Washington – US officials do not want a planned Indonesian-East Timorese commission on 1999 violence in East Timor to supplant UN efforts to determine if justice has since been done, a senior US official said on Wednesday.

Indonesian gangs supported by elements in the Indonesian army killed about 1,000 East Timorese during a 1999 rampage triggered by a referendum in which East Timor voted to break free from Jakarta after 24 years of brutal military rule. Few people have since been held accountable.

An Indonesian special human rights court convicted six of 18 Indonesian military and police officers charged in connection with the violence, but five convictions were later overturned and an appeal of the sixth is pending.

Indonesia and East Timor announced plans on Tuesday to create a joint Commission on Truth and Friendship in the hopes of heading off a possible UN review to decide whether justice was done after the violence.

"We don't think that [the joint commission] can be the sole vehicle," a senior State Department official, who asked not to be named, told reporters. "They haven't really led to anything. They perhaps were undertaken in the right spirit but they haven't led to much in the way of results," the official said of Indonesian efforts to bring those responsible to justice.

Mainly Catholic East Timor became independent in May 2002 after 2-1/2 years of UN administration, closing the book on centuries of Portuguese colonial rule and its later occupation by Indonesia, the world's most populous Muslim nation. US Secretary of State Colin Powell met the Indonesian and East Timorese foreign ministers on Wednesday to discuss ways of coordinating the work of the proposed joint commission with the UN effort under consideration by UN Secretary-General Kofi Annan.

After the talks with Indonesia's Hassan Wirajuda and East Timor's Jose Ramos-Horta, State Department spokesman Richard Boucher said there was a danger the joint panel may undercut a UN probe but Washington hoped the work could be coordinated.

"Both initiatives are valuable," he told reporters. "Our view is that working it together with the UN and with them we can coordinate these things."