East Timor

In 1999 an overwhelming majority of the population voted for independence from Indonesia in a UN-supervised referendum. In the weeks that followed, anti-independence militia supported by the Indonesian military conducted a campaign in which 1,400 were killed and 300,000 were displaced. 

East Timor became a sovereign state on 20 May 2002 and has enjoyed relative stability ever since. UN forces were deployed in 2006 to help quell an army mutiny, but were withdrawn in 2011.

In 2011 the United Nations Working Group on Enforced or Involuntary Disappearances quoted the East Timor Commission for Reception, Truth and Reconciliation figure of at least 102,800 civilian casualties – from violence, illness or hunger – during the Indonesian occupation 1975-1999, including 18,600 killed or disappeared. Other organizations put the casualty figures even higher and the number of missing in the tens of thousands.

The Victorian Institute of Forensic Medicine (VIFM) and the Argentine Forensic Anthropology Team (EAAF) signed a memorandum of understanding to form the International Forensic Team (IFT), which was invited by the Government of Timor-Leste to undertake exhumations at several mass grave sites.

The Commission for Reception, Truth and Reconciliation in East Timor (Comissão de Acolhimento, Verdade e Reconciliação de Timor Leste, CAVR) was established in 2001 under the UN Transitional Administration in East Timor (UNTAET) and published its report in 2005. The “Chega!” report “recommended that a register of the disappeared be established and, where resources permit, for exhumations to be carried out to identify remains and establish the cause of death. With regard to memorialization, the CAVR recommended that Parliament declare a national day to remember ‘the famine of 1978–79’ and to memorialize significant sites of deaths and killings.”*