Indonesia’s elite has too much to lose from addressing its actions in East Timor

Wednesday, 23rd September 2009

While defenders of the country’s bloody history remain in positions of power, justice for the slain Australian journalists will be slow in coming, says Eric Ellis

‘This has not happened in Indonesia,’ says Winters. ‘The powerful actors from the past remain fully empowered — both the criminals and their influential friends. There has been no justice whatever for past atrocities in any case of significance. Things are so bad that even extreme cases that occurred after the fall of Suharto have not been handled satisfactorily.’

Winters cites Suharto’s son Tommy, who ordered the murder of a sitting Supreme Court judge because the judge dared to uphold a corruption conviction. Tommy got 15 years in jail, served a little over five years and mostly spent it in Jakarta having ‘medical check-ups’. One of Indonesia’s nastier people, Tommy is now free to dynastically run for leadership of his late father’s fiefdom, Golkar, which he hopes to rebuild into the force it once was under his father.

‘The problem is that the perpetrators remain strong and the government is overflowing with people who not only support them, but continue to believe that the invasion of East Timor was fully justified,’ says Winters. ‘Their reaction to opening the [Balibo] case and others like it tends to be: “You’ve got to be joking!”.’

Reckoning for the Balibo Five might uncork a very ugly genie for Indonesia. And Jakarta is not going to go there.