From: hrcoord@igc.org (Human Rights Coordinator)
Newsgroups: soc.rights.human
Subject: Asia Watch UN Statement
Date: 31 Jul 92 03:12:00 GMT
Nf-ID: #N:cdp:1476700301:000:14778
Nf-From: cdp.UUCP!hrcoord    Jul 30 20:12:00 1992


From: Human Rights Coordinator <hrcoord>
Subject: Asia Watch UN Statement

/* Written  5:29 pm  Jul 30, 1992 by apakabar in cdp:reg.indonesia */


Forwarded courtesy of Asia Watch:

July 27, 1992

              HUMAN RIGHTS IN EAST TIMOR

               Sidney Jones, Asia Watch

Statement to the United Nations Special Committee on Decolonization

Thank you, Mr. Chairman, for the opportunity to address this
Committee.  Asia Watch, as you know, takes no position on the
political status of East Timor. We believe, however, that the
sharp deterioration of the human rights situation there since this
Committee last convened underscores the urgency of finding a
solution which will prevent further abuses of the fundamental
rights of the East Timorese.

The November 12 massacre was the worst slaughter since the Kraras
incident of August 1983 when up to 200 villagers were killed.
Every year thereafter, we heard that the human rights situation
was improving. Atauro was emptied of its prisoners. Longterm
detainees were brought to trial and given shorter terms. A new
commander, less tolerant of abuse than his predecessors, came in.
In 1989, parts of East Timor were declared open, and it was
possible to go to and from Dili without a travel permit.

Those changes were real, but they also provided a cover for
continuing abuses. After 1989, almost every time an influential
visitor came, the Indonesian authorities would round up possible
trouble-makers beforehand as a preventive measure and afterwards
as a punitive measure. One man I spoke with in late 1990 said of
East Timor, "It used to be that we had hundreds of people in
prison. Now the whole place is a prison."

Since November 12, even the facade has been dropped. Surveillance
is tighter than ever before. Journalists have been effectively
banned from the territory since February 26, although a BBC
reporter was allowed in to cover the June elections. The alleged
masterminds of a largely peaceful demonstration, marred by just
one incident of violence, have begun serving savage prison terms
after trials where the verdicts were determined from the outset.
Freedom of expression, association, assembly and movement are
either non-existent or heavily restricted. And East Timorese
students studying in Java and Bali find the repression in their
homeland re-created in their place of study but only for them, not
for their Indonesian classmates.

What the November 12 demonstration showed beyond any doubt is that
16 years of Indonesian rule had generated resistance among a whole
generation which had never known Portuguese rule. Why? The
Indonesian government poured billions of rupiah into East Timor,
but much of the development took place benefitted the Indonesian
newcomers far more than the East Timorese, who remained very much
an underclass. This was illustrated last year in the much
publicized scheme of Yayasan Tiara, a foundation run by President
Suharto's daughter Tutut, and the Ministry of Manpower to lure
East Timorese to Indonesia with promises of training and
high-paying jobs. Two groups of young men and women found on their
arrival in Jakarta in March and June 1991 respectively that there
was no training, the jobs were menial and paid the minimum wage or
less, and that anyone who protested risked being labelled a
political activist and detained by the Indonesian military. These
schemes were not just exploitative; they were tantamount to forced
labor.

The contempt many Indonesians show for East Timorese was for me
demonstrated most vividly when I talked in Dili last February with
a priest who had gone to the scene of the massacre an hour after
it took place to see whether he could find some of his missing
seminarians. There was a truck piled with bodies, and a soldier
was dragging a wounded demonstrator toward the truck by the legs,
repeatedly kicking him in the head. When the priest tried to
intervene, the soldier said, "But Father, these are just
communists!"

Manuel Carrascalao, the elder brother of East Timorese Governor
Mario Viegas Carrascalao, also described corpses being loaded onto
trucks, saying: "I had the occasion to see one person who perhaps
only fainted, but as soon as a soldier caught sight of him and saw
that his head was moving, he pounded him with a rock.  And one
more case, I saw that there was one person still alive in the
truck full of corpses, and the soldier pulled this person down and
beat him on the head.  Then he threw him back on the truck."

This kind of treatment of wounded demonstrators is cruel and
inhuman, but it is also indicative of a more broadly shared
attitude of many Indonesians toward their East Timorese subjects.

If the East Timorese are regarded as an underclass, those with
nationalist sympathies are at the bottom of that underclass. A
double standard has been particularly visible in the justice
system. Let me give two examples. On October 28, East Timorese
motorcyclists, working for the local military, provoked a fight
with young independence supporters who had taken refuge for the
past year on the grounds of the Motael Church in Dili. In the
ensuing brawl, one of the provocateurs, Afonse Henrique, was
stabbed to death and an 18-year-old independence supporter,
Sebastiao Gomes Rangel, was shot and killed by uniformed troops
who stormed the church.

The military lost no time in rounding up 40 of Sebastiao's friends
for questioning. Of these, 18 were detained, seven throughout the
month of November.  Five of them, Bonifacio Barreto, Joao dos
Santos, Aleixo da Silva, Jacob da Silva, and Bobby Xavier, have
since been sentenced for their involvement in Afonso's death. None
of the provocateurs were arrested, and no one involved in the
death of Sebastiao Gomes Rangel has been identified.

A second case involves a series of demonstrations held in Jakarta
after the November 12 killings. On November 19, 70 East Timorese
students held a peaceful demonstration to protest the killings,
starting in front of the UN office and marching past the embassies
of Japan, Britain and Australia. All were arrested and taken to
police headquarters. A week later, 49 were released after signing
forced "confessions." The remaining 21 were held through February
together with four East Timorese arrested in Bali. By March, all
but five had been released. The five were put on trial and
eventually sentenced to terms ranging up to ten years.

But Indonesian demonstrators belonging to the national youth
organization, KNPI, and some of its affiliates held a
demonstration with about the same number of people in front of the
Australian embassy on November 20, one day after the East Timorese
protest, to criticize the Australian reaction to the massacre.
There were no arrests. Indonesians, it was clear, were encouraged
to exercise freedom of assembly when their aim was to promote a
government point of view. East Timorese, with a very different
view, were taken away and locked up.

The Indonesian government fails to recognize how deeply it is
loathed in East Timor. Governor Mario Carrascalao touched on this
after the massacre when he said in an interview, "Maybe it was our
fault. Those who are against us [i.e. the government] were in fact
able to touch the hearts of many people...If before people slept
with knives to protect themselves from those working against us,
now it is us they defend themselves against...In the last two or
three months, people in the cities have felt unhappy, so much so
that a strange thing happened. As the Portuguese visit approached,
the people were no longer afraid of Fretilin, they were afraid of
us. We have to understand why, and find the proper medicine to
cure it."

President Suharto may have thought he found the proper medicine
with the National Commission of Inquiry, the Council of Military
Honor, the prosecutions and convictions of nine soldiers and one
policeman, the sacking of senior officers, and the assignment
given General Try Sutrisno to find the bodies. But those efforts,
however unprecedented they may have been, have left most of the
major questions unanswered. To this day, we do not know the
following:

1. Who started the shooting? Who were the so-called pasukan liar
or mysterious forces already firing when the soldiers found guilty
arrived on the scene?

2. In addition to the one man found guilty of slashing a
demonstrator's ear with his M-16, who beat up, stabbed and kicked
the other demonstrators, leading to the hospitalization of at
least 49 people whose injuries were from blunt instruments and
bayonets, not bullets? Who finished off the wounded demonstrators
at the scene?

3. Who loaded bodies on to trucks, and where were they taken?  Why
have only 18 graves been found?

4. Who are the 66 people still listed as missing and what happened
to them? The National Commission report criticized inadequate
autopsy procedures and the failure of doctors to identify bodies,
but someone at the Wirahusada Military Hospital surely must know
how many bodies passed through the morgue and who took them away.

5. Who tortured the hundred of East Timorese arrested after the
massacre, and why have there been no prosecutions -- ever -- of
Indonesian soldiers accused of torture of East Timorese?

6. How much effort was made to investigate reports of executions
of eyewitnesses after the massacre?

If the failure to undertake a properly impartial investigation was
bad enough, the courts-martial of the ten men in May and June
added insult to injury by giving a maximum of 18 months to men who
deliberately fired into a crowd of unarmed civilians. Moreover,
the one man prosecuted for assault, Police Corporal Marthin Alau,
has been named in other eyewitness reports as having deliberately
killed two other demonstrators, but no investigation was made into
these accusations. The man with the slashed ear appeared as a
witness in Corporal Alau's trial; he was the only civilian witness
to appear in any of the military trials. The indictments seem to
be based solely on questioning of fellow officers and soldiers,
not of their victims.

If Governor Carrascalao's medicine is to be found, a serious
effort needs to be made to find the real perpetrators of the Dili
killings. Those people, Mr. Chairman, are still at large, and
neither President Suharto nor the military establishment appears
to be making any effort to find them.

Human rights violations in East Timor did not end with the
immediate aftermath of the massacre. More than two dozen arrests
were reported from Dili, Aileu and Taibesse -- the Jakarta Post
said "scores" -- in late February and early March in connection
with preparations for a Portuguese "peace ship" to visit East
Timor.  The ship was eventually turned back by the Indonesian
navy.

On March 9, 1992, the newspaper Suara Karya reported that 24 East
Timorese prisoners detained after the massacre who would not be
tried would be subject to an army indoctrination program in
various locations outside of Dili.  Under the pretext of
protecting these East Timorese from the putative anger of local
villagers, the 24 were to receive "special treatment," according
to Brigadier General Theo Syafei.  Syafei said that they would be
"given guidance and educated into becoming good Indonesians who
will participate in development."  Such re-education, a form of
administrative detention, has been characteristic of Aceh as well,
a region on the northern tip of Sumatra where military operations
during 1989-91 resulted in widespread executions and
disappearances of civilians.

Between May and July of this year, eight East Timorese civilians
in Dili, most of them civil servants working for the local
administration, were sentenced in unfair trials to prison terms
between 5 and two-thirds years and life for their role in planning
the demonstration of November 12.  Two men, Gregorio da Cunha
Saldanha, who was sentenced to life in prison, and Francisco
Miranda Branco, who was sentenced to 15 years in prison, were
found guilty of subversion.  The other six, whose sentences were
as high as ten years, were found guilt of spreading hatred.  Among
those convicted was Carlos dos Santos Lemos, who received a nine
year sentence for taking photographs of the November 12
demonstration with the intent of sending them abroad. Despite the
harshness of the sentences imposed, none of these civilians were
charged with any violent activity.  The charges of six of them
explicitly focused on their role in organizing a committee whose
intent it was to present a petition to the Portuguese
parliamentarian delegation.  The petition requested that Portugal
and Indonesia enter into negotiations with all parties concerned,
including East Timorese both for and against integration with
Indonesia.

This July, every East Timorese student in Bali was summoned into
the local military headquarters.  There, the students were forced
to complete a "test" drawn up by BAKORSTANAS, the security agency
chaired by Commander-General Try Sutrisno.  The questionnaire
asked for detailed biographical data, and asked specific political
questions, such as the respondent's opinions of the National
Commission of Inquiry (KPN) and Council of Military Honor (DKM)
reports on the November 12 massacre, and of the Balibo Declaration
of 1976, which Indonesia says officially proclaimed the
integration of East Timor with Indonesia.  The respondents were
also forced to give their opinions of the process of integration
so far.  The students were then summoned back for a series of oral
interviews in small groups on the same subject.  Asia Watch
regards this exercise as an attempt to restrict freedom of opinion
and differs little from similar questionnaires given Indonesian
citizens to determine their sympathy and inherited affiliation to
the banned Communist Party of Indonesia (PKI).

Mr. Chairman, this Committee has a role to play in maintaining the
pressure on Indonesia to work towards a resolution of the East
Timor problem in a way that will reduce human rights violations.
One important step is to determine why those violations are taking
place, even after all the steps taken by President Suharto in the
weeks after the massacre. In this regard, it would be useful for
the Committee to press for the report of Amos Wako, who visited
East Timor in February as a special envoy of the Secretary
General, to be made public. It would also be useful to have the
Indonesian government invite the UN Working Group on Enforced or
Involuntary Disappearances to visit East Timor to discuss how the
outstanding cases of disappearances could best be resolved and
future ones prevented. In the end, however, human rights abuses in
East Timor will only be curbed when the underlying political
causes have been addressed. Thank you, Mr. Chairman.
Xref: sparky soc.rights.human:2658 soc.culture.europe:6600 soc.culture.celtic:5227 eunet.politics:982 talk.politics.misc:35774