army officer Sender: [EMAIL PROTECTED] X-Loop: [EMAIL PROTECTED] Precedence: bulk http://www.smh.com.au/news/0105/09/text/pageone5.html The Sydney Morning Herald Australia covered up Indonesian atrocities in Timor, says army officer Date: 09/05/2001 By Jill Jolliffe in Darwin An Australian Army intelligence officer who served in East Timor has accused the Howard Government of concealing vital evidence on Indonesian army and militia war crimes in 1999. Captain Andrew Plunkett, 31, of the parachute battalion 3RAR, has alleged that a massacre of 47 people at the police station in Maliana in September 1999 might not have occurred if the Government had acted on intelligence information predicting the killings. He also alleged that Australian soldiers from the International Force for East Timor (Interfet), who entered Maliana after the massacre, had orders to minimise estimates of the death toll. Captain Plunkett said Australian sources had accurately reported on Indonesian plans to kill independence supporters in Maliana, but their reports were "pushed up the chain of command, hosed down and politically wordsmithed by the Asia division of the Department of Foreign Affairs and Trade". He said the information was "held" at the department instead of being passed to United Nations observers in Maliana, who could have warned the population. As a serving officer, Captain Plunkett risks prosecution for his declarations, made in an interview with the Herald and in greater detail in a two-part edition of SBS's Dateline beginning tonight. But he said he wanted the truth told regardless of the penalty. Captain Plunkett is on convalescent leave for post-traumatic stress suffered during his Timor mission, which involved examining mass graves in the Oecussi enclave. He said his decision to talk was also influenced by his belief that an international war crimes tribunal on East Timor needs to be established. Leaks to the media have already disclosed that Australian intelligence agencies knew the extent of Indonesian military involvement in the 1999 violence. But Captain Plunkett's allegations, and other revelations on Dateline are the first direct accounts from intelligence insiders and the first accounts of prior knowledge of a specific mass killing. Captain Plunkett arrived in East Timor with the first Interfet soldiers in September 1999, serving until February 2000. He holds the Infantry Combat Medal, Active Service Medal and the Interfet Campaign Medal. He had earlier trained with a group of military liaison officers assigned to East Timor before the August 1999 independence referendum, as part of the unarmed United Nations Mission in East Timor (Unamet). However, he was not posted to Unamet. During this training, when militia violence was growing, he had seen accurate reports from the Defence Intelligence Organisation, "none of which were being passed on to the UN on the ground". On the Maliana killings, Captain Plunkett said the reports on Indonesian plans to kill independence supporters had come from "human intelligence" sources in Maliana, including Mr Wayne Sievers, then an Australian Federal Police officer with Unamet. Interviewed on Dateline, Mr Sievers said two of his reports on Maliana were sent to Unamet, but had been ignored by UN officials and Australian diplomats. These reports had detailed plans by Indonesian officers and militia leaders to kill independence supporters in Maliana, predicting how and when the killings would take place. Mr Sievers had also sent his reports by "secure means" to a friend in the Australian "defence intelligence community". Captain Plunkett said Unamet subsequently told Maliana people that if violence erupted they should go to the police station, where the Indonesian police would protect them. "Had they had accurate reporting, UN advice to the general population would have been 'head to the hills' rather than to seek shelter at the [Indonesian] police station," he said. According to survivors, on September 8, 1999, the area was surrounded by militiamen, with Indonesian police and soldiers forming an outer ring. The militias hacked about 47 independence supporters to death with machetes. A witness, Teresinha de Jesus, said that later the local police chief, Lieutenant-Colonel Budi Susilo, had bodies loaded into trucks, which then headed towards the coastal town of Batugade. Twelve people had escaped, reaching a lagoon by dawn where they were caught and slaughtered by the military. Part of one body was found but the rest had disappeared. In October 1999 a local resistance leader, Paulo Maia, was called to Batugade by Australian soldiers to identify the mutilated corpse of his father which had floated up from the sea. Australian soldiers in Batugade at the time told journalists that several other bodies had washed up on the same beach, but weeks later the UN Human Rights Office in Dili knew nothing of them. Captain Plunkett said Australian troops in Interfet had orders to minimise the estimated number of deaths and "go soft on body disposal by the TNI Indonesian Army". As a result, the official body count registered for post-election violence in Maliana had been about 12, whereas as an intelligence officer he had evidence of "over 60 bodies in Maliana town and the surrounding area". Captain Plunkett said he calculated the overall 1999 toll from TNI and militia violence there as about 200. 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