failure even though 100
reconciliation of them (counting
and Indonesian
transformation prosecutions); major
criminals against
humanity living in
Indonesia; mixed for
Timorese –mostly
small fry
Community Reconciliation Success: large number
Process using traditional lisan with high success rate
justice in locals living
peacefully together
afterwards
Truth telling, documenting Success through the
collective memory analytic quality and
the depth and breadth
of Truth and
Reconciliation
Commission
documentation
Reception and reintegration of Success for 10,000s
Timorese who fled to West through lisan justice
Timor
IDP resettlement Failure 2006-2008;
otherwise a success
(1999-2005), and
with very few IDPs
not resettled after
2008
 J. Braithwaite / Journal of International Peacekeeping 16 (2012) 282–305 297

and conflict settlement as in 1999. More than two years of daily gang fighting
in the streets, persistence of IDP camps occupied by people who continued
to be afraid to return home, constant use of violence to destabilize the govern-
ment, failure to enforce or negotiate the surrender of the armed mutineers
from the military, did not end until 2008. Peace returned when President
Ramos-Horta was shot several times and almost killed. The leader of the muti-
neers, Major Alfredo Reinado, was killed in the process of the attempt on the
president’s life. Conflict settlement quickly flowed after this shock to the
nation. The remaining military mutineers were persuaded to surrender, mostly
without punishment. Gang truces were also negotiated, religious and indige-
nous leaders led many local and national reconciliations, generous resettle-
ment payments were offered to IDPs, after which IDPs felt safe to return to
their homes and IDP camps were closed. After more than two years of regress
to Hobbesian disorder, Timor-Leste’s peace operation returned to a trajectory
of two steps forward, one step back in peacebuilding and consolidation of
democratic governance from the national down to the village level.
The terrible violence and unraveling of 2006-2008 should not diminish
those accomplishments of 1999-2006 which were real, such as the building of
quite a good health system, significant strides toward greater gender equality,
quite a low rate of rape after a long war during which rape had been extremely
prevalent, reconciliation with Indonesia, and many other accomplishments.23
The renewed violence of 2006 should, however, diminish confidence in a num-
ber of the peacebuilding endeavors of 1999-2006 that had been falsely evalu-
ated as successes by UN leaders in New York. Security Sector Reform was at the
top of the list of accomplishments that had to be re-evaluated as a failure.
The policy of the independence leadership, supported by civil society, until
2000 had been that Timor-Leste would not have a defence force. The UN would
have served peace well to have held the leadership to this policy. Instead, when
Falintil elements threatened trouble if they were not given jobs in a new Timor-
Leste military, both the Timorese independence leaders and the UN leadership
caved in to this on grounds that it was a right of a new sovereign government
to have its own military, even if it had no prospect of defending itself against
neighbors as powerful as Indonesia and Australia. They also reasoned it was
better to have Falintil in the military than unemployed and forming armed
gangs. In retrospect, the cost of a reintegration program that guaranteed farming
and other livelihoods to around a thousand extra fighters would have been low

23)
Braithwaite, Charlesworth and Soares, Networked Governance of Freedom.
298 J. Braithwaite / Journal of International Peacekeeping 16 (2012) 282–305

compared to the cost to the international community of managing the 2006-

2008 crisis and the ongoing burden upon the Timor-Leste budget of a defence
establishment that consumes 8 per cent of public expenditure.
The bigger problem was that in the process of this negotiation of Security
Sector Reform, the security sector became highly politicized.24 Those who
became the civilian ministers elected to take over the defence and interior
(police) ministries had not moved from the mentality of insurgency leaders to
democratic leaders. They viewed themselves as well positioned to dominate
the country if the democratic process spun out of control. Because they com-
manded a key component of the security sector, they believed they could then
call the shots. Leaders sought to make the police and the military their per-
sonal fiefdoms. When Rogerio Lobato became the minister responsible for the
police, he promoted those who were his personal political loyalists, sidelined
those who were not, and embarked upon a dangerous arms race with the mili-
tary. This ended with the police being better armed than the military.
Notwithstanding their higher-powered weaponry, the police had not been as
well trained or as hardened through the experience of fighting Indonesia.
When it came to a showdown in May 2006 the F-FDTL cut through the
police ‘like a knife through butter.’25
The UN then had to recognize that its transitional administration had pre-
sided over the constitution of a politicized, factionalized, competitive security
sector with deep fissures within and between both the military and the police.
The fissures in the military opened up along ethnic lines, giving the impres-
sion that 2006-2008 was fundamentally an ethnic conflict, fragmentation of a
society insufficiently unified and unready to rule itself. In fact, the process of
nation building under the peace operation had accomplished quite a strong
sense of national unity compared to other emerging nations. What seemed to
be conflict driven by ethnic divisions was more fundamentally driven by a
divisive security sector politics. Certainly ethnic tensions also had some basis
in problems like occupation of land and homes in Dili by groups that had no
traditional claim on them. These were properties abandoned by Indonesians
or the Indonesian state. What was so dispiriting for the people of Timor-Leste
and for the UN was that the divisions of the near civil war of 2006-8 had
nothing much to do with the conflict between Indonesia and East Timor, or
the sides people took on that conflict.

24)
International Crisis Group, Timor-Leste: Security Sector Reform, Asia Report No. 143, 17
January 2008 (Brussels: International Crisis Group, 2008).
25)
Interview with an Australian military observer.
 J. Braithwaite / Journal of International Peacekeeping 16 (2012) 282–305 299

There were also many more micro problems of the security sector. One of
these was a general problem that was almost a top to bottom weakness of the
UN administration of Timor-Leste, that was particularly evident in the rule of
law institutions. This was a problem of UN officials failing to share power suf-
ficiently with Timorese counterparts early on and failing to shift power more
fully to them early enough. A quite separate question is whether the transition
should have run for longer; it probably should have. The critique is of the poor
quality of the enablement of local capacity performed during the transition
period that was funded. The UN transitional administration did too much
running of the country and performed poorly at developing indigenous capac-
ity to run the country in a Timorese way.26 When handover of judicial func-
tions to Timorese judges went badly, the UN response was to put international
judges back in control. Policing was this problem at its worst. Instead of ascer-
taining what would be a good way to do community policing in a Timorese
way, then assisting Timorese to provide that themselves, when an Australian
UNPOL contingent took over policing in a district, it would set up policing
policy and administration in an Australian way. Later when the Australian
UNPOL in that district were replaced by Malaysian UNPOL, they would run
the district in a Malaysian way, requiring Timorese police to unlearn the little
they had learnt from the Australians. Then on the next rotation, they would
have to unlearn what they had learned from the Malaysians at the behest of
UNPOL from some third nation. Little wonder that the police in Dili became
fractured, confused and unprofessional at the moment of crisis in 2006.
In policekeeping in many countries we see the following problem that we
simply saw more acutely in Timor-Leste. UNPOL understand that their job is
capacity building. They see their Timorese partner do something badly, so
they explain to them how to do it properly. In future, they see them do it badly
again and they patiently explain again how to do it properly. On a third
occasion when they see the same mistake, in exasperation they say to them-
selves that it is easier and better to do it themselves properly. And that is what
they do. Trouble is, when they have that natural response, they leave behind
something worse than a police force that does not know how to operate effec-
tively. They also leave behind a police who lose the confidence of many
citizens they police when they come during the UN time to view local police
as second rate compared to UNPOL.

Chopra, ‘The UN’s Kingdom of East Timor’; Jarat Chopra, ‘Building State Failure in East
26)

Timor’, Development and Change, vol. 33, no. 5, 2002, pp. 979-1000.
300 J. Braithwaite / Journal of International Peacekeeping 16 (2012) 282–305

Personnel who are good operational police at home do not necessarily excel
at police institution building in another country. In fact, operational police
officers have never built a police institution from scratch in their own country.
We would not think of importing hundreds of bus drivers from a foreign
country and telling them to work with locals to build the transport infrastruc-
ture of a nation. Yet we feel it makes enormous sense to drop hundreds of
police in a country, few of whom have any experience as police academy train-
ers, let alone experience at setting up a police disciplinary or payroll system,
and think they can build security institutions.

Interactions among the DimensioMns of Success

Figure 1 represents Diehl and Druckman’s27 hypothesized relationships among

the first three goals from Table 2. One might have expected that the three core
goals have so much in common that they are mutually reinforcing. But Diehl
and Druckman28 suspect, based on past research, that peacekeepers lessen the
chance of a ‘hurting stalemate’ by preventing fighting. This is why the Diehl
and Druckman path from Violence Abatement to Conflict Settlement is nega-
tive. We find it is positive in the case of Timor-Leste, rendering all three core
goals mutually supportive.
In 1999 violence spiked at the end of a period when Falintil and the
Indonesian military had had a less violent relationship with each other than

Figure 1. Diehl and Druckman’s hypothesized relationships among the Core Goals of peace
operations

Violence + Conflict
Abatement Containment

- +
Conflict
Settlement

27)
Diehl and Druckman, Evaluating Peace Operations, p. 191.
28)
Diehl and Druckman, Evaluating Peace Operations, p. 193.
 J. Braithwaite / Journal of International Peacekeeping 16 (2012) 282–305 301

in previous decades. Since the Santa Cruz massacre, the Indonesian military
had learnt that they needed to manage the new Timorese tactics of nonvio-
lence without delivering the huge propaganda victory that their violent
response to Santa Cruz had delivered their enemy. The militias trained by the
military in preparation for a time like 1999 had also been prevented from
indulging killing sprees. So on the Indonesian side, far from fighters approach-
ing a hurting stalemate, many were warming to revenge they had been
restrained from unleashing for some time. Restraint of an explosive desire to
fight was even stronger on the Falintil side. Falintil were frustrated and angry
that they were prevented from rushing to the defence of their families and vil-
lages by being held in cantonment. So it was one-sided slaughter that peace-
keepers abated; being one-sided, there was no two-sided hurting stalemate.
Likewise, between 2006 and 2008 there was no hurting stalemate. The
military had already defeated the police before the peacekeepers had arrived;
the Police Commissioner was hiding in the hills. The mutineer faction of the
military and those loyal to the commander had not really begun to fully
engage each other in battle. As for the youth gangs fighting on the street, they
were engaged in a self-regulated form of violence that kept guns off the field
of battle 99 per cent of the time, even though some gangs had access to auto-
matic weapons had they chosen to use them. The inter-gang warfare acquired
revenge-driven momentum of its own. Yet much of its initial motivation came
from political parties and political leaders paying gang members to destabilize
governments that were losing control of the streets. The gangs had a taste for
these payments and would have liked more of them. They were enjoying the
excitement and the monetary rewards of the street fighting. Peacekeeping
dampened their taste for more, rather than preventing them from any pro-
spective approach to a hurting stalemate.
After pacifying violence between two gangs, peacekeepers often facilitated
the bringing together of leaders of both gangs in reconciliation talks. There
were even occasions when peacekeepers brought in a nun respected by both
gangs to abate violence between them. Then the nun followed through with
reconciliation meetings to settle the inter-gang conflict. Violence abatement
by peacekeepers in Timor-Leste prevented escalation rather than preventing
the prospect of a hurting stalemate.
Figure 2 summarizes Diehl and Druckman’s29 hypothesized relationships
among all the above Core Goals and their five New Mission goals. A case can

29)
Diehl and Druckman, Evaluating Peace Operations, p. 194.
302 J. Braithwaite / Journal of International Peacekeeping 16 (2012) 282–305

be made from the historical dynamics of 1999-2012 that the Timor-Leste case
fits most of the arrows posited in this figure. The exceptions are the three paths
that lead to and from ‘Democratization’ to ‘Violence Abatement’, ‘Conflict
Containment’ and ‘Conflict Settlement’. Time-Leste is a success of democra-
tization, but as democratization progressed, so did the impetus to violence.
Moreover, this was not an artifactual association. Political competition with
an eye to electoral politics was an important motive of violence and conflict
escalation and causing reconciliation settlements to fail. There is nothing
novel in this result. Statistically, across many peacebuilding cases, transition to
democracy involves a greater risk of civil war than being a stable democracy or
a stable autocracy.30

Figure 2. Diehl and Druckman’s hypothesized relationships among the Core Goals of peace
operations and the five New Mission types.

Humanitarian + Human Rights

Assistance Protection

+ +
+ Violence +
Abatement +

Conflict Disarmament,
Containment + Demobilization,
+
+ Reintegration
+
+ +
Conflict
+ Settlement +

+
Democratization Election
Supervision

30)
Michael W Doyle and Nicholas Sambanis, Making War and Building Peace: United Nations
Peace Operations (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2006); T Havard Hegre, Tanja
Elligsen, Scott Gates and Nils Petter Gleditsch, ‘Toward a Democratic Civil Peace? Democracy,
Political Change and Civil War, 1816-1992’, American Political Science Review, vol. 95, no. 1,
2001, pp. 33-48.
 J. Braithwaite / Journal of International Peacekeeping 16 (2012) 282–305 303

Figure 3, Diehl and Druckman’s final set of hypothesized relationships, sees

the greatest divergence from the Timor-Leste experience. We have already
seen with Figure 1 that for Timor-Leste the relationship between Violence
Abatement and Conflict Settlement was positive rather than negative. Earlier
still in our analysis we concluded that the 1999 Referendum (‘Election
Supervision’) and Falintil cantonment (‘DDR’) were causally prior to all the
other peace operation variables in the Figure 3 model, and so should move for
the Timor-Leste case to the far left of the figures with arrows moving from
them to the Core Goals and to Democratization.
The causal sequence of the middle panel of Figure 3 also does not fit Timor-
Leste very well. ‘Restoration/Reconciliation’ often created the conditions of
‘Local Security’, ‘Local Governance” and ‘Rule of Law’ rather than the
other way around. ‘Rule of Law’ as state law was a rather minor force across
most of Timor in practical terms. But traditional rituals of ‘Restora­tion/
Reconciliation’ were a major force that could accomplish acolihimento

Figure 3. Diehl and Druckman’s hypothesized relationships among all the key goals of their model

Humanitarian
Assistance

Conflict Human Rights

Peacebuilding
Containment + Protection
Local Security
+
+
+ + Disarmament,
+ Conflict
Rule of Law Demobilization,
Settlement
Reintegration
+
-
Local Governance
Violence
+ Election
Abatement
+ Supervision
Restoration/Reconciliation
+

Democratization
304 J. Braithwaite / Journal of International Peacekeeping 16 (2012) 282–305

(reception-welcome-reintegration) for militia families who had fled to West

Timor. These reconciliation traditions also assisted in post-war accomodations
over who could build and farm on what land, thereby creating a functioning
rule of land and property law, persuading people from opposite sides of the
conflict to work together to rebuild the destroyed uma lulik (sacred spiritual
centre of the community).31 This enabled the blossoming of ‘Local Governance’
again. Put another way, all the variables on the right hand two panels of
Figure 3 have the same kinds of positive relationships posited by Diehl and
Druckman as consolidating a mutually reinforcing architecture of peace. But
the causal ordering was different in an indigenously Timorese way, with acoli-
himento (reception-welcome-reintegration) having considerable causal prior-
ity. Acolihimento created a world safe for courts, as opposed to courts creating
a world safe for reconciliation.32

Conclusion

Among the great institutional development lessons of Timor is that peace

operations need to work with indigenous justice institutions such as lisan. One
reason is that when indigenous justice institutions are enabled rather than
crowded out by rule of law institutions, they can have strengths that cover the
weaknesses of the rule of law work of peace operations. At first, as the leader-
ship of UNTAET came to concede, there was a general UN failure of creating
new institutions in a manner that supposed Timor was an institutional tabla
rasa. This was a failure to first ask the question, what is already working here to
deliver peace goals, and how can we support that indigenous strength?
The distinctive indigenous centrality of acolihimento (reception-welcome-
reintegration) in the Timor-Leste case has an important lesson for how we

31)
José Trindade and Bryant Castro, Rethinking Timorese Identity as a Peace Building Strategy: The
Lorosa’e – Loromonu Conflict from a Traditional Perspective, Final Report for GTZ/IS (Dili: The
European Union’s Rapid Reaction Mechanism Programme, 2007), www.timorleste.org/nation
_building/Trindade_Castro_Rethinking_Timorese_Identity_2007.pdf, accessed January 2008;
Alexander Loch, and Vanessa Prueller, ‘Dealing with Conflicts after the Conflict: European and
Indigenous Approaches to Conflict Transformation in East Timor’, Conflict Resolution Quarterly,
vol. 28, no. 3, 2011, p. 324.
32)
Tanja Hohe, ‘Justice without Judiciary in East Timor’, Conflict, Security and Development,
vol. 3, no.3, 2003, pp. 335–57; Tanja Hohe and Rod Nixon, Reconciling Justice: ‘Traditional’
Law and State Judiciary in East Timor, Final Report (Washington, DC: United States Institute of
Peace, 2003).
 J. Braithwaite / Journal of International Peacekeeping 16 (2012) 282–305 305

might further strengthen the Diehl and Druckman framework. It is probably

a mistake to view the goals in Figure 3 as providing a ‘template’ of variables
that interrelate in any determinate sequence. The Timor-Leste experience is
consistent with the Diehl and Druckman goals laying out a highly relevant
conception of how to evaluate a peace operation. It is consistent with them
being broadly ‘intertwined or mutually reinforcing’.33 Yet which variables are
causally prior may be different in different contexts. Local wisdom is required
to resolve which of these mutually reinforcing variables will be the most stra-
tegic starting button to push first. Where there is insufficient local knowledge,
iterated experimentation may be required. Trial and error finds the driver that
can kick-start a mutually reinforcing peace process. A key type of organiza-
tional learning may be how to experiment iteratively until the right driver is
found to kick-start a virtuous circle of peacebuilding.
On the question of contextually different start buttons being important in
different conflicts, I am reminded of the story of a local bank manager who
bravely travelled from the airport to his bank in downtown Dili with a suitcase
of US currency to stuff into his Automated Teller Machines. He did not love
his bank so much as to risk his life so it could continue to trade. He did so
because he loved the people of Timor. Why were the buttons on those ATMs
important ones to press in dampening this violence? Because trucks were in
scarce supply as truck owners were making money transporting loot and gangs
of young fighters to points of defence and attack. With the banks closed,
NGOs had no donor cash with which they could rent trucks to get refugees
out of harms way, to get food to hungry children. Once the donor cash began
to flow to those humanitarian NGOs through the bank manager’s ATMs, it
was the young militants who started to find it hard to attract the scarce supply
of trucks to their projects.
My policy conclusion is therefore that peacebulders may not need to learn
a template. Diehl and Druckman have provided what Timor-Leste shows to
be a useful repertoire. Still, peacebuilders must think in context about contex-
tual bottlenecks to a peace that lie outside the standard repertoire. It is good
for them to be jazz musicians who know the repertoire of jazz standards which
have recurrently proved useful in getting a gig jumping. But like that Dili
banker, they will do even better if they are also creative, responsive and
thoughtful at improvisation.

33)
Diehl and Druckman, Evaluating Peace Operations, p. 201.