Dana Priest and Peter Slevin – The State Department has decided to put a half-dozen current and former Indonesian military officers, including a leading presidential candidate, on a watch list of indicted war criminals, effectively barring them from entering the United States, according to US government officials.
The list includes Gen. Wiranto, the former head of the armed forces who hopes to lead the country, and whom the Defense Department once considered a reform-minded professional. He and the others on the watch list were indicted last year on war crimes charges by a special UN tribunal. The United Nations is investigating the 1999 violence that left 1,500 East Timorese dead in the days surrounding a referendum on East Timor independence from Indonesia.
A subsequent Indonesian ad hoc tribunal refused to investigate or try the officers, and nearly all other lower-level Indonesian police and army personnel charged with human rights abuses in East Timor have been acquitted.
The refusal to prosecute has angered State Department officials, who believe the tribunal disregarded the evidence. The decision to deny those individuals visas to enter the United States was an attempt to show the administration's disapproval, one official said.
"Had there been a generalized perception that the prosecution was vigorous and a reasoned judgment was made," the visa process "would have been looked at in a different light," said one government official involved in the deliberations.
The decision comes as the Bush administration has vastly increased its ties with Indonesia's military and security forces to track down suspected terrorists. At the same time, the US government is pressuring the Indonesian military to cooperate with an FBI investigation of an attack on Americans, including two teachers who were killed, in August 2002, in Papua, an Indonesian province.
An FBI team recently returned from its third trip to Indonesia only partly satisfied with the cooperation of Indonesian authorities. Meanwhile, Patsy Spier, the widow of one of the teachers, met recently with FBI Director Robert S. Mueller III and Deputy Defense Secretary Paul D. Wolfowitz. Both officials, she and other US officials said, assured her they would continue to aggressively pursue the investigation to find the killers.
Eight Americans were wounded in the assault that claimed the teachers' lives. Their vehicle was ambushed on an isolated mountain road in Papua controlled by the military and a US mining company, PT Freeport Indonesia. State Department officials and an Indonesian police investigator have said the preponderance of evidence points to military involvement in the ambush.
The Indonesian military has a long history of human rights abuse. After Suharto, the US-backed authoritarian leader, was driven from power in 1998, Wiranto was viewed by the Defense Department as a reform-minded general who would turn the military into a professional organization subject to civilian control. He has asserted he did not know about or direct the East Timor killings.
The names will be added to a State Department watch list. None has applied to enter the United States, but if they do, their names will pop up on the consular affairs computers, and their requests will be automatically subject to further investigation, a State Department official said. But several officials pointed out that it would be highly unusual for the United States to give a visa to someone indicted for serious war crimes.