https://johnmenadue.com/prabowo-subianto-jaccuse/
In a just world, Prabowo Subianto should not be Indonesia’s new president. He ought to be facing the full strength of the law in court, if not serving time.
The closest he’s come to justice is being banned from the US by three presidents, Clinton, Bush and Obama, and from Australia and presumably other jurisdictions. That he has escaped justice is principally due to the junior status that his principal victim, East Timor, occupies in the great scheme of things.
Prabowo’s background is primarily military and most of his military career was spent in East Timor. His fitness for office should be assessed against this background.
In 1975, his former father-in-law, Suharto, invaded and occupied Portuguese Timor in violation of the UN Charter. Two truth commissions have reported on the international legal dimensions of the violent occupation. Both concluded that Indonesia and its military committed crimes against humanity and war crimes. No Indonesian military, including Prabowo, have been held accountable for these violations of international law.
The lead commission, known by its acronym CAVR, was established by the UN, adopted by the East Timorese government and co-funded by Australia. Its report, entitled Chega! (never again), records that Prabowo was active in East Timor during at least four periods over 20 years. For most of this time, he was a member or commander of Kopassus, the Indonesian military’s secretive ‘special operations’ force that specialises in the dirty work of unconventional warfare and counter-insurgency. Kopassus, reports CAVR, was the military unit associated with most human rights violations in East Timor.
Prabowo waged war in East Timor in 1976 (despite a binding 1975 UN Security Council Resolution that called on Indonesia to withdraw all its forces from the territory); 1978 when, during a time of military-induced mass starvation, his troops killed Nicolau Lobato, East Timor’s revered leader whose statue today dominates the entrance to Dili and the whereabouts of whose remains Prabowo is suspected of knowing; 1983 when his troops allegedly massacred Timorese civilians in Kraras following the breakdown of peace negotiations which CAVR alleges Prabowo undermined; the 1990s when he was involved in the creation of militia whose psy-war role was to intimidate the Timorese population and to Timorise the war as an internal conflict. Prabowo is also said to have removed local children from East Timor.
Prabowo rejects the specifics of accusations levelled at him with claims such as he was nowhere near the site in question at the time. In self-defence, he can also point to fictional claims widely held by the Indonesian military that its presence in East Timor was a legitimate response to local conflict and insurgency. He has never had to explain why these activities required the mass starvation, bombing, executions, massacres, torture, political imprisonment, sham trials, sexual abuse and other forms of violence that are documented in painful detail in the CAVR report. Or indeed to justify to the Indonesian public why, after 24 years, the huge Indonesian military machine could not defeat tiny East Timor or win the hearts and minds of its people.
None of this featured in this year’s election campaign. East Timor has been blacked out in Indonesia. The CAVR report has been ignored, the second truth commission report sidelined and the education curriculum left a silent blank. Neither Prabowo’s opponents in the presidential race nor the electorate, much of it youthful, gave Prabowo’s record in East Timor a second thought.
The final arbiter of the claims and counter-claims should be a properly constituted inquiry or judicial court. East Timor, however, has long made it clear that it cannot afford to alienate its big and powerful neighbour by pressing charges. Neither will Australia, whose prime minister told the media ‘no questions’ when Prabowo visited Canberra in August, an instruction that did not prompt our media to ask why not and who is this guy.
It is too much to hope, as the Jakarta Post has editorialised, that Prabowo will admit his errors. But, now that he’s president, thanks in no small measure to East Timor, might he repay his struggling neighbour and its victims with the largesse he now commands?
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