Lisbon – East Timor will not seek compensation from Indonesia after the publication of a report blaming Jakarta for over 100,000 deaths during its occupation, East Timor's Prime Minister Mari Alkatiri said in an interview Monday.

"Collective justice should prevail over individual justice. We can't now find among the people victim A, B or C," he said in an interview published in daily Portuguese newspaper Diario de Noticias. "If the entire people suffered to gain independence, the compensation for this suffering was independence," he added.

Last month East Timor's President Xanana Gusmao submitted an independent report to the United Nations which concluded Indonesia killed up to 180,000 East Timorese through massacres, torture and starvation during its 24-year military occupation.

The report of more than 2,000 pages was the fruit of over three years of work during which more than 7,000 victims testified on human rights violations committed in East Timor between April 1974 and October 1999.

Some human rights campaigners have urged the government of East Timor to draw greater attention to the report's accusations of human rights violations by Indonesia but Alkatiri said the East Timorese people had to avoid dwelling on the past.

"What would be the goal of this? Create new conflicts with Indonesia? What would be the point of that?," he asked.

Indonesia annexed East Timor with the tacit approval of major powers in 1975, shortly after former colonial master Portugal abandoned the territory amid worsening civil war.

But the brutality of the occupation eventually turned world opinion against Jakarta and led to a UN-backed vote for independence in 1999. East Timor gained full independence in May 2002, becoming the world's newest nation, after more than two years of UN stewardship.