DAVID AND I flew from Sydney to Bali with a plane-load of happy Australian tourists. We caught an internal flight to Kupang in Indonesian West Timor. Not far from where Captain Bligh had sought refuge after the mutiny on the Bounty, we found ‘Teddy’s Bar’. We explained to Teddy about ‘Adventure Tours’, that we needed a four-wheel drive vehicle and a driver who knew the mountains in the east. He could provide both, but reminded us that foreigners needed special documentation to cross the border. We paid him and left.
It was early Sunday morning as the road reached down to the sea, and the border came into view. The bags with the cameras were beneath the seats. We wound up the tinted windows, and I lay down in the back. Ahead of us was a minibus spilling out its occupants for inspection of their papers. ‘Don’t stop,’ we directed the Timorese driver. ‘Drive around it.’ The police on duty had walked back to their cabin. We accelerated and were through.
Now the faces changed. In the west of the island people had smiled and waved; here, they almost never did. On the roadside they invariably looked away. The young and the old did not stare; young men consciously turned their backs.
Working with the aeronautical map and its blank spaces, we turned inland to get away from the main military route. On the horizon was a line of black smoke and fire. This was the traditional method of agriculture known as slash-and-burn, wherein the burnt scrub temporarily enriches the soil. The effect was three-dimensional, a harsh, almost menacing landscape. Yet we had only just climbed away from the coastal belt, with its lines of sugar palms. Ahead was a plateau of savannah that looked like the vast outback of Australia. Ghost gums rose out of grass almost as tall, then this changed without notice to a forest of dead, petrified trees: black needles through which skeins of fine white sand drifted, like mist. On the edge of this stood the surreal crosses.
They are almost everywhere; great black crosses etched against the sky, crosses on peaks, crosses in tiers on the hillsides, crosses beside the road, overlooking white slabs. I have seen graves and crosses like these in the north of Portugal, where they are stark symbols of the rhythm of life and death in an impoverished corner of Europe. There, you pass them without comment. In East Timor they litter the earth and crowd the eye. Walk into the scrub and they are there, always it seems, on the edge, a riverbank, an escarpment, commanding all before them.
The inscriptions on some are normal: those of generations departed in proper time and sequence. But look at the dates of these, and you see that they are all prior to 1975, when proper time and sequence ended. Look at the dates on most of them and they reveal the extinction of whole families, wiped out in the space of a year, a month, a day. ‘R.I.P. Mendonca, Crismina, 7.6.77 . . . Mendonca, Filismina, 7.6.77 . . . Mendonca, Adalino, 7.6.77 . . . Mendonca, Alisa, 7.6.77 . . . Mendonca, Rosa, 7.6.77 . . . Mendonca, Anita, 7.6.77 . . .’
I had with me a hand-drawn map of where to find a mass grave where some of the murdered of the 1991 massacre in the Santa Cruz cemetery had been dumped; I had no idea that much of the country was a mass grave, marked by paths that end abruptly, and fields inexplicably bulldozed, and earth inexplicably covered with tarmac; and by the legions of crosses that march all the way from Tata Mai Lau, the highest peak, 10,000 feet above sea level, down to Lake Tacitolu where a Calvary line of crosses looks across to where the Pope said mass in 1989 in full view of a crescent of hard, salt sand beneath which, say local people, lie human remains.
We approached Balibo, where the Australian television teams had died. We could not see the whitewashed house on which Greg Shackleton had painted ‘Australia’ before the murders. Shirley also had been unable to find it and believes it has been demolished. The main road wound past the church where Shirley had planted a tree for Greg in 1989. She had struggled to get permission for this, with the Indonesians saying no as it would, they said, admit liability for the murders. Finally, a priest offered the yard behind his church, and prepared a plot; and Shirley was allowed to plant the sapling with Indonesian troops surrounding her, sealing off the vicinity.
‘They had not allowed any Timorese to be there,’ she said. ‘But as I kneeled, saying a few words to Greg, the most wonderful singing washed over me. On the other side of the road, a young people’s choir had timed its practice to my being there. I shall never forget those beautiful voices. They came through the barrier the Indonesians had set up between us, and they comforted me. You see, that’s how the resistance works; everything is pre-arranged but never appears to be. They will never be defeated.’
The road out of Balibo snaked up through the mountains, with the four-wheel drive easing us around the strewn tree trunks with inches to spare and boulders suspended above as if on invisible wire. ‘Gerry’, our driver, pumped the brake pedal and leaned back on the handbrake like you do on the oars of a dinghy. It was becoming clear why the untried Indonesian army had taken years to get the better of Fretilin. This was guerrilla terrain, as difficult for outsiders to negotiate as any I have known.
Coming down the spine of the mountains, we were swallowed by folds of baked eroded red earth and by the silence. People seemed absent; but they were there. From the highest crest the road plunged into a ravine that led us to a river bed, then deserted us. The four-wheel drive forded the river and heaved out on the other side, where a boy sat motionless and mute, his eyes following us. Behind him was a village, overlooked by the now familiar rows of whitewashed slabs and black crosses. We were probably the first outsiders the people here had seen for a very long time. The diffident expressions, long cultivated for the Indonesians, changed to astonishment. We had entered, without knowing, a kind of prison.
The village straddled the road, laid out like a military barracks with a parade ground and a police post at either end. Unusually, the militia were trusted Timorese. The remoteness might explain this; the Indonesians remain terrified of Fretilin. That week a patrol of nine Indonesian soldiers had been ambushed and killed. People were moved here from their homes so they could be easily controlled. The village was a ‘resettlement centre’, similar to the ‘strategic hamlets’ invented by the Americans in Vietnam as a means of separating the population from the guerrillas. To the Timorese, the ‘control areas’, as the army calls them, are little better than concentration camps, which they cannot leave without a ‘travel pass’. As a consequence, their ability to grow food is extremely limited. In the late 1970s and early 1980s famine claimed many thousands of lives, on a scale likened by international relief officials to the war-related cataclysms that had hit Biafra in the mid-1960s and Cambodia in 1979–80.
Although we saw no starvation, many people were terribly malnourished.101 Camps such as this are also known as ‘model plantations’ and produce mostly cash crops for an export trade controlled by an Indonesian company, P. T. Denok, which was set up by generals close to Suharto. P. T. Denok monopolises the trade in sandalwood, cumin, copra and cloves; all the coffee grown in Timor, one of the finest Arabica coffees in the world, is controlled by the generals’ front company.102
After we had turned south, towards Suai, we saw other camps where many of the faces were Javanese: the product of the ‘transmigration programme’ designed to unravel the fabric of Timorese life and culture and eventually to reduce the indigenous population to a minority. Meanwhile, the East Timorese are themselves encouraged to ‘migrate’ to Irian Jaya, Sumatra and West Kalimantan, where there is work and where they remain permanently displaced. From a distance, I watched a flag-raising ceremony in one of these ‘villages’. Javanese cheer-leaders led a motley group of farmers, who were forced to stand to attention and cry out their allegiance in Bahasa Indonesia, a foreign language.
In Suai, the centre for oil drilling on the south coast, militarism seemed to invade all life. Traffic stopped for marching schoolgirls, jogging teachers and anthem-singing postmen (‘Tanah Airku: My Fatherland Indonesia’). Billboards announced the ‘correct’ way to live each day ‘in the spirit of Moral Training’. In an Orwellian affront to the Timorese, one billboard told them, ‘Freedom is the right of all nations’, quoting Indonesia’s own declaration of independence. This is known as the ‘New Order’.
‘It is the Indonesian civilisation we are bringing [to East Timor],’ said the Indonesian military commander in 1982. ‘And it is not easy to civilise backward people.’103 ‘Feeble mentality is still very evident among the Timorese,’ explained the Indonesian Armed Forces’ magazine. ‘[Such] low social, economic, mental conditions are the source of many negative features because they result in extremely inappropriate thought processes and experiences. The Binpolda [a kind of military brainwashing squad] have a great role to play in building village society if this is to proceed in accord with the programmes that have been decided upon. All the more is this so in East Timor where society so greatly yearns to be guided and directed in all spheres of life. Guiding the people is a process of communication whereas communication means conveying ideas or concepts for the purpose of creating uniformity.’104
Timorese occupy few jobs other than as drivers, waitresses and broom-pushers. In a café in Suai the Javanese owner, a portly young woman, flirted with lonely Javanese soldiers while a Timorese girl cooked, served and swept. As the Javanese emptied their bowls of noodles, they snapped their fingers and the girl cleaned around them, giggling nervously. On the wall was a gallery of posters of the Indonesian generals shot in the 1965 ‘communist coup’. They are the official martyrs of the New Order. ‘If President Suharto hadn’t rescued the nation, and beaten the communists’, we were told, ‘Indonesia would have broken up into many pieces.’ This is the state’s line, repeated incessantly on television and in schools.
That the ‘martyred’ generals died in factional fighting within the military, leaving Suharto to mount a real coup and the extermination campaign that was the precursor to East Timor’s agony, is a truth uttered only at great personal risk. In the New Order, Fretilin guerrillas are ‘separatist delinquents’ who ‘threaten the break-up of the fatherland’ and must be ‘wiped out’ by the ‘heroic people’s army’.
Thousands were massacred in Suai in the late 1970s, their bodies dumped on the oil-blackened coastline. The few Timorese who spoke to us publicly, drifting by the parked four-wheel drive and muttering snatches of Portuguese and English out of the sides of their mouths, were terrified and, of course, extraordinarily brave. Every street has a military façade, with a variety of units, mostly special forces, housed in former Portuguese villas or prefabricated houses, announced by large signs and military insignia. Next to the hostel where we stayed were the ‘red berets’, whose record of slaughter is documented. In the heat I slept very little, covered in an insect repellent so strong it melted the plastic case of my watch. The sound of the night was the soldiers next door playing country and western tapes, accompanied by the melodic humming of mosquitoes that carried the falciparum strain of malaria, which can be fatal.
‘Before the invasion we lived a typical island life, very peaceful,’ said Abel.fn1 ‘People were always very hospitable to foreigners. Villagers would go about their daily lives, working in rice fields without constantly looking over their shoulders, worrying about the military or guns. I could get up at any time and come back home at any time, go down to the river, catch prawns or go hunting without any restriction. I had to go to school to learn Portuguese. We had to learn to lead a double life; you go to school to communicate with the Portuguese, but once you are in a village you are totally within the traditional village life. But if the Portuguese had done what the Indonesians have done, the whole of East Timor would have been populated by white Portuguese. That’s not to say there was no brutality from the Portuguese. Of course any colonial situation is always brutal. But I think we were happy, yes I think so.
‘It is difficult to describe the change since then, the darkness over us. Of fifteen in my immediate family only three are left: myself, my mother and a brother who was shot and crippled. My village was the last Fretilin base to fall to the Indonesians in 1979. There was a massive bombardment. People said that all the trees were blown off the rocks, whole rocks became white. Because the land was very fertile; I mean you can grow almost anything there; lots of people from the lowlands went up there for protection. So it was overpopulated and very soon there wasn’t enough to sustain the number of people that were hiding there. Disease, and slow starvation, also took a lot of people. I told you about my family, but the estimate is that our clan has been reduced from 5,000 to 500.
‘Up until 1985 or 1986 most of our people were concentrated in what they called the central control areas, we lived in concentration camps for a long, long time. Only in the last three or four years have some of us been allowed to return home, but we can be moved again at any time. We are only allowed to go to specific areas to grow food. We have to go there at a certain time in the morning and come back at a certain time in the afternoon.
‘Any step away from those guidelines is considered suspect. Indonesians use local people to spy on the others. So there’s a constant fear of somebody always looking over your shoulder. People usually know who the spies are and they learn to deal with it. Certain things are not to be said widely even within the family. People have to be careful what they say about the Indonesians, they have got to pretend that everything is okay, just accept what the Indonesians are doing to them. That is part of finding a way to survive for the next day. But a human body and mind have limitations and can only take so much. Once it boils over, people just come out and protest and say things which mean they will find themselves dead the next day. I suppose you can compare us to animals. When animals are put in a cage they always try to escape. In human beings it’s much worse. I mean, we the people in East Timor call it the biggest prison island in the world. You must understand that. For us who live here, it’s hell.’
Was it Primo Levi who said that the worst moment in the Nazi death camps was the recurring fear that people would not believe him when he told them what had happened, that they would turn away, shaking their heads? This ‘radical gap’ between victim and listener, as psychiatrists call it, is suffered en masse by the East Timorese, especially the exiled communities. ‘Who knows about our country?’ they ask constantly. ‘Who can imagine the enormity of what has happened to us?’
‘I was born in Timor in 1963,’ said Constancio. ‘When Indonesia invaded I was twelve years old, and I went to the jungle. I was on the run all the time. Then I crept back to Dili to see my family, and I was caught. I was only fourteen. I was tortured, but I survived. In 1990 I helped an Australian lawyer, Robert Domm, meet Xanana Gusmao, our resistance leader. After that they caught me again. It was my birthday; and they tortured me all over my body, so that blood came out from my mouth and my nose and my ears. There were so many of them, hitting me, in front and in the back, and down here in my genitals, many times, so many times. They’d start at nine o’clock in the morning and did not finish until midnight. They let me go; but I heard that I was supposed to be arrested again, at two o’clock in the afternoon. I had no chance to say goodbye to my wife. That was over two years ago.’
‘Have you seen her since?’ I asked.
‘No, not once.’
‘Do you have children?’
‘When I went into hiding, my wife was six months pregnant. I have a son. But I have never seen him, except this one photo I have just received. I look at it all the time . . .’
‘What makes you keep on fighting?’
‘Because of our right to independence. This is a universal right; and a third of us have died for this right. Don’t pity me. Think of my wife. They keep on interrogating her, torturing her psychologically. This is her daily bread, and the daily bread of our people, and it is mine, too.’
From the day of the invasion Fretilin gave the Indonesians a shock. For two years those whom Jakarta had dismissed as ‘primitives’ held the interior to which most of the people had fled. It was only the arrival of Western military equipment, chiefly low-flying aircraft, that changed the course of the war. Otherwise Fretilin might have forced the Indonesians to negotiate their way out of East Timor.
Indeed, in 1983 Fretilin forces were in such command of most areas outside the towns that the Indonesians agreed to a ceasefire. Today, there are probably no more than 400 guerrillas under arms, yet they ensure that four Indonesian battalions do nothing but pursue them. Moreover, they are capable of multiplying themselves within a few days, for they are the locus of a clandestine resistance that reaches into every district and has actually grown in strength over the years. In this way they continue to deny the fact of integrasi – integration – with Indonesia.
Domingos is 40 years old and has been in the jungle since 1983. ‘My wife was tortured and burnt with cigarettes,’ he said. ‘She was also raped many times. She is now in Kraras. In September this year [1993] the Indonesians sent the whole population of the village to find us. My wife came to me and said, “I don’t want to see your face because I have been suffering too much . . .” At first I thought she was rejecting me, but it was the opposite; she was asking me to fight on, to stay out of the village and not to be captured and never to surrender. She said to me, “You get yourself killed and I shall grieve for you, but I don’t want to see you in their hands. I’ll never accept you giving up!” I looked at her, and she was sad. I asked her if we could live together after the war, and she said softly, “Yes, we can.” She then walked away, back to Kraras.’
Kraras is known by the Timorese as the ‘village of the widows’ because of the slaughter that took place there. During the summer of 1983 a whole community of 287 people was massacred here. One of them was the man who saved Steve Stevenson’s life, Celestino dos Anjos, who, like most of them, was forced with his family to dig his own grave, then shot. I found Celestino’s name on a list compiled in Portuguese by a priest who had passed it to Max Stahl. In a meticulous hand he recorded the name, age, cause of death and date and place of death of every one of these people murdered by the Indonesian army in the district of Bilbeo. In the last column he identified the battalion responsible for every murder.
Every time I pick up this list, I find it difficult to put down, as if each death is fresh on the page. Like the ubiquitous crosses, it records the Calvary of whole families, and bears witness to genocide . . . Feliciano Gomes, aged 50, Jacob Gomes, aged 50, Antonio Gomes, aged 37, Marcelino Gomes, aged 29, Joao Gomes, aged 33, Miguel Gomes, aged 51, Domingos Gomes, aged 30 . . . Domingos Gomes, aged 2 . . . ‘shot’.
So far I have counted forty families, including many children: Kai and Olo Bosi, aged 6 and 4 . . . ‘shot’ . . . Marito Soares, aged one year . . . ‘shot’ . . . Cacildo dos Anjos, aged 2 . . . ‘shot’. He must have been Celestino’s grandson. There are babies on the list as young as three months. At the end of each page, the priest imprinted his name with a rubber stamp, which he asked not to be publicised ‘in the interests of personal security’. Using a typewriter whose ribbon had seen better days, he addressed this eloquent, angry appeal to the world:
‘The international community continues to miss the point in the case of East Timor. There is only one crime, only one criminal. To the capitalist governors, Timor’s petroleum smells better than Timorese blood and tears. How long do the Indonesians think they can imprison, torture and kill? This is what the Timorese people in their concentration camps have asked themselves since 1975. It has always been a question without an answer.
‘It even seems as if it is the United Nations itself that is easing the path of the aggressor, giving it the time and conditions necessary to execute the ethnic and cultural genocide of the Timorese people and, finally, declare that East Timor is definitely integrated into the Indonesian Republic. Unfortunately the UN and the international community are the only viable solution for this tragedy but they have to be consistent with their condemnation of the 1975 invasion, and not leave it to the following year, since each year the level of extermination increases.
‘So who will take the truth to the world? Sometimes the press and even the international leaders give the impression that it is not human rights, justice and truth that are paramount in international relations, but the power behind a crime that has the privilege and the power of decision. It is evident that the invading government would never have committed such a crime, if it had not received favourable guarantees from governments that should have a more mature sense of international responsibility. Governments must now urgently consider the case of East Timor, with seriousness and truth. They must insist and advocate full Human Rights: the right of the Timorese people to independence.’
We drove into Dili in the early afternoon. It was quiet: not the quiet of a town asleep in the sun but of a place where something cataclysmic had happened and which was not immediately evident. Fine white colonial buildings faced a waterfront lined with trees and a promenade fitted with ancient stone benches. At first the beauty of this seemed uninterrupted. From the lighthouse, past Timor’s oldest church, the Motael, to the long-arched façade of the governor’s offices and the four ancient cannon with the Portuguese royal seal, the sea was polished all the way to Atauro Island where the Portuguese administration had fled in 1975. Then, just beyond a marble statue of the Virgin Mary, the eye collided with rusting landing craft strewn along the beach. They had been left as a reminder of the day Indonesian marines came ashore and killed the first people they saw: women and children running down the beach, offering them food and water, as frightened people do.
At dawn the next day we walked the length of the beach to the stone pier where people were brought to be shot and their families and friends ordered to count as each body fell into the water. I wanted to record a tribute to Roger East, the Australian journalist who went to East Timor early in November 1975, and stayed to his death. East had been outraged at the killing of Greg Shackleton and his colleagues and sympathetic to Fretilin. Before leaving Darwin he told his sister, ‘The people have been betrayed. Someone’s got to go and get the truth out.’105 His brother urged him to get a weapon, but East replied that he was ‘too old for that’ and had ‘lived too long with just a typewriter’.106
Arriving in Dili he set up an East Timor news agency and made many friends among the Timorese, who appreciated his dry humour. When the Australian government urged its nationals to leave Dili, he was the only one to stay, in spite of the fact that Indonesian propaganda had called him a ‘communist’ and promised that he would ‘share the fate’ of the television crews. As the invasion began and Fretilin withdrew to the east of the city, East remained in the Hotel Turismo, on the seafront, typing a dispatch which he sent to Australian Associated Press-Reuter in Darwin. Inexplicably, it was never used.
Roger East was caught in the street by Indonesian troops, bound with wire and dragged to the pier where he could hear the executions taking place. According to two eye-witnesses, he kept up a stream of rich, Australian abuse until the point of his death. He was told to face the sea; he refused and was shot in the face. His body fell, with all the others, into the ‘sea of blood’. An Indonesian report later claimed East was an armed revolutionary. After that, all knowledge of him was denied. Like the aftermath of the Balibo murders, an enquiry by the Australian Department of Foreign Affairs came to nothing, and not a word of protest was lodged publicly with Jakarta.
Staying at the Hotel Turismo, I could not get Roger East out of my mind. My room was a haven for cockroaches and spiders, and clearing a path through them was a prerequisite for a trip to the cesspit of a bathroom. I thought about him in this squalid and menacing place as he weighed up whether to stay or go. What would I have done? I would have got out. Roger East’s memory deserves more than his government’s wretched obsequiousness to his killers.
Today, the Turismo is where Indonesian officers, their hangers-on and local informers can be found. ‘Who are you?’ we were asked at the reception. ‘I see you are a company director. What is your company?’
‘Adventure Tours,’ I replied.
When I recorded a ‘camera piece’ that morning on the beach near the pier, under the noses of a group of Indonesian soldiers and with the camera only partly concealed, I could hear an echo of my words and felt deep inside me a cold fear I had not previously known.
We were now being watched constantly and decided to drive back into the mountains. Climbing the steep road out of Dili, we passed a war memorial built by the Australian veterans of the Timor campaign against the Japanese. Its dedication read, ‘To the Portuguese from Minho [a northern Portuguese province] to Timor’. The memorial was intended for native Timorese who gave their lives for the Australians, but the inscription does not mention the word ‘Timorese’, because all Timorese were supposed to be Portuguese citizens.
Low cloud engulfed us, with crosses marking every bend, it seemed, all the way to Aileu. ‘When they finally forced Fretilin to withdraw from Aileu in 1975’, wrote James Dunn, ‘Indonesian troops, in a brutal public spectacle, machine-gunned the remaining population of the town, except for children under the age of four, who were sent back to Dili in trucks. These infant survivors were ultimately to be placed in an orphanage near Jakarta, where the “poor victims of the Fretilin terror” were to become the subject of the charitable indulgence of Tien Harto (Suharto’s wife) and her coterie of bored wives of the affluent and powerful in the Indonesian capital.’107
In the centre of Aileu is the mass grave of victims of the Japanese in 1942. On the hill above are statues depicting God and Jesus, smiling and surreal, and more crosses leading to yet another Calvary. There is no sign of the Indonesian massacre. From behind the tombs of the 1942 memorial, we attempted to evade local spies while filming marching students; once again, a whole town seemed to be marching and honouring the flag of its executioners. I had yet to become accustomed to this irony; it was as if prisoners were taking their exercise in a prison yard hung with bunting and accompanied by a brass band. ‘Welcome to Timor,’ said an old Timorese man in English sitting on the steps of a café. He stood and lunged for my hand. ‘Welcome to the land of free people!’ At this, he gave out a fine, false laugh, like a cackle. The Javanese owner of the café tapped his finger to his head and said, ‘He’s okay, just a little mad.’
None of the shops in Aileu is owned by a Timorese; all seemed to be Javanese. As one of the principal sponsors of the ‘transmigration programme’, the World Bank should be pleased with its success in transforming towns like Aileu. The World Bank is also the main backer of Indonesia’s ‘family planning programme’ in East Timor. According to a senior bank official, ‘There is no inherent contradiction between the Indonesian government’s population and transmigration programme. We believe that family planning is capable of providing important economic and social benefits to all concerned.’108
When the World Bank opened its ‘family planning’ headquarters in Dili in 1980 the puppet governor of East Timor, Mario Carrascalao, was more to the point. The aim of the programme, he said, was ‘to prevent an increase in the population of the province’.109 For the regime, there is, of course, no ‘inherent contradiction’ in reducing the East Timorese population while increasing the immigrant population. A senior Indonesian officer told Bishop Belo, ‘We only need your land. We don’t need people like you Timorese.’110
‘In the village clinics,’ said Christina, ‘anything is possible. You have to do what the Indonesian doctors say. Many of the women are injected with Depo Provera without knowing what it is. Women have been sterilised when they come to the clinic for something else, even for medicine for their babies. They don’t know what is happening, or they are told that it’s okay by the babinses [the ‘guidance officials’, or brainwashers, in the resettlement camps]. We have lost so many people killed by the Indonesians, we must give birth in order to compensate or our population will fade away. We are not like any developing country. It’s a mistake to think of us that way. We need to increase our population, just to survive . . . Yes, we know what they are doing to us; we can’t fight this kind of attack on us with guns.’
In 1989, General Suharto received the United Nations Fund for Population Activities Prize, which praised his ‘support for family planning’.
We drove east, towards Baucau. It was here in 1981 that Operasi Keamanan (‘Operation Security’) had its most devastating effects. Timorese between the ages of eight and fifty were recruited to form human chains across the island, known as the ‘fence of legs’. The object was to flush out Fretilin guerrillas, with Indonesian troops following on behind and pursuing them into ‘human corrals’ where they could be captured or killed. A man who survived one of these ‘corrals’ reported, ‘It was a ghastly sight. There were a great many bodies, men, women, little children strewn everywhere, unburied, along the river banks, on the mountain slopes. I would estimate that about 10,000 people were killed in that operation.’111 Two years later a ‘scorched earth’ policy brought repeated bombing raids. This was known as Operasi Persatuan, or ‘Operation Unity’.
I was struck by the similarity of the landscape to parts of central Vietnam, between Quang Ngai and Song Tra, where the Americans dropped huge quantities of chemical defoliants, poisoning the soil and food chain and radically altering the environment. Indonesians also used chemical defoliants, most of which they made themselves. Today, as in Vietnam, the trees are twisted into grotesque shapes and there is no cultivation. This is known in East Timor as the ‘dead earth’, a place whose former inhabitants are either dead or ‘relocated’.
We reached Baucau in darkness. Baucau is a former Portuguese resort that once proclaimed a certain melancholy style and where holiday flights used to arrive from Australia. (‘Come and get a whiff of the Mediterranean!’ invited a 1960 Trans Australia Airways brochure.) Today the airport is an Indonesian airforce base and Baucau a military ‘company town’, surrounded by barracks. In the town square are two enormous statues of Timorese in ‘native costume’, their hands raised towards an Indonesian flag. The statues, made from reinforced concrete, are crumbling in the tropical climate, their expressions unsmiling and wan.
Behind them stands the Hotel Flamboyant. We climbed the long staircase in darkness and called out. A Timorese man emerged from the shadows, limping and coughing terribly. ‘What do you want?’ he asked. ‘A room?’ we said. He turned and struggled along a deserted colonnade, and flung open two doors. There was no water, a fan that turned now and then, a mattress coated with fungus and a window without glass. ‘There are no mosquitoes in Baucau,’ he said mysteriously. He left us with our echoes. The Hotel Flamboyant was, until recently, a torture centre.
‘I was arrested by the military command in Baucau, KODIM 1628,’ said Julio. ‘They used electric shocks on me. They attached a wire at the top of my feet, toes, fingers and ears, then started operating the current. I passed out. Then they attached negative and positive wires at the top of my toe, finger and actually inside my ear. I passed out again.’
‘My father was arrested several times,’ said Alberto. ‘He refused to join the new administration. They took him to the police headquarters, then sent for me and my sisters and brothers to see him being tortured. They said to us that if we followed our father’s example, this is what would happen to us. They beat him with iron bars at first, then they did something to him that you learn in karate. They put their hands on his stomach and manipulated his organs and intestines. Indonesian soldiers are trained in these methods. They did this to him in four sessions. Then he got a disease in his stomach and vomited a lot of blood. I saw all this happen. He died when he lost all the blood. That was 1983.’
‘When I was young’, said Agio, ‘the military came to my house, and killed my two brothers in front of my eyes. Before they killed them, they prepared a hole and persecuted them. When they did it, they pulled out a heart from one of them and showed it to us. “That’s a guilty, dirty, filthy heart”, they said to us. “You cannot be like this because this is the heart of a communist . . .”’
Torture appears to have been systematic throughout East Timor. The Indonesian military publishes an erudite manual on the subject, entitled ‘Established Procedure for the Interrogation of Prisoners’. Section 13 reads, ‘Hopefully, interrogation will not take place except in certain circumstances when the person being interrogated is having difficulty telling the truth . . . If it proves necessary to use violence, make sure that there are no people around . . . to see what is happening . . . Avoid taking photographs showing torture in progress [such as when] people are being subjected to electric current, when they have been stripped naked etc. Remember do not have such photographic documentation developed outside East Timor which could then be made available to the public by irresponsible elements. It is better to make attractive photographs, such as shots taken while eating together with the prisoner, or shaking hands with those who have just come down from the bush, showing them in front of a home, and so on . . . If necessary, the interrogation should be repeated over and over again using a variety of questions, so that, eventually, the correct conclusion can be drawn from all these different replies.’112
As John Taylor has pointed out, the torture manual’s definition of interrogation, of drawing a ‘correct conclusion’ from replies which constantly denied this conclusion’s inversion of reality, could also have been taken as a guide for the Indonesian military’s relations with its Western backers.113 Foreign ‘fact finding’ delegations have occasionally visited East Timor under military sponsorship and have been accommodated in the Hotel Flamboyant, presumably in a wing undisturbed by the activities of its torturers. One such delegation was led by Bill Morrison, former defence minister in the Whitlam Government and later Australian Ambassador to Indonesia. The Indonesians allowed the Morrison visit mostly on their terms, including the use of military interpreters. ‘The delegation’, wrote John Taylor, ‘duly recorded that the military had invaded East Timor to quell chaos, that Suharto was reluctant to intervene, that the vast majority of people voted for the military in the elections, that food shortages were due to the long dry seasons and even that malnutrition was due to “a lack of variety in diet”.’114
Morrison arrived during the ceasefire in 1983, which allowed him to meet a group of Fretilin representatives who had flagged down his convoy. The Indonesian interpreters so distorted his conversation with the guerrillas that all references to atrocities and a nearby concentration camp were omitted. That night the delegation stayed at the Hotel Flamboyant and recorded in their report: ‘Back in Baucau the delegation leader informed other members of the delegation of the meeting [with Fretilin] before settling down to a night of bridge.’115
Morrison had promised the Fretilin group, ‘Somehow we will get a message to you . . .’116 No message was ever sent; Morrison’s report claimed that ‘the [Indonesian] administration in East Timor appears to be in effective control of all settled areas’;117 yet his own encounter with Fretilin had contradicted that. On his return to Australia, Morrison was asked to comment on a report from Fretilin that the Indonesians were about to break the ceasefire and attack the population. ‘We have just been there’, he said, ‘and seen with our own eyes, and we have discussed with the military commander . . . Certainly nothing we saw, nothing we were told there, gives any credence to that report.’118
A few days later, the Indonesian chief-of-staff, Benny Murdani, launched a new terror campaign, using American and British aircraft. ‘This time no fooling around,’ he said, ‘we’re going to hit them without mercy.’119
When David and I returned to Dili it was evident that our cover was wearing thin. At the New Resende Inn the same spook was waiting for us as we came and left. Perhaps it was David’s highly convincing public conversation with a Javanese travel agent about the ‘tourist potential of East Timor’ that bought us extra time. Talking to any Timorese was extremely risky. A group of American Congressional aides had been and gone, aware that the streets had been ‘cleaned’ for their visit, as the Timorese say, with some 3,000 arrests and expulsions from Dili. The nights now belonged to truck-loads of black-helmeted troops.
When an old man approached me in the hotel courtyard, asking me in a whisper to contact his family in exile in Australia, I walked away at first, then turned back and drew him into a passageway. ‘All my children are in Darwin,’ he said, ‘I sent them out. It cost a lot in bribes. Now I long to see them.’ I asked him if he had ever tried to leave. He shook his head and ran a finger across his throat. ‘Will you take a letter for me?’ he asked. ‘Post it anywhere but here. They open everything. I have not had a letter for eight years.’ I agreed to collect the letter that evening.
Across the road from the Roman Catholic cathedral three security policemen stopped a woman as she opened the gate, and demanded her name. She kept going to the bishop’s door. Brave woman. The church in East Timor is, to the generals, a greater enemy than Fretilin, in spite of the Pope’s apparent silence on the genocide during his visit to East Timor in 1989. According to members of the East Timorese church, the Pope was ‘poorly briefed’ prior to his visit. Once there, they said, he spoke generally about human rights and has since maintained the independence of the East Timorese church by not recognising it as part of the Indonesian Bishops’ Conference. Yet he also gave public communion to General Murdani, who led the invasion and whose troops did much of the killing.
The massacre of hundreds of young people who marched peacefully to the Santa Cruz cemetery on November 12, 1991, remains like a presence in Dili. They had set out to place flowers on the grave of a student, Sebastiao Gomes, who had been shot dead at the church two weeks earlier. When they reached the cemetery, they were shot down by waiting troops, or they were stabbed or battered to death. There was no provocation. What was different about this massacre was that foreigners were present, including one with a video camera. However, it was after the foreigners had been arrested and expelled from East Timor (one, a New Zealander, was murdered; several others were badly beaten) that a more typical, unreported massacre took place.
‘After the killings in the cemetery,’ said Mário, ‘I escaped being hit. So I pretended to be dead. The soldiers came and searched all the bodies and me, and hit me on the head so that I bled. They threw me with the other bodies on to a pick-up truck. They took us to the mortuary, locked the door and went upstairs. Some of my friends were still alive, crying. They were calling out for water. I told them the only water was dirty, so we must pray together. I saw with my very eyes that among the bodies were children and old people. Suddenly I heard steps approaching and I lay down again, pretending to be dead. Two soldiers came in. One of them picked up a big stone, and the other got a tablet from a jar. They then said out loud that if anyone was able to walk they had to stand up.
‘When some of my friends got up, one of them was hit on the head by the soldier with the stone; he died later. I heard the blows, and it sounded like coconuts cracking as they fall from a tree on the ground. As they got close to me I stood up so suddenly that the soldiers were taken aback. I told them I was an informer, that I really worked for them. I didn’t want to lie, but this saved my life. The soldier with the jar of tablets was making the injured take them, and he gave me one; I think it was yellow; it made me vomit.’ (We passed several of these tablets to Scotland Yard’s forensic laboratories in London, which found them to be paraformaldehyde. When vaporised this is a powerful disinfectant and must not, under any circumstances, be ingested.)
José, a Timorese orderly at the military hospital in Dili, took up the story. ‘I was at the hospital receiving the dead and wounded,’ he said. ‘Most of them were dead, but some were pretending to be. The soldiers didn’t unload the bodies one by one; they just pushed them down on the ground. If they spotted one that was alive they killed him by running the van over him. Some of the soldiers were afraid of killing more. So they ordered the Timorese who were there to kill them. People said no, or they ran and hid in the toilets. The Indonesians then tried to inject them with sulphuric acid. But the soldiers stopped doing this as the people screamed too loudly. Instead they gave each of them two pills and they got very ill.’
The hospital orderly described how Indonesian military doctors took part in killing the wounded. ‘The doctors themselves went to get poison liquid’, he said, ‘and they gave it to people to drink. I don’t know if the higher ranks in Indonesia knew about this; anyway, they would deny it. This information is not hearsay; it was given to me by someone who was actually told to kill some survivors. We were forced by the Indonesians to do this job. If people didn’t take the poison, they were stoned or beaten with sticks. One effect of the poison was that people started passing out one by one. You could see them struggling with their breathing. There was one soldier, a corporal; he was the most ferocious. He gave poison to people. Then he stoned them till they died. Up until now I have not told this to any foreigner. I am worried about my safety. The Indonesian intelligence follows everyone. That is why I have had to keep it secret.’fn2
While Indonesian officers and spooks sang maudlin songs backed by the Karaoke in the hotel dining-room downstairs, I attempted to shred my notes and stuff them down the lavatory. This succeeded in blocking it, and it then had to be unblocked; the rest David and I burned, almost setting the bathroom curtain on fire. An element of black farce, which had underpinned ‘Adventure Tours’, was now reasserting itself. With the small videotape cassettes strapped to our legs, bellies and crotches, we said farewell to Gerry, our driver, and set out to leave the country from Dili airport. Swathed in Timorese cloth and nursing a large wooden statue sold to me by a village liurai (king), we hoped we looked as ‘travel consultants’ might, although I doubt if this made as much difference to our fortunes as the wonderfully chaotic distractions at the airport caused by the mêlée of Indonesians desperate to escape from a posting most had come to dread.
I had met the old man who wanted to give me a letter to post. After all the years of separation, he said, with tears in his eyes, he had not been able to compose his thoughts and put them on paper in time for my departure. Instead he gave me a telephone number in Darwin for Isabella, his eldest daughter. I telephoned the number when I got to Bangkok. A recorded voice said it had been disconnected.
fn1 The identities of most Timorese interviewed inside and outside East Timor are disguised, including those who insisted they could be identified, saying they had ‘nothing to lose’. The interviews were conducted by myself, and by Max Stahl and Ben Richards.
fn2 This man and the other witnesses to the ‘second massacre’ in November 1991 are now safely out of East Timor. In February 1994 they gave testimony to the United Nations Human Rights Commission sitting in Geneva.