Sun, Oct 24, 1999 page1

• Interfet not prepared to investigate the carnage it is uncovering

  • By Andrew Perrin / STAFF REPORTER
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  There was not much to see in the dry creek bed that runs through the center of the town of Liquica, 35km west of Dili. What the local villagers were eager to show the Interfet soldiers who secured this town two weeks ago was little more than a mound of dirt, directly below where an embankment had collapsed.

  But this was no occurrence of nature. The embankment, the locals said, had been deliberately collapsed by the militia group Besa Merah Puti last month to hide the bodies of roughly 10 men whom they had murdered.

  A quick scratch in the dirt by the Interfet commander confirmed the story. Human bones lay just centimeters from the surface. Encouraged, the locals then directed the soldiers to two more sites in the town, one down by the beach, believed to hold four or five bodies, and then to a home that once belonged to a militia commander.

  In the bathroom behind the home, soldiers found the dismembered body of 19-year-old girl shoved into a washbasin. Meanwhile, there were rumors that a well 10km from town contained as many as 15 bodies.

  But the sites, made public just last week by Interfet headquarters, and claimed to be the largest mass graves discovered in East Timor so far, were hardly new discoveries. The graves have been discovered by independent human rights observers who traveled to Liquica last month and had alerted Interfet and UNAMET to their presence.

  The well outside Liquica did indeed contain bodies, as documented by an Australian television broadcast at the beginning of this month. When questioned by the media why Interfet had not disclosed the discovery sooner, spokesman Colonel Mark Kelly refused to comment.

  But it soon became apparent that a shortage of investigators in East Timor had meant that no forensic experts could get out to visit the sites until last Monday, the day before the announcement. According to an Interfet source, there are just eight military police and four civilian police currently responsible for the whole of East Timor. In that group, there is just one forensic pathologist.

  "These guys are so overworked," one source said. "The problem is that when Interfet came in here it was not our mandate to investigate abuses. We were responsible for security. We only took the job because no one else was here to do it."

  Lyndell Barry, a human rights observer in East Timor, and the first person to record the graves sites in Liquica, said the lack of commitment by international bodies to deploy a large-scale task force to investigate the grave sites is jeopardizing any chance the Timorese ever have of achieving justice through a war crimes tribunal.

  "The UN and Interfet and other people keep telling the world, `There are no bodies. Where are all these people who are meant to have been killed?'" she said. "We are finding graves everywhere we go, every town. And we are not even looking for them. The same goes for other NGOs that I speak to. All they have to do is go out and ask the locals and they will soon be shown the graves. Right now, nothing is being done, and the bodies are deteriorating and the evidence is being destroyed."

  Barry has recorded on her video camera more than 50 sites so far in East Timor, including a burnt-out truck on a beach near Dili that contained nine bodies, numerous death cells in police stations all around Timor, and the church in Suai, a town in the south, where up to 500 people were massacred.

  Most disturbing, she says, was a cliff site just west of Liquica, where locals say more than 600 people were pushed off, plunging onto the rocks more than 100m below.

  "There were no bodies. They would have been washed away by the ocean," she said. "But something horrendous has definitely happened there. There are piles of clothes, and thousands of rounds of spent ammunition. It's a haunting place. I have no doubt that proper investigators could piece together what happened there."

  Despite public pronouncements of exhaustive investigations, the Interfet source in Dili said that just three sites had been investigated: Suai, Liquica and Los Palos. The UN's human rights commissioner, Mary Robinson, is due to deliver a report at the end of the year on abuses in East Timor, but many here are skeptical that the report will tell the whole story, given the size of the investigative team.

  Joaquim Fonseca, a member of the Timorese human rights group Yayasan Hak, has watched with increasing alarm the conduct of the UN in investigating abuses. He believes that the future of East Timor rests upon the success of the investigation and the trials that would follow.

  "We cannot create a good, civil society in which law rules everything if we let this go," he said. "If the people responsible for what happened last month are not brought to trial, or at least thoroughly investigated, and attempts made to bring them to trial, then people will begin to judge by themselves. Timor has always been a violent land. Through the rule of law perhaps we can stop it."
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