JAKARTA, Indonesia — In the first verdict in a series of trials of former Indonesian officials charged with crimes against humanity, the ex-governor of East Timor was convicted Wednesday of allowing massacres and sentenced to three years in prison.
Abilio Soares punched his fist into the air after hearing the verdict and promised to appeal. Prosecutors, too, said they would appeal what they described as a too-lenient sentence.
"I've been made a scapegoat," Soares told reporters. "How can I, one person, disband a militia which is armed with spears, axes and guns?"
The verdict was delivered by a human rights court trying the cases of 18 former officials charged with crimes against humanity for their alleged involvement in violence that shook East Timor at the time of its 1999 independence referendum.
Human rights groups have called the trials a whitewash — and Soares' three-year sentence was likely to do little to dispel that impression.
"This shows that Indonesia is not serious about justice for what happened in East Timor," said Rosentino Amaduhei of Yayasan Hak, East Timor's leading human rights organization.
Speaking in the East Timorese capital of Dili, he said a three-year sentence was ridiculous, adding that individual militiamen had been sentenced to 20 years in jail in East Timor for a single murder.
"The verdict is irrelevant as the process from the beginning was deeply, deeply flawed," said Sidney Jones from the Brussels-based think tank International Crisis Group. "By no stretch of the imagination can you say justice has been achieved."
Soares was Indonesia's governor of East Timor during the U.N.-organized plebiscite. He is one of three Timorese among the 18 defendants, who include the Indonesian military and police commanders of the province at the time.
Judge Emmy Murni Mustafa said the defendant had "failed to prevent his men from committing grave human rights violations."
But East Timor's foreign minister said Wednesday he was worried Timorese would pay for war crimes committed by Indonesians.
"Anyone who knows the situation knows that no Timorese official had power over security forces," Jose Ramos-Horta said during a visit to Malaysia.
Judge Mustafa said Soares was given a lighter sentence than the 10 1/2 years requested by the prosecution because of a request for leniency from East Timorese President Xanana Gusmao.
"The letter shows a spirit of reconciliation, which could have been buried by a heavy sentence," Mustafa said.
The ad hoc human rights court was established last year in response to intense international pressure for Jakarta to bring to justice those responsible for the bloodshed.
The Jakarta trials — played out since March in cramped and sweltering courtrooms — have been fraught with shortcomings, critics say.
The indictments play down the role of the military, which the United Nations has blamed for the violence.
But Judge Mustafa echoed the government position, saying both sides were to blame.
"The clashes which occurred were started by both the pro-independence and anti-independence groups so therefore both sides must share the responsibility for the violence," she said.
If the trials of three army and police generals result in convictions, it would be the first time high-ranking Indonesian military commanders have been punished for decades of abuses in East Timor and elsewhere in the country.
Hundreds were killed in the lead-up to the Aug. 30, 1999 referendum that saw the overwhelming majority of Timorese vote for independence. After the ballot, Indonesia's army and its militia proxies killed up to 1,000 people and forced at least 250,000 others to flee to neighboring West Timor.
The violence only ended when an Australian-led peacekeeping force arrived in September 1999. In May, the nation of 800,000 declared its nationhood after 2 1/2 years of U.N. administration.