Rethinking transitional justice in East Timor

Eleven years after the end of the Indonesian occupation, East Timor continues to grapple with the legacy of its violent past. The United Nations (UN) has attempted to assist this process by establishing a transitional justice framework. Shortly after the 1999 referendum it created a Serious Crimes Process to investigate and prosecute cases of genocide, war crimes and crimes against humanity. It also formed and supported a Commission for Reception, Truth and Reconciliation (CAVR), to address cases of ‘less serious’ crimes and document the stories of thousands of survivors.

As a human rights officer from 2000–2002 for the United Nations Transitional Administration in East Timor, and then later as a researcher, I became increasingly aware of the vast gap that existed between UN claims for the benefits of the transitional justice process and the Timorese community’s disenchantment with its achievements.

On one reading, the reasons for this seem obvious – given its political constraints, the Serious Crimes Process had been unable to prosecute suspects based in Indonesia. Among those who have evaded trial are senior members of the Indonesian military, widely held to be responsible for arming and training the East Timorese militia who perpetrated the violence of 1999, resulting in mass displacement, rape and the deaths of over 1000 people.

However, I also thought that there may be other issues at stake. My intuition was that the ways in which transitional justice mechanisms conceptualise ‘justice’ and ‘transition’ may not encapsulate the complexities and lived realities of these issues. It was this which drove me to embark on a PhD project that sought to investigate the disjuncture between official transitional justice rhetoric and local expectations.

Fieldwork in East Timor – including interviews with survivors of the conflict who had participated in the transitional justice process – was a key aspect of my PhD project. I chose to conduct this fieldwork in three districts, Covalima, Liquica and Lautem. In both Covalima and Liquica, brutal massacres of civilians had taken place in 1999. Up to 60 people were killed on 6 April 1999, in and around the local Liquica church. A massacre also took place in Suai, Covalima, on 6 September 1999, the day after the announcement of the referendum results, in and around the local church, resulting in the deaths of up to 200 civilians.

My interviews sought to explore what individuals were hoping for from participating in the Serious Crimes Process or the CAVR. A key finding that emerged was that local understandings of justice may differ markedly from prevailing criminal justice understandings of this concept. While prosecutions, punishment and truth-telling were widely held to be important, it was also apparent that many had participated in the transitional justice process to seek a range of other goals, some with which transcended the possibilities of trials and truth commissions.

Some, for example, had hopes that the revelation of the ‘truth’ would lead to the identification and recovery of bodies of the dead so that long-delayed burial rites could be conducted in accordance with the demands of custom.

There were widespread hopes, too, that participating in the transitional justice process would connect individuals to resources that would help them to escape lives of poverty. What these diverse views indicated was that it is unlikely that trials and truth commissions alone would address fully the demands of East Timorese survivors for justice.

Local perceptions of justice, I found, are informed via a range of different historical and cultural influences, including the existence of powerful customary belief systems which stress ongoing responsibilities to the spirit world and to the dead, socio-economic conditions, and historical experiences and beliefs linked to the 24-year resistance struggle.

Another finding of my research was that, in the wake of the formal transitional justice process, East Timorese survivors of violence are pursuing their own, locally grounded, and highly personalised forms of justice.

This pursuit of justice is taking place through the reburial of loved ones who died during the conflict and ceremonies to put the spirits of the deceased to rest, and the construction of local level monuments to keep the memories of the past alive and educate future generations.

Some individuals are also becoming involved in victims’ support groups and engaging in advocacy to demand that political leaders respond to their experiences of suffering.

 What is interesting about these practices is that they show that the official transitional justice process has not provided a definitive justice response that could foster East Timor’s ‘transition’ from violence to peace. Rather, they suggest that in the gaps between local expectations and the form of justice that has been officially delivered, a conversation is continuing about how best to ‘deal with the past’.