Meidyatama Suryodiningrat, Jakarta – The casualty list piled into the newsroom like a high-scoring sports box line. Even in Jakarta little imagination was needed to hear the distant screams as gloomy dispatches filled the day.

For a confused Indonesian nation, 1999 was another bad dream to compound the ongoing calamity of the year prior. For Timorese, those early weeks in September 1999 were a living nightmare.

Nine years after post-referendum violence swept through East Timor, two-and-a-half years after the Commission of Truth and Friendship (CTF) began its work, Indonesia must come to terms with something it already knew but never accepted: Its forces committed "organized gross human rights violations" in the former province in 1999.

News of the commission's findings have trickled in several days ahead of the report's official release in Bali today. Whatever the conclusion, many will not be happy.

For victims and their families, the absence of retributive justice is scorn on the pain already suffered. Parties felt "accused" – despite none being named – and the egoist nationalist will feel an affront to pride.

Despite a restrictive mandate, the commission still produced a candid, progressive yet prudent report to serve the goal of restorative justice sought by the governments of Indonesia and Timor Leste.

Likely missing from the headlines will be the political context which the commission so deftly identified as helping permeate the violence.

"Events cannot be understood in isolation from the longer period of conflict that occurred in East Timor," said the report.

The violence "grew out of the unique political circumstances that were created by Indonesia's transition from an authoritarian to democratic state" where "there was no effective mechanism for abandoning the previous repressive security enforcement strategies and replacing them with new methods".

The commission conceded that while instructions were issued to prevent rights violations, these orders "did not serve as an effective mechanism to prevent such violence" for a military "still strongly influenced by legacies of the past".

The Greek playwright Aeschylus once wrote that "one's moral strength comes out of pain". The foreboding gravitas of the commission's report can be Indonesia's source of strength. There is no shame in accepting guilt.

There is indignity, however, in veiling culpability behind a whitewash of legalese and historical circumstance. Those of us who had personnel on the ground in Timor in late August 1999 – the military, civilian authorities and even the media – will remember we had more than an inkling of the impending violence. It was not a case of "if", but "when".

No words in the report should ring clearer than the call for the parties to "accept state responsibility" for the violations.

If Indonesians wonder how a seemingly cultured nation could foster brutality, then the report is a window into the mores of authoritarianism.

The report shines a light on the nation's darker side that Indonesians often choose to ignore: On structures that need correction but refuse intervention, and the subterfuge nuance of "military occupation" and "military presence".

Hence the need to underscore the commission's exhortation to promote "a culture of accountability" within the state's tools of coercion (military, police).

Timor Leste Prime Minister Kayrala Xanana Gusmao has said his nation has to be "strong enough to put the past in the past".

The question for Indonesia is whether it is willing to face its own past. As the report is disseminated, public reaction, or lack thereof, will speak volumes of our moral courage.

What should serve as a further impetus of internal reform could easily twist into an outcry of nationalist chauvinism as villains pose as martyrs.

The extended delay of the commission's report is perhaps unhelpful in the present political setting.

Entering an election period when overt nationalist fervor is in vogue, it will be a test to induce change, as recommended by the commission, born out of national culpability.

If at best there is silent disregard, then the efforts of the commission to begin healing the social, political and cultural fabric will have been in vain. Eventually the report would serve only as a political solution, without a noble conclusion.

Then perhaps, Indonesia would deserve to be put before an international tribunal.

If there is truth to Edmund Burke's adage "all that is necessary for the triumph of evil is for good men to do nothing", then the report confirms we – good Indonesian men and women – did not do enough to stop brutality on people once considered kin.