Dealing with a legacy of injustice

What interesting days were last Thursday and Friday (May 3 and May 4) with regard to human rights. On Thursday the United States (U.S.) was ousted from the United Nations Commission on Human Rights (UNCHR) for condoning Israeli violence against the Palestinians and ironically, therefore, because of the opposition of several human rights-abusing countries.

On Friday, to the great indignation and vexation of the United Nations Secretary-General, Kofi Annan, and the UN High Commission for Refugees (UNHCR), six prointegrationists from East Timor were handed down very light sentences by an Indonesian court for last September's heinous murders of three UNHCR staff.

Also on Friday, the British government was condemned by the European Court of Human Rights for failing to conduct a proper investigation into the deaths of 12 people who were killed by or with the complicity of the British security forces in Northern Ireland between 1982 and 1992, in contravention of Article 2 of the European Convention on Human Rights.

Let's try to put these events into context by reference to the brutal U.S.-induced murder of between half a million and one million people in Indonesia in 1965. In the case of the UNHCR murders the judge referred, in mitigation, to the defendants' dissatisfaction with East Timor gaining independence from Indonesia. This has a parallel, albeit not a legal one, in the U.S.' use of the Cold War and Washington's need for political and commercial hegemony, as justification for the truly nefarious deeds of the CIA in numerous places around the world, including Indonesia.

The ousting of the U.S. from the UNCHR, which it helped to found, is indicative of America's all too obvious double standards that change according to the exigencies of its vested interests. The UNCHR is charged with the probing of killings, torture and arbitrary detentions around the world; but until now has made no attempt to investigate the complicity of the U.S. in the 1965 massacres in Indonesia. Clearly though, in the light of its recent criticism of Britain, if Indonesia were a European country, the European Court of Human Rights would be harshly criticizing both the U.S. and Indonesia for their total failure to investigate the 1965 bloodbath here.

In the context, then, of the 1965 Indonesian massacres, these recent events confirm the obvious: that the lack of justice in Indonesia has a historical basis. Indonesians have not been conferred justice and are unlikely, therefore, to confer it on others. In order to change this situation to at least meet the expectations of the Western media when their short-sighted criticism is focused on this country, the West needs to set an example by investigating the covert barbarism committed here in its name, particularly that perpetrated in 1965. In accordance with the principle enunciated by the European Court of Human Rights on Friday, now that the U.S. has lost its voting rights in the UNCHR, that human rights forum has, perhaps, a better opportunity to comply with its mandate and initiate its own investigation into the 1965 killings here. However, the "abusers bloc" of UNCHR member nations, whose sole reason for participating in the forum is to ward off condemnation of their own human rights abuses, must first, for the sake of the developing world, be overridden. Ironically, those very "abuser" countries that are criticized by the West, will actually be serving the interests of the West if, to avoid setting an uncomfortable precedent, they block such an investigation.

FRANK RICHARDSON

Jakarta