New York – East Timor will have to face up to atrocities committed by the liberation movement during the 25-year independence campaign if the new nation hopes for true reconciliation and peace, its interim Foreign Minister, Jose Ramos Horta, said.
The mandate of a newly established truth commission had been extended back to 1974, when Portuguese colonial rule collapsed, partly so that human rights abuses committed by all sides and factions could be investigated, he told diplomats and human rights activists gathered at the Ford Foundation on Tuesday.
After Indonesian troops invaded and occupied East Timor in 1975, civil war raged in the territory, with the main pro-independence guerilla group, Fretilin, battling other factions and the Indonesians.
"In Fretilin-held areas of the mountains, there were gross human rights abuses", as serious as any committed by Indonesian troops or their proxy militias, Mr Ramos Horta, a co-recipient of the 1996 Nobel Peace Prize, said. In touring East Timor and talking to villagers, Mr Ramos Horta said, he was "shocked by the number of Fretilin human rights abuses" reported to him.
While East Timor's people need to examine those atrocities, it is unlikely anyone will be prosecuted or even called to confess any crimes. Most of the guerilla leaders were killed in the independence struggle, and the current Fretilin party leaders were all jailed or exiled during the worst of the violence in 1976 and 1977, Mr Ramos Horta said.
Fretilin won 57 per cent of the vote in an election last year and secured 55 of 88 seats in the assembly that will steer the territory to independence this year.
Mr Ramos Horta said he was aware of only one surviving commander accused of atrocities in those days – Alarico Fernandes, who betrayed Fretilin in 1977 and has lived in exile on an Indonesian island since.
He urged the United Nations to set up a criminal tribunal to deal with the worst abuses in East Timor, just as it sponsored tribunals for the Balkans and Sierra Leone, but said it appeared to lack the courage to do so.
East Timor's truth and reconciliation commission, expected to last at least two years, will examine violence from 1974 to 1999, when an estimated 200,000 people perished.