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.