by John Pilger
Shirley travelled to East Timor in 1989, at the time of the Pope’s visit to Dili. In the Hotel Turismo she confronted General Murdani, who commanded the invasion and whose troops had killed her husband and his colleagues. ‘He was having breakfast in the dining-room,’ she told me. ‘People were genuflecting and grovelling to him. After drinking a double-strength coffee I walked over to his table and said, “General, my name is Shirley Shackleton. I’ve always wanted to ask you what exactly happened to my husband and his colleagues.” He said, “I wouldn’t know; we weren’t there.” I said to come off it, that Greg had filmed his ships arriving at Balibo before he had been killed.
‘At this he stood up to go; and I realised that for once in my life I had absolute power over this man, because everyone was watching and he wouldn’t dare be rude to me. So I put my hand on his elbow and said, “Sit down, because we’re not going to get anywhere with that, but I’d like to tell you what I’ve seen in the time I’ve been in Timor.” He sat and he listened as I told him about the atrocities committed by his troops. I told him that a lot of young men they were now torturing had Indonesian fathers and were the result of the rapes of Timorese women. I said the Timorese would never accept the Indonesians under any circumstances. He said nothing. He knows who I am now.’
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fn1 Like Max Stahl, Ben Richards is a pseudonym.
A LAND OF CROSSES
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 s
aw 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 resi
stance 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.