East Timor, Australia and Regional Order: Intervention and its Aftermath in Southeast Asia

This book explains the exceptional nature of the East Timor intervention of 1999, and deals with the background to the trusteeship role of the UN in building the new polity. All of these developments had an important impact on regional order, not least testing the ASEAN norm of 'non-interference'. Australian complicity in the Indonesian occupation of East Timor was a major factor in the persistence of Indonesian rule in the territory which was maintained for twenty-five years despite international censure and which required an unremitting campaign against the independence movement. This work reviews the reasons for that history of complicity, and explains the extraordinary change of policy that led ultimately to the occupation of the territory by the Australian-led INTERFET coalition.

Acknowledgements Acronyms Introduction 1. East Timor and Australia: The 25-year policy legacy 2. Australian Relations with Indonesia and the East Timor Issue 3. The Failure of Indonesian Policy 4. The East Timor Intervention, Humanitarian Norms and Regional Order 5. Australia's East Timor Commitment: Causes and consequences 6. Australia's East Timor: The official version and its critique 7. Outcomes: Peacekeeping lessons, security dilemmas, bi-lateral tensions 8. Independent Timor-Leste in a Regional and Global Context BibliographyIndex