Human Rights Watch today welcomed the naming of nineteen suspects by Indonesian prosecutors investigating the terror and destruction in East Timor last year.
"It's a long-awaited first step, but serious obstacles remain," said Joe Saunders, deputy Asia director at Human Rights Watch. "The whole prosecution still is on shaky legal ground."
After East Timorese overwhelmingly chose independence from Indonesia in a U.N.-supervised referendum, pro-Indonesia militias armed and supplied by the Indonesian military unleashed a scorched-earth campaign that left an estimated 1,000 civilians dead and most of the island destroyed. A quarter of the population was displaced, mostly by force, to Indonesian territory in West Timor.
The list of suspects, the first to be issued by the Indonesian attorney general's office since its investigation began in February, includes fifteen current or former Indonesian military and police officials, including three generals. It does not include General Wiranto, commander in chief of the Indonesian armed forces at the time, or Zacky Anwar Makarim, Indonesia's covert operations chief who was in East Timor when the violence began and widely believed to be one of its orchestrators.
Saunders said the list appeared to have emerged from investigations into five priority cases that have been the focus of the attorney general's efforts. They include a massacre on September 6, 1999 of displaced Timorese taking refuge in a church in the border town of Suai and an earlier massacre in April 1999 of people who had sought shelter in a church compound in Liquica, just outside Dili, East Timor's capital. The named suspects include top civilian and military leaders of Suai and Liquica.
"I think we can assume there is reasonably strong evidence against those named," said Saunders. "The failure to list Wiranto and Zacky doesn't mean they're off the hook; it may just indicate that, for the moment, the attorney general doesn't have a case against them that would hold up in court." Saunders said prosecutors could still go after Wiranto on chain-of-command grounds if they can first prove a case against some of the lower-ranking commanders on the list. The problem now is the legal basis of the cases. The prosecution is proposing creating a special "human rights tribunal" and is relying on a 1999 presidential decree to do so. Indonesia's parliament considered but did not enact the decree into law and has so far failed to pass other legislation that would provide for such a tribunal. More significantly, a constitutional amendment was recently enacted, after heavy lobbying by generals, that likely will bar prosecutors from charging suspects with international crimes such as war crimes and crimes against humanity.
Human Rights Watch recently issued a briefing paper setting forth a detailed description and analysis of East Timor justice efforts to date. The briefing paper is available at: https://www.hrw.org/backgrounder/asia/timor/etimor-back0829.htm.
