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Weekend
Edition
November 11 / 12, 2006
Fifteen Years Later
East
Timor Massacre Victims Still Waiting for Justice
By BEN TERRALL and
JOHN M. MILLER
This November 12 marks the fifteenth
anniversary of the 1991 massacre at the Santa Cruz cemetery in
Dili, East Timor (also called Timor-Leste).
On that day, Indonesian soldiers
killed at least 271 East Timorese civilians nonviolently marching
to demand a UN-supervised referendum after years of illegal Indonesian
military occupation.
U.S. reporter Allan Nairn,
who joined the marchers and had his skull fractured by a soldier
wielding a U.S.-supplied M-16, wrote later: "The troops
fired no warning shots and did not tell the crowd to disperse.
They . . . raised their rifles to their shoulders all at once
and opened fire."
By the time of the Santa Cruz
massacre, more than 100,000 East Timorese had died as a result
of the U.S.-backed occupation. But the testimony and documentation
of Nairn, Amy Goodman and other foreign journalists who survived
Santa Cruz exposed the brutality of Indonesian military occupation
to the outside world, and helped spark a campaign in the U.S.
to block military aid to Jakarta.
East Timor finally achieved
independence after a hard-won referendum in 1999, a process steeped
in yet more Indonesian military mass killings. Under intense
U.S. grassroots pressure, the Clinton administration suspended
all military assistance to Jakarta when the Indonesian military
responded to the pro-independence vote by laying waste to East
Timor in September 1999, and Congress subsequently legislated
continuing limits on aid. But after seven years and countless
processes, Indonesia, Timor-Leste and the United Nations have
failed to achieve accountability for crimes against humanity
committed between 1975 and 1999. This impunity has led some in
Timor-Leste to believe that they will not be held accountable
when they commit violent crimes.
Timor-Leste's people still
live with their memories of Indonesia's quarter-century of illegal
military occupation; the majority of them experienced this brutality
first-hand or have victims in their immediate families. This
unhealed mass trauma continues to strongly influence the reactions
of Dili residents, both in their decisions to flee en masse during
armed battles between police and military this past April and
in the fact that many still refuse to return home. The secrecy
and self-reliance essential to the independence struggle needs
to be transformed into transparency, accountability, and open
debate.
The majority of East Timorese,
and their supporters internationally, continue to view an international
tribunal to pursue Indonesian generals and political leaders
who organized and ordered the worst atrocities during the occupation
as the only resolution for the current situation of impunity
and post-traumatic stress. A credible international tribunal
can demonstrate that impunity will not prevail, as indicated
by a May 2005 UN Commission of Experts report on 1999 human rights
violations in East Timor. That report concluded, "The Commission
wishes to emphasize the extreme cruelty with which these acts
were committed, and that the aftermath of these events still
burdens the Timorese society. The situation calls not only for
sympathy and reparations, but also for justice. While recognizing
the virtue of forgiveness and that it may be justified in individual
cases, forgiveness without justice for the untold privation and
suffering inflicted would be an act of weakness rather than of
strength."
Timor-Leste's truth commission,
the Commission for Reception, Truth and Reconciliation in East
Timor (known by its Portuguese initials, CAVR) came to equally
strong conclusions on the need for concrete justice. The product
of three years of extensive research by dozens of East Timorese
and international experts, the CAVR report (called "Chega!",
Portuguese for "Enough!") recommended reparations to
East Timorese victims from countries -- including the U.S. --
which backed the occupation, and from corporations which sold
weapons to Indonesia during that period.
An East Timorese involved in
disseminating the report throughout the country remarked, "It
is clear that many in the community who took part in seminars
on Chega! over the last two months saw a strong connection between
the findings and recommendations of Chega! and the re-emergence
of violence and instability. Many asked why East Timorese leaders
have failed to learn the lessons of the past."
Unfortunately, the Bush Administration
refuses to learn past lessons. It is willing to give the Indonesian
military nearly anything, sacrificing justice in the name of
fighting terrorism. On November 22, 2005, the State Department
announced, "it is in the national security interests of
the United States to waive conditionality pertaining to Foreign
Military Financing (FMF) and defense exports to Indonesia."
Senator Patrick Leahy (D-VT), author of Congressional restrictions
this maneuver overrode, called the move "an abuse of discretion
and an affront to the Congress. To waive on national security
grounds a law that seeks justice for crimes against humanity
-- without even obtaining the Indonesian government's assurance
that it will address these concerns -- makes a mockery of the
process and sends a terrible message."
Given the US electorate's strong
rejection of Bush's politics of empire in the recent congressional
elections, there now exists the potential to change that message
and to once again move toward a process of justice for the many
victim's of U.S.-backed Indonesian military crimes in East Timor,
including those at Santa Cruz 15 years ago.
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