Timor verdicts shows New Order's game

Timor verdicts shows New Order's game

Aboeprijadi Santoso, Radio Netherlands, Amsterdam

The controversy on the verdicts on human rights crimes
committed in East Timor in 1999 suggests that Timor's painful
legacy continues to affect its former occupying country.
Indonesia needs to be "liberated" from East Timor.

Lies, after all, cannot -- and should not -- live forever.

In 1992 a Timorese politician, who worked closely with
Indonesia's architect of Timor policy, Gen. Ali Moertopo,
provided an insider's view on how the New Order prepared an
aggression from West Timor in 1975. Jose Martins-III was a warm
supporter of Indonesia's cause in East Timor.

He used to talk with Gen. Moertopo and Gen. Benny Moerdani
among others about the conflict between the leftist-nationalist
movement Fretilin and the UDT. The generals wanted to create a
"civil war".

"I told them, the civil-war (in August 1975) was only three
days! But (the generals) decided to tell the world that there is
a civil-war in (East) Timor when there is no (longer) civil-war
at all," Martins told Radio Netherlands in Lisbon in 1992.

Nevertheless, the idea of "civil war" -- i.e. of blowing up
the conflict -- in East Timor has since proved to be an effective
weapon exploited by Jakarta and seen as "fact" by the media.

The consequences of this discourse cannot be underestimated
and affect the public sense of justice.

A descendant of a landowner family, Martins feared Fretilin
might jeopardize his interest. But, given Fretilin's popularity,
he correctly assumed that the civil war could not have lasted
more than a few weeks except with help from outside. The story of
40,000 refugees at the West Timor border was consistent with this
civil war myth.

Then the generals resorted to infiltration, persuasion,
threats and war of aggression, thereby stimulating the evolving
small-scale civil-war. These were pointedly what then president
Soeharto, talking to U.S. president Gerald Ford and his secretary
of state Henry Kissinger hours before the Dec. 7, 1975 invasion,
called in deceptive terms: "how to manage ... a majority wanting
unity with Indonesia."

Finally, Jakarta "justified" the invasion by arguing that
Indonesia was "invited to bring peace and order to East Timor".

The world -- including then Indonesia's repressed media -- was
thus led to believe that basically the problem was not Indonesia,
but East Timor's suffering of a chronic, widespread civil war. As
the territory was subsequently closed from the outside world for
more than a decade, the New Order effectively propagated that the
tragedy was of East Timor's own making. It served to deny the
legitimacy of the Timorese resistance.

Twenty-three years later, when then president B.J. Habibie
offered independence as a second option echoes of the 1970s were
visible. Instead special forces members "using Portuguese names,
acting like tourists" as in 1975, according to Martins, now the
old militias were revived and the new ones trained and armed.
Jakarta quickly warned that a referendum would ignite a "civil-
war", yet finally agreed with one-man-one-vote.

A strategy of exploding the "civil war" had apparently been
set in motion to intimidate the pro-independent supporters,
provoke the resistance and sabotage the campaign presumably so as
to influence the vote-outcome and the decision of the People's
Consultative Assembly on East Timor. Many violent incidents --
more than the five cases selected for trial -- were clearly
directed at these aims.

However, the basic ideas remained -- East Timor is sick, a
civil-war could erupt any time -- with one big, crucial
difference, though, i.e. that the Army now claimed they were
unable to control the Timorese militias.

With the source of the problem thus confirmed, the blame
should be apportioned accordingly i.e. to the East Timorese. As
if to demonstrate this, as early as April 1999, then defense
minister and military chief Gen. Wiranto, came to Dili pretending
to act as a peace-broker between the pro-Jakarta militias and the
Falintil guerilla.

Wiranto's message -- i.e. that not the Indonesian Military
(TNI), but the militias were equal to Falintil -- served to
justify that the militias remained armed as Falintil refused to
be disarmed. At the bottom of this was the view that TNI was the
sole legitimate force and Falintil simply domestic rebels rather
than an army that resisted a foreign occupation. Until today,
Jakarta never officially admits any aggression nor invasion.

The arguments and the perceptions on what happened in East
Timor among the judges and the prosecutors basically rests on
this very paradigm of 1975 that still dominates the view of the
political elite.

In the ad hoc tribunal on human rights, prosecutors described
the various violence incidents described as war between the two
camps. As Ifdhal Kasim of the Institute for Policy Research and
Advocacy (Elsam) said, by ignoring police or military involvement
in creating the conflict, "it's not surprising that the judges
acquitted the defendants..." (The Jakarta Post, Aug. 21, 2002)

Yet, various evidence had been abundantly published that the
Army facilitated the militias with help of local civilian
authorities while the police often acted passively.

True, neighborhoods sympathizing with pro-independent cause
were also involved in violence. However, if it were a "civil
war", how could the militias freely patrol the city with military
vehicles, issuing "exit permits," setting up road blocks,
controlling ports, transporting thousands of people, looting
shops and killing pro-independent supporters?

And why -- as journalists witnessed -- were there no organized
or armed groups of pro-independent supporters on the streets or
involved in clashes? East Timor is not Balkan or Rwanda.

A group of observers led by Yeni Rosa Damayanti and Mindo
Rajaguguk, who traveled extensively in the period around the
referendum, concluded that the emergency, under the command of
Gen. Kiki Syahnakri, which was imposed since early September,
provided the Army with extra leverage. With the police sidelined,
most observers and media gone, the Army joined the militias in
persecuting their targets.

Rather than a "civil war", what happened was a systematic
state collusion at various levels aiming at persecution,
massacres and destruction -- resembling, not Bosnia, but New
Order's 1965-1966 massacres, albeit in smaller scale.

To suggest a "civil war" in East Timor as if the civilian
authorities and the officers were powerless is a palpable
nonsense.