by JOSEPH ISRAEL M. LABAN

JAKARTA, INDONESIA AND DILI, EAST TIMOR — With intermittent applause and encouraging laughter, it was almost easy to forget that the imposing figure who had the floor was testifying about his alleged involvement in atrocities committed in East Timor in 1999. The speaker, after all, was the former commander of the Indonesian armed forces, and he was supposed to be a giving a public, factual testimony to the Indonesia and East Timor Commission of Truth and Friendship (CTF). Yet given his audience’s nearly jocular mood and his easy manner, he may as well have been recounting his experiences in the 2004 presidential campaign trail.

	GENERAL Wiranto swearing to tell the truth with a Koran held to his head before the Commission of Truth and Friendship in Jakarta. [photo by Joseph Laban]

Retired Indonesian armed forces general Wiranto was the officer in charge of security during the August 30, 1999 referendum in East Timor. A former Portuguese territory, East Timor came under Indonesian rule in late 1975. The United Nations-sponsored referendum saw East Timor voting to separate from Indonesia. Soon after, however, violence broke out, leading to the loss of more than 1,000 Timorese lives. Thousands of homes and buildings were also razed to the ground, almost wiping out the country’s economic infrastructure. Some 250,000 of the people were rendered homeless, and countless local women were said to have been raped. The rampage — believed by many to have been carried out by anti-independence Timorese militias supported by the Indonesian military — lasted several weeks. The nightmare stopped only with the arrival of multinational peacekeeping troops in late September 1999.

CTF was created in March 2005, a bilateral initiative of East Timor and Indonesia that was aimed at closing a bitter and highly sensitive chapter in the two countries’ shared history. More importantly, it was supposed to uncover the truth about the 1999 mayhem in East Timor. But even while its composition was still being drawn up, few believed the Commission would be able to achieve that particular goal.

CTF wound up its hearings late last month, when the likes of former East Timorese guerrilla leader and current prime minister Xanana Gusmao testified behind closed doors in Dili. Ordinary East Timorese, however, are not holding their breath over what CTF’s final report may say.

Indeed, throughout Southeast Asia, victims of large-scale atrocities committed or ordered by those who were in power have yet to see justice. Even Cambodia, which had a million of its people slaughtered by the Khmer Rouge in the 1970s, has yet to round up all the surviving leaders of the once mighty guerrilla group and have them tried by the Extraordinary Chambers in the Courts of Cambodia.

At least the Cambodian tribunal has the support of the United Nations. The CTF — which can issue recommendations but has no mandate to prosecute anyone — cannot claim similar backing. The United Nations has called its proceedings a “whitewash” and even boycotted the Commission’s closed-door meetings. The head of the UN mission in East Timor in 1999, Ian Martin, was reportedly one of several UN officials who declined to testify before it.

Yet if the CTF’s report is deemed credible by the international community, it may effectively undermine the necessity of an international tribunal that will independently (albeit very publicly) investigate the 1999 tragedy in East Timor. Such a development would spare Indonesia further embarrassment, and presumably lead to an improved relationship between Jakarta and Dili. To many, however, that would mean a denial of justice to the victims of the 1999 atrocities.

THE NEED FOR A STRONG MESSAGE
At this juncture ''a trial at an international court would send a strong message to everyone that crimes against humanity will not be tolerated,” said Jose Luis de Oliveira, executive director of HAK Association, a human-rights organization based in Dili. “It would end the circle of impunity and would provide a measure of justice to the victims." Unfortunately, he said, the CTF was "just another effort to evade the principle of justice and allow the perpetrators to go unpunished. This time the whitewashing goes under the name of friendship."

It’s a view that is shared by many East Timorese. In East Timor — now also often referred to as Timor-Leste — some sectors even believe that former resistance leaders in the government share Indonesia’s eagerness in blocking a possible international crimes tribunal. Aside from scrutinizing crimes purportedly done by pro-Indonesian militia and the Indonesian military, they say a tribunal could also dig up allegations of crimes committed by the local guerilla movement during Indonesia’s more than two decades of occupation of East Timor.

	EAST TIMOR President Jose Ramos Horta in his house in Dili. [photo by Joseph Laban]

Interviewed earlier this year, East Timor President Jose Ramos Horta vehemently denied these allegations. "It has absolutely nothing to do with that," said the Nobel Peace laureate. He also noted that the findings of a UN-sponsored commission that "only 20 percent of the crimes during the occupation were committed by the resistance.''

Dionisio Babu Soares, CTF’s Timor-Leste co-chairman, meanwhile professed to be "amazed" by the criticisms directed at the Commission. "This is a method that has been used by other commissions around the world but has not been criticized," he said, comparing the CTF to the South African Truth and Reconciliation Commission. But he admitted that unlike its South African counterpart, the CTF "is not mandated to use a prosecutorial approach."

"If you are asking me as a lawyer, of course a formal court is the most credible,” he also said, when asked if he would support an international tribunal. “But if you are asking me as a commissioner exercising the mandate given to me by my president, I think the best way to resolve this case is through reconciliation and a non-prosecutorial approach."

Ramos Horta had a much simpler response. "I will not support the call for an international tribunal," he said. According to the East Timor president, his country and Indonesia are "new democracies" that cannot afford an overdrawn process that such a tribunal would entail. He also said that there is a host of pragmatic considerations for his young government. ''Justice,” said Ramos Horta, “cannot be blind to the social, economic, and political situations."

Indonesia is not only East Timor’s giant next-door neighbor; it is also its main trading partner. But Indonesian and East Timorese political analysts and human-rights advocates pointed out that East Timor can ill afford reinforcing the perception that it suffers from a “judicial deficit.” Which is, they said, what Wiranto’s testimony that sweltering Saturday afternoon last May in Jakarta seemed to demonstrate.