Column: Reconciliation commission not enough

Collegiate Times - February 21st, 2007

Brett Morris, regular online columnist

On Monday, a commission set up by Indonesia and East Timor began its first hearing to further reconciliation between the two countries over the violence that occurred during 1999 when East Timor voted in a referendum to declare independence from Indonesia. The Commission of Truth and Friendship consists of 10 members, including experts from both countries. However, the new commission will do little to bring justice to those responsible for the crimes perpetuated during the 1999 referendum, as it lacks any real power.

One good reason Americans should care about East Timor and the pursuit of justice for victims in the country is that the U.S. government is directly complicit — and by extension American citizens are complicit —in not only the slaughter that occurred in 1999, but in a more than two-decade-long genocide against the East Timorese people. Only when U.S. citizens understand what has happened can true justice be administered and proper pressure be exerted to promote meaningful reconciliation.

In 1965, an Indonesian general named Suharto took power in Indonesia and installed a dictatorship. He proceeded to murder hundreds of thousands, perhaps millions, of landless peasants and wiped out the mass-based communist political party that had been run by the peasants. The CIA described this as "one of the worst mass murders of the 20th century," comparable to the likes of Hitler and Stalin, though they were happy to hand over lists of suspected communists to the Indonesian military.

The media, always willing to demonstrate their subservience to power, described the slaughter as "a gleam of light in Asia" and that "almost everyone is pleased by the changes being wrought" (New York Times). Suharto was praised right up through the 1990s in the U.S. media — as a "moderate," "at heart benign," "soft-spoken, enigmatic" and a "profoundly spiritual man." The Clinton administration declared that Suharto was "our kind of guy." Corporations, always the government's main constituents, quickly moved in to do business with Suharto's regime, which was described as an "investors' paradise." Chevron and Texaco ran a full page ad in the New York Times titled "Indonesia: A Model for Economic Development."

In 1975 Indonesia invaded East Timor, replacing the colonialist Portuguese. The United States and its ally Australia knew the invasion was coming and essentially authorized it. The United States and Australia reasoned that it may be possible to get a better deal on oil reserves in East Timor with a United States-backed Indonesia in power instead of allowing East Timorese independence. At this time, Indonesia was receiving over 90 percent of its arms from the United States in the name of "self-defense" for Indonesia. After the invasion, the arms flow increased at the same time that an arms suspension was declared publicly.

The United Nations Security Council ordered Indonesia to leave East Timor. This failed as then-U.N. Ambassador Daniel Patrick Moynihan explained in his memoirs that he took pride in making the United Nations "utterly ineffective in whatever measures it undertook" because the United States "wished things to turn out as they did." Although he admits that by this time 60,000 Timorese had been slaughtered in the invasion with U.S. arms, "almost the proportion of casualties experienced by the Soviet Union during the Second World War." The arms flow peaked during the Carter administration, with the ultimate death toll of East Timorese standing at about 200,000, in the worst case of genocide relative to population since the Holocaust.

Finally, in 1999, East Timor held a referendum on whether to become independent of Indonesia. The population was very courageous and voted that they wished to be independent. Indonesian militia forces backed by Jakarta moved in and killed over 1,400 people and left more than 250,000 displaced. The Clinton administration insisted that East Timor is "the responsibility of the Government of Indonesia, and we don't want to take that responsibility away from them," despite the fact that Indonesia is a U.S.-backed state under United States control. This was made evident a few days later when Clinton, under enormous international and domestic pressure, reversed the more than two-decades-long support for Indonesia's crimes in East Timor and informed the Indonesian military that the United States would no longer support their crimes. Indonesia quickly complied and immediately withdrew from East Timor. East Timor became an officially recognized state in 2002.

With the magnitude of such crimes, it is necessary to ensure justice through careful and deliberate proceedings. The current commission has no power to bring prosecutions and will have no legal ramifications whatsoever. It can only offer advice. In fact, the commission is most likely an attempt to forestall any real investigations of the crimes. A panel of experts from the United Nations has described the current commission as inadequate. Human rights groups and the Catholic Church in East Timor have described the commission as an "attempt to bury the past rather than pursue justice."

The United Nations should establish an international war crimes tribunal to truly make sure that justice is brought to the perpetrators of crimes in East Timor. Such a body would have enough power and clout to bring criminals to justice. However, it should not be forgotten, that if it was not for United States support and complicity of Indonesia for over two decades, the initial slaughters and eventual invasion could have been easily halted beforehand with a simple command from the master.