Genocide and Mass Atrocities in Asia: Legacies and Prevention by Deborah Mayersen & Annie Pohlman

Author:Deborah Mayersen & Annie Pohlman [Mayersen, Deborah & Pohlman, Annie]
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9781299641419
Goodreads: 18543219
Publisher: Routledge
Published: 2013-07-02T00:00:00+00:00

5

Humanitarian intervention and the legacies of Security Council (in)action

East Pakistan (1971) and East Timor (1975–79)

Phil Orchard

Introduction

Throughout the Cold War, the United Nations (UN) Security Council was perceived as powerless to prevent genocides, mass atrocities and deliberate displacement by the state. This is echoed by two crises in the Asia-Pacific. In 1971, when the government of Pakistan killed at least 300,000 of its citizens in East Pakistan and caused an estimated 8 to 10 million refugees to flee into India, the issue never reached the Council's agenda. Following the Indonesian invasion of East Timor in 1975, which displaced 300,000 East Timorese over the next four years, the Council met twice over the incident, but took no formal action. In both cases, these states used violence, coercion and mass displacement as tools in an attempt to vanquish locally based independence movements. In both cases, neither state appeared to be concerned by the international response.

In neither of these cases, however, did these attempts at regime-induced displacement – the deliberate use of coercive tactics by government or governmentsponsored actors directly or indirectly to cause large numbers of their own citizens to flee their homes – succeed. East Pakistan gained its independence as the state of Bangladesh on 16 December 1971, following a decisive military intervention by an Indian government determined to stop the refugee flows. While East Timor remained an occupied Indonesian province subjected to gross human rights violations, a new wave of violence and displacement in 1999 following a pro-independence referendum led to an Australian-led and UN-mandated peacekeeping mission and East Timorese independence in 2002.

Why do I focus on the issue of regime-induced displacement? Both these cases represent mass atrocities or even genocides in themselves. The government of Pakistan is estimated to have killed between 300,000 and 1,500,000 people in East Pakistan, the vast majority of them Hindus.1 The Indonesian government is estimated to have directly or indirectly killed a minimum of 102,800 people during the occupation (out of a pre-invasion population of 690,000), the majority between the invasion and 1979.2

However, I focus in particular on displacement for two linked reasons. The first is that while such acts frequently transition into acts of mass atrocity, and hence may fall within the bounds of the responsibility to protect (RtoP) doctrine, they also serve to internationalize crises. The Indian government's eventual invasion did not reflect on the mass atrocities occurring, but rather on the millions of refugees who had fled across the border. While geography meant that East Timorese refugees generally fled into Indonesia, their numbers were used by that government as a defence for its policies.

The second is that regime-induced displacement represents a growing problem in the contemporary world. Between 1991 and 2006, across the globe over half of the 103 situations of mass displacement (in which either 100,000 refugees or internally displaced persons were created in a year) were caused in whole or in part by regime-induced displacement.3 The Asia-Pacific region has not been immune to this phenomenon – of the 28 situations

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