by John Pilger
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