U.S. Has No Intent to Send Troops to E. Timor : Asia: A U.N. force would get logistical help, but America is not 'the policeman of the world,' Cohen says. Washington explores using economic pressure on Indonesia.

By TYLER MARSHALL

Sept. 9, 1999 12 AM PT

TIMES STAFF WRITER

WASHINGTON — Six months after leading NATO into a 78-day air campaign to stop “ethnic cleansing” in Kosovo and serving notice it would not let such human-rights atrocities go unchallenged again, the Clinton administration has decided to limit its military role in halting yet another convulsion of organized killing, this time in East Timor.

“The United States is not planning on any insertion of peacekeeping forces” in the Indonesian province, Defense Secretary William S. Cohen stated Wednesday. “The United States cannot be, and should not be viewed as, the policeman of the world.”

Cohen’s comments followed a series of consultations over the past two days among President Clinton’s senior foreign policy advisors. The administration officials decided that the United States would provide air transports, communications and intelligence to support any United Nations peacekeeping mission organized if Indonesian authorities are unable to restore order in East Timor, but would not provide combat troops.

The decision came despite pressure applied by the government of Australia for a more central U.S. role. Australia has agreed to lead any U.N.-sanctioned mission in East Timor.

Roving gangs and militias have been rampaging through the province, killing independence supporters and driving, by some estimates, 200,000 people from their homes, since the province voted overwhelmingly Aug. 30 to break away from Indonesia.

While the administration has rejected contributing ground troops to a peacekeeping force, the United States is wielding threats of economic pressure in an effort to force Indonesian President B.J. Habibie to either halt the chaotic attacks on East Timorese civilians or allow U.N. peacekeepers to do the job for him.

A senior State Department official said U.S. aid to Indonesia is under review as a result of the crisis. “There is nothing imminent, but certainly people are reviewing what levers we have to use,” the official said.

The administration’s tactic seemed part of a larger international attempt to marshal economic pressure on a nation already struggling to recover from Asia’s economic crisis two years ago and the bumpy transition to democracy following last year’s fall of President Suharto, who ruled Indonesia for 32 years.

“Indonesia’s relations with the international community, including the United States, are at risk here,” State Department spokesman James P. Rubin said Wednesday. “A country in chaos does not attract foreign investment, foreign visitors or foreign capital.”

Indonesia would certainly appear to be vulnerable to such pressure.

In addition to about $75 million in direct assistance provided by the United States this year, Indonesia receives substantial foreign aid from Japan and the European Union. The International Monetary Fund also has yet to disburse more than $2 billion of a $12.2-billion loan to Indonesia. The World Bank has approved a $600-million budget support loan, though it has been held up because Indonesia has failed to meet some elements of the loan’s conditions.

Both lending institutions have expressed displeasure with Habibie’s government.

The IMF is said to be reviewing whether to go ahead with a scheduled visit to Jakarta, the Indonesian capital, by a technical team next week. World Bank President James Wolfensohn wrote a sharply worded letter to Habibie on Wednesday described by one bank official as a “shot across the government’s bow.”

“There’s definitely a feeling here that we’ve got to look very closely at what is going on there,” said this official.

At the same time, Sen. Russell D. Feingold (D-Wis.) introduced legislation in the Senate demanding an immediate suspension of U.S. military aid to Indonesia, mandatory U.S. opposition to further IMF assistance and support for an international peacekeeping mission.

“I am outraged at what is going on in East Timor today,” Feingold said.

Although the United States is actively involved in dealing with the East Timor crisis, its reluctance to take on a more central, forceful military role has clearly upset some observers.

Speaking at the National Press Club on Wednesday, Jose Ramos-Horta, who won a Nobel Peace Prize in 1996 for his work in East Timor, leveled a verbal broadside at the West for what he characterized as too tepid a response to the crisis.

“This is an aggression against every institution in East Timor,” he said. “And what is the West doing--the West that went to Bosnia, that went to Serbia and bombed Serbia back to the Stone Age in the name of human rights--to prevent ethnic cleansing?”

Unlike in Kosovo, where the United States and its European allies decided that Yugoslavia had forfeited its sovereignty by sanctioning the killing of its own people, Clinton administration officials have been very careful to make clear that they will support the deployment of a U.N.-mandated peace force in East Timor only with Jakarta’s approval. Kosovo is a province of Serbia, Yugoslavia’s dominant republic.

In an interview, Feingold said the crisis underscores that the United States uses different standards in its reaction to global events, depending upon where they occur.

“There’s a double standard in our policy, depending on where people are,” he said. “It’s one thing if the United States acts out of strategic interests. But the justification of Kosovo and Bosnia was humanitarian. It was a reaction to genocide and ethnic cleansing. If Kosovo, then why not Rwanda and East Timor?”

In part, expectations of a stronger U.S. intervention in East Timor have been fueled by previous comments from the White House, including statements by the president in response to speculation that the U.S.-led intervention in Kosovo represented a new “Clinton Doctrine.”

In June, within weeks of Yugoslav capitulation in Kosovo, Clinton told CNN: “If the world community has the power to stop it, we ought to stop genocide and ethnic cleansing. Innocent civilians ought not to be subject to slaughter because of their religious or ethnic or tribal heritage.”

He then admitted that the international community had failed to react adequately to halt genocide in Rwanda, where more than 800,000 ethnic Tutsis and Hutu moderates were slain in 1994, and indicated that he would not let such a slaughter go unopposed again.

On Wednesday, however, senior administration officials rejected the direct comparison between East Timor and Kosovo, arguing that a limited U.S. response is appropriate.

“East Timor is not Kosovo because Indonesia, under its current leadership, is not responsible for three wars in the last three years,” one official said. “[Yugoslav President Slobodan] Milosevic is a repeat offender. Democracy doesn’t exist in Serbia. Habibie has brought democracy to Indonesia. That’s a big difference.”

* U.N. FORCE URGED

The United Nations made a plea for Indonesia to accept peacekeeping troops. A10