NZ backs Timorese tribunal

By KEVIN TAYLOR

The Government is backing calls by human rights groups for an international tribunal to try those responsible for 1999 crimes in East Timor.

Foreign Minister Phil Goff yesterday criticised an Indonesian appeal court's decision to overturn convictions against four Indonesian security officers, one of them a major-general, who had been convicted by the country's Ad Hoc Tribunal.

The appeal court also halved to five years the sentence of militia leader Eurico Guterres.

Mr Goff said the decisions were a blow to those seeking justice for the terrible abuses during and after the Timor independence vote. International peacekeepers, including New Zealand soldiers, deployed to the country in force to stop the troubles.

Mr Goff said the United Nations was consulting concerned countries, including New Zealand, about how to respond.

"New Zealand's view is that the failure of the Ad Hoc Tribunal requires the establishment of an international crimes tribunal ... notwithstanding the opposition which might exist to this path being followed."

Mr Goff said of 18 original defendants, only two had been convicted, both of them ethnic Timorese.

The abuses came as East Timorese voted for independence from Indonesia, sparking a spree of destruction and killing by pro-Jakarta forces in which up to 1500 people died.

Maire Leadbeater, of the Auckland-based Indonesia Human Rights Committee, said the trials had been "an unequivocal travesty" of justice.