GEAROID KILGALLEN,
Sir, - I want to appeal to our Government to give its strongest support to Human Rights High Commissioner Mary Robinson's call for an international tribunal to bring to justice those guilty of the murder and mayhem which devastated East Timor during and after the August 1999 referendum conducted by the UN.
Under international pressure Indonesia did set up a "special human rights court", which was no more than a sham. Recent verdicts were a pure whitewash, as theformer East Timor chief of police and five of his senior officers were acquitted, while in an obvious sop to international opinion, the governor of East Timor at the time of the massacres in question, himself a Timorese, was given a derisory sentence of three years.
These results were clearly signalled at the start of the trials in Jakarta last March, when the head of the Indonesian army and his counterpart in the navy publicly attended the court hearing, to "give moral support to the accused".
It is, of course, common knowledge that the hard men of the Indonesian armed forces are the real power throughout the archipelago.
May I also draw the Government's attention to West Papua where Indonesian military are conducting another East Timor type operation? What happened in East Timor is being replicated in West Papua, where 10 per cent of the indigenous population have been killed since Indonesia took over the territory in 1963. Just as they did in East Timor, the army of occupation rape the women, murder ad lib, and have bombed whole villages.
Indonesia and its allies in international big business are robbing the rightful owners of the extensive mineral deposits and the hardwood stocks in which West Papua is rich. It is a repeat performance, but one which Jakarta has to date managed to keep largely under wraps. I hope that our Government, which played such a strong and creditable role with regard to East Timor, will play an equally forceful role in the matter of West Papua. - Yours, etc.,
GEAROID KILGALLEN,
Dun Laoghaire,
Co Dublin.