Talks over East Timor clashes

Mark Dodd
October 28, 2005

EAST Timor President Xanana Gusmao will meet his Indonesian counterpart, Susilo Bambang Yudhoyono, to discuss a spate of violent border clashes.

The meeting was announced this week by East Timor Prime Minister Mari Alkatiri in a briefing to local reporters in Dili.

Dr Alkatiri reportedly suggested his country could pull out of the Truth and Friendship Commission with Indonesia if violence persisted along the border with the troubled northwest enclave of Oecussi.

Dissolving the commission was one option if the clashes continued to disrupt two-party talks aimed at settling a crucial border demarcation for the enclave, Dr Alkatiri reportedly said.

"The two countries are trying to maintain their friendship. However, people are still provoking them, showing that there is no longer any intent to continue the friendship," the Suara Timor Lorosae (Voice of East Timor) newspaper quoted Dr Alkatiri as saying.

Dr Alkatiri said the presidents of East Timor and Indonesia would meet soon to discuss recent tensions around the enclave - a province of East Timor bounded by Indonesian West Timor - the legacy of a complicated deal between former colonial powers Portugal and Holland.

In the most serious clash, on October 15, two East Timorese border police were injured in an attack by 200 Indonesian villagers armed with stones and improvised weapons.

Last week, East Timor's Foreign Minister, Jose Ramos Horta, denied that a spate of border clashes around the enclave were linked to former pro-Indonesian militia, directly contradicting East Timor's national security chief, Ricardo Ribeiro, and his own complaints to the UN mission in Dili.

A UN diplomatic cable obtained by The Australian cited a furious Mr Horta blaming the violence on former anti-independence militia and Indonesian troops.

The 10-member Truth and Friendship Commission is a key policy platform in attempts to mend relations between East Timor and Indonesia following the bloody 1999 UN-brokered ballot for independence.

The commission commits the two countries to work together to investigate events leading up to and immediately after the historic ballot.

It does not provide guarantees of legal justice for thousands of Timorese victims of army-backed militia violence, and is strongly opposed by East Timor's influential Catholic Church.