Transitional Justice Forum

I was going to post something on East Timor today, but I see you got there first. :)

According to the BBC, the CAVR report has not yet been made public. I checked their web site earlier today and it isn't up. I'd expect that it will be available on the site sometime fairly soon, but there's no word on when.

The scale of what happened in East Timor can be appreciated in view of the fact that its population was about 800,000 at the time Indonesian rule ended. In other words, between 10 and 20 percent of the population were killed in the conflict. This is an atrocity on the scale of Cambodia, and it's amazing that it has received so little attention.

I agree that a war crimes tribunal is unlikely, but I wonder if the East Timor government might be making a virtue of a necessity - they really can't afford to anger Indonesia, and too much insistence on accountability would do that. I wonder if some kind of constructive solution might be possible, such as the construction of a joint memorial or financial compensation for disabled victims.

Good point there, Jonathan, about virtue and necessity...

On the other hand, it seems to me that a good part of the "art" of creating working approaches to transitional justice often lies precisely in being able to make a virtue out of necessity! One prime example of this was South Africa's TRC, which at one level was the result of a slightly unsavory political deal that the ANC was forced to make with the apartheid-era security forces on the very eve of the 1994 election-- but the genius of the ANC and of Archbishop Tutu then managed to "re-brand" the TRC into something visionary and inspiring... I am certainly prepared to be inspired by the Fretilin leaders' very similar form of magnanimity today.

Meanwhile, regarding joint Indonesian-Timorean truth-discovery efforts, as was noted in this TJF post back in August, the two governments have indeed established a "Truth and Friendship Commission", designed to reveal the truth and promote reconciliation. One would certainly hope that through its work various different kinds of reparative acts, both symbolic and perhaps also material, might be undertaken.

I know I'm a bit late to the discussion, but I would like to throw in my two cents' worth:

A truth commission really is a very different kind of exercise than a criminal mechanism... and with good reason. The two are designed very differently in order to produce two different kinds of outcomes. Indeed, I used to wonder if perhaps a truth commission was simply a lower-cost alternative to criminal justice, an accusation that was often hurled at me in the "early days" of TJ research. But I've come to realize that the two are apples and oranges. If you want Outcome A, then hold a truth commision; if you want Outcome B, then hold a trial. (Okay, it's not as easy as that, but you get my general drift.)

Of course, that raises some serious questions, as in the case of Timor-Leste, above. Does the incoming regime have some selfish reason not to want criminal prosecutions? Is the court system in the country simply unable to cope with that kind of enterprise? (Time Magazine, for example, reported on April 10, 2000, that such prosecutions would be impossible if a tribunal in Cambodia were to be established, since "only one in five judges in the country has a law degree... [and] some never finished grade school.") Do the people want to move on without a criminal tribunal, as the people in Mozambique claim? I'm not familiar enough with the situation in Timor-Leste to make any predictions. But since TJ isn't one-size-fits-all, it's just possible that this is the right decision.