THE case of east timor/timor-leste:
Unfinished truth, unfinished justice
Patrick Gouthro
The United Nations authorized peace-restoration force, Intervention Force for East Timor (INTERFET), stationed in East Timor arrested a number of militia members who had engaged in genocidal acts. While United Nations commissions recommended the creation of a tribunal modelled on those set up for the former Yugoslavia and for Rwanda, this was not politically feasible so, in 2000, the United Nations Transitional Administration for East Timor (UNTAET) set up special panels or tribunals in the Dili District Court to try those accused of war crimes, crimes against humanity, and genocide. For its part, the Indonesian military refused to turn over wanted suspects, failed to conduct its own trials, and rejected In 1999, East Timor/Timor-Leste was the last nation-state to emerge during the particularly violent twentieth century after a quarter century delay from the original decolonization process begun by Portugal in 1974 -75 during the height of the Cold War. At that time, East Timor/Timor-Leste was prevented from peaceably joining the international community of nations by an Indonesian military invasion, violent occupation, and intentional implementation of a genocidal regime. First, this essay will argue that the Indonesian regime did, in fact, commit genocide in East Timor in at least three and possibly four separate and distinct ways. Second, this essay will also examine the Commission for Reception, Truth and Reconciliation (CAVR) in East Timor and the Serious Crimes Panels in the District Court of Dili (East Timor) to argue that the victims of genocide in East Timor/Timor-Leste were not able to attain sufficient justice and that the Commission for Truth and Friendship (CTF), which Indonesia and Timor-Leste created bilaterally in 2005, was fundamentally flawed in that it offered too much friendship and not enough truth or justice.
In 1974, young military officers took part in a pro-democracy coup d’état, dubbed the ‘Carnation Revolution’, against the hard-line Salazar-Caetano dictatorship in Portugal. Committed to a quick process of decolonization, in 1975 the new Portuguese government recognized East Timor’s right to self-determination. The Portuguese coup d’état and its rapid imperial retreat came as a surprise to a number of interested parties such as regional powers Australia and Malaysia, global powers such as the United States, and, much more importantly, neighbouring power, Indonesia. A number of East Timor political parties emerged to fill that gap which resulted in a brief civil war. After the brief civil war, the East Timorese Front for Independence (FRETILIN) emerged with a clear victory. Indonesia’s increasingly aggressive intentions towards the East Timorese became clear as Indonesian soldiers brazenly attacked the East Timor town of Balibo on 16 October 1975 where they not only indiscriminately murdered East Timorese but they also murdered five, later six, Western journalists based in Australia who had been there to report on the crisis. Despite these atrocities, on 28 November 1975, FRETILIN declared that the former colony of East Timor was now the Democratic Republic of East Timor and sought recognition of its new status from other nations. Whereas Indonesia’s intelligence services had sought to sabotage the new burgeoning independence movement in East Timor through fostering internal conflict within East Timor, this new political development meant that the Indonesian military forces would be used to intervene and invade East Timor.
The Indonesian invasion in 1975 was characterized as being particularly savage as there was systematic killing, gratuitous violence, and extensive looting and plundering of the East Timorese population immediately after Indonesian troops landed in East Timor. Many men from Dili were brought to the wharf, shot, and their bodies dropped in the ocean, anyone suspected of being associated with or being a sympathizer of FRETILIN was summarily executed on the spot along with their entire family, in the villages of Remexio and Aileu the entire populace over the age of three was summarily shot, and most of the movable property, such as cars, tractors, radios, furniture, and windows were stolen and placed aboard Indonesian ships in Dili harbour as legitimate spoils of war. Whenever the Indonesian military forces would enter an area, they deliberately separated all able-bodied men and boys from other villagers for the purpose of summary execution in order to prevent any of them from becoming a potential resistance fighter. A woman named ‘Eloise’ from the village of Villa Verde recalled how Indonesian soldiers machine-gunned almost all of the village’s able-bodied men and boys such that her sister had lost her husband and son to the murders. East Timor’s Chinese population was singled out for killing as five hundred Chinese in Dili were murdered on the first day of the attack and the entire Chinese populations in towns, such as Maubara and Luiquica, were killed en masse by Indonesian soldiers. Many Chinese in East Timor owned businesses and formed a significant part of the merchant class, such as ‘Leong’, who often loaned money to the Timorese, ‘Tsam’, whose family owned a coffee business, and the Siongs, who owned shops in Dili, such that the deliberate targeting of East Timor Chinese for slaughter may have been an attempt to replace an entire ethnic and economic class. Of East Timor’s pre-invasion twenty thousand ethnic Chinese community, a huge percentage were murdered by Indonesian soldiers and, while some Chinese fled the island for other countries, the surviving East Timor Chinese community numbered a few thousand by 1985. By the definition in the United Nations Genocide Convention, the deliberate targeting of these two specific groups constitutes cases of genocide.
Despite the initial military campaign of genocide and terror conducted by Indonesian military forces, FRETILIN resistance remained strong in the interior of the island thereby prolonging the struggle. Indonesian military intensified their pacification campaign by destroying entire villages, relocating their population into strategic camps, using chemical weapons such as napalm, and continuing to commit atrocities by executing hundreds of East Timorese in areas such as Suai and Zumalai. Anywhere between sixty and a hundred thousand East Timorese were killed in the first two months of the Indonesian invasion with the majority being civilian casualties. In order to break the East Timorese resistance, the Indonesian military launched a new campaign in 1977 with two objectives, encirclement and annihilation, designed to conquer the island once and for all. Through saturation bombardment from air and naval forces, chemical spraying to destroy forests, crops, and livestock, and mass transportation of the terrified population to new strategically located and military controlled resettlement camps. As many as 300,000 East Timorese were eventually living in these camps. These camps served the purpose of the Indonesianization of the East Timorese people and culture through the disruption and often violent repression of their traditional way of life. Then, East Timorese culture was replaced by Indonesian songs and dances, an Indonesian school system with the language of instruction being Bahasa Indonesia, and the fact that the only history that was taught in class was Indonesian history. All expressions of East Timorese culture were banned with any attempts by East Timorese to “embrace, encourage, or express” their own culture was often met with summary execution or arrest, torture, and indefinite imprisonment. The East Timorese were separated from their connection to the land and subjected to a state of utter dependency in that artificial environment of the camps. All the horrible side-effects of unrelenting warfare were inflicted upon the East Timorese; epidemics and disease, famine and starvation, and high infant mortality rates. Through various demographic assessments, Ben Kiernan suggests that the total East Timorese death toll with its high initial death toll and recurrent killings and massacres is a quarter of the population, or somewhere between 150,000 and 200,000. It is a sobering even staggering number. The attempt by Indonesia to eradicate East Timor culture through enforced cultural assimilation into Indonesian culture in these resettlement camps constitutes genocide under the definition in the United Nation Genocide Convention.
The invasion and occupation was not just about systematic killings but also systematic rape of East Timorese girls and women. Beginning with the invasion force landing in Dili, two young Chinese Timorese cousins, ‘Ruby’ and ‘Olinda’, recounted how the Indonesian soldiers looked and asked everywhere for single girls for the purpose of marriage but their uncle, who had been forced to act as an interpreter for the Indonesian military, later told them how he had witnessed Indonesian soldiers raping Timorese women. East Timor women and girls were regularly targeted for sexual assault and violent rape by Indonesian soldiers. The fear and terror that Indonesian soldiers inflicted upon the East Timorese was clear as ‘Eloise’ recounted how her husband was increasingly worried about their niece because of the predatory conduct of Indonesian soldiers such that they bought them off by giving them old family valuables, such as an big wall clock. A woman named ‘Edhina’ told how, although most East Timorese women and girls were targets, there was a preference for girls who were part Timorese and part Portuguese as they were especially coerced or forced by Indonesian soldiers to become their personal sexual slaves. Rape became so common that it can be considered a constitutive component of the Indonesian military occupation of East Timor. When the particular soldier left East Timor, they then abandoned the girl who was left virtually destitute with the children resulting from these forced sexual enslavements meaning that, as ‘Edhina’ states, Timor was “full of them.” As East Timorese culture and society was largely traditional with a growing percentage professing the Roman Catholic faith, contraception and abortion were not options available for many women making for an horrific situation where women were forced to raise children produced from often violent rapes and sexual assaults against them. ‘Edhina’ also recounted other violent yet somewhat unexpected acts of rape such as how her nephew’s eight month pregnant wife who lost her baby when she had been raped by an Indonesian soldier and that there were time when the soldier raped the wife in front of the husband. Although systematic rape was added to the genocide protocol much later, if it could be applied retroactively then it could be considered another case of genocide in the case of East Timor. In this way, some degree of justice and historical redress could be achieved for these East Timorese comfort women and the children produced from these violent sexual encounters.
The Indonesian military occupation and genocidal regime continued for another twenty-five years but the renewed violence in East Timor caused international awareness and condemnation of Indonesia’s genocidal regime of chaos, terror, and death. Following the death of Indonesian dictator Suharto and intense international pressure, Indonesia relented to a proposed referendum on independence in East Timor in September 1999. Following an overwhelming pro-independence vote, the Indonesian military and militia gangs went on a systematic killing spree massacring thousands of East Timorese, destroyed a majority of the infrastructure, homes, and buildings, and forcibly deported 250,000 people to Indonesia. As Ben Kiernan noted, Indonesian military and militia conducted what he termed a genocidal counter-insurgency designed to liquidate, eliminate, and cleanse East Timor of any and all pro-independence leaders and supporters as the referendum approached in August 1999. Tragically, Indonesian involvement ended in 1999 as it began in 1975 in an orgy of intentional and genocidal destruction, devastation, and death. Through a United Nations brokered and monitored process, the former Portuguese and Indonesian colony became on 20 May 2002 the newest independent international nation, the Democratic Republic of Timor-Leste, which had the distinction to be the last to emerge out of the particularly violent twentieth-century pattern of decolonization and the first to emerge in the twenty-first century. The focus then shifted to the matter of finding justice, truth, and, perhaps, reconciliation for the victims of the genocide.
The United Nations authorized peace-restoration force, Intervention Force for East Timor (INTERFET), stationed in East Timor arrested a number of militia members who had engaged in genocidal acts. While United Nations commissions recommended the creation of a tribunal modelled on those set up for the former Yugoslavia and for Rwanda, this was not politically feasible so, in 2000, the United Nations Transitional Administration for East Timor (UNTAET) set up special panels or tribunals in the Dili District Court to try those accused of war crimes, crimes against humanity, and genocide. For its part, the Indonesian military refused to turn over wanted suspects, failed to conduct its own trials, and rejected the report proposing the establishment of the East Timor tribunal. These special panels lasted from 2000 to 2006, held 55 trials involving 88 accused suspects involving suspected crimes committed between 1976 and 1999. One of these cases was that of accused genocidaire, Joseph Nahak, who was arrested on 15 March 2002, tried at the special panel in the Dili District Court, and was released after Judge Rapoza found him to be not mentally competent and therefore unfit to stand trial. Despite stalling to set up domestic trials for accused war criminals, Indonesia established a special human rights court in 2002 in which 18 mostly junior officers were charged for crimes committed in 1999 but the government “made very little prosecutorial effort” such that only one officer was convicted while the other defendants were all acquitted. The Indonesian government has since ignored recommendations for war crimes prosecutions from the Indonesian human rights commission, indictments of senior Indonesian military leaders issued by the East Timor Serious Crime Unit, and only gave light five to seven year sentences for recent murders of United Nations peacekeepers by Indonesian military soldiers. Some have viewed these special panels as indicative of the misrepresentation of the nature of the genocidal violence inflicted on East Timor for a quarter century as the relatively few legal indictments against the “big fish” command and control perpetrators of a quarter century of genocide has helped “perpetuate a culture of impunity” among Indonesian military officials, various, national governments, and international bodies. According to Joseph Nevins, the special panels in the Dili district court’s legal focus on a narrow conception of violence effectively means that East Timor “has paid, and will continue to pay, a very high price for the resulting impunity barring significant changes on the international scale and within powerful countries complicit with Indonesia’s invasion and occupation.” As with geopolitical considerations during the Cold War, the United States global war on terrorism once again shifted the priority to Indonesia as a regional ally thus mitigating any international will to achieve a comprehensive accounting of the genocide itself.
Even the establishment of the Commission of Truth and Friendship in Indonesia and Timor-Leste (CTF) has suffered from fundamental flaws in its terms of reference (TOR) in that they were created behind closed doors, had minimal consultation, and no expert involvement suggesting that it was merely a mechanism to improve bilateral diplomatic relationships rather than making a serious contribution to truth-telling or reconciliation. Among the major flaws are that there is poor representation of witnesses because so few victims have testified, the lack of any effective mechanism for inducing witnesses to tell the truth, the lack of witness protection and the use of closed hearings, poor legal training and division among the Commissioners, and the failure of the hearings to empower the victims. According to Megan Hirst, a program associate with the International Center for Transitional Justice (ICTJ) in Timor-Leste, the process is so fundamentally flawed that she termed it a case of “too much friendship, too little truth.” Even though the people of East Timor/Timor-Leste are finally free, the nation has greatly suffered as a result of a quarter century of genocide. It is a terrible and unnecessary price that they had to pay. To make matters worse, the victims of genocide in East Timor/Timor-Leste were not able to attain sufficient justice and that the Commission for Truth and Friendship, which Indonesia and Timor-Leste created bilaterally in 2005, was fundamentally flawed in that it offered too much friendship and not enough truth telling to promote genuine justice, peace, and reconciliation.
In 1974, young military officers took part in a pro-democracy coup d’état, dubbed the ‘Carnation Revolution’, against the hard-line Salazar-Caetano dictatorship in Portugal. Committed to a quick process of decolonization, in 1975 the new Portuguese government recognized East Timor’s right to self-determination. The Portuguese coup d’état and its rapid imperial retreat came as a surprise to a number of interested parties such as regional powers Australia and Malaysia, global powers such as the United States, and, much more importantly, neighbouring power, Indonesia. A number of East Timor political parties emerged to fill that gap which resulted in a brief civil war. After the brief civil war, the East Timorese Front for Independence (FRETILIN) emerged with a clear victory. Indonesia’s increasingly aggressive intentions towards the East Timorese became clear as Indonesian soldiers brazenly attacked the East Timor town of Balibo on 16 October 1975 where they not only indiscriminately murdered East Timorese but they also murdered five, later six, Western journalists based in Australia who had been there to report on the crisis. Despite these atrocities, on 28 November 1975, FRETILIN declared that the former colony of East Timor was now the Democratic Republic of East Timor and sought recognition of its new status from other nations. Whereas Indonesia’s intelligence services had sought to sabotage the new burgeoning independence movement in East Timor through fostering internal conflict within East Timor, this new political development meant that the Indonesian military forces would be used to intervene and invade East Timor.
The Indonesian invasion in 1975 was characterized as being particularly savage as there was systematic killing, gratuitous violence, and extensive looting and plundering of the East Timorese population immediately after Indonesian troops landed in East Timor. Many men from Dili were brought to the wharf, shot, and their bodies dropped in the ocean, anyone suspected of being associated with or being a sympathizer of FRETILIN was summarily executed on the spot along with their entire family, in the villages of Remexio and Aileu the entire populace over the age of three was summarily shot, and most of the movable property, such as cars, tractors, radios, furniture, and windows were stolen and placed aboard Indonesian ships in Dili harbour as legitimate spoils of war. Whenever the Indonesian military forces would enter an area, they deliberately separated all able-bodied men and boys from other villagers for the purpose of summary execution in order to prevent any of them from becoming a potential resistance fighter. A woman named ‘Eloise’ from the village of Villa Verde recalled how Indonesian soldiers machine-gunned almost all of the village’s able-bodied men and boys such that her sister had lost her husband and son to the murders. East Timor’s Chinese population was singled out for killing as five hundred Chinese in Dili were murdered on the first day of the attack and the entire Chinese populations in towns, such as Maubara and Luiquica, were killed en masse by Indonesian soldiers. Many Chinese in East Timor owned businesses and formed a significant part of the merchant class, such as ‘Leong’, who often loaned money to the Timorese, ‘Tsam’, whose family owned a coffee business, and the Siongs, who owned shops in Dili, such that the deliberate targeting of East Timor Chinese for slaughter may have been an attempt to replace an entire ethnic and economic class. Of East Timor’s pre-invasion twenty thousand ethnic Chinese community, a huge percentage were murdered by Indonesian soldiers and, while some Chinese fled the island for other countries, the surviving East Timor Chinese community numbered a few thousand by 1985. By the definition in the United Nations Genocide Convention, the deliberate targeting of these two specific groups constitutes cases of genocide.
Despite the initial military campaign of genocide and terror conducted by Indonesian military forces, FRETILIN resistance remained strong in the interior of the island thereby prolonging the struggle. Indonesian military intensified their pacification campaign by destroying entire villages, relocating their population into strategic camps, using chemical weapons such as napalm, and continuing to commit atrocities by executing hundreds of East Timorese in areas such as Suai and Zumalai. Anywhere between sixty and a hundred thousand East Timorese were killed in the first two months of the Indonesian invasion with the majority being civilian casualties. In order to break the East Timorese resistance, the Indonesian military launched a new campaign in 1977 with two objectives, encirclement and annihilation, designed to conquer the island once and for all. Through saturation bombardment from air and naval forces, chemical spraying to destroy forests, crops, and livestock, and mass transportation of the terrified population to new strategically located and military controlled resettlement camps. As many as 300,000 East Timorese were eventually living in these camps. These camps served the purpose of the Indonesianization of the East Timorese people and culture through the disruption and often violent repression of their traditional way of life. Then, East Timorese culture was replaced by Indonesian songs and dances, an Indonesian school system with the language of instruction being Bahasa Indonesia, and the fact that the only history that was taught in class was Indonesian history. All expressions of East Timorese culture were banned with any attempts by East Timorese to “embrace, encourage, or express” their own culture was often met with summary execution or arrest, torture, and indefinite imprisonment. The East Timorese were separated from their connection to the land and subjected to a state of utter dependency in that artificial environment of the camps. All the horrible side-effects of unrelenting warfare were inflicted upon the East Timorese; epidemics and disease, famine and starvation, and high infant mortality rates. Through various demographic assessments, Ben Kiernan suggests that the total East Timorese death toll with its high initial death toll and recurrent killings and massacres is a quarter of the population, or somewhere between 150,000 and 200,000. It is a sobering even staggering number. The attempt by Indonesia to eradicate East Timor culture through enforced cultural assimilation into Indonesian culture in these resettlement camps constitutes genocide under the definition in the United Nation Genocide Convention.
The invasion and occupation was not just about systematic killings but also systematic rape of East Timorese girls and women. Beginning with the invasion force landing in Dili, two young Chinese Timorese cousins, ‘Ruby’ and ‘Olinda’, recounted how the Indonesian soldiers looked and asked everywhere for single girls for the purpose of marriage but their uncle, who had been forced to act as an interpreter for the Indonesian military, later told them how he had witnessed Indonesian soldiers raping Timorese women. East Timor women and girls were regularly targeted for sexual assault and violent rape by Indonesian soldiers. The fear and terror that Indonesian soldiers inflicted upon the East Timorese was clear as ‘Eloise’ recounted how her husband was increasingly worried about their niece because of the predatory conduct of Indonesian soldiers such that they bought them off by giving them old family valuables, such as an big wall clock. A woman named ‘Edhina’ told how, although most East Timorese women and girls were targets, there was a preference for girls who were part Timorese and part Portuguese as they were especially coerced or forced by Indonesian soldiers to become their personal sexual slaves. Rape became so common that it can be considered a constitutive component of the Indonesian military occupation of East Timor. When the particular soldier left East Timor, they then abandoned the girl who was left virtually destitute with the children resulting from these forced sexual enslavements meaning that, as ‘Edhina’ states, Timor was “full of them.” As East Timorese culture and society was largely traditional with a growing percentage professing the Roman Catholic faith, contraception and abortion were not options available for many women making for an horrific situation where women were forced to raise children produced from often violent rapes and sexual assaults against them. ‘Edhina’ also recounted other violent yet somewhat unexpected acts of rape such as how her nephew’s eight month pregnant wife who lost her baby when she had been raped by an Indonesian soldier and that there were time when the soldier raped the wife in front of the husband. Although systematic rape was added to the genocide protocol much later, if it could be applied retroactively then it could be considered another case of genocide in the case of East Timor. In this way, some degree of justice and historical redress could be achieved for these East Timorese comfort women and the children produced from these violent sexual encounters.
The Indonesian military occupation and genocidal regime continued for another twenty-five years but the renewed violence in East Timor caused international awareness and condemnation of Indonesia’s genocidal regime of chaos, terror, and death. Following the death of Indonesian dictator Suharto and intense international pressure, Indonesia relented to a proposed referendum on independence in East Timor in September 1999. Following an overwhelming pro-independence vote, the Indonesian military and militia gangs went on a systematic killing spree massacring thousands of East Timorese, destroyed a majority of the infrastructure, homes, and buildings, and forcibly deported 250,000 people to Indonesia. As Ben Kiernan noted, Indonesian military and militia conducted what he termed a genocidal counter-insurgency designed to liquidate, eliminate, and cleanse East Timor of any and all pro-independence leaders and supporters as the referendum approached in August 1999. Tragically, Indonesian involvement ended in 1999 as it began in 1975 in an orgy of intentional and genocidal destruction, devastation, and death. Through a United Nations brokered and monitored process, the former Portuguese and Indonesian colony became on 20 May 2002 the newest independent international nation, the Democratic Republic of Timor-Leste, which had the distinction to be the last to emerge out of the particularly violent twentieth-century pattern of decolonization and the first to emerge in the twenty-first century. The focus then shifted to the matter of finding justice, truth, and, perhaps, reconciliation for the victims of the genocide.
The United Nations authorized peace-restoration force, Intervention Force for East Timor (INTERFET), stationed in East Timor arrested a number of militia members who had engaged in genocidal acts. While United Nations commissions recommended the creation of a tribunal modelled on those set up for the former Yugoslavia and for Rwanda, this was not politically feasible so, in 2000, the United Nations Transitional Administration for East Timor (UNTAET) set up special panels or tribunals in the Dili District Court to try those accused of war crimes, crimes against humanity, and genocide. For its part, the Indonesian military refused to turn over wanted suspects, failed to conduct its own trials, and rejected the report proposing the establishment of the East Timor tribunal. These special panels lasted from 2000 to 2006, held 55 trials involving 88 accused suspects involving suspected crimes committed between 1976 and 1999. One of these cases was that of accused genocidaire, Joseph Nahak, who was arrested on 15 March 2002, tried at the special panel in the Dili District Court, and was released after Judge Rapoza found him to be not mentally competent and therefore unfit to stand trial. Despite stalling to set up domestic trials for accused war criminals, Indonesia established a special human rights court in 2002 in which 18 mostly junior officers were charged for crimes committed in 1999 but the government “made very little prosecutorial effort” such that only one officer was convicted while the other defendants were all acquitted. The Indonesian government has since ignored recommendations for war crimes prosecutions from the Indonesian human rights commission, indictments of senior Indonesian military leaders issued by the East Timor Serious Crime Unit, and only gave light five to seven year sentences for recent murders of United Nations peacekeepers by Indonesian military soldiers. Some have viewed these special panels as indicative of the misrepresentation of the nature of the genocidal violence inflicted on East Timor for a quarter century as the relatively few legal indictments against the “big fish” command and control perpetrators of a quarter century of genocide has helped “perpetuate a culture of impunity” among Indonesian military officials, various, national governments, and international bodies. According to Joseph Nevins, the special panels in the Dili district court’s legal focus on a narrow conception of violence effectively means that East Timor “has paid, and will continue to pay, a very high price for the resulting impunity barring significant changes on the international scale and within powerful countries complicit with Indonesia’s invasion and occupation.” As with geopolitical considerations during the Cold War, the United States global war on terrorism once again shifted the priority to Indonesia as a regional ally thus mitigating any international will to achieve a comprehensive accounting of the genocide itself.
Even the establishment of the Commission of Truth and Friendship in Indonesia and Timor-Leste (CTF) has suffered from fundamental flaws in its terms of reference (TOR) in that they were created behind closed doors, had minimal consultation, and no expert involvement suggesting that it was merely a mechanism to improve bilateral diplomatic relationships rather than making a serious contribution to truth-telling or reconciliation. Among the major flaws are that there is poor representation of witnesses because so few victims have testified, the lack of any effective mechanism for inducing witnesses to tell the truth, the lack of witness protection and the use of closed hearings, poor legal training and division among the Commissioners, and the failure of the hearings to empower the victims. According to Megan Hirst, a program associate with the International Center for Transitional Justice (ICTJ) in Timor-Leste, the process is so fundamentally flawed that she termed it a case of “too much friendship, too little truth.” Even though the people of East Timor/Timor-Leste are finally free, the nation has greatly suffered as a result of a quarter century of genocide. It is a terrible and unnecessary price that they had to pay. To make matters worse, the victims of genocide in East Timor/Timor-Leste were not able to attain sufficient justice and that the Commission for Truth and Friendship, which Indonesia and Timor-Leste created bilaterally in 2005, was fundamentally flawed in that it offered too much friendship and not enough truth telling to promote genuine justice, peace, and reconciliation.