by John Pilger
Where are all these missing Timorese? The facts ought to be well known, but are not. As a direct result of the Indonesian invasion and occupation, which continues, some 200,000 people, or a third of the population, have died. This estimate was first made in 1983, by the head of the Roman Catholic Church in East Timor, following an admission by the Indonesian Department of Defence and Security that the civilian population of East Timor had halved since the invasion.2 In 1993 the Foreign Affairs Committee of the Australian Parliament reported that ‘at least 200,000’ had died under the Indonesian occupation.3
Moreover, this figure has been secretly accepted by Western governments, as the CIA operations officer in Indonesia at the time of the invasion confirmed to me in 1993.4 What in other countries would have been condemned and punished as an act of barbarism and a crime against humanity has, it seems, been quietly deemed acceptable. When pressed in an interview Gareth Evans, the Australian foreign affairs minister, whose policies have supported the Suharto regime, admitted that the number of East Timorese dead ‘is horrifyingly large’.5
How they died has been Indonesia’s and its allies’ great secret. Western intelligence has documented the unfolding of the genocide since the first Indonesian paratroopers landed in the capital, Dili, on December 7, 1975 – less than two months after two Australian television crews were murdered by the Indonesian military, leaving just one foreign reporter, Roger East, to witness the invasion. He became the sixth journalist to die there, shot through the head with his hands tied behind his back, his body thrown into the sea.
As a result, in the age of television few images and reported words reached the outside world. There was just one radio voice, picked up in Darwin, Australia, 300 miles to the south, rising and falling in the static. ‘The soldiers are killing indiscriminately,’ it said. ‘Women and children are being shot in the streets. We are all going to be killed. I repeat, we are all going to be killed . . . This is an appeal for international help. This is an SOS. We appeal to the Australian people. Please help us . . .’6
No help came. Tens of thousands of people died resisting the invasion, or were slaughtered without reason.7 Or they died in concentration camps where Indonesian troops herded peasants whose villages were razed. Or they starved. ‘I was the CIA desk officer in Jakarta at that time,’ Philip Liechty told me, ‘I saw the intelligence that came from hard, firm sources in East Timor. There were people being herded into school buildings by Indonesian soldiers and the buildings set on fire; anyone trying to get out was shot. There were people herded into fields and machine-gunned, and hunted in the mountains simply because they were there. We knew the place was a free fire zone. None of that got out.’
The Indonesian military all but closed East Timor to the outside world, making it extremely difficult to verify what was happening there and relatively easy for Jakarta and its defenders to plead ignorance of the atrocities. However, information from credible sources did get out. In 1977, two nuns in Lisbon received a letter from a priest in hiding in East Timor. ‘The invaders’, he wrote, ‘have intensified their attacks from land, sea and air. The bombers do not stop all day. Hundreds die every day. The bodies of the victims become food for carnivorous birds. Villages have been completely destroyed. The barbarities, understandable in the Middle Ages, justifiable in the Stone Age, all the organised evil have spread deep roots in Timor. The terror of arbitrary imprisonment is our daily bread. I am on the persona non grata list and any day I could disappear. Genocide will come soon . . .’8 Another survivor wrote, ‘The luck of the Timorese is to be born in tears, to live in tears and to die in tears.’9
‘Anyone can come to East Timor,’ say the Indonesians. According to Amnesty International, at least 33,000 people remain on an official government blacklist restricting entry to and exit from the country.10 Those who are granted visas are shepherded, restricted and watched. Journalists who attempt to enter as tourists are generally discovered and deported. In the week I left London for Sydney, en route to East Timor, an Australian film maker, David Bradbury, was arrested in Dili and his videotape confiscated. In the preceding month, correspondents of the Washington Post, Frankfurter Allgemeine and the Sydney Morning Herald had applied for visas simply to travel to Indonesia; all were refused. In 1994, as the UN Human Rights Commission again considered East Timor and my film, Death of a Nation, was shown in a number of countries, two brief, highly restricted press tours were arranged.
The regime, understandably, is frightened of the media, especially television. On November 12, 1991 a British cameraman, Max Stahl (a pseudonym), recorded Indonesian troops shooting and beating to death scores of young people in the Santa Cruz cemetery in Dili. His videotape, which he buried among the graves before he himself was arrested, was shown around the world. When some, like Foreign Affairs Minister Evans, sought to explain away the massacre – which had left more than 450 people dead and ‘disappeared’11 – as an ‘aberration’,12 their apologetics were undermined not only by the reaction of the Indonesian regime, whose senior military officer said he wished to shoot and ‘wipe out’ more ‘delinquents’,13 but by international revulsion at the pictures of wounded youngsters dying among the gravestones.
If British television ever reclaimed the power of its documentary tradition it was in Max Stahl’s report, made with such skill and bravery. I regret I cannot use his own name; that would identify those of the East Timorese resistance who helped him, and have since helped me.
Max had got in touch with me earlier that year and suggested we go to East Timor together, but events had conspired against my going. For years I had been listening to friends in Australia vent their frustration at not being able to travel freely in East Timor and to film unhindered. Gil Scrine’s Buried Alive and Mandy King’s and James Kesteven’s Shadow over Timor were both fine films that documented the collusive role played by the West, notably Australia, in the suffering of the Timorese. However, the wall that Suharto and his generals had built around Indonesia’s ‘27th province’ remained the obstacle it was intended to be.
For me, the Australian dimension to the genocide in East Timor is especially disturbing. In the Sydney street where I grew up in the years following the Second World War were several ‘diggers’ (veterans) who had fought the Japanese in Asia. One of them, the father of one of my earliest friends, would display a ceremonial sword he had taken from a Japanese he had killed during an ambush on the ‘Portuguese island’. It was common to describe Australia’s neighbours in racist terms; and to him, the Timorese were ‘boongs’ and ‘fuzzy wuzzies’; but he also spoke of them with unusual affection and admiration, and would point in a school atlas to where he had served as a commando and talk of the people he had ‘left behind’. He had regrets.
It was many years before I understood the importance of these regrets. In December 1941, Australian commandos invaded the neutral Portuguese colony of East Timor in an attempt to prevent the Japanese building airfields from which they could launch an invasion of northern Australia. The arrival of the Australians had the effect of drawing the Japanese to island communities they might otherwise have spared. The Australians fought a classic guerrilla campaign, disrupting a numerically superior Japanese force, and their exploits passed into popular legend, dramatised by Damien Parer’s 1942 film, Men of Timor. They were able to achieve this only because of a remarkably close relationship forged with the Timorese, who supplied and protected them and who themselves fought like lions.
As a result of this succour, the Australians lost only forty men. The Timorese, however, paid a dreadful price. As many as 60,000 were killed, or 14 per cent of the population. Many died under torture after the Australians hurriedly withdrew, having promised to take people with them; they took no one.
‘We shared their homes,’ recalled John (‘Paddy’) Kenneally, then a young commando private. ‘You found Australian soldiers sleeping on one side, the fire in the middle, and on the other side would be a granddad and grandmother and all the children and a s
pare dog or two . . . The night on the beach when we left was heart-breaking. [The Timorese] were crying their eyes out . . . We went to Timor and brought nothing but misery on those poor people. That is all they got out of helping us – misery.’14
In 1943, the Royal Australian Airforce dropped leaflets which began, Os vossos amigos não vos esquecem – your friends do not forget you. When the war ended, the government sent the Timorese a wreath of roses and bougainvillea, then promptly forgot about them for twenty years when the foreign affairs minister was moved to describe their country as ‘an anachronism, not capable of independence’.15
In 1987 I interviewed Arthur (‘Steve’) Stevenson, a former commando. He told the story of Celestino dos Anjos, a Timorese trained by the Australians, whose ingenuity and courage had saved his life, and other Australian lives, behind Japanese lines. Steve Stevenson returned to Timor in 1970 and had an emotional reunion with Celestino. ‘I went to his village,’ he said. ‘We had a son the same age. The bond between us was wonderful. I owed the man the debt of life. When I got back to Australia I tried to get him the military recognition he deserved, but this wasn’t possible as the Timorese were not officially part of the Australian army. I eventually got him one of those loyalty medals they handed out around the islands. To make it special, I arranged for the Governor of Timor to pin it on Celestino. That was 1972. I was there, beside him.’
In 1975 Steve Stevenson heard that Celestino had survived the Indonesian invasion, then heard nothing for almost eleven years. In 1986 he received a letter from Celestino’s son, Virgilio, dated two years earlier. Written in Portuguese, it told of Celestino’s murder. The son wrote that in August 1983 Indonesian forces entered their village of Kraras . . . ‘They looted, burned and devastated everything and massacred over 200 people inside their huts, including old people, the sick and babies . . . four battalions encircled Bibileo and fighter aircraft bombed the area intensively during the following weeks.’ The Indonesians, he wrote, ‘captured about 800 people’ who were ‘massacred by machine-gun fire . . . on 27/9/83 they called my father and my wife, and not far from the camp, they told my father to dig his own grave and when they saw it was deep enough to receive him, they machine-gunned him into the grave. They next told my pregnant wife to dig her own grave but she insisted that she preferred to share my father’s grave. They then pushed her into the grave and killed her in the same manner as my father.’16
Vigilio and his brother, who escaped, joined the Fretilin guerrillas. In 1991 Steve Stevenson learned of their deaths. ‘When Celestino and I were reunited in 1970,’ he said, ‘he didn’t ask me why Australia let him and his people down, why we deserted them. He felt that was a consequence of war. It was as if the Japanese reprisals hadn’t happened! But for us, a free people, to let the Timorese down, to watch while the Indonesians mark their boots on them is intolerable. I dream about that man and his family, all gone . . .’ At the end of our conversation, he turned away and wept. He died in 1992.
The history of East Timor is very different from that of the other islands that make up the volcanic stepping stones, rising from clear deep seas, east of Bali. The Suharto regime has tried to justify its illegal occupation on the grounds of what it calls ‘deeply felt and longstanding ties . . . of common brotherhood’. In fact, the East Timorese have little in common with Indonesia and especially the Javanese who rule it. Descended from the Atoni people of the highlands, Malay and Melanesian immigrants and Chinese, Arab and Gujerati traders, they have over the centuries developed strikingly different languages and culture from what is now Indonesia. Whereas most Indonesians are Muslim or Hindu, the East Timorese are animist or Roman Catholic. Even their colonial experience was different, with the Portuguese ‘latinising’ the eastern half of the island and insulating it from the upheavals of the Dutch colonies, including West Timor, that became Indonesia in 1949.
Unlike the Dutch, the Portuguese were interested in trade, not settlement. They made no attempt to disrupt a civilisation that was divided into kingdoms, or rais, ruled by a king or liurai. The rais were made up of tribal groups which divided into clans, or village units. The thread was kinship; few places on earth have such strong ties of family. Today, exiled Timorese, with feats of memory, can name their hundreds of ‘close’ relatives.
While they competed with the Dutch for the white aromatic sandalwood of the small trees that covered the mountains and which they sold at great profit in India and Persia, the Portuguese adapted their administrative system to the village units. Their rule was benign, neglectful and, as in other Portuguese colonies, multi-racial. ‘What did stick out like a thumb’, recalled Paddy Kenneally, ‘was the lack of racism. The Anglo-Saxons or the Dutch or the Germans would take native mistresses and they might do something for the children without admitting to them openly, but the Portuguese just didn’t seem to have that gulf. It was usual to see a Portuguese properly married to a native wife . . . At gatherings you’d see the full range of mixtures in the colours and looks all talking away happily. Some were a mixture of Chinese, Portuguese, Timorese and there were some Portuguese African and Goan Indian troops . . . So in one family some would be black, some white and everything in between, and you’d get some attractive combinations with a dash of this or a dash of that. I found the Timorese very attractive, with beautiful eyes and teeth, unless they got into the betel nut. It’s a kind of drug. They use lime with it and it can wear their teeth away . . .’17
Not even the Catholic Church, it seems, resorted to forced conversion, which perhaps explains why Christian and animist beliefs and prejudices coexist in harmony. However, the church, as elsewhere, ran the schools and created an elite that was indebted to its liturgy of power. This changed dramatically with the Indonesian invasion. An East Timorese church emerged, similar to that of the popular ‘political’ church of Central America. Its priesthood became more Timorese, and for the first time mass was said not in Portuguese but in Tetum, the Timorese lingua franca. This represented a direct challenge to the Indonesian ban on the institutional use of all languages except that of the state, Bahasa Indonesia. Thus the church forged a solidarity with the people and with the resistance and became, as Peter Carey has written, ‘the only institution capable of communicating independently with the outside world and of articulating the pain of the East Timorese people’.18 In under two decades (from 1975) the proportion of nominal Catholics has shot up from less than 30 per cent to over 80 per cent of the population.
In 1989, Bishop Carlos Felipe Ximenes Belo, the head of the Catholic Church in East Timor and himself a Timorese, appealed directly to the world in a letter to the United Nations Secretary-General. ‘We are dying as a people and as a nation,’ he wrote.19 He received no reply.
In April 1974, Portugal’s old fascist order, established by Antonio de Oliveira Salazar, was swept aside by the Revolucão dos Cravos, the ‘Carnation Revolution’. Events in Lisbon moved quickly and chaotically. The new government, drawn from the left-wing Armed Forces Movement, began to decolonise the last of Europe’s great empires by offering almost immediate independence to the African colonies of Angola, Mozambique and Guinea-Bisseau, which were already in revolt, and to the Cape Verde islands, São Tome and Principe. The tiny ‘overseas province’ of East Timor, ‘asleep at the end of the earth’, as one Portuguese commentator later wrote, ‘was on no one’s list of priorities’.
However, within a month of the revolution in Lisbon, three political groups had formed in East Timor. The Timorese Democratic Union (UDT), led by members of the colonial administrative elite and coffee plantation owners, called for federation with Portugal and eventually independence. The Timorese Social Democratic Association (ASDT), which later became the Revolutionary Front for an Independent East Timor, or Fretilin, comprised most of the younger nationalist opposition who wanted genuine economic reforms. A third party, the Timorese Popular Democratic Association (Apodeti) drew its tiny membership from the border with West Timor and wanted integration with Indonesia.<
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During the campaign, ‘We criss-crossed the country,’ wrote José Ramos Horta,fn1 who is today Fretilin’s foreign minister in exile. ‘Our theme was simple. We spoke the language of the people: “Are we human beings or a sack of potatoes to be sold to another country?” The Timorese, proud and independent, responded enthusiastically to the cry for independence. A literacy campaign was launched; student brigades taught children and adults to read and write in their own language for the first time ever. They helped the people build schools and health centres, where they taught nutrition and hygiene; paramedics were mobilised for a vaccination campaign . . . Nicolau Lobato [a Fretilin leader who was later killed] inaugurated the co-operative schemes that became so popular . . .’20
In June 1974, José Ramos Horta travelled to Jakarta, where he met the Indonesian foreign minister, Adam Malik. ‘He told me he sympathised “whole-heartedly” with the East Timorese desire for independence,’ said Ramos Horta. ‘He said that Indonesia respected “the right of every nation [to independence] with no exception for the people of Timor”. The Government of Indonesia had “no intention to increase or expand their territory, or to occupy territories other than what is stipulated in the Constitution . . . Whoever will govern East Timor in the future after independence can be assured that the Government of Indonesia will always strive to maintain good relations for the benefit of both countries”.’21
As a piece of deception this has few equals. As James Dunn has pointed out, the conspiracy to integrate East Timor forcibly had already begun when Malik was issuing his reassurances. The Indonesian military dictatorship believed that Fretilin would turn East Timor into a base for communist insurgency, ‘another Cuba’, which was absurd. Although Fretilin included students recently returned from Lisbon with Marxist views, most of the leaders were Catholic socialists who looked to the Cape Verde philosopher Amical Cabral and the Brazilian priest and educator Paulo Friere; or, like José Ramos Horta, they took Swedish social democracy as their model. Above all, they were nationalists who wanted their people to control their own destinies, trade and resources. This was no more than the Indonesian nationalists had demanded for themselves when they threw the Dutch out of their country. The Fretilin leaders had also made clear that they wanted to live at peace with their huge neighbour, the fifth largest nation on earth.