Indonesia: President, establish rights tribunals
Indonesia: President must establish rights tribunals
Human Rights Watch
New York, March 23, 2001
Human
Rights Watch today urged Indonesian
President
Abdurrahman Wahid to issue a presidential decree
establishing
special human rights courts.
On March
21, Indonesia's parliament formally approved special courts
to
prosecute the 1999 crimes in East Timor, as well as
cases stemming from
a massacre by security forces of
Muslim protesters in Tanjung Priok, the
port area of
Jakarta, in 1984. Under Indonesian law,
establishment of
the courts now awaits only action by the
president.
"The parliament's action removes a huge obstacle to
justice, but the
real question is when we will see
actual trials begin," said Sidney
Jones, Asia director
of Human Rights Watch. "Not only do we need the
President to issue a decree, but we also need the
Attorney-General to
issue indictments and the Supreme
Court to appoint judges for the new
courts. Unless all
of that happens quickly, skepticism about Indonesia's
will to confront the military about human rights abuse
is just going to
grow deeper."
Indonesian justice
groups have long demanded a tribunal for the crimes
committed in East Timor after the independence
referendum there on
August 30, 1999. In January 2000,
separate international and Indonesian
commissions of
inquiry concluded that systematic rights abuses had taken
place, and that Indonesian military officials and the
militia leaders
they organized and trained were
responsible for the crimes. The
international inquiry
team, set up at the request of United Nations
Secretary-General Kofi Annan and under the auspices of
the U.N. High
Commissioner for Human Rights, called for
an international tribunal to
be set up to try the
crimes.
The international community ultimately did not
push for immediate
establishment of such a tribunal,
deferring instead to Indonesia's
assertion that it would
see that justice be done in Indonesian courts.
Indonesia's failure until now to take meaningful steps
toward
prosecution of the crimes has led to renewed
calls for an international
tribunal, a demand likely to
be echoed in coming weeks at the annual
meeting of the
U.N. Commission for Human Rights in Geneva.
The Tanjung
Priok incident, in which troops opened fire on Muslim
protestors in 1984, has long been a symbol in Indonesia
of the alleged
second-class status and political
powerlessness of Muslim groups.
Although the
overwhelming majority of Indonesia's citizens are Muslim
and the country is today led by a moderate Muslim
cleric, Muslim
political forces were marginalized during
the first two decades of
Soeharto's rule. Since the
ouster of Soeharto in May 1998, pressure has
mounted for
justice for the Tanjung Priok crimes.
A copy of the
letter to Indonesian President Abdurrahman Wahid can be
found at http://www.hrw.org/press/2001/03/indo0323.htm#letter
For more information on Indonesia, please see:
Indonesia:
Transition and Regional Conflict (HRW Focus Page) at
http://www.hrw.org/campaigns/indonesia/index.htm