SMH: East Timor's tale of misery

http://www.heraldsun.news.com.au/common/story_page/0,5478,17895753%5E663,00.html

East Timor's tale of misery

EAST Timorese President Xanana Gusmao has presented UN Secretary-General Kofi Annan with a long-awaited report documenting atrocities committed in his country as a result of Indonesia's 24-year occupation.

The 2500-page report, compiled by the Commission for Reception, Truth and Reconciliation, established that as many as 180,000 Timorese, roughly 10 per cent of the territory's population, died as a result of the Indonesian occupation. The report took more than three years of intensive work during which more than 7000 victims testified on human rights violations committed in East Timor between April 1974 and October 1999.

Speaking after his talks with Annan yesterday, Gusmao said the main objective of the report was to establish the truth of what happened and to ensure the international community acts so it does not happen again.

"We accept the results of the report as a way to heal the wounds," he said. "The figures (of casualties) can be disputed. But it is not so important to look at the figures. It is more important to look at the lessons.

"We don't advocate punitive justice, but restorative justice," said Gusmao, citing as a model South Africa, where a Truth and Reconciliation Commission exposed the brutal excesses of apartheid and for the first time gave mainly black victims a voice.

The report blamed the deaths, most of them due to hunger and illness, on the policies of Indonesia's military toward East Timor's civilian population. It also says troops used napalm against the population.

The Indonesian security forces "consciously decided to use starvation of East Timorese civilians as a weapon of war", the report said.

But yesterday Indonesia denied deliberately starving East Timorese civilians during its occupation.

"This is a war of numbers and data about things that never happened," Defence Minister Juwono Sudarsono said in Jakarta.

"How could we have used napalm against the East Timorese?" he asked. "Back then we didn't even have the capacity to import, let alone make, napalm."