Tardy Move Into East Timor

The U.N. Security Council, racing the clock to relieve tormented inhabitants of East Timor, moved closer Monday to deploying an international security force, too late for many but not too late to safeguard the new country’s hard-fought independence. Indonesian Foreign Minister Ali Abdullah Alatas, whose government equivocated while its army-backed militias rampaged through the newly independent territory, said Jakarta will impose no conditions on the U.N. force.

“It’s all up to the United Nations to prepare the security force,” he told reporters at U.N. headquarters in New York. This decision should have been taken two weeks ago, in the wake of the overwhelming Aug. 30 vote of East Timorese for independence on their half of the island of Timor. Any Washington or Jakarta official could have predicted the violence that followed the vote. Ruthless militias burned the homes of rural Timorese and drove inhabitants to the capital.

An airdrop of troops and food supplies is being considered. The U.S. contingent is expected to be no more than a few hundred, mostly involved in communications, logistics and intelligence.

More should have been done earlier. Indonesia has its soft spots, primarily the economy, a victim of last year’s Asian economic crisis. Now the decision has been made to accept a U.N. presence in East Timor, another blow to the Indonesian leadership. The long regime of former President Suharto was notorious for graft and hard rule on the outer territories, and for the relationship in which the Suharto family and the military took good care of each other.

Militias, under the wing of the Indonesian military, buttoned up East Timor in 1975, with the withdrawal of Portuguese colonial authorities, and turned the territory into a virtual prison province. An independence movement only tightened the rule of Jakarta, which faces other rebellious regions on the archipelago. Washington and the United Nations should keep a close eye on Indonesia, a often troublesome giant of the South Pacific.