There is no such thing as justice in Jakarta

There is no such thing as justice in Jakarta

Ian Martin, Former Special Representative to the UN Secretary
General for East Timor, The Washington Post

The trials before an ad hoc human rights tribunal in Jakarta
of officials implicated in the 1999 crimes in East Timor are not
only failing to do justice: They have turned truth on its head
and added insult to injury.

In February 2000 the UN Security Council, receiving the report
of an international commission of inquiry into these crimes,
agreed to put off other action in order to give Indonesia the
chance to bring those responsible to justice. The Security
Council expressed the hope that legal proceedings in Indonesia
would be "swift, comprehensive, effective and transparent," and
in conformity with international standards of justice. Now, 2 1/2
years later, that hope is dead.

This leaves the United Nations with a special test of its
determination to ensure justice for international crimes --
special because the crimes were an attack not only on the great
majority of the East Timorese people but also on the United
Nations itself: Ten of the East Timorese staff of the UN mission
in East Timor, which I headed, were among those killed.

The prosecution, and now the court in its first verdict, have
bought into the mythical version of the events of 1999 that the
Indonesian army has long sought to propagate. According to this
view, the violence was between two Timorese factions, with the
pro-Indonesian faction indignant at pro-independence bias on the
part of the United Nations. The worst Indonesian offense
supposedly amounted to a failure to do enough to intervene to
check this violence.

That these allegations against the United Nations have no
credibility anywhere outside Indonesia should not allow the
damaging consequences of their going unchallenged in Indonesia to
be underestimated. The killings, rape and extreme physical
destruction perpetrated after the overwhelming vote for
independence were not an emotional response of the East Timorese
losers in the UN-conducted ballot. They were a planned and
coordinated operation under the direction of the Indonesian army.
The army had created the East Timorese militias, and they had
begun their campaign of terror and coercion against pro-
independence leaders and supporters well before the agreement
among Indonesia, Portugal and the United Nations led to the
establishment of the UN mission to conduct the ballot.

When the worst violence began after the ballot, journalists
and international observers were chased out of East Timor and the
UN mission was besieged in its Dili compound as the massacres
were committed. After the Australian-led military intervention
restored security, separate investigations, one by the UN
commission of inquiry headed by a distinguished Costa Rican
jurist and one by Indonesia's own national human rights
commission, left no doubt regarding the Indonesian army's
responsibility for crimes against humanity.

The Jakarta prosecutions of some -- but not all -- of those
named by the Indonesian commission have been fatally flawed. The
jurisdiction of the ad hoc human rights tribunal was limited in
such a way that the full pattern of the Indonesian army's
operation in East Timor, a necessary element of crimes against
humanity, could not have been laid out before it -- even if the
prosecution had genuinely wished to do this.

The first prosecutions were of the East Timorese governor and
the Indonesian police chief. The local administration was closely
involved with the militia, and the police had responsibility for
security during the ballot. But the reality was that the militias
operated under the direction of the army; this meant the police
could never have dared to act against them, even if they had
wanted to. The prosecutors had available to them mounds of
evidence of the army's responsibility from the commissions of
inquiry, and from the international investigators and prosecutors
of the UN transitional administration in East Timor. Yet they
failed to put a serious case before the court, even as regards
the worst single massacre -- of priests and those they were
sheltering in a church at Suai.

The accounts given at the trials by military commanders as
witnesses or defendants have been founded on the most blatant
falsehoods yet seem to have gone unchallenged by the prosecution.
At their most ludicrous, they claimed that the security
responsibility before, during and after the ballot lay with the
UN civilian police. Yet Indonesia had insisted on retaining
responsibility for security at all stages, and was adamant in
restricting the 270 unarmed UN police to an advisory role.

What is to be done now? The international commission's
recommendation of an international tribunal is still on the
Security Council table -- action on it having been deferred to
allow Indonesia to act. It is generally right that national
prosecutions should be the first option, although it was never
likely that they could be credible in this instance.

Now an international tribunal has the best prospect of
obtaining the strongest evidence of the Indonesian military chain
of command that was operating during the violence, which exists
in Australian intelligence intercepts. The case for an
international tribunal is unanswerable. It may also appear to be
politically inconceivable -- but then, so was statehood for East
Timor, which next month will be admitted to the United Nations as
an independent country.