Eyewitness

by Garrie Hutchinson

  ‘We’ve lost everything,’ one of them said. ‘I have no idea what has happened to the wonderful family that looked after us.’

  We knew our beachside house was doomed when the militia came around one night and painted a silver arrow on the fence, indicating it was marked for attack. The military commander’s house next door is untouched.

  For days Dili’s streets have remained deserted except for rampaging militia, police or soldiers. A UN official today described a group of dazed-looking people walking towards Dili’s wharf, where more than 4000 people were waiting for ships. UN officials have confirmed that almost all of Dili’s suburbs are deserted. Specific houses appear to be have been targeted, particularly those of independence leaders and supporters.

  Residents of the suburb of Becora, a pro-independence stronghold, said the militia and military went from door to door dragging out people who were hiding inside. They were loaded onto trucks at gunpoint.

  The UN has hundreds of reports of people being kidnapped and put on military or civilian planes and ships against their will with nothing but the clothes they stand in. Some were even thrown on to a ship departing for Irian Jaya. ‘The entire town has been cleansed of people,’ a Western official said. ‘It’s similar to what the Khmer Rouge did in Phnom Penh in 1975.’

  Some residents who risked execution to return to their homes were seen today picking through smouldering rubble. An American activist, Allan Nairn, who sneaked past Indonesian soldiers guarding the UN compound at dawn, returned after three hours to say nearby houses were deserted of people. Almost everything of value had been taken. ‘One old man hiding out shared a plate of rice with me,’ he said. ‘I was just climbing over back fences and walking through people’s living rooms. The doors were all open.’

  When the militia eventually saw him he wrapped a red and white cloth across his body, the colours of Indonesia’s flag, and walked down the centre of the streets back to the compound.

  When the two-vehicle UN convoy arrived to check a food warehouse, militia started to gun the motors on the motorbikes they were riding and shouted abuse and threats. A shot was fired at the departing convoy. A second five-vehicle UN convoy was confronted by an angry 50-strong militia gang brandishing firearms and machetes. A stand-off developed. Indonesian soldiers who were supposed to be providing security for the escort did nothing to intervene. The convoy managed to obtain only a small amount of water before one of the militia members smashed the rear window of a UN vehicle with a machete. The convoy dashed backed to the UN compound, where basic supplies of food and water are quickly running out. About 100 UN staff and 2000 refugees sheltering in the compound have only a day or two of basic supplies left.

  *

  Darwin, September 11th. The destruction of the capital is greater than anybody could imagine. Hundreds of houses are blackened shells. The doors of government offices are ajar. Banks, cafés, hotels, boarding houses, service stations: all burnt or trashed.

  One building – the police station – hides one of the most shocking of many shocking stories that have emerged so far from East Timor’s killing fields. Two days ago Ina Bradridge, wife of Mr Isa Bradridge, 45, of Ballina, walked the corridors of the station looking for a toilet. According to Mr Bradridge, who told her story last night after evacuation to Darwin, she happened to glance inside a large building that she knew was once used as a torture cell for political prisoners.

  ‘My wife told me she saw bodies. Thousands of them. Stacks of bodies went up to the roof. I know it is hard to believe but it is absolutely true. My wife saw arms and legs and dripping blood.’

  Now, from the safety of Australia, Bradridge plans to do a lot of talking on behalf of his wife, who can’t speak English, in the next few days. ‘They [the Indonesian military] are going to obliterate everybody,’ he said before boarding one of the evacuation trucks with his family. ‘The East Timorese have a choice … they either leave or die.’

  Leaving Dili to fly out in the same R.A.A.F. shuttles that take out the Bainbridges, we drive in silence through the mass destruction, past street after street of smouldering ruin. There are looters and thugs carrying pistols who walk with the arrogant swagger of the victor. But Dili is basically empty. In five days 70,000 people have gone. The bare-footed teenagers with fresh fish tied to their poles are gone. The clapped-out taxis, the naked kids playing on the debris-strewn beachfront, the old people hawking Portuguese-era coins who used to bother us at the hotel, the people who used to sit in the gutter every morning and read the local newspaper. All gone. Dreadful things have happened: here is a child’s bike twisted in the middle of the road; here are pools of dark liquid on the pavement. It looks like blood.

  Our drive from the besieged United Nations compound starts with a volley of shots from Indonesian soldiers who are supposed to be guarding us. We all duck for cover, even the 12 soldiers armed with AK-47 rifles who have been ordered to act as human shields on each truck. We think it’s a pretty good bet the thugs on the streets, most of whom we suspect are Indonesian police or soldiers, will not want to hurt their own people. But nobody believes the word of the Indonesian military any more, not in Dili anyway.

  Our drive from the besieged United Nations compound starts with a volley of shots from Indonesian soldiers who are supposed to be guarding us. We all duck for cover, even the 12 soldiers armed with AK-47 rifles who have been ordered to act as human shields on each truck. We think it’s a pretty good bet the thugs on the streets, most of whom we suspect are Indonesian police or soldiers, will not want to hurt their own people. But nobody believes the word of the Indonesian military any more, not in Dili anyway.

  Streets are littered with burnt-out buses, cars, and motorbikes. Nobody has bothered to move them out of the way. Many buildings have B.M.P. or Aitarak painted on them. B.M.P. stands for Besi Merah Puti or Red and White Iron, the militia group based in Liquica, 40 kilometres west of Dili. Aitarak or Thorn is the name of the Dili-based thugs who do the military’s dirty work. On one building somebody has scrawled in Bahasa Indonesian: ‘the result of a wrong choice’, a reference to the 30 August ballot when 78.5 per cent of eligible people voted for independence.

  We pass under a blue banner which declares that after East Timor’s ballot the UN will stay. We all believed that once, before this evil madness. But here they are departing in fear, almost 500 UN civilian police, international staff and 350 Timorese who were employed by the UN. Only a small group stay behind to try to ensure there is not a slaughter of hundreds of refugees who have been living with us for days in the compound, scared of an attack. We embrace and shed a few tears; hardship provides strong bonds of friendship.

  Only a few hundred metres from the compound, trucks parked outside a military barracks are loaded high with furniture. These killers are going, but when? And here is the clue to how to stay alive in Dili: display a red and white cloth, the colours of Indonesia’s flag. Every truck in the barracks is draped in red and white. A lone man on the pushbike wears a red and white headband. Soldiers wear red and white patches. Even the military truck taking us to the airport has a red and white cloth tied to the side mirror.

  Our drivers choose a route clear of debris. Past the Catholic cathedral, the one built by the Indonesians, which is untouched, unlike the waterfront home and chapel of Bishop Carlos Belo. There was terrible bloodshed there when the militia, soldiers and police attacked refugees last Tuesday. You only had to look at the bloodstains to establish that. The truck we are in drives slowly past the Portuguese restaurant where we enjoyed fresh fish most nights and where the militia came one night and made a noose, indicating they wanted to kill some journalists. The real business end of town is now in the western outskirts in a suburb called Comora.

  We drive past the two-storey Australian consulate, which was abandoned in great haste two days ago after the militia had spent two days terrorising the diplomats. The high-iron gate is open and Indonesian soldiers are walking inside. We see the militia in greater numbers alo
ng the road from the consulate, towards the airport. One pushes an empty trolley, his head down, almost running. But it’s hard to imagine there’s anything left to loot. It is here that for the first time we see ordinary people. Hundreds of women and children are camped out in the grounds of Dili’s main police station.

  We were greatly relieved to see an R.A.A.F. Hercules plane and Australian troops waiting to greet us at Dili airport. They were tense and business-like, searching our bags and checking names off lists. Shortly before we fly out of the town hidden by thick smoke, a Garuda 747 landed and taxied to the vandalised arrival and departure hall. Commercial flights had stopped days ago so I asked a soldier what it was doing here. ‘There will be three Garuda flights today to take people to other parts of Indonesia. There will be nothing left for them here. There will be many flights.’

  As I walked to the plane, dozens of refugees being herded off trucks waved. They were the waves of desperate people.

  *

  Dili, Monday, September 21st. The thugs disappeared quickly from Dili’s streets. When the first Australian soldiers arrived today in full combat dress, their rifles at the ready, the militiamen pretended they were the very refugees they had terrorised for weeks. Some of the killers, rapists and looters walked in small groups along debris-strewn streets waving at the Australians who began arriving shortly after dawn in huge cargo planes from Townsville and Darwin in what will probably become Australia’s most significant military operation since World War II. But the militia no longer carried the rifles given to them by the Indonesian armed forces or brandished their machetes, knives or home-made pistols. A couple were confronted by heavily armed New Zealand soldiers on Dili’s docks but handed over their pistols without argument.

  ‘They are basically cowards,’ said Irish journalist Robert Carroll, who has spent the past nine days hiding in Dili and the town’s surrounding mountains. ‘They ran away when real soldiers arrived.’

  The night before, the militia had emptied their rifles into the air as they had every night since the United Nations announced that 78.5 per cent of eligible East Timorese rejected Indonesia’s rule and voted to become the world’s newest independent state. They set alight or trashed the few buildings still habitable in the town, from which 70,000 people have fled. But as hundreds of foreign troops arrived, tense and ready for action, the bullies disappeared and the fires were burning themselves out.

  Major Chip Henriss-Anderssen, of Townsville’s Third Brigade, said when he arrived this morning on Dili’s wharf that genuine refugees appeared frightened and remained in small groups. ‘But after a while they came up, one or two at a time, and shook our hands,’ he said. ‘The little kids were saying, “Hey mister!” Perhaps after a while we will be able to teach them to say “G’day.”’

  The scene at Dili’s airport today was surreal. Shortly after dawn, crack Special Air Service troops based in Perth were among the first Australians to arrive in screaming Hercules planes. They ran across the dusty tarmac, securing the perimeter. But waiting and watching were a few dozen Indonesian soldiers, representatives of a humiliated, embittered force that is leaving East Timor in disgrace.

  Indonesia has never in its history suffered so great a humiliation: the world’s fourth most populous nation, rejected by people who had suffered 24 years of repression, most of whom are now homeless and still living in terror. The few dozen Indonesian soldiers who stayed around to watch wave after wave of soldiers arrive didn’t seem too fussed. Asked about the destruction and looting, one said: ‘This incident happened before we arrived.’ He declined further comment.

  Major-General Peter Cosgrove, the Australian commander of the multinational peacekeeping force, described the reception his soldiers received as ‘benign’. ‘We have had a cordial reception from the TNI (Indonesian armed forces),’ he said. Nobody mentioned the fact that it was the Indonesian armed forces who through their proxy militias have destroyed most of what Indonesia claimed was its 27th province, and stood by and watched mass killings and almost unbelievable atrocities. General Cosgrove was not underestimating the risks as more than 1000 of his troops sat under the few trees with shade at the airport. ‘It is still, from my point of view, a very risky environment beyond the sight of the nearest Australian soldier,’ he said.

  I was among a group of 40 journalists who were ordered not to leave the airport after we arrived from Darwin in a crammed Hercules. The first soldiers who went into the now wrecked departure lounge found the place smeared with excrement. Red and white banners, the colours of Indonesia’s flag, still hang outside the airport’s VIP lounge, one of the few buildings in Dili not wrecked.

  Tonight we will be escorted under armed guard to the Turismo, the waterfront hotel from which many of us fled in fear of our lives. The place is trashed but we will set up a makeshift camp in the mosquito- infested garden where only a couple of weeks ago Australia’s former deputy prime minister, Tim Fischer, and an Australian delegation of ballot observers sat and enjoyed cold beers and talked confi- dently of the birth of a new nation.

  There is some good news, though. The UN compound where we spent six long and scared days before being evacuated has not been burnt and much of the UN’s equipment is untouched. But a UN official who has been staying at the fortified Australian consulate, not far from the airport, said: ‘It’s a pretty horrific picture, overall. There are thousands of people dying up in the hills without food or water. They need urgent help. There is nothing left in the town for people to return to.’

  Robert Carroll, the Irish journalist, said he has seen young children with bloated stomachs and families with nothing to eat but small portions of rice. ‘People have been told the peacekeepers are coming but they don’t believe anything any more,’ he said.

  *

  Dili, September 25th. Television footage beamed via satellite out of Dili shows starving children, hundreds of thousands of people forced from their homes, rampaging thugs, destroyed towns. You have heard the clichés: war-zone, ghost town, haunted streets, genocide. But the enormity of it hits when people you know are dead or missing. Every foreigner who has lived or worked in East Timor knows somebody who has gone.

  I am typing this report in the burnt-out shell of the waterfront Hotel Turismo, with Australian soldiers sitting behind machine-guns and sand-bags on the balcony of my old room. Old John, the hotel waiter, has risked death to come back and see if he can help those of us who have returned. The last he heard, his family had been forced to one of the West Timor camps. John was here in 1975, when Indonesian troops invaded the former Portuguese territory, but he says this is worse.

  Even in those dark days the Indonesians never attacked the home of the Catholic bishop just along the road. This morning John arrives with the news that Indonesian soldiers, having burnt and trashed the home of Bishop Carlos Belo two weeks ago, are stealing rice from an 84-year-old nun, Sister Margarita, who has defied Indonesian military orders to leave and is trying to keep alive a small group of children separated from their parents.

  Armoured vehicles and tanks rumble frequently past our fortified hotel. Australian soldiers in full combat gear, their Steyr rifles at the ready, patrol the waterfront day and night where thousands of refugees have been living without shelter, food or water. The men of the militia have blended into the groups of refugees, who are too terrified to point them out. The mood of the Australian troops is tense, their behaviour business-like and disciplined. At the time of writing they have not yet fired a shot back in anger, even when three truckloads of Indonesian troops drove around firing into the air and once again terrorising Dili’s residents.

  I cried when I returned to Dili this week. Many reporters did, not just because of the slaughter of the East Timorese but because of the shame the behaviour of Indonesia’s soldiers and police have brought on our giant neighbour whose people are mostly kind and gentle and have long suffered from state brutality themselves.

  The other day in Melbourne, after I had spent a week inside
the besieged United Nations compound in Dili, an editor asked me to write a personal account of how we coped or didn’t cope with the pressure. But in Dili now that drama seems irrelevant.

  Try to picture this: every man, women or child forced from the city or town where you live, often at gunpoint. Entire towns and villages turned into wastelands. Everything of value stolen and loaded onto trucks by the military, police or the militias. Maybe tens of thousands of people slaughtered because 78.5 per cent of East Timorese voters dared reject Indonesia’s rule, after an annexation in 1975 that was never recognised by most of the world. The horror of seeing, on top of an untold number of other bodies, the beheaded body of a woman stuffed down a well.

  On Thursday I flew in an Australian army helicopter over the coastal town of Manatuto, east of Dili. It is totally destroyed, its people gone. Because it is too dangerous for anybody other than Indonesian soldiers, police or militia to travel outside Dili, we know little about towns such as Liquica, just one hour’s drive west of Dili, Maliana, the government and administrative and market centre for Bobonaro district, the port town of Suai or Lospalos, Viqueque, Same, Maubessi, Ainaro or even the second-largest town, Baucau, a picturesque place atop a cliff 400 metres above the sea.

  We know that most of the people are gone from there, too, because we see them on Dili’s waterfront – mothers trying to keep their children alive, ordered by the Indonesian military to climb aboard one of the ships sailing to Kupang or some other Indonesian port where they don’t want to go. The peacekeepers’ task is to disarm the militias. They have not yet been able to stop the depopulation of East Timor.

  We hear horror stories of concentration camps on the border with the Indonesian province of West Timor. We hear threats by the militia leader Eurico Guterres and others to kill the multinational forces, most of them Australians. We see Dili residents returning in trickles from the waterfront, where they fled, or were herded, when the killing began. A flicker of hope, perhaps, returns with them.