| The Australian
Ex-governor Jailed for Timor Carnage
By Sian Powell, Jakarta correspondent
July 19, 2004
INDONESIA has jailed its first ringleader of human rights atrocities
in the
East Timor carnage of 1999.
Former East Timor governor Abilio Soares originally was convicted
in 2002
of gross crimes against humanity.
He has consistently maintained his innocence and blamed the Indonesian
armed forces and their militia proxies for the bloody violence.
"I realise I am only a scapegoat in this case," he said
on Saturday, before being taken to Jakarta's Cipinang prison. "I
believe the world understands that military and police officers
should be held responsible for the riots in East Timor."
Indonesia's Ad Hoc Tribunal on Human Rights found Soares guilty
of abetting
the violence that roared through East Timor before and after the
ballot for independence and killed as many as 1500 East Timorese
and laying the
half-island to waste.
The Supreme
Court upheld the decision in April, and formally sentenced
Soares to three years in prison.
Spawned by international
pressure but widely described as a whitewash, the
ad hoc tribunal tried 18 suspects for human rights violations. Of
the
mainly military and police officers tried, it convicted six.
The Soares case
is the only tribunal conviction upheld by the Supreme Court
and, with only two more to be heard, it could be the last.
Soares has now
been accommodated in the suite of luxury cells once used by
former dictator Suharto's son, Tommy Suharto, befitting his status
as a
former governor, according to the prosecution.
Although Soares
was not found culpable of direct violence, his second-in-command
in East Timor, Rajakarina Brahmana, had told the tribunal that between
10 per cent and 20 per cent of the total provincial government's
budget in 1999 was spent on the anti-independence cause, including
paying for the militias who wreaked havoc throughout the province.
As governor,
Soares had ultimate control of the budget.
Soares also leant
support to those opposing independence. He was at a militia rally
in Dili in April 1999, where militia commander Eurico Guterres said
pro-independence leaders should be killed.
Later that day,
the militias burst into the house of opposition leader Manuel Carrascalao,
killing 12 people including his 18-year-old son.
Last Tuesday,
Central Jakarta Court permitted Soares's lawyers to submit a
request for a judicial review to the Supreme Court - his last judicial
port of call.
The new evidence,
required for the judicial review, includes testimony from two former
civil servants who worked in East Timor at the time.
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