Tony Hotland, Jakarta – Establishing a Truth and Reconciliation Commission to probe and resolve past human rights abuses here is unnecessary, Vice President Jusuf Kalla says.

In a statement Friday, which is likely to provoke a strong reaction from rights activists, Kalla said he could not think of any human rights cases that needed to be resolved through reconciliation.

The 2004 law on the establishment of commission requires it to investigate past human rights violations between 1945 and 2000. One of the commission's main objectives is to reexamine past conflicts and reconcile victims of abuse with the perpetrators.

Kalla said establishing the commission would cast Indonesia internationally as a country with similar problems to South Africa, one of the first countries to set up a such a body following the end of the apartheid regime there.

"In South Africa, there were starkly opposing opinions – like black and white – among different groups. I don't feel that such a situation has occurred in Indonesia," he said.

Kalla said the bloodletting following the aborted Gestapu coup in 1965, in which tens of thousands of Indonesians were murdered, was now 40 years old. "If it's the Gestapu case, it's been 40 years, and I wonder if there are things that still needed to be reconciled. I don't know who (to seek the truth from)," he said.

Meanwhile, Indonesia's most recent internal conflict, between the Indonesian Military (TNI) and Free Aceh Movement (GAM), had already been settled. "If it's about GAM, we've already settled it and reconciled," Kalla said, referring to the August peace deal signed between GAM and government in Helsinki.

The government was supposed to establish the commission by an April 2005 deadline – the month the selection team to pick commission members was set up. The team then screened 42 candidates and submitted them to President Susilo Bambang Yudhoyono in August.

More than five months later, Yudhoyono has yet to establish the commission because of what his aides say is his "tight schedule". Critics have slammed the government for dragging its feet on the issue, and suggested the President is giving into political pressure.

Yudhoyono is a retired general from the Army – one of the institutions at the center of many alleged human rights abuses during the authoritarian Soeharto era. Kalla, meanwhile, leads Soeharto's old Golkar Party, which is still the home of many former New Order loyalists.

Institute for Policy Research and Advocacy (ELSAM) director Ifdhal Kasim said Kalla's statement showed the government lacked the political will to resolve past human rights cases. It was also a clear sign that the government misunderstood the essence of the commission, which was primarily aimed at establishing the truth of rights abuses, he said.

The House of Representatives should summon the President and asked him why the government had broken the law by not establishing the commission by the deadline, Ifdhal said.