It was a small country that was invaded by a bigger one. The conquering soldiers occupied land, mistreated people and established a puppet government. So outrageous was the aggression that the United Nations, by overwhelming majorities, passed several resolutions calling on the invaders to leave.
They haven`t left, and the world has not gone to war to force them out. This isn`t Kuwait. It`s Cyprus, much of which was conquered and occupied in 1974 by Turkey.
There have been scores of wars and rebellions in the last 20 years, but only in Cyprus, Kuwait and the Pacific island of East Timor has a territory recognized as sovereign or separate by the United Nations been occupied and absorbed by its neighbor in defiance of UN resolutions.
There are technical differences. Only part of Cyprus is under occupation, and East Timor was never officially an independent country, though its right to be one was generally acknowledged.
And there is this practical difference: Only for Kuwait did the world go to war to reverse the conquest.
”This has been the first time the UN has been so determined to enforce its resolutions,” said Maria Zoupaniotis, the press attache for the Cypriot UN delegation. ”It`s amazing. Maybe it`s because of the oil. We have oil, but it`s the kind that comes from olives.”
It isn`t that she or her government oppose the UN resolutions against Iraq`s invasion of Kuwait. But after 16 years of having more than one-third of their country under Turkish occupation, Cyprus officials see a certain irony in the world`s willingness to go to war to right a similar wrong in the Persian Gulf.
And they`re determined to do something about it. ”When the gulf crisis is over,” Zoupaniotis said, ”the UN must take up the Cyprus issue if it is to be consistent.”
Cyprus has little leverage beyond this plea for consistency. But it has more than East Timor, which is located at the western edge of the Indonesian archipelago and doesn`t even have an official advocate in the English-speaking world.
In 1975, the 700,000 or so residents of the eastern half of Timor island declared their independence, supported by the Portugese, who were surrendering colonial control of the island. Catholic East Timor is culturally distinct from its larger Muslim neighbor, Indonesia.
But Indonesia, with a population of more than 140 million, invaded. It annexed the territory in the summer of 1976, though armed resistance continued for a few more years. In the invasion, Indonesian forces used American weapons in apparent violation of U.S. law.
According to a report by Freedom House, the New York-based private watchdog of democracy, ”estimates of those who died during 1975-79 as Indonesia strove to crush resistance vary from 100,000 to 200,000. Many of the casualties were people who starved to death during a serious famine, allegedly exacerbated by Indonesia deliberately destroying croplands.”
Last November, the Front for an Independent East Timor sought peace talks with the Indonesian government. The talks were rejected outright by Foreign Minister Ali Alatas, who stated that ”the overwhelming majority of East Timor people have decided to be integrated with Indonesia,” a claim weakened by reports that the army and police had suppressed student demonstrations in East Timor. Sixteen years after the invasion, a large Indonesian occupation force reportedly remains on the island, despite UN resolutions calling for its withdrawal.
These are not the only examples of small nations that have come under the heel of larger neighbors. Latvia, Lithuania and Estonia are part of the Soviet Union thanks to ”secret protocols” of a Soviet-German agreement in 1939, and much of the world, including the U.S., still officially regards the three Baltic states as independent nations.
In 1959 Tibet was invaded by China, whose troops continue to occupy the mountainous region with a population of roughly 2 million.
In addition, Morocco has occupied the area known as the Western Sahara since 1975, when Spain gave up its colonial claims on the territory.
During the 1980s, South Africa launched several invasions on neighboring countries. South Africa never directly conquered or occupied any of its neighbors, but its 1986 invasion of Lesotho led to a coup in which a friendlier government replaced one that supported the African National Congress.
The United Nations General Assembly condemned this and other South African attacks, but veto threats from the United States and Britain have blocked similar action in the Security Council.
The U.S. has invaded two foreign countries in recent years. In 1983 U.S. forces invaded Grenada at the request of some political factions of that Caribbean country. In 1989 U.S. forces attacked Panama to oust and capture dictator Gen. Manuel Antonio Noriega. Both countries are now governed by civilian governments, although some U.S. forces remain in Panama. The United Nations took no official action on either invasion.
There are two other current occupations, both in the Middle East and both complicated. While the world was preoccupied with Iraq`s occupation of Kuwait, Syrian troops took control of Lebanon. There has been little objection, perhaps because the situation in Lebanon was so chaotic before the Syrian invasion that even foreign occupation seemed acceptable.
The other example is the West Bank, which has been occupied by Israel since 1967. In this case the occupiers did not start the war in which they took control of the land. And the land itself did not ”belong” to anyone. Israel took it from Jordan, which was also a military occupier, on territory over which no government claimed sovereignty.
There is little mystery about why the U.S. and other countries have not gone to war to liberate these small conquered nations. Intervening on behalf of the Baltic states would risk war against the Soviet Union, and any effort to free Tibet would have meant confronting China.
Indonesia would not have been as threatening, but East Timor is a little- known dot of land, far from the consciousness of America and Europe (though geographically not at all far from Australia). Besides, as Joseph Ryan of Freedom House put it, ”At the time the U.S. was preoccupied, having just lost the war in Vietnam. Getting involved in another conflict of Asia was the furthest thing from our minds.”
But there appears to have been more to it than that. According to Arnold Kohen, who has worked with Timorian refugees, the U.S. was also being careful not to offend Indonesia, the world`s largest Muslim nation and a source of oil and other minerals.
Noting that the invasion came less than 48 hours after President Gerald Ford and Secretary of State Henry Kissinger left Indonesia, Kohen said it was clear that ”Kissinger didn`t want to kick Indonesia in the teeth.” And Kissinger did say at the time that the U.S. understood Indonesia`s position on East Timor.
”Bush starts putting (the Persian Gulf war) in moral terms,” Kohen said, ”but the loss of life and violation of human rights was far greater in East Timor, and we did nothing.”
The case of Cyprus is even more convoluted and reflects even less well on American motives and actions. The invader-Turkey-was an ally, a member of NATO. It, too, used weapons supplied by the U.S. in apparent violation of the 1961 Foreign Assistance Act.
The inspiration-or excuse-for the Turkish invasion was the attempted coup d`etat against the elected Cypriot government headed by Archbishop Makarios. This effort was engineeered by the military junta then governing Greece. The junta, and perhaps even the coup, had the support of the U.S. government and intelligence officials, some of whom were close to anti-Makarios factions on Cyprus. In addition, Kissinger expressed his sympathies for ”the Turkish community” on Cyprus just a few days before Turkey invaded the island.
The anti-Makarios coup failed, and the failure led to the downfall of the Greek junta and the eventual restoration of democracy in Athens.
There were no massacres on Cyprus comparable to those on East Timor. But according to the UN and a 1976 report by the European Commission on Human Rights, about 200,000 Greek Cypriots either fled or were displaced from their homes and about 80,000 Turks were settled on the northern part of the island, which calls itself the Turkish Republic of Northern Cyprus, though no country except Turkey recognizes it. In addition, more than 1,600 people have vanished and remain unacccounted for, according to the government of Cyprus.
”It has been 16 years,” Zoupaniotis said. ”The problem is getting more complicated.”
The U.S. has voted with the majority on the Cyprus resolutions, but according to Zoupaniotis ”it has not exercised much pressure, and the U.S. is really the key.”
Consistency may impel the U.S. to pay some attention to the Cyprus situation when the gulf war ends. If anything, diplomatic and political reality will make it even more difficult to pressure Turkey, which is cooperating in the effort against Iraq.
”But we are here, too,” Zoupaniotis said.
But then, they`ve been there all along.
