[Ed. Note: The author, currently the vice president of the International Centre for Transitional Justice, was a special representative of the U. N. secretary-general for the popular consultation in East Timor in 1999. He is also the former director of Amnesty International (AI).]

The trials before an ad hoc human rights tribunal in Jakarta of the former governor of East Timor and Indonesian military and police officials accused of responsibility for the crimes against humanity committed in East Timor in 1999 are not only failing to do justice, but they have turned truth on its head and have added insult to injury.

In February 2000, the U. N. Security Council, receiving the report of an international commission of inquiry into these crimes, agreed to defer consideration of its recommendation that an international tribunal should be established and to give Indonesia the chance to bring those responsible to justice. It expressed the hope that legal proceedings in Indonesia would be "swift, comprehensive, effective and transparent" and in conformity with international standards of justice. More than two-and-one-half years later that hope is dead.

The United Nations now faces a special test of its determination to ensure justice for international crimes-special because the crimes were not only an attack upon the great majority of the East Timorese people but a violation of solemn agreements with the United Nations and an attack upon the United Nations itself. Ten of the East Timorese staff of the U. N. mission in East Timor, which I headed, were among those killed.

The prosecution, and now the court in its first verdict, have bought into the mythical version of the events of 1999 which the Indonesian army has long sought to propagate. According to this view, the violence was between two Timorese factions with the pro-Indonesian faction indignant at the pro-independence bias on the part of the United Nations. Supposedly, the worst Indonesian responsibility amounted to the failure to do enough to intervene to check this violence. The fact that these allegations against the United Nations have no credibility anywhere outside of Indonesia should not allow the damaging consequences of their being left unchallenged within Indonesia to be underestimated.

The killings, rape and extreme physical destruction perpetrated after the overwhelming vote for independence were not an emotional response of the East Timorese losers in the U. N.-conducted ballot. They were a planned and coordinated operation under the direction of the Indonesian army. The Indonesian army had created the East Timorese militias, and they had begun their campaign of terror and coercion against pro-independence leaders and supporters well before the agreement among Indonesia, Portugal and the United Nations led to the establishment of the U. N. mission to conduct the ballot. The United Nations and other international observers witnessed the relationship between the Indonesian army and the militias throughout what was termed the "popular consultation." The Carter Centre was in the forefront in exposing this publicly.

When the worst violence began after the ballot, journalists and international observers were chased out of East Timor, and the U. N. mission ended up besieged in its Dili compound as the worst massacres were committed. After the Australian-led military intervention had restored security, however, separate investigations by the U. N. commission of inquiry, headed by a distinguished Costa Rican jurist and by Indonesia's own National Human Rights Commission (NHRC), left no doubt regarding the Indonesian army's responsibility for crimes against humanity.

The Jakarta prosecutions of some-but not all-of those named by the Indonesian commission have been fatally flawed. The jurisdiction of the ad hoc human rights tribunal was limited in such a way that the full pattern of the Indonesian army operation in East Timor, a necessary element of crimes against humanity, could not have been laid out before it-even if the prosecution had genuinely wished to do so. The first prosecutions were of the East Timorese governor and the Indonesian police chief. The local administration was closely involved with the militia, and the police had the responsibility for security during the ballot. The reality though was that the militia operated under the direction of the army, which meant that the police could never have dared to act against them, even if it had wanted to. The prosecutors had available to them mounds of evidence of the army's responsibility from the commissions of inquiry and from the international investigators and prosecutors of the U. N. transitional administration in East Timor. Yet they failed to put a serious case before the court, even as regards the worst single massacre of priests and those they were sheltering in the church at Suai.

The accounts given at the trials by military commanders as witnesses or defendants have been founded on the most blatant falsehoods, yet they seem to have gone unchallenged by the prosecution. At their most ludicrous, they claimed that the security responsibility before, during and after the ballot lay with the U. N. civilian police. Yet Indonesia had insisted on retaining responsibility for security at all stages and was adamant in restricting the 270 unarmed U. N. police to an advisory role.

The international commission's recommendation of an international tribunal is still on the Security Council table. It is generally right that national prosecutions should be the first option, although it was never likely that they could be credible in this instance. U. N. Secretary-General Kofi Annan and other U. N. officials and world leaders at the time, such as former U. N. High Commissioner for Human Rights Mary Robinson and former U. S. Secretary of State Madeline Albright, as well as others warned Indonesia that this recommendation would be further considered if the Indonesian process failed. East Timor was a special international responsibility when the crimes were perpetrated. An international tribunal has the best prospect of obtaining the strongest evidence of the Indonesian military chain of command that was operating during the violence, which exists in Australian intelligence intercepts. The case for an international tribunal is as unanswerable as it appears politically inconceivable-just as inconceivable as it once seemed that East Timor would be admitted to the United Nations as an independent country.