By CLINTON FERNANDES
During the campaign for independence, the East Timorese and their supporters were constantly told that the Indonesian occupation was ‘irreversible’. For example, Australia’s Foreign Minister Gareth Evans informed a Portuguese audience that ‘the Indonesian annexation and acquisition of sovereignty is irreversible – however regrettable it may be…’ He said that it was ‘irreversible so far as the attitude of the Indonesians is concerned’ and ‘irreversible in effect so far as the international community is concerned.’ Even the Vatican – an organization known for its belief in miraculous events – took the view that ‘the Indonesian takeover was irreversible both internally and diplomatically.’
Those who used the word ‘irreversible’ were not only wrong, but they were weakening international support for independence by their declarations that the independence struggle was a lost cause. Although framed as a neutral analysis of the reality of the international environment, their declarations were in fact a discursive strategy employed to lend analytical legitimacy to an unjust situation. There was, as East Timor’s liberation showed, a flaw in their idea that the analyst and the policy-maker were merely analyzing a sequence of events that they were powerless to change. In Ernst Gellner’s terms, the flaw has its source in an ‘empiricist metaphysic’ which sought to establish the ‘autonomy of fact’ by proposing a dichotomy between reality and interpretation, and between subject and object . This empiricist metaphysic allowed analysts to pretend that they were merely describing an international system that was imposing its pessimistic reality upon them.
Today, those who persist with this empiricist metaphysic say repeatedly that there will never be justice for the people of East Timor. But previous international tribunals have come into existence although analysts dismissed their prospects at first. New York University’s Professor of Law, Theodor Meron, once wrote in Foreign Affairs magazine that a Yugoslavia tribunal ‘will not be very effective.’ Less than a decade later, he was president of the International Criminal Tribunal for the former Yugoslavia (ICTY).
The UN Secretary-General identified a prosecutor, who was formally appointed but resigned before beginning work. When the ICTY began, it had no high-profile defendants in custody, no cooperation from regional governments and little assistance from NATO-led troops on the ground. One suspect, Dusko Tadic, was arrested in Munich, and prosecution began before Germany’s national courts. Although Tadic was an insignificant personality, the ICTY Prosecutor was desperate for a case to prosecute, so he invoked ‘primacy’ over German courts and demanded that Tadic be tried at the ICTY. Some years later, however, the ICTY’s caseload was so heavy that the Prosecutor was trying to refer cases to national jurisdictions rather than have them dealt with at the ICTY!
The International Criminal Tribunal for Rwanda (ICTR) also ran into serious difficulties at first. The new Rwandan regime – which was then a non-permanent member of the Security Council – was the only Council member to vote against the resolution that established the ICTR. Administrative difficulties and corruption were encountered, and at one point the UN had to fire the two most senior officials of the Tribunal, the Registrar and the Deputy Prosecutor. Even the Rwandan government threatened to block all access of ICTR officials to its territory, a move that would have ended the institution. Yet it did its job, prosecuting many leaders of the 1994 genocide. Indeed some of its jurisprudence has entered the High Court of Australia, the Supreme Court of Canada, and courts in the US and Switzerland.
Today, analysts who advise the Timorese people to move on without justice are contributing to a narrative frame that affects the prospects for justice or injustice. Yet, just like the independence struggle, the prospects for justice are not separable from comments about it because comments can strengthen or weaken international support for the issue. The world of international relations is always an interpreted construct; it requires analysis based on personal and social responsibility. One cannot evade this responsibility by pointing to objectified sources like ‘international reality’, the ‘national interest’ or ‘human nature’. Analysts who say there will not be justice are really saying that they will continue to oppose it by their silence – and by their analysis.
1 Gareth Evans, Joint Press Conference with Joao de Deus Pinheiro, Lisbon, 17 March 1992.
2 CAVR 2005: 7.1; 70.
3 Ernst Gellner, Legitimation of Belief, Cambridge University Press, Cambridge, 1974, p 166.
.
0 comentários:
Enviar um comentário