[Nasional-m] Timor verdicts shows new order's game

[Ambon]

The jakarta Post
Aug. 29, 2002

Timor verdicts shows new order's game
Aboeprijadi Santoso, Radio Netherlands, Amsterdam

The controversy on the verdicts on human rights crimes committed in East
Timor in 1999 suggests that Timor's painful legacy continues to affect its
former occupying country. Indonesia needs to be "liberated" from East Timor.
Lies, after all, cannot -- and should not -- live forever.
In 1992 a Timorese politician, who worked closely with Indonesia's architect
of Timor policy, Gen. Ali Moertopo, provided an insider's view on how the
New Order prepared an aggression from West Timor in 1975. Jose Martins-III
was a warm supporter of Indonesia's cause in East Timor.
He used to talk with Gen. Moertopo and Gen. Benny Moerdani among others
about the conflict between the leftist-nationalist movement Fretilin and the
UDT. The generals wanted to create a "civil war".
"I told them, the civil-war (in August 1975) was only three days! But (the
generals) decided to tell the world that there is a civil-war in (East)
Timor when there is no (longer) civil-war at all," Martins told Radio
Netherlands in Lisbon in 1992.
Nevertheless, the idea of "civil war" -- i.e. of blowing up the conflict --
in East Timor has since proved to be an effective weapon exploited by
Jakarta and seen as "fact" by the media.
The consequences of this discourse cannot be underestimated and affect the
public sense of justice.
A descendant of a landowner family, Martins feared Fretilin might jeopardize
his interest. But, given Fretilin's popularity, he correctly assumed that
the civil war could not have lasted more than a few weeks except with help
from outside. The story of 40,000 refugees at the West Timor border was
consistent with this civil war myth.
Then the generals resorted to infiltration, persuasion, threats and war of
aggression, thereby stimulating the evolving small-scale civil-war. These
were pointedly what then president Soeharto, talking to U.S. president
Gerald Ford and his secretary of state Henry Kissinger hours before the Dec.
7, 1975 invasion, called in deceptive terms: "how to manage ... a majority
wanting unity with Indonesia."
Finally, Jakarta "justified" the invasion by arguing that Indonesia was
"invited to bring peace and order to East Timor".
The world -- including then Indonesia's repressed media -- was thus led to
believe that basically the problem was not Indonesia, but East Timor's
suffering of a chronic, widespread civil war. As the territory was
subsequently closed from the outside world for more than a decade, the New
Order effectively propagated that the tragedy was of East Timor's own
making. It served to deny the legitimacy of the Timorese resistance.
Twenty-three years later, when then president B.J. Habibie offered
independence as a second option echoes of the 1970s were visible. Instead
special forces members "using Portuguese names, acting like tourists" as in
1975, according to Martins, now the old militias were revived and the new
ones trained and armed. Jakarta quickly warned that a referendum would
ignite a "civil-war", yet finally agreed with one-man-one-vote.
A strategy of exploding the "civil war" had apparently been set in motion to
intimidate the pro-independent supporters, provoke the resistance and
sabotage the campaign presumably so as to influence the vote-outcome and the
decision of the People's Consultative Assembly on East Timor. Many violent
incidents -- more than the five cases selected for trial -- were clearly
directed at these aims.
However, the basic ideas remained -- East Timor is sick, a civil-war could
erupt any time -- with one big, crucial difference, though, i.e. that the
Army now claimed they were unable to control the Timorese militias.
With the source of the problem thus confirmed, the blame should be
apportioned accordingly i.e. to the East Timorese. As if to demonstrate
this, as early as April 1999, then defense minister and military chief Gen.
Wiranto, came to Dili pretending to act as a peace-broker between the
pro-Jakarta militias and the Falintil guerilla.
Wiranto's message -- i.e. that not the Indonesian Military (TNI), but the
militias were equal to Falintil -- served to justify that the militias
remained armed as Falintil refused to be disarmed. At the bottom of this was
the view that TNI was the sole legitimate force and Falintil simply domestic
rebels rather than an army that resisted a foreign occupation. Until today,
Jakarta never officially admits any aggression nor invasion.
The arguments and the perceptions on what happened in East Timor among the
judges and the prosecutors basically rests on this very paradigm of 1975
that still dominates the view of the political elite.
In the ad hoc tribunal on human rights, prosecutors described the various
violence incidents described as war between the two camps. As Ifdhal Kasim
of the Institute for Policy Research and Advocacy (Elsam) said, by ignoring
police or military involvement in creating the conflict, "it's not
surprising that the judges acquitted the defendants..." (The Jakarta Post,
Aug. 21, 2002)
Yet, various evidence had been abundantly published that the Army
facilitated the militias with help of local civilian authorities while the
police often acted passively.
True, neighborhoods sympathizing with pro-independent cause were also
involved in violence. However, if it were a "civil war", how could the
militias freely patrol the city with military vehicles, issuing "exit
permits," setting up road blocks, controlling ports, transporting thousands
of people, looting shops and killing pro-independent supporters?
And why -- as journalists witnessed -- were there no organized or armed
groups of pro-independent supporters on the streets or involved in clashes?
East Timor is not Balkan or Rwanda.
A group of observers led by Yeni Rosa Damayanti and Mindo Rajaguguk, who
traveled extensively in the period around the referendum, concluded that the
emergency, under the command of Gen. Kiki Syahnakri, which was imposed since
early September, provided the Army with extra leverage. With the police
sidelined, most observers and media gone, the Army joined the militias in
persecuting their targets.
Rather than a "civil war", what happened was a systematic state collusion at
various levels aiming at persecution, massacres and destruction --
resembling, not Bosnia, but New Order's 1965-1966 massacres, albeit in
smaller scale.
To suggest a "civil war" in East Timor as if the civilian authorities and
the officers were powerless is a palpable nonsense.