U.N. Official to Lead Probe of East Timor Atrocities

Mary Robinson, the U.N. high commissioner for human rights, was appointed Thursday to investigate atrocities in East Timor. She said she would have specialists on the ground next week.

Secretary-General Kofi Annan formally gave Robinson the responsibility Thursday after the U.N. Human Rights Commission voted in Geneva on Monday for the inquiry despite objections from Indonesia, which has rejected the probe.

Robinson told a news conference that many witnesses would identify the perpetrators of the violence, who included Indonesian military personnel as well as army-backed militia members. The militias killed, raped, looted and burned after East Timorese voted overwhelmingly for independence from Indonesia in a U.N.-organized ballot Aug. 30.

She is to submit her report by Dec. 31. Annan will then make it available to the U.N. General Assembly and the Security Council. The council could set up a U.N. war crimes tribunal but probably will not have support from nations such as China and Russia to do so.

Robinson said forensic experts and other human rights officials would be sent to East Timor next week, after which she would name the leaders of the investigating commission.

The Indonesian army invaded East Timor, a former Portuguese colony, in 1975 and annexed the territory the following year.

Robinson said she did not expect her teams would be allowed into the Indonesian province of West Timor, where she hoped that Indonesia’s own human rights panel would conduct inquiries in cooperation with her commission.

She said she had spoken to numerous refugees during her recent visit to Darwin, Australia, and was told how militias forced East Timorese civilians at gunpoint into neighboring West Timor and even to other islands in the Indonesian archipelago.

“I heard alarming allegations that, even in the boats taking them, women were raped constantly and that in three camps there continued to be a pattern of rape and assault,” Robinson said.

“I know there is great concern that in the refugee camps the militia appear to be in control . . . and there is a worry they are even looking for those” identified as independence supporters or their families, she said.

Documenting the violations, however, may prove difficult. East Timorese activist Jose Ramos-Horta, among others, has said that files were shredded as government buildings and military sites were being destroyed in East Timor.

Robinson was asked repeatedly how valid an investigation by an Indonesian rights commission would be. She said that she had met members of the group from Jakarta, the Indonesian capital, and that they were “taking the reports very seriously,” including involvement of the military.

She said her inquiry would be confined to the “post-ballot period”--after Aug. 30--while the Indonesian commission was reviewing all of 1999.