East Timor PM Wants Intl Tribunal To Try Indonesian Officers

DILI, East Timor, May 30 (AP)--The prime minister Friday called for the
establishment of an international tribunal in a neutral country to try
Indonesian military officers for the bloodshed that swept East Timor when
it voted to break from Jakarta in 1999.

Mari Alkatiri also criticized the trials of 18 senior Indonesian officials
in Jakarta over their alleged roles in the violence, which left up to 2,000
people dead.

"I am not satisfied (with the Jakarta trials)," he told reporters after
meeting with President Xanana Gusmao. "They are like a piece of theater."

The Jakarta trials, which followed intense international pressure on
Indonesia to prosecute those responsible, have so far acquitted 12 suspects
and convicted five, who got sentences from three to 10 years.

Alkatiri's comments will likely cheer local and foreign rights activists,
who have also criticized the Jakarta trials and called on Gusmao to push
for the prosecution of the Indonesian officials in an international war
crimes tribunal.

Alkatiri said there was "an obligation to establish an international
tribunal in a neutral country to punish and bring to justice the
perpetrators." He didn't elaborate.

Alkatiri said he and several ministers were traveling to Jakarta on June 10
and would discuss the issue of an international tribunal with President
Megawati Sukarnoputri.

Indonesian troops and their militia proxies destroyed much of East Timor
and killed up to 2,000 people before and after a U.N.-sponsored
independence referendum in 1999.

Gusmao has said that maintaining ties with its giant neighbor and former
occupying power are more important than pursing justice for those accused
in the violence, which only stopped when international peacekeeping troops
arrived in East Timor.

Prosecutors in the capital Dili are pursuing their own war crimes trials.
They have indicted nearly 250 people, including the former chief of the
Indonesian military, Gen. Wiranto. Thirty people - mostly former militiamen
- have been convicted.

Indonesia has said it won't send any officers to Dili to stand trial. It is
unlikely to agree to cooperate with an international tribunal unless
foreign governments and the United Nations put intense pressure on it to do so.

Jakarta convened the trials in Jakarta to head off an international drive
to set up a U.N. war crimes trial for East Timor akin to those for
ex-Yugoslavia and Rwanda.