A truth commission for E. Timor -- but who planned the mayhem?
A truth commission for E. Timor -- but who planned the mayhem?
Aboeprijadi Santoso
Amsterdam
Indonesia has asked East Timor to initiate a joint-commission
of truth and reconciliation to resolve the issue of the violence
during and after the United Nations-organized vote in East Timor
in 1999.
With some 1,500 deaths, a capital destroyed, hundreds of
thousands forcibly deported and 17 of only 18 defendants
acquitted (one more has an appeal pending), the crimes against
humanity allegedly committed by the Army and its proxies, have
apparently been completed with total impunity. But who, then, is
responsible for the mayhem?
During Dili's final observance of Indonesian Independence Day
on Aug. 17, 1999, then governor Jose Abilio Osorio Soares proudly
announced before UN diplomats and community leaders that East
Timor would continue to celebrate the day because he believed the
country would remain part of Indonesia. As he spoke, violence was
sweeping the country, and in the hall, this writer recalls, some
civil servants whispered to each other with a sense of disbelief.
They were right: A few weeks later, the majority (79 percent) of
the people voted for independence.
Yet the governor knew better. Abilio must have been aware of
local anxieties and the upcoming danger, for example, what the
soldiers and militiamen would do when defeat eventually came --
the "morning after (the vote)" problem had by then become an
international concern. Pro-Jakarta militiamen said the
administration authorized them to set up check points along the
main roads and ports soon after the vote -- indicating that, far
from rogue elements fighting in a "civil war", the violence had
involved some planning.
When Abilio was finally acquitted by the court, law experts
warned that the verdict could endanger Indonesia's position in
the international community, as the trials have been widely seen
as a sham to avoid an international tribunal.
Indeed, Gen. Wiranto's adviser, Muladi, welcomed it as a step
to avert international criticism that only military men were
freed from punishment, while Foreign Minister Hassan Wirayuda
regretted it, saying it would "erode the credibility of the
rights tribunal".
In other words, rather than reflecting on the unjust treatment
of the victims, Jakarta was concerned about the image of the
military and the rights trials -- the two institutions most
responsible for impunity, whose credibility was thus at stake.
A negative, possibly devastating, judgment could be the
outcome if the expert commission initiated by the UN secretary-
general -- instead of Jakarta's proposed truth commission -- is
allowed to probe the way Jakarta handled the case.
One expert who witnessed and researched the case is Professor
Geoffrey Robinson of the University of California. The Canadian
Indonesianist was a political adviser of UN Mission in East timor
(UNAMET), which organized East Timor's referendum. His report to
the United Nations Office of the High Commissioner for Human
Rights in Geneva, East Timor 1999, Crimes against Humanity was
for years suppressed, but is soon to be published.
"In both 1965 (left-wing massacres) and 1999 (E. Timor),"
Robinson told Radio Netherlands recently, "the Army was directly
involved in organizing the killings. People talked of the 1999
case as if it was just the work of some rogue elements, but it's
clear that the Army was involved in mobilizing their own soldiers
to take part in the crimes. The 1999 case was in front of the
international community, that's the big difference ...
It's not easy, however, to explain how the massacres, rampage
and rapes were organized. Robinson said, "What I think happened
was that several Indonesian Military (TNI) officers and other
officers in Jakarta spelled out a general strategy to mobilize
the militia groups and to use terror and violence in order to
intimidate people and to punish them. And within that strategy,
as you went down the command, there were more specific ideas
about what to do. So, yes, there was planning at some level, a
general strategy, but that doesn't mean that a particular
individual planned a particular massacre. There is no smoking
gun ... but the links between the formal Army commands and the
militia groups are well documented.
"That doesn't change the level of responsibility", Robinson
insisted. For "the line of responsibility is only partly informal
and some of the formal lines of command were still operating ...
Probably the Army's Special Forces (Kopassus) had a separate,
parallel command, controlling certain activities separately from
the formal territorial lines of command". This conclusion is
parallel to UN investigator James Dunn's report of Feb. 2001.
Mass murderers like to ensure and measure their success.
Hitler did it at the special Wansee conference and the Khmer
Rouge kept lists of victims that went into meticulous detail. Not
so in the Timor case. But there were documents of a contingency
plan to transport people, which according to Dili's Yayasan Hak
suggests a preceding scorched-earth plan. This was the directive
from the Office of the Coordinating Minister for Political, Legal
and Security Affairs for the Army and police district commanders
in Dili.
All these point to the use of Army infrastructure and other
networks to operate the militia groups. Examples abound -- like
attacks on churches in Liquisa and Suai and on Carrascalao's
house.
The planning apparently involved the TNI headquarters, Army
Strategic Reserves Command (Kostrad), Kopassus and the Armed
Force's Strategic Intelligence Agency (BAIS), but also key
members of President BJ Habibie's Cabinet. One was the defense
minister and TNI chief Gen. Wiranto, who let his soldiers do what
they did -- a very serious omission. But at a higher level the
coordinating minister Gen. ret. Feisal Tanjung played a key role
as he chaired a team, known by its acronym TP4OKTT, which
included ministers of home and foreign affairs, of defense,
justice and the BAIS chief. According to Robinson, it is this
group that formulated the general strategy.
The Indonesia-East Timor Truth Commission is yet to spell out
its aim and modus operandi. However, being a truth commission, it
will have -- if any -- limited judicial power. To resolve the
issue, a truly credible court -- a hybrid or international
tribunal -- should precede such a commission, check the above
findings, and let justice take its course.
The writer is a journalist with Radio Netherlands, Amsterdam.