East Timor human rights trials: All just a game

East Timor human rights trials: All just a game

Moch. N. Kurniawan, The Jakarta Post, Jakarta

Indonesia's landmark human rights trials of alleged gross human
rights violators in the former province of East Timor will always
raise public concern for their failure to break the cycle of
impunity.

While the world has placed high hopes that the trials, which
started in March, would uphold justice for the victims of the
bloodshed in East Timor in 1999, nine military and police
officers and a civilian, from a total 18 defendants taken to
court, have been acquitted.

The court sentenced two East Timorese civilians, former East
Timor governor Abilio Jose Osorio Soares and former pro-Jakarta
militia leader Eurico Guterres, to three years and 10 years in
jail respectively. Both, however, did not immediately serve their
sentences despite their conviction of exceptional crimes.

What about the remaining six defendants? Many, particularly
human rights activists, have already made their final judgment:
Military and police officers implicated in the East Timor mayhem
will all walk free.

If there is any, the verdict will be aimed at saving the face
of the trials.

The military and police were charged with failing to prevent
the bloodshed that swept the former Indonesian province carried
out by pro-Jakarta militias prior to and after a UN-administered
ballot in August 1999 that saw about 80 percent of East Timorese
opting to secede from Indonesia.

The carnage left over 1,000 dead, many buildings burned down
and 250,000 East Timorese fleeing to safety in East Nusa
Tenggara.

Indonesian military and police had the responsibility, as
mandated by the UN, to maintain peace and order before, during
and after the self-determination ballot offered by former
president B.J. Habibie early in 1999.

With such huge human and material losses, the acquittal
verdicts for the military and police reflect the laughable way in
which legal processing of the perpetrators and masterminds of the
crimes against humanity in East Timor has been carried out.

Human rights activists, as well as ad hoc judges, said that
from the beginning of the investigation into this extraordinary
crime, there was no political will from the government to uphold
justice but more to protect high-ranking military and police
officers.

Hendardi, of the Indonesian Legal Aid and Human Rights
Association (PBHI), said the government, through the Attorney
General's Office, clearly showed its reluctance to ask former
Indonesian Military (TNI) chief Gen. Wiranto to account for the
violence by removing him from the list of suspects proposed by
the National Commission on Human Rights (Komnas HAM).

"The Attorney General's Office limited those being held
responsible for the East Timor chaos to the local officers," he
said.

The highest-ranking military officer to stand trial for the
violence has been Maj. Gen. Adam Damiri, former chief of Bali-
based Udayana Military Command, which oversaw Bali, Nusa Tenggara
and East Timor.

"From that point onward, it was a victory for the military and
police. It set a precedent that the ad hoc court is just a
mechanism to ease international pressure, not to uphold justice,"
Hendardi told The Jakarta Post.

Ifdhal Kasim of the Institute for Policy Research and Advocacy
(Elsam) concurred.

He said both the government and ad hoc judges ought to be held
responsible for the poor performance of the human rights court,
established under Law No. 26/2000 on human rights tribunal.

According to him, the government was blameworthy, not only for
its reluctance to take high-ranking military and police officers
to court, but also for its belated move to endorse the much-
awaited victim protection regulations and for providing
inadequate training and information to prosecutors and judges.

He said the issuance of the government regulation on witness
protection only several days before the start of the trial had
made it difficult for prosecutors to convince key witnesses to
testify at court.

"Key witnesses were vital to help judges reach a verdict.
Without them, the trials were useless," Ifdhal said.

Most of the witnesses taken to court testified in favor of the
defendants, which, of course, left the judges with inadequate
evidence on which to sentence the defendants.

Ifdhal said the government had also failed to provide good
training and literature for prosecutors and judges, making them
appear unprepared to handle such exceptional crimes.

"Prosecutors were so weak in presenting their indictments that
they didn't try to expose the lines of communication or chains of
command between the military/police and the militias that carried
out violence and murder there," he said.

"Bloodshed there was simply perceived as a clash between
prointegration and proindependence groups."

Furthermore, he said, the sentence demands for the military
and police were minimal, due to a perception that security
personnel were those who had to maintain the unity of Indonesia,
and therefore deserved exemption from punishment.

Nonactive, ad hoc judge Winarno Yudho and judge Binsar Gultom
also expressed their dissatisfaction at the trials.

Winarno, a senior lecturer at the University of Indonesia, was
recently made nonactive from the ad hoc court due to his
discontent at the lack of seriousness shown by parties handling
the trial.

"The absence of key witnesses, a failure to perceive the
seriousness of crimes against humanity and the failure to use
videoconferencing technology to present witness testimonies all
prove that the court has not been treated seriously and has
operated well below international standards," Winarno said.

"If you observed the trials, many witnesses appeared to have
been briefed before they testified before the court. That's why
their testimonies matched each other's," he added.

He said, for example, many witnesses, in the same way,
testified that there were no attacks on civilians except the
clashes between prointegration and proindependence supporters.

Witnesses also claimed that armed civilians, Pam Swakarsa,
were formed at the initiative of locals and had no link to the
military, although it was common knowledge that the military was
behind the establishment of the paramilitary group, as also
happened in other provinces, Winarno said.

Videoconferencing was proposed for the trials of Adam Damiri,
former chief of East Timor Military Command Brig. Gen. M. Noer
Muis and former chief of Dili Military Command Col. Soedjarwo, to
hear the testimony of former Bishop Carlos Filipe Ximenes Belo
and other witnesses residing in East Timor. No such facility
materialized, however.

With local parties showing reluctance to hold the human rights
court at all, international pressure has also weakened following
the Sept. 11, 2001 terrorist attacks in the U.S.

All governments in the world looked to strengthen cooperation
with their military and police forces to provide support in the
war against terrorism, rather than upholding human rights.

In combating terrorism, preemptive actions even violate human
rights, such as the use of intelligence reports to arrest people
believed to be involved in terrorist activity.

"Terrorism is a larger issue than human rights at present, so
you can see that even the UN didn't really pay attention to the
development of the human rights court in Indonesia," Hendardi
said.

"This situation was cynically taken advantage of by the court
here to acquit more and more military and police charged with
crimes against humanity," he said.

Grants and other forms of assistance poured into the country,
which joined the war against terrorism, and were allocated
primarily to equipping the military and police.

However, the holding of human rights trials is one of several
conditions cited in the Leahy Law and must be satisfied before
the U.S. can restore full military ties with Indonesia.

The U.S. government, which penalized the Indonesian Military
for the East Timor carnage by imposing an embargo on weapons
sales to Indonesia, has lifted the embargo on the sale of
nonlethal equipment to TNI, but still maintains an embargo on
other items, including officer training.

Winarno concurred with Hendardi.

But Hendardi warned all the defendants on criminal charges in
East Timor not to be too complacent, as an international tribunal
would be able to try them if the UN expressed its dissatisfaction
with the trials.

According to him, the UN would evaluate whether or not the
local human rights ad hoc court had functioned in line with
international standards, was impartial, and had imposed
appropriate punishment on the defendants.

He said there was still a possibility that the UN would
announce that the ad hoc courts here had failed to provide
justice, although it was a slim chance.

"Let's await the UN's assessment as it is the only hope for
upholding justice. Local pressure can't be expected to have a
great impact on the court," he said.

According to him, the East Timor trial should pave the way for
the court to try the Aceh, Papua, Sampit, Semanggi and Trisakti
University cases, the last two of which occurred in Jakarta.

"If the result of the East Timor case, which has been
monitored internationally, is poor, we can expect very little
from other human rights abuse trials, where international
scrutiny may be absent," he said.