Justice at a crossroads in East Timor

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DILI - Justice is at the crossroads in East Timor, with the United Nations formally moving to check the impunity of those accused of war crimes committed during Indonesia's bloody withdrawal from the island in 1999 and Timorese and Indonesian leaders proposing that all such charges be dropped.

UN Secretary General Kofi Annan announced in New York on Friday that he was appointing a commission of experts to review Timor war crimes prosecutions and assess why a 1999 Security Council resolution to try those accused of war crimes has failed. He named the three experts as Justice Prafullachandra Bhagwati of India, Professor Yozo Yokota of Japan and Shaista Shameem of Fiji.

It seemed symptomatic of the world's slide into apathy over Timor atrocities that the official UN statement said the experts would "recommend possible future action over the 1999 anti-independence violence in which dozens of people were killed and hundreds of thousands fled".

Dili records show that UN lawyers have investigated more than 1,400 homicides, not "dozens", since they arrived in 2000, and have indicted various Indonesians and Timorese over the deportation of around quarter of a million people, who did not "flee", but were forced from their homeland at gunpoint.

Asia Times