17 Mart 2010, Çarşamba
saat: 05:16
"And, our post-conflict darling: East Timor.
This is heroic little place that gained self-determination from Indonesia after a thirty-six year struggle during which, due to the folly of President Sukarno's successor, President Suharto, it was turned into a colony instead of welcomed as a part of the nation. It joined the ranks of the international community to a chorus of congratulation. It is perhaps ungracious to point out that if every group of eight hundred thousand people was granted the right to self-determination, the world would have around eight thousand countries. In other words, independence for East Timor did not pass the morality test proposed by Immanuel Kant: What if everybody did that?
But, never mind, how has heroic little East Timor progressed since its independence in 2001? East Timor was one of the 40 percent of post-conflict situations that did not make it through the first decade without a reversion to violence. In 2006 one of its leading politicians was found to be importing arms for his private militia. A large disaffected group in the army that came from the western part of East Timor attempted a coup and then retreated into the mountains: sure enough, the same mountains where the civil war had been fought. In the ensuing struggle a tenth of the population was displaced. Had not two thousand Australian troops promptly arrived to put down the coup, a prolonged civil war might have led to the entry onto the world stage of a new sovereign country of West-East-Timor."
Paul Collier - Wars, Guns and Votes
