Transition from occupation to independence and democracy: a UN role?

Okay, let’s say that Country X is running a military occupation over the entirety of Country Y. (You can read my lengthy thoughts on military occupations in general if you go here.) And that everyone concerned–including, at the rhetorical level, the rulers of occupying country X– says that their goal is to restore independence and legitimate indigenous government to country Y–
How do you do that?
Easy, if the country you’re talking about is Kuwait, 1990. Kuwait’s “legitimate” (though deeply undemocratic) rulers had escaped from their country en masse at the time of the Iraqi invasion, and set up a skeleton administration in exile… They had powerful friends, the Americans, who spearheaded the military operation aimed at the restoration of the status quo ante.
But what if Country Y has no leadership that is generally recognized as legitimate that is both (a) in existence, and (b) able to call in powerful foreign armies to effect its restoration?
What if we’re talking about, say, Namibia in the 1980s, East Timor in the 1990s– or Iraq, today?
Why then, the answer is Dial ‘911’ for the United Nations!
But can the UN indeed do the trick, and under what circumstances?

The UN has actually, over the past 15 years, overseen transition-related elections in many spots around the world. Some have, overall, “succeeded” (Namibia 1989, Mozambique 1994, East Timor 2001… ) Some have notably failed (Angola 1992, East Timor 1999… ) On many, the jury is still out…
But most of those elections around the world have been ones where the UN-sponsored elections were held as part of a peacebuilding transition from civil war to national reconciliation. Only in a few cases was the political context one of transition from rule by a foreign military force to a democratic form of national independence.
That’s why, as people have been talking about the possibility and possible parameters of a UN role in the transition to independence and democracy in Iraq, I’ve been looking back at two interesting examples in recent world history where the UN has played exactly such a role. And I’ve been trying to establish what worked, and what didn’t.
These cases are Namibia 1989, and East Timor 2001, which were both successful. (The experience of East Timor 1999, which was a notable and tragic failure, also provides excellent food for thought.)
In fact, I’ve just finished writing a series of three columns for Al-Hayat on just this subject. (I’m afraid even the Arabic readers among you will have to wait a few days for those texts to be trasnlated into Arabic and then scheduled for publication. I’ll try to let y’all know when it happens.)
So here’s my bottom line:
In the case of both Namibia (in the 1980s) and East Timor (in the 1990s), the situation was one where a foreign power had been illegitimately occupying the country for many decades.
In Namibia, South Africa had been in illegitimate foreign occupation of the country ever since the post-WW1 League of Nations mandate that SA had been given over the country ran out with the dissolution of the LoN. In East Timor, Indonesia had been in illegitimate foreign occupation ever since Henry Kissinger gave President Suharto the green light to send his forces into the country in 1975.
In the case of Namibia, many western nations (and the UN) had been eager from the mid-70s onwards to find a peaceful way to get the South Africans out of the country and a legitimate independent government put in place. The western leaders thought that having a withdrawal of raw South African military power from Namibia would help to keeping the lid on tensions throughout the broader region that were already threatening to escalate to the level of a contest between the superpowers.
A group of Western states negotiated with South Africa and formulated a plan to insulate Namibia from the effects of the vicious proxy war that South Africa was fighting in neighboring Angola by having a ceasfire throughout the whole of Namibia and holding “free and fair”elections there under UN supervision and control. That plan was endorsed by the UN Security Council in resolution 435 of April 1978.
Though South Africa had nominally signed onto the plan, it did nothing to implement it in good faith for a further 11 years. It was only in late December 1988 that the apartheid regime– totally exhausted from all the wars it had been waging nonstop against its neighbors and its own people, and almost totally isolated as a result of the global boycott against it– finally agreed to implement resolution 435 in Namibia.
The following April, Pretoria named a new administrator for Namibia, whose mandate was explicitly to implement 435. At the same time, UN Sec-Gen Javier Perez de Cuellar named Fininish diplomat Martti Ahtisaari to be his representative in Namibia.
It was explicitly agreed that South Africa, whose security forces were already in Namibia, would continue to have responsibility for security in the lead-up to and the all-important aftermath of the planned election. However, regarding the crucial issue of who would make all the political decisions around the election, South Africa was certainly not given a free hand. Ahtisaari had a decisive voice in that at every step of the way….
There were four central, sequential steps taken to designing the elections that were planned for later in 1989:

1. determining the rules for forming the voter rolls;
2. determining the rules for registration of parties;
3. determining the rules for conduct of the elections; and
4. determining the rules for the scope and purpose of the assembly to be elected.

Typically, what happened at each one of those steps along the way was that first, the South African administrator would publish his proposal for the rules in question. Then, there would follow negotiations between him and Ahtisaari. Finally, once they reached agreement, their agreed text for the rules would be published, and would then go into effect immediately.
Each one of those four sets of decisions was hotly contested, and very important. Ahtisaari (who went on a few years later to become President of his own country) was, in effect, negotiating with Pretoria over them on behalf of the whole world community of nations, including the Namibians. His participation gave the entire process a legitimacy it could not possibly have had without his high-level and decisive participation. This element of international legitimacy was particularly important in reassuring the Namibian nationalist of the integrity of the entire process because, as I mentioned before, the occupying power South Africa continued to be in control of security throughout the whole country.
(Indeed, after a terrible misunderstanding right at the beginning of the process in April 1989, 2,000 fighters from the main nationalist group SWAPO had entered the country with their arms— something that had been expressly disallowed during the earlier agreement concluded in New York– and the South African forces killed 375 of them in a fierce fire-fight… But still, the legitimacy of the process in the eyes of the nationalists was somehow salvaged, and the process continued.)
Though Namibia was still very under-developed, and voter rolls had to be developed almost from scratch, the country-wide election for the (transitional) Constituent Assembly went ahead in mid-November 1989 according to plan. A total of 670,830 voters (96.4% of those registered) participated in the vote. Fifty-seven percent of those voted for SWAPO.
The Constituent Assembly started its work at the end of that November. SWAPO’s people led it wisely and well. They dusted off a proposal for a Constitution that had been agreed to in a preliminary way back in 1982, but that had been gathering dust ever since then: after a little further revision it was ready to go.
The new Constitution came into force on March 21, 1990– just under one year after the whole process of the transition to democratic self-rule started. SWAPO leader Sam Nujoma was sworn in as President by Perez De Cuellar just after midnight. And the Constituent Assembly then itself became the country’s first democratically elected legislature…
Well, that was the good example. I’m really tired now. But if I have the energy to come back to this tomorrow, I’ll write a bit more about East Timor… There are certainly more good lessons to be learned from the experience there. (For the long version, however, you’ll have to wait till you see it in Hayat.)
Here’s a suggestion, though: Why don’t people in Iraq who want to see a speedy and successful transition to democracy in their country send delegations to Namibia and East Timor to learn more about what worked, and what didn’t? (And if they want to invite me along, too, hey, I might even say yes.)