Lessons in international criminal justice

The Australian recently scooped a report from the UN Commission for Reception, Truth and Reconciliation in East Timor. In its 2500 pages, the report documents the crimes committed in East Timor during the brutal military occupation that lasted from 1975 to 1999. It estimated that the Indonesian military and its proxies were responsible for the death of 180,000 Timorese during that period. The Australian even made this startling revelation:

It recommends reparations from Indonesia and the members of the UN Security Council, including Britain and the US, who gave military backing to Indonesia between 1974 and 1999, as well as those nations that provided military assistance to Jakarta during the occupation, including Australia.

As a significant supporter of the US's so-called 'War on Terrorism', a war apparently between the forces of civilisation and barbarism where the Western powers are meant to represent the former, you'd think Australia would jump at the opportunity provided by the UN report on East Timor to press Indonesia to prosecute those most responsible for the atrocities in Timor.

Instead, of course, there is total silence. No murmur from the Labor Party. And the media has given only limited coverage to the Greens, who have been quite vocal on this issue.

Also note the total lack of what I would describe as causational analysis by the media. At the very same time that this report has come out, Indonesia's brutal occupation of West Papua has hit the headlines again, albeit implicitly. After 43 West Papuans sought refuge in Australia from persecution at the hands of Indonesia at home, at least two Papuans have been shot. Papuan activists allege that the Indonesian Army is responsible. The Australian response is typically immoral: give Indonesia, with its decades long reputation for violence and murder as has been unambiguously documented in the UN report, the benefit of the doubt.

The treatment of the indigenous population in West Papua by the occupying Indonesians is an open secret. Considering that the region is literally at Australia's doorstep, it is incredible that there is very limited coverage of the situation in West Papua. Indeed, when the Centre for Peace and Conflict Studies at Sydney University released a detailed report on Indonesian atrocities in West Papua, the Federal Government and Opposition response was notable by its absence.

The message was and remains clear. The real value of musings on protecting civilisation, of Governments' interest in protecting the vulnerable, and prosecuting the guilty is not in justice per se. It only has value to the extent that it provides a justification for conquest and engineered moral outrage. Well might the media be dominated by stories of the Australian Wheat Board scandal in Iraq, and there is no doubt that this is a serious matter worthy of significant media scrutiny. But where is the follow through when the scandals are of far greater levity and much closer to home as they are where East Timor and West Papua are concerned?