Indonesia's top generals must be imprisoned, but not executed, if found guilty by a tribunal investigating human rights abuses in East Timor, Nobel Peace Prize laureate Jose Ramos-Horta said during a stop in Bangkok.
When asked if he would be satisfied to have guilty military officers stripped of their positions, but not jailed, Ramos-Horta said: "I don't think that is justice, so that is out of the question."
Ramos-Horta, who acted as the East Timorese resistance movement's self-exiled foreign minister, stressed that prison sentences must be meted out to those found guilty of human rights crimes.
"Imagine committing crimes against humanity, and the only thing that happens to them is they lose their jobs," he said.
Ramos-Horta and Xanana Gusmao are widely seen as East Timor's top two political leaders.
Gusmao, formerly a guerrilla commander before being jailed for seven years by the Indonesians, has declined offers to run for president or any other post in a future East Timorese government.
Ramos-Horta did not advocate using the death penalty to punish military leaders convicted of crimes against humanity, especially since East Timor was trying to "reconcile" with Indonesia. "I oppose capital punishment," he said.
Ramos-Horta said the evidence implicating the Indonesian military in last year's bloodshed in East Timor was overwhelming.
"If the Indonesian republic has the political [will] to establish a war crimes tribunal to bring to trial those who are named -- or if there is an international war crimes tribunal -- there are hundreds of thousands of East Timorese witnesses who can testify that the Indonesian army was part and parcel of the violence in East Timor," Ramos-Horta said at a press conference on Wednesday.
"The scale of the violence, as you know, ... was planned, it was financed," he said. "Indonesians were recruited in West Timor. Thousands of these so-called militia from East Timor are not East Timorese. They were from West Timor, from Flores and other Indonesian islands, and brought into East Timor," he said.
Ramos-Horta said it would have been impossible for East Timorese to carry out "the abduction of 200,000 people" on their own. An estimated 200,000 East Timorese were trucked, shipped or fled on foot, often at gunpoint, from devastated East Timor into Indonesian-held West Timor during the violence, apparently to depopulate the east and perhaps later replace them with pliant, pro-Indonesian residents.
Ramos-Horta said East Timorese leaders have obtained documents that detail "the plan to destroy East Timor, to kill as many people as possible after the referendum in favor of independence."
"The chain of command begins with General Wiranto, goes to Denpasar [on Bali] to General Adam Damiri, and to East Timor, to Colonel Suratman," he said.
Colonel Tono Suratman, who protected the Pope during a visit to Indonesia, was a special forces officer schooled in the US at Fort Benning, Georgia.
He commanded troops in Indonesia's dreaded US-trained Kopassus special forces units.
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