Distant Voices (36 page)

According to Australian journalist Jill Jolliffe, on the day the journalists were murdered, the Australian Associated Press bureau in Darwin was informed by telephone by the Department of Foreign Affairs that ‘something big' was about to happen in East Timor that day. The ‘something big' had already happened that very morning. When the call came, the journalists had been dead for four hours.
⁹³

The Australian Government made no formal, public protest to Jakarta. Two of the dead were Britons; the British Government said nothing. The official Australian response was first to try to blame the victims, then to feign that ‘no definitive information' had ‘yet come to hand'.
⁹⁴
According to the then Foreign Affairs Minister, Senator Don Willesee, the journalists were ‘missing' at ‘the scene of heavy fighting between rival factions'.
⁹⁵
Willesee referred to a Fretilin soldier who had ‘described the entry of anti-Fretilin forces into Balibo'.
⁹⁶
James Dunn, who was present at the interview with the soldier, wrote that what he ‘actually described was the entry of
Indonesian
troops' into the village where the television teams were.
⁹⁷

More than two weeks elapsed before Prime Minister Whitlam took action. This was in the form of a letter to Suharto in which he sought his friend's co-operation in determining the fate of the newsmen. Six months later the government of Malcolm Fraser agreed to participate in an Indonesian enquiry, which was stage-managed to the point of farce. ‘Despite its knowledge of the true facts,' wrote Dunn, the government ‘agreed to this futile exercise in a deliberate attempt to dispose of an obstacle to the normalisation of relations between Jakarta and Canberra.'
⁹⁸

On April 28, 1976, Australian embassy officials flew from Jakarta to East Timor. Witnesses to the killings had already been moved out of Balibo by the army; and the ‘Timorese' the Australian officials met were Indonesian soldiers ‘specially selected from among the troops originating from neighbouring islands where the people resemble the Quemac of the Balibo area'.
⁹⁹
Others were trusted agents working for
Operasi Komodo
, the Indonesians' subversion campaign, and
well-known collaborators who went on to occupy high positions in the puppet administration of East Timor, including the ‘governor' and ‘vice-governor'.

Unsurprisingly, the official report submitted to the Australian Parliament was inconclusive on just how the journalists were killed and who killed them. A funeral service was held at a cemetery in Jakarta with a wreath sent from the Australian embassy and a card, which read, ‘They stayed because they saw the search for truth and the need to report at first hand as a necessary task'.
¹⁰⁰
Shirley Shackleton's response to this platitude was understandable outrage. The Department of Foreign Affairs in Canberra told her that if she wanted her husband's body brought back to Australia, she would have to pay for it.

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.'

^fn1
Like Max Stahl, Ben Richards is a pseudonym.

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