Battle Ready

world… without butting in. He was ready if he was needed and called.

The call came. And another.

The first, in the summer of 2001, was from his old friend and boss, and now Deputy Secretary of State, Richard Armitage: “Would you be interested in taking on a peace mission in Indonesia?”

This was followed a few weeks later by a second call from another State Department official: “Would you be interested in taking on a peace mission in the Middle East?”

THE WISE MEN

In Indonesia, a bloody dispute had been under way for twenty-five years between the national government and an independence movement in the oil-rich province of Aceh on the northern tip of Sumatra. The call from Armitage was an invitation to take part in a mission under the guidance of the Henri Dunant Centre for Humanitarian Dialogue (HDC) in Geneva, Switzerland.

The HDC realized a dream of Henri Dunant, the founder of the Red Cross, to establish a humanitarian center devoted to conflict resolution and mediation. It gave special attention to internal conflicts — problems within and not between nations. The latter are normally best handled by international organizations such as the UN or regional collectives of nations, but sovereign states get nervous when international bodies meddle in what they take to be internal affairs — as in the case of rebellions or separatist movements. Such conflicts are probably best resolved by private organizations, which have no agenda and no ulterior interests.

Though Zinni was unfamiliar with Indonesia and its multitude of troubles, and had never heard of Aceh or the HDC, he was eager to take on the mission. This was interesting. It could add a significant new angle of vision to what he already knew about peacemaking and conflict resolution.

Tony Zinni:

I learned long ago that finding new angles in peacemaking really matters, because — paradoxically — each peacemaking situation is unique. No matter how much experience you have, each conflict brings its own unique requirements. You have to develop a process distinctive to it. Sure, you can maybe call on or modify previous experiences, but there are no models, formulas, or formats that will necessarily help you reach your goals.

A lot of people think you can know exactly how to go about the process and become predictive. I learned you can’t. You can’t take some model off the shelf and hammer it to fit. It doesn’t work that way. What happens is this: Gaining more experiences builds up your experience base and your understanding of the possibilities, and that shows you how to combine, mix-match, develop, and modify from past experiences to fit the unique situation you’re in. Experience doesn’t give you any big answers. It shows you how to be creative.

He talked over the mission at a meeting with Armitage and Karen Brooks, a member of the National Security Council. There he learned that the State Department and the NSC had come up with an innovative idea to create a new element in negotiations: a group of Wise Men — people of significant international stature, senior diplomats and military men — who would stand above the negotiating process and advise all sides.

In tough negotiations, mediators always get dragged into the process. They become viewed as biased by one or both sides, or sometimes become too deeply involved in contentious issues to “step above” the heated exchanges. No matter how hard mediators try to maintain and protect their neutrality and objectivity, both sides transfer fears and hopes onto them, attack them, and blame them. It always happens.

The function of the Wise Men was not to change the process but to back it up. If the mediators were getting hit by stones from all sides, they lived with it, rolled up their sleeves, waded into the mud, and did the dirty work. The Wise Men stood above it all, there to be called on by both sides or by the mediators for advice, recommendations, consultation, or intervention.

The HDC jumped at the idea.

At that point, they had chosen three Wise Men for the Indonesia mission — Surin Pitsuwan, a retired Thai Foreign Minister; Budamir Loncur, a retired Yugoslav Foreign Minister; and Lord Eric Avebury, a Member of the British House of Lords. They now wanted a fourth, an American with military stature — someone with peacekeeping experience, who could handle issues such as how to monitor mechanisms and observers on the ground, and who could talk to the Indonesian military — who everyone thought would be the toughest group to bring into the peace process. Zinni was the obvious choice.

“This is great!” Zinni told Armitage and Brooks. “It’s just the kind of thing I want to do.” He agreed to take on the mission with State Department support, but only as an unpaid private citizen working with the HDC, thus ensuring his independence.

That set the machinery moving.

State Department briefs followed, detailing the history of the struggle, current intelligence about what was happening on the ground, the state of the negotiations, the U.S. position on the issues, and background on the HDC.

Zinni followed up on that by reading everything he could find on Aceh online and from local bookstores and libraries. He was surprised at the amount of information that was out there:

Indonesia is unique among nations. For one thing, it’s big. It spreads across thousands of islands, some of them among the largest in the world, that cover thousands of miles from east to west and many time zones. It’s extremely diverse in geography, population, and ethnic identity. In religion it’s predominantly Muslim (usually of a moderate kind), but there are also many Buddhists. All of these factors would make the country very difficult to govern; but add to that corruption, dictatorships, all kinds of divisive political issues, and a blanketing atmosphere of turmoil; and further add to that internal struggles with provinces in distant parts of the country — like East Timor (now independent), Papua New Guinea, and Aceh — that want to break away and gain independence; and you have a nation that’s never far from catastrophic fission.

In spite of the confusion and diversity, the political scene in Indonesia is surprisingly straightforward — more or less evenly divided between hard-liners and moderates. On the issue of separatism, the moderates wished to end the struggles through peaceful negotiations that would eventually allow areas such as Aceh some freedom and autonomy from the central government. The hard-liners — including much of the military[83] — would have none of that, and preferred an increased crackdown to end the conflict once and for all. Already, the military and police operations in response to the uprising had turned the beautiful and resource-rich province into a battle zone.

The fight for independence had been led by the Free Aceh Movement, or GAM, directed by its government in exile in Stockholm, Sweden. Now an agreement had been reached to conduct negotiations between them and the government, with the HDC as mediator.

The United States had taken a carefully moderate position in these negotiations. That is, it supported a resolution of the problem within the context of the state of Indonesia. In the U.S. view, the independence of Aceh had to be off the table. The U.S. was not going to support a breaking up of that nation. By the same token, they sent a strong message to the Jakarta government: “You’ve got to do better for the people of Aceh. They are in a special situation and deserve special treatment. You have to find a reasonable way to give them that.”

There were several compelling reasons for the American position; but the most compelling was practical: Indonesia is fragile. The U.S. didn’t want to see it fragment, and create a constellation of potentially nonviable states. God knows what could happen if these failed or incapable states started harboring extremist movements.

There was a second, no less practical reason: Independence movements provoked governments to take a hard-line approach, and this almost inevitably ended in bloodshed. If ways could be found to moderate demands for independence, while delivering many of the material benefits that independence promises, and if all this was coupled with moderation of the central government’s hard-line approach, then everybody got a win. But getting there involved a lot of ifs.

Zinni was not involved in developing the U.S. government position in the Aceh-Indonesia conflict, nor was it