| Subject: IPS: ECOSOC
Endorses Probe into Timor Rights Violations RIGHTS-EAST
TIMOR: ECOSOC Endorses Probe into Human Rights Violations By Jim Wurst
UNITED NATIONS, Nov 18 (IPS) - The UN's Economic and Social
Council (ECOSOC), in a highly divisive vote, has endorsed the decision of the UN Human
Rights Commission to send a team to East Timor to investigate human rights violations.
With this last bureaucratic matter settled, the team,
headed by Sonia Picado of Costa Rica, is scheduled to leave for East Timor this weekend.
The decision was immediately welcomed here by Timorese
leader Jose Ramos-Horta, who declared: "There has to be an assignment of
responsibility to the military people who destroyed our country."
The ECOSOC vote was 27-10 with 11 abstentions. Indonesia
and all its Asian neighbors on the 53-member ECOSOC voted against the decision.
The vote was to endorse the creation of an international
commission to investigate abuses which might "constitute breaches of international
humanitarian law."
The debate on the issue this week was dominated by
complaints of procedural irregularities. Indonesia's ambassador Makarim Wibisono said the
original Human Rights Commission meeting that called for the inquiry was "legally
defective."
Ramos-Horta said, "The important thing now is not the
tone, but that the mission goes ahead." He was at the United Nations headquarters to
accept an award from the Hague Appeal for Peace, the international NGO coalition.
The team's mandate is to investigate the period from Jan.
1999, when it was decided to hold a referendum on the future of East Timor, through to the
voting on Aug. 30 and subsequent attacks on civilians by Indonesian army-backed militias,
after voters opted for independence.
The UN High Commissioner for Human Rights, Mary Robinson,
called for a commission of inquiry at a special session of the Human Rights Commission in
September.
She said at the time there was "overwhelming evidence
that East Timor has seen a deliberate, vicious and systematic campaign of gross violations
of human rights [and] an international commission of inquiry into the violations must be
established so that those responsible are brought to justice."
The UN estimates that 500,000 of Timor's population of
890,000 were effected by the violence.
The UN mission, however, will not visit West Timor, the
Indonesian province, where up to 200,000 East Timorese refugees were forced to flee.
Last week, three UN human rights officials characterized as
"devastating" the evidence that wide-spread acts of murder, rape, torture and
other violations had occurred in East Timor.
Ramos-Horta, who was awarded the Nobel Peace Prize in 1996
with Bishop Carlos Bello, was clear in distinguishing between the political and military
leadership of Indonesia.
He called the newly-elected president of Indonesia, Wahid,
"the most decent human being in Indonesia today."
On the other hand, "the military is responsible and
must be held accountable for the sake of East Timor but also for the sake of democracy in
Indonesia," he added.
Xanana Gusmao, the leader of the Timorese resistance, and
Ramos- Horta will meet Wahid in Jakarta on Nov. 30.
The UN's new representative in East Timor, Under-Secretary
General Sergio Vieira de Mello, arrived in Dili Tuesday.
He will head the UN Mission in East Timor - UNAMET - which
the Security Council established on October 25. UNAMET, Like the UN authority in Namibia
in the early 1990s, will have military, police, governance and humanitarian components.
The UN's Office for Humanitarian Affairs , meanwhile, has
issued an appeal for 199 million dollars through June 2000 to meet urgent humanitarian
needs.
Shepard Forman, a conflict resolution specialist at New
York University, said there are three urgent humanitarian issues:
."First, Indonesia needs to be convinced of the wisdom
of cooperating, allowing the East Timorese in West Timor and elsewhere in Indonesia to
freely exercise their right of return and to open safe land corridors between the refugee
camps in West Timor and East Timorese sanctuaries...
"Secondly, the Indonesian authorities and their
surrogates need to be held accountable, individual by individual, for those who have
disappeared. President Wahid has promised his cooperation. We need to make certain that
promise is fulfilled.
"Finally," Forman told an audience at Yale
Divinity School, "there is a very real risk that the good will the humanitarians have
built up will quickly be squandered if the situation on the ground does not improve
rapidly for the East Timorese." (END/IPS/jw/mk/99)
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