Asia-Pacific, Headlines, Human Rights

RIGHTS-INDONESIA: A Reality Check Over War Crimes in East Timor

Marwaan Macan-Markar

BANGKOK, Jun 30 2005 (IPS) - Indonesia’s hope of emerging as a force for democracy in South-east Asia faces a reality check in regards to its stance on justice – especially justice for victims of human rights violations in East Timor.

A United Nations panel of judges has put Jakarta on the spot this week in a report submitted to the Security Council. The three-member Commission of Experts says that Indonesia’s security forces and militia leaders involved in gross human rights violation in East Timor in 1999 must be put on trial.

And the commission has given the Indonesian government of President Susilo Bambang Yudhoyono six months to deliver on this – prosecuting the perpetrators of crimes against humanity in a special tribunal with ”a team of international judicial and legal experts, preferably from the Asian region.”

Were that to fail, the U.N. commission urges the Security Council to create an ”international criminal tribunal for Timore-Leste to be located in a third state.”

The commission’s recommendations come after it found the attempts Indonesia had made to try people for war crimes – 21 were charged – ”manifestly inadequate,” and that these trials revealed ”scant respect for or conformity to relevant international standards (of justice).”

The commission’s scathing critique of Indonesia’s attitude towards justice – or lack thereof – hardly surprises human rights groups. For most of the governments that followed the fall of President Suharto after over 30 years of tyranny appeared least interested in going after those military and militia men who terrorised the people of East Timor in 1999.

”Previous presidents have shown little enthusiasm to prosecute those responsible for organising the violence in 1999,” John Miller, spokesman for East Timor and Indonesia Action Network (ETAN), a New York-based human rights lobby, told IPS.

He noted that the only exception was former president Abdurrahman Wahid, who did apologise for the occupation of East Timor.

The commission, which was set up early this year by U.N. Secretary-General Kofi Annan, came after leading human rights groups began a campaign for the world body to send an international team of jurists in response to Indonesian courts letting key suspects wanted for crimes against humanity get away.

Among those who have benefited from Indonesia’s cavalier attitude towards justice are Maj. Gen. Adam Damiri, who was in charge of the country’s military operations in East Timor at the time of a 1999 referendum, and Gen. Wiranto, the former Indonesian military commander, who made an unsuccessful run as a presidential candidate last year.

The crimes against humanity occurred before and after the East Timorese voted in a U.N.-sponsored referendum for independence in August 1999.

Thugs and members of the militia, with the blessings of Indonesian troops, went on the rampage and killed close to 1,400 people, destroyed buildings and much of the infrastructure, and forcefully drove out about 250,000 people.

Such terror came after Indonesia had occupied the former Portuguese colony with brutal force since 1975. An estimated 200,000 Timorese, nearly a third of its population, died as a result of bombings, killings and starvation during the Indonesian occupation of an area on the eastern end of this archipelago that Jakarta considered its province.

But the leaders of East Timor’s separatist struggle, both on the military and political front, appear more keen to mend fences with the former occupier and giant neighbour since the half-island nation gained independence in May 2002.

An outcome of this is the weight both Dili and Jakarta are throwing behind a Commission of Truth and Friendship as a way of healing the political wounds between the two.

Indonesia, the world’s most populous Muslim country, is home to 222 million people, while East Timor, a predominantly Roman Catholic country, has only 947,000 people.

”This attitude of the East Timorese leaders poses a snag in the call for an international tribunal,” says Withaya Sucharithanarugse, an Indonesia expert at the Institute of Asian Studies at Bangkok’s Chulalongkorn University.

East Timorese President Xanana Gusmao has said that ”he is not interested in having a tribunal,” Withaya told IPS. ”If the president of East Timor is not seeking redress, then that raises questions about how much support there will be for the tribunal.”

Gusmao, a former guerilla leader, has the support of another equally notable personality to go down the road of friendship and stability with Indonesia rather than seek justice for the atrocities of the past. He is Jose Ramos Horta, a Nobel Peace laureate and the country’s foreign minister.

It is an attitude that is increasingly at odds with what the people want, says ETAN spokesman Miller. ”The East Timorese victims and public would prefer trials. They know the truth already.”

”We have always believed that a strong relationship with Jakarta must be built on justice,” he adds. ”I think pressure will build over time. Internal critics of the government’s stance will certainly feel strengthened in their pursuit of genuine justice.”