Timor War Crimes: Trading Convictions For the Truth Fri, 4 Feb 2000 09:56:01 -0500 Via NY Transfer News * All the News That Doesn't Fit source - Joyo@aol.com Sydney Morning Herald Wednesday, February 2, 2000 Trading convictions for the truth By ED O'LOUGHLIN, Herald Correspondent in South Africa Winston Churchill is said to have envisaged the Nuremberg war crimes tribunal as a body that would select the top 100 Nazis, give them a fair trial, then hang them. Since then, no international body has been able to draw the moral line beneath a major conflict with such a rough and ready judicial process. With United Nations war crimes tribunals on Bosnia and Rwanda mired in practical and procedural realities, it has become commonplace for those seeking a moral reckoning in other conflicts - in South America, in Northern Ireland and now in East Timor - to suggest setting up a "truth commission" as a possible way to square the natural desire for justice with the harsh realities of political impunity. But the experience of South Africa, where the world's most intensive and far-reaching truth commission carried out its work, suggests that truth is uncovered only when backed by fear of punishment. And even when the truth emerges, the guilty often walk free. When the first all-race elections of 1994 ended white rule in South Africa, many people inside and outside the country expected the defenders of white supremacy would face judgment for crimes they committed against the majority of their countrymen. What they got was the Truth and Reconciliation Commission, a statutory body designed to investigate - but not punish - the myriad human rights abuses committed by all sides in the apartheid civil war. Many within Nelson Mandela's African National Congress clearly wanted a Nuremberg-style tribunal, but their hands were tied by a pre-election deal which effectively swapped the right for vengeance for a guarantee that security forces would not turn their arms against the democratic process. The National Party's outgoing president, Mr F.W. de Klerk, fought hard to prevent the setting up of any tribunal, but was forced by its electoral weakness to accept the Truth and Reconciliation Commission and its charismatic chairman, the former Anglican Archbishop of Cape Town, Dr Desmond Tutu. Born of compromise, the resulting body had the power to inquire into apartheid-era political crimes and even name perpetrators, but not to punish them. It could grant amnesty to applicants it judged had made full disclosure of their offences, but not indict those it judged to have relinquished the opportunity. >From early on, it became clear that the majority of human rights abusers within the former white establishment would be content to remain silent, trusting in the inability of the commission to wrinkle them out, and the incapacity of South Africa's overburdened judicial system to pursue them. Only about 100 of the roughly 500 amnesties granted so far have gone to former members of the apartheid security or political establishments, while the rest have been granted to supporters of the ANC and the other black freedom movements. Among these have been the Pan-Africanist Congress guerillas responsible for the 1993 machine gun attack on a Cape Town church congregation which left 11 dead, and the killers of Amy Beihl, an American exchange student lynched by a mob as she gave some black friends a lift home to their township. On the plus side, the truth commission did manage to implicate former president P.W. Botha in the 1980s bombing of a church headquarters by security police, but only on the evidence of a former police minister, Adriaan Vlok, who was forced to seek amnesty because criminal prosecutors were hot on his trail. Although the legal possibility exists, nobody in South Africa has yet been jailed as a result of evidence uncovered by the truth commission. In Indonesia, where those responsible for atrocities in East Timor still enjoy broad support from those in power, the prospect of a truth commission making life difficult for the guilty seems even more remote. ================================================================= NY Transfer News Collective * A Service of Blythe Systems Since 1985 - Information for the Rest of Us 339 Lafayette St., New York, NY 10012 http://www.blythe.org e-mail: nyt@blythe.org ================================================================= nytpac-02.04.00-09:55:59-9786