Ever illusive justice

Many Indonesian officials and legal experts have gone up in arms after hearing the news on Tuesday that East Timor has indicted seven top Indonesian Military (TNI) officers on charges of crimes against humanity. The typical official response was that since East Timor has no authority to issue such an indictment, Jakarta would ignore the summonses issued for the Army generals.

Experts in international laws backed the government's stance. Besides lacking the authority to indict, they pointed to the absence of an extradition treaty between Indonesia and East Timor as a reason for not complying, even if Jakarta had wanted to.

Their arguments, therefore, rests largely on legal technicalities. But can they seriously maintain a similar posture from the point of justice? Can Indonesia ignore the call for cooperation from a neighboring country to help uphold justice?

The seven TNI officers and a top civil servant are wanted by East Timor for their alleged roles in the mayhem that erupted there in the last weeks before the territory broke away from Indonesia in October of 1999.

Hundreds if not thousands of people were murdered, and more than 200,000 East Timorese were forced to leave their homes after it became apparent that the pro-Indonesian forces were losing the UN-sponsored vote on self-determination to the pro-independence camp in early September, 1999.

While most of the atrocities were blamed on pro-Indonesian militias, there have been suggestions that the TNI, which was in charge of security in East Timor at the time, played a part in instigating the violence.

This part about the TNI role was never clear, and this is what the newly formed independent East Timor state is trying to establish by issuing indictments against the TNI officers.

Heading the list is Gen. (ret) Wiranto, the TNI chief in 1999, making him the man most responsible for the security, as well as the safety of the people, in East Timor at the time.

Indonesia managed to evade international wrath over what happened in East Timor in 1999 when it promised to bring those TNI officers responsible for the mayhem to court. But as time passes, it becomes clear that the Human Rights Court established to hear the cases has failed in its job, which is to uphold justice. Wiranto was never put on trial, and most of the officers tried by the court were either acquitted or let off lightly.

Now with the trials of the East Timor mayhem reaching the final stages, it is clear that Indonesia has failed to meet its responsibilities as a member of the international community in upholding justice. These trials, held in Jakarta, failed to answer the single most important question: Who was, or were, responsible for the atrocities? And consequently, to this day and after so many trials, we have not seen anyone in Jakarta being punished for those heinous crimes.

With the Human Rights Court in Indonesia failing to meet even the basic expectations to uphold justice, it should come as no surprise that Dili has now moved to indict the seven TNI officers. And given that the East Timor administration receives advisory assistance from the United Nations, it is also clear that the international community, as well as the East Timorese people, will not rest in their quest for justice.

It is not just the East Timorese who are finding that justice is an elusive thing in Indonesia. Many Indonesians craving for justice have also come across a thick brickwall. There are just simply too many issues of human right violations committed by the state and the military in the past, most notably in Aceh, Papua and here in Jakarta, that have not been addressed by the court. East Timorese must count themselves lucky because they have the international community behind them in constantly putting the pressure on the Indonesian government to act.

When Indonesia decided to let go of East Timor through the referendum in 1999, it was with the strong expectation that it would remove, once and for all, a controversial international issue that had been "a pebble in the shoe", to use the expression popularly used by officials then, for more than two decades.

More than three years has now passed, and it seems that this "pebble" is still bugging Indonesia. We know that we have ourselves to blame. We can run, but we cannot hide. Sooner or later, we have to come to terms with the fact that Indonesia was responsible for the 1999 mayhem in East Timor, and that some people in the TNI should be held accountable.

If not the Human Rights court in Jakarta, this will happen in a court in Dili, or in The Hague, where the International Court of Justice resides. The choice is Indonesia's alone to make.