"IF YOU LEAVE US HERE, WE WILL DIE": How Genocide Was Stopped in East Timor

"IF YOU LEAVE US HERE, WE WILL DIE": How Genocide Was Stopped in East Timor. By Geoffrey Robinson. Princeton and Oxford: Princeton University Press, 2009. xvi, 319 pp. (Figures, maps, B&W photos.) US$27.95, cloth. ISBN 978-0-691-13536-6.

After a 1999 United Nations-sponsored referendum in which a strong majority of East Timorese voted for independence, Indonesia's military (the TNI) and its militia allies waged a campaign of terror and destruction. Over a few weeks, they killed many hundreds of civilians, forced at least 400,000 people to flee their homes-almost half of the illegally occupied territory's population-while burning or destroying about 70 percent of East Timor's buildings and infrastructure.

Historian Geoffrey Robinson vividly recounts the terror and the surrounding events, while offering a multifaceted analysis of the structural and contingent factors that brought about and ultimately stopped it. In doing so, he engages important discussions on violence, humanitarian intervention, and justice following mass atrocities. The result is a thoroughly researched, carefully analyzed and compellingly argued work, one greatly enriched by Robinson's first-hand witnessing of, and participation in, myriad developments he discusses as a political affairs officer with the UN mission that oversaw the vote.

In analyzing the terror, Robinson interrogates the three principal explanations that circulate, all of which, he finds, have some value. The first is that the militias were a spontaneous response...