Jakarta – Prosecutors of the United Nations Transitional Administration in East Timor (UNTAET) have launched cases against three men accused of 27 crimes against humanity during a violent campaign against pro-independence supporters in 1999.
The defendants are pro-Indonesia militia commanders Joao Franca da Silva and Jose Cardoso Ferreira and former Guda village chief Sabino Gouveia Leite, UNTAET said in a statement Tuesday.
"For the people of Lolotoe the face of terror, the face of murder and the face of persecution are indeed the faces of the three accused before you," lead prosecutor Essa Faal said.
Da Silva and Ferreira, commanders of the Kaer Metin Merah Putih militia, are accused of illegal imprisonment, murder, torture, rape, persecution and inhumane treatment of civilians in Lolotoe district near the border with Indonesian West Timor. Leite is accused of being an accomplice in the offences committed by the militia and the Indonesian armed forces.
Faal said prosecutors would show that the three, with local military help, orchestrated a campaign to arrest and abuse pro-independence supporters and their families. They were bent on terrorising the people of the district to discourage them from voting for independence in the ballot on August 30, 1999. About 80 percent eventually voted to split from Indonesia.
In the months surrounding the vote, pro-Jakarta militias backed by the Indonesian military went on a bloody rampage. They killed hundreds of people, burned towns to the ground, destroyed 80 percent of the former Portuguese territory's infrastructure and forced or led more than a quarter of a million villagers into Indonesian-ruled West Timor.
Two others named in the indictment – the armed forces commander of Lolotoe, Second Lieutenant Bambang Indra, and Francisco Noronha, an Indonesian civil servant – are still at large and believed to be in West Timor. The Lolotoe case is the second of 10 priority cases to be tried by the Special Panel for Serious Crimes in East Timor.
Indonesia, under international pressure to bring offenders in East Timor to justice, is scheduled separately to start on March 14 its first trial of army, police and civilian officials accused of gross rights violations in 1999.