James Balowski – On November 27, an Indonesian court sentenced notorious militia chief Eurico Guterres to 10 years in prison for crimes committed during the violence in East Timor following the 1999 referendum for independence.
The judge said that on April 7, 1999, Guterres instructed hundreds of his militia to kill pro-independence leaders. Shortly afterwards, a pro-Indonesian mob murdered 12 people sheltering at the home of an independence leader, Manuel Carascalao, in Dili. "The judges find the defendant guilty of grave human rights violations and crimes against humanity", Judge Herman Hutapea said.
Indonesian prosecutors had sought the minimum sentence of 10 years for Guterres. The maximum penalty would have been death.
Guterres is the eighth of 18 suspects to be tried by the human rights court and the second to be found guilty. Six police and military officers were acquitted on charges similar to those faced by Guterres. The province's former governor, Abilio Soares, was found guilty and jailed for three years.
The United Nations has estimated that post-referendum violence took the lives of at least 1000 civilians and 250,000 were forcibly deported to West Timor. A number of reports – including one by Indonesian's human rights commission (Komnas-Ham) – have established that the militia were created and supported at the highest levels of the Indonesian military (TNI).
Hendardi, an Indonesian human rights activist, told Associated Press on November 28 that Guterres had been "sacrificed" to protect the military tops. "They are untouchable by law", he said.
Sidney Jones, from the International Crisis Group think tank, pointed out on Radio Australia on November 28: "There was nothing in the verdict that suggested that the militia led by Eurico Guterres was created, funded, equipped and so on by the Indonesian military. The whole state role in the violence in East Timor has dropped [out of] the picture." The November 28 South China Morning Post reported that the trials "have become a chance for the military to yet again rewrite history by claiming that the violence which destroyed [East Timor] three years ago was the result of warring Timorese civilians and that the armed forces were helpless to stop it".
Although the attorney-general's office had been provided with comprehensive evidence by Komnas-Ham, as well as UN prosecutors, that proved that the militia were created, trained and backed by the TNI, prosecutors used little of it.
The investigations and trials of those responsible for the terrorism committed against the people of East Timor stand in stark contrast with the investigation into the October 12 Bali bombings, which has resulted in the speedy arrest of a number of the alleged perpetrators. This success – which the international media has attributed to the high level of cooperation between the Indonesian and Australian police – fits neatly into Canberra's moves to reestablish military ties with Indonesia.
On a number of occasions recently, defence minister Robert Hill has said that Australia is considering resuming military links with Indonesia's notorious Kopassus special forces. Kopassus was at the forefront of the violence in East Timor and has recently been implicated by Indonesian police and the FBI in the killing of US foreign nationals at the Freeport mine in West Papua on August 31.
Unlike the Bali investigation, the Freeport investigation (led by Made Mangku Pastika, who also headed the Bali case) has stalled on the grounds that it must be handled by the military.