Rethinking Transitional Justice: Lessons From East Timor

Transitional justice mechanisms have become firmly entrenched in the United Nations (UN) toolkit for post-conflict recovery. Criminal justice processes and truth and reconciliation commissions, it is claimed, will help individuals and societies to come to terms with the violent past and enable states to make the transition to peaceful, stable, liberal democracies. Following the end of the 24-year Indonesian occupation of East Timor, and in the wake of the post-referendum violence of 1999, the UN created a Serious Crimes Investigations and Prosecutions Process (Serious Crimes Process) to investigate and prosecute cases of genocide, war crimes and crimes against humanity, and a Commission for Reception, Truth and Reconciliation (CAVR), to address cases of minor crimes through community-based reconciliation hearings, and document the stories of thousands of survivors. The East Timor experience reveals a vast gap between UN claims about the benefits of transitional justice mechanisms and local expressions of disenchantment with that process. How can this disjuncture be explained? This In Brief reports the key findings of a research project that investigated these issues. It argues that the lack of Indonesian government co-operation with the Serious Crimes Process which led to an inability to prosecute suspects based in Indonesia is only part of the reason for local disappointment with transitional justice. Specifically, it suggests the discourse of transitional justice is based on limited definitions of justice (as retributive justice or restorative justice) and envisages a rupture between the violent past and the peaceful present; this does not encapsulate the complexities and realities of dealing with the past