Jakarta – An international rights group on Saturday welcomed Indonesia's naming of 19 suspects in the violence that ravaged East Timor after its independence vote last year, but said "serious obstacles" remained in bringing them to justice.
"The whole prosecution is still on shaky legal ground," the New York-based Human Rights Watch said in a statement received here. "The problem now is the legal basis of the cases," Rights Watch's deputy Asia director, Joe Saunders said.
The 19 – whose status was changed on Saturday by the attorney general's office from "provisional suspects" to suspects – include three Indonesian generals and 13 other government officials and lower ranking military men. The three others are little known pro-Jakarta militia men. "I think we can assume there is reasonably strong evidence against those named," Saunders said.
Conspicuous by their absence from the list were two men whose names topped an earlier list issued by a sub-commission of the National Commission on Human Rights – former covert operations chief Zacky Anwar Makarim and then-armed forces commander General Wiranto.
"The failure to list Wiranto and Zacky doesn't mean they're off the hook. It may just indicate that for the moment the attorney general doesn't have a case against them that would hold up in court." Saunders suggested that the Indonesian prosecutors "could still go after Wiranto on chain of command grounds" but only after they can first prove a case against some of the lower-ranking officers on the list.
But the crux of the legal problem, he said, lay in a controversial constitutional amendment passed by the country's highest legislative body last month which prevents past crimes being tried under new laws.
That amendment will "likely bar prosecutors from charging suspects with international crimes such as war crimes and crimes against humanity," the Rights Watch' statement said.
The prosecution was relying on a 1999 presidential decree to enable them to set up a special human rights tribunal "but Indonesia's parliament considered but did not enact the [1999] decree into law," it said. Parliament has "also failed to pass other legislation which would provide for such a tribunal," it added.
The defence lawyers for the military men charged made it clear late Friday that they were exploring the same apparent weakness of the prosecutors' grounds for action. The defence team issued a statement saying they would take immediate legal action in order to "obtain legal certainty" in light of the constutitional amendment.
The UN's chief administrator in East Timor, Sergio Vieira de Mello, on Friday indicated that the United Nations expected more suspects to be named. "It is a very good beginning, but only a beginning," de Mello said.
Topping the list of the 19 suspects was Major General Adam Damiri, formerly head of the Bali-based Udayana military command which had responsibility for East Timor.
Also named were Brigadier General Tono Suratman, Indonesian army commander in East Timor until three weeks before the August 30, 1999 vote, his replacement Colonel Noer Muis, and then Timor police chief General Timbul Salaen.
During a recent visit to Jakarta, UN High Commissioner for Human Rights Mary Robinson reiterated that the UN would call an international war crimes tribunal if Jakarta failed to bring the perpetrators of the Timor violence to justice.
The wave of violence, arson and murder launched by Indonesian-backed militias, following the September 4 announcement of the overwhelming 78.5 percent vote for independence in East Timor, left more than 600 dead and its infrastructure in ruins. More than 200,000 East Timorese were pushed into Indonesian-controlled West Timor, most of them by force.