Only tribunal can bring justice: Victims

Only tribunal can bring justice: Victims

Guido Guilliart, Associated Press, Dili

Domingas Casimira has spent the last six years trying to find
justice for her husband and brother, gunned down in the
Indonesian military's drive against Timor Leste's independence.
But like others who suffered in the rampage that left 1,500 dead,
she is starting to lose hope - and not without reason.

Indonesia and Timor Leste have rejected a UN committee's
recommendation for an international tribunal to investigate the
abuses and instead created a joint truth and reconciliation
commission that starts work on Monday. But few expect the
investigation by the two countries to be anything but a
whitewash.

"This is a device to bury the past, not to find justice," said
Brad Adams, Asia director of the New York-based Human Rights
Watch. "The Indonesian military has no incentive to tell the
truth ... they know they will never be extradited to East Timor
or prosecuted in Indonesia if they don't."

Indonesia invaded and occupied the tiny half-island territory
in 1975 ending three centuries of Portuguese colonial rule.

When Timor Leste voted overwhelming for independence almost 25
years later, elements of the Indonesian military and its militia
proxies punished the island's people through a campaign of
killing, looting and burning that ended only when Australian-led
peacekeepers stepped in.

Though Jakarta agreed under intense international pressure to
an ad hoc tribunal for 18 men suspected in the violence, most of
them military and police, all but one were eventually acquitted.
That suspect, a Timorese militia leader, is free on appeal.

"It was a sham," said Casimira, 33, who says Jakarta-backed
militias kidnapped her 29-year-old brother Paulino Lopeswas from
his home in the village of Memo on Aug. 25, 1999, and killed him.
Two weeks later, she said, Indonesian soldiers murdered her
husband, Jaime de Antas, 43.

She presented all the information she had about the deaths to
a special crimes investigation unit, she said, but the evidence
was ignored.

"The only thing the Indonesian government wants is to protect
former high ranking police and military," she added.

A United Nations commission of experts has recommenced that
those accused of violence be retried and, if found responsible,
punished within six months.

If that doesn't happen, it wants Indonesia to submit to an
international tribunal in a third country - as was done for
Rwanda and former Yugoslavia.

But Indonesia and Timor Leste say they don't want that, and
will instead hold a joint Truth and Friendship Commission that
focuses on reconciliation. The panel will consist of legal
experts from the two countries who will be able to summon
witnesses. It is not designed to recommend prosecutions.

In rejecting an international tribunal, the government of East
Timor made clear it doesn't wants to jeopardize its burgeoning
relations with its giant neighbor.

"We want to address the past without endangering our future
relations," said Foreign Ministry spokesman Yuri Thamrin.

But Adams, of Human Rights Watch, said "it is concerned about
being the mouse stepped on by a neighboring elephant."

Asmara Nababan, executive director of the Center for Democracy
and Human Rights Studies, agreed that fear of Indonesia is the
main motivation for the Timor Leste's government to back the
joint commission.

"Timor Leste knows how brutal the Indonesian military can be,"
he said. "Indonesia can use all means to destabilize or occupy
East Timor as they did for 24 years."

But Maria Afonso de Jesus, whose husband was among dozens
killed when pro-Jakarta militias stormed a church sheltering
terrified refugees in April 1999, says she has no confidence in
the joint commission.

She, too, sees an international court as the only answer.

"The only point of the commission is to enhance the
relationship between the two countries, while our fate is
forgotten," said the 30-year-old finance officer. "It has nothing
to do with the victims."