Global Policy Forum

Indonesia Sets Up Timor

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CNN
April 24, 2001

Indonesia is setting up a special court to try cases of human rights abuses by Indonesian troops in East Timor in 1999. Officials said President Abdurrahman Wahid has signed a decree to establish the court. The decree also provides for a separate tribunal to prosecute officers accused in the murder of dozens of anti-government demonstrators in Jakarta's Tanjung Priok port district in 1984, presidential spokesman Yahya Staquf said.


Indonesia has been under growing international pressure to prosecute war crime suspects or face the possibility of an international war crimes tribunal being set up. United Nations investigators are expected to indict as many as 400 suspects, including some top Indonesian military generals. An Indonesian government probe has prepared a list of 23 potential suspects. However, no formal charges have been filed. "The government hopes that this can speed up the process," Staquf said.

Appeal to U.N.

Wahid's move came as East Timor's spiritual leader, Bishop Carlos Belo, urged the U.N. to set up a tribunal akin to those for the former Yugoslavia and Rwanda. "What is good for Bosnia or Rwanda is also good for East Timor," Belo said in Sydney, Australia. "There must be no hiding place for political monsters such as unleashed the destruction of East Timor in 1999."

U.N. officials believe Indonesian soldiers and paramilitary thugs murdered up to 1,000 East Timorese civilians, when they rampaged through the province in the aftermath of an independence referendum in August 1999. About 80 percent of the housing and infrastructure was destroyed in the rampage that ended with the arrival of international peacekeepers a month later.

A report prepared for the U.N. penned by the former Australian consul to East Timor, James Dunn, implicated the Indonesian army of tolerating violence against pro-independence civilians in East Timor. The report was prepared for U.N. prosecutors conducting their own investigation in East Timor. The former Portuguese colony was under Indonesian military occupation since 1975.


More Information on East Timor

 

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