Distant Voices (37 page)

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 resistance 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.

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.