Subject: WP: Indon Military Tries To Play Down E.
Timor Killings
Date: Sat, 25 Sep 1999 09:58:24 -0400Washington Post Tuesday, September 21, 1999
Indonesia Plays Down East Timor Killings
Military Chiefs Say Foreign Press Exaggerated Reports; U.N. Launches Inquiry
By Keith Richburg Washington Post Foreign Service
JAKARTA, Sept. 20—As thousands of Indonesian troops continued their speedy
withdrawal from East Timor, handing over control of the territory to an Australian-led
multinational force, Indonesia's military commander today played down reports of
executions and massacres in the territory, saying the foreign press had exaggerated the
violence.
"The number of victims that we have recorded since the announcement of the result
of the referendum is roughly in the nineties," Gen. Wiranto, commander of the armed
forces, told parliament today.
Human rights groups and diplomats said thousands may have been killed during the two
weeks since the results of a referendum were announced. In the referendum, East Timorese
voted overwhelmingly for separation from Indonesia. Mary Robinson, the U.N. human rights
commissioner, has launched an inquiry into what she called a "well-planned and
systematic policy of killings, displacement [and] destruction of property."
But Wiranto dismissed the reports of mass killings. "It is not the tens of
thousands, or hundreds of thousands, as reported by the foreign media," he said.
Another top commander, Lt. Gen. Susilo Bambang Yudhoyono, rejected the allegation that war
crimes had been committed in East Timor and said the violence there was nowhere near as
bad as other recent tragedies in Africa and the Balkans.
"I am worried of opinion being formed in the international community that what
happened in East Timor is a great human tragedy, ethnic cleansing or a large-scale crime,
when in reality, it is not," said Yudhoyono, chief of territorial affairs for the
military and a close confidant of Wiranto.
"I have been stationed in Bosnia," he told reporters after the parliamentary
session. "Please do not picture that what happened in East Timor is as bad as the
human tragedies in Rwanda, Somalia, Bosnia and Kosovo."
The extent of the killing is one of the largest unanswered questions about East Timor,
and one that will immediately face the multinational intervention force as they begin
fanning out beyond the capital of Dili and into other towns and villages--particularly in
the west--that have been closed to most foreigners since the Aug. 30 referendum.
Besides securing the territory from marauding militiamen and opening supply routes for
the delivery of badly needed relief aid to the hundreds of thousands of people displaced
by the violence, the troops also will search for evidence that could be used in any
possible international criminal trials.
U.N. officials said they believe at least 25 people were killed on Sept. 6, when
militiamen attacked the house of Dili's Catholic Bishop Carlos Belo, where thousands of
displaced people had gathered. Local newspapers, quoting hospital sources, reported that
14 people were shot and stabbed to death on Sept 5, in an attack on a building belonging
to the Catholic diocese of Dili.
There were also accounts from people who had fled the violence, confirmed by the
Vatican, that militiamen in the town of Suai entered a church where displaced people were
being sheltered and killed scores with grenades and automatic weapons. Three priests were
the first to be slain, witnesses recounted.
But there also have been stories of survival, some involving prominent pro-independence
leaders and human rights activists. For example, Leandro Isaac, spokesman for the National
Council for Timorese Resistance (CNRT), was first reported to have been killed, but he
later called a contact on a cellular phone from a hiding place. The same now seems to be
true of David Ximenes, another prominent CNRT leader in Dili who apparently escaped the
killings.
Since the outset of the violence, it has been a consistent pattern by top Indonesian
officials to play down the extent of the chaos in East Timor and blame outsiders, such as
the press and foreign governments, for exaggerating it.
On Sept. 5, the day the worst violence erupted, Wiranto and Foreign Minister Ali Alatas
briefly visited Dili and met with U.N. officials at the airport. During that session, U.N.
officials outlined what they said were eyewitness accounts that an American U.N. police
officer was shot and wounded by a uniformed Indonesian policeman from the police mobile
brigade, known as Brimob, who opened fire on a U.N. convoy. Illinois state trooper Earl
Candler was shot by Indonesian troops in the town of Liquica.
Alatas's reaction, said a source, was to become angry, shouting: "Those are very
serious allegations!"
During the first days of martial law, Alatas and military officials in Jakarta insisted
that new emergency powers they had decreed to maintain order were working. But U.N.
officials and journalists huddled in the besieged U.N. compound reported only a worsening
of the situation.
There have been countless eyewitness accounts of militiamen, soldiers and Indonesian
Brimob officers working openly together--looting houses in Dili, helping herd displaced
people from Belo's seaside compound onto waiting trucks, even joining to steal cars from
an abandoned U.N. compound in full view of foreigners.
But today, Maj. Gen. Sudrajat, an army spokesman, said the military "has nothing
to do with the pro-integration groups at all. . . . This point should be made clear."
The militias are known as "pro-integration" because they favor East Timor's
continued integration into Indonesia, rather than independence.
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