Distant Voices (43 page)

This was ignored by Keating and other Western leaders and by most of the media. Paul Kelly's
Australian
published only Jakarta's denials. The Jakarta regime, said an editorial in the
Australian,
‘can be declared moderate'.
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Amnesty International has said of the Indonesian regime: ‘If those who violate human rights can do so with impunity, they come to believe they are beyond the reach of the law.'
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Western politicians who speak of a ‘pragmatism' and ‘realism' in relation to East Timor not only give support to a lawless bully, but condemn an entire nation to a slow cultural and physical death. They may not yet have their way.

The United States has, as ever, pivotal power. Even if the proposed congressional action to ban arms sales is not quite ‘historic', as its supporters claim, it represents a perceptible change in American outlook and understanding, and the emergence of the East Timorese, and the great crime committed against them, from the shadows of imperial geo-politics. In 1993 the UN Human Rights Commission called on Indonesia to allow international experts on torture, executions and disappearances to investigate freely in East Timor. At the time of writing, the UN Commission has again summoned Indonesia into its dock. In 1994, in an action brought by Portugal against Australia, the World Court will decide whether the Timor Gap Treaty is legal or not. (Indonesia does not recognise the World Court.) According to Roger Clark, the Australian government will probably comply with the decision. In a parallel case brought by the Timorese themselves, the Australian High Court will also decide on the treaty's legality. There is every likelihood that both courts will find against it.

It is one of recent history's more melancholy ironies that
the Timorese place most hope in the actions of their former colonial masters, the Portuguese, who so ignominiously abandoned them. Public opinion in Portugal feels strongly about East Timor. People constantly write to the government and to newspapers, demanding justice for the Timorese. There is a sense of guilt, as if the nation's honour was sullied in the retreat to Atauro Island in 1975. The politicians are acutely aware of this, especially the President, Mário Soares, who has also been prime minister and foreign secretary since the revolution in 1974. Under the constitution, he has personal responsibility for the remaining overseas territories: Macau and East Timor.

I flew to Lisbon and interviewed President Soares in the magnificent eighteenth-century Palacio Belém (the ‘Pink Palace') overlooking the Tagus River. He is an interesting anti-fascist; during the Salazarist years he was an outspoken opponent in exile. For a head of state, he spoke with undiplomatic passion about the Timorese. ‘They have never submitted to the power of Indonesia,' he said. ‘Even isolated in the mountains, they make sure we never forget; one feels a wind of silence that heroically accuses . . . There has been a real genocide, a cold destruction of a people, their complete identity, destroying their habits, their traditions, language and religion . . . over 200,000.'

I asked him how much blame should lie with Portugal. ‘After our own dictator fell on April 25, 1974,' he said, ‘there was a revolutionary period in which the state was practically in the street. We had a million Portuguese from the former colonies returned to Portugal without work, without money, with nothing. Perhaps this explains a bit of what happened over East Timor. I don't exclude there was guilt, and incompetence and lies over our role there.'

I said, ‘Your EC partner, Britain, is now the biggest arms supplier to Indonesia. What's your view of this, in the light of evidence that British Hawk aircraft are being used in East Timor?'

He replied, ‘I was in England recently and spoke to John
Major and Douglas Hurd about Timor. The Foreign Secretary said that dictators could usefully provide certain guarantees. He defended what he called the “realistic policy” that England often follows in defending its own interests, while forgetting a bit about international law and moral values. I replied that the English had thought like this at the end of the Second World War in relation to the dictators of Portugal and Spain. And because of this so-called “realistic policy” we Portuguese were held back for more than thirty years. I said, “We can never forgive you for this. It's also possible the Timorese will never forgive you, either.”'

I asked Soares if he could give an unambiguous assurance that Portugal would stand by the Timorese until they won independence. ‘I give it', he said, ‘without a doubt. We are very proud of them.'

By all accounts the Timorese resistance should have been wiped out years ago; but it lives on, as I found, in the hearts and eyes of almost everyone: eyes that reflect a defiance and courage of a kind I have not experienced anywhere else.

Recent opposition has come most vociferously from the young generation, raised during Indonesian rule. This has particularly angered the generals, who had anticipated that the second generation would have been ‘resocialised', to use a favourite word of the regime. It is the young who keep alive the nationalism minted in the early 1970s and its union with a spiritual, traditional love of country and language, in spite of the ban on all Timorese languages; it is they who bury the flags and maps and draw the subtle graffiti of a sleeping face resembling the tranquil figure in Matisse's
The Dream
, reminding the Indonesians that, whatever they do, they must one day reckon with a Timorese reawakening.

When Amelia Gusmao, wife of the resistance leader, Xanana, was forced into exile, young people materialised along her route to the airport and stood in tribute to her, then slipped away. And when Xanana himself was brought before a kangaroo court in 1993, he gave the regime a glimpse of its ‘problem'.

Although he was prevented from speaking from the dock,
his statement of defiance was released all over the world. ‘The Indonesian generals', he wrote, ‘should be made to realise that they have been defeated politically in East Timor. I acknowledge military defeat on the ground. I am not ashamed to say so. On the contrary, I am proud of the fact that a small guerrilla army was able to resist a large nation like Indonesia, a regional power which in a cowardly fashion invaded us and sought to dominate us by the law of terror and crime. As a political prisoner in the hands of the occupiers of my country, it is of no consequence at all to me if they pass a death sentence here today. They are killing my people and I am not worth more than their heroic struggle . . .'
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Among the Timorese in exile and their supporters all over the world those who have not allowed the world to forget about East Timor are Constancio Pinto, Abel Guterres, José and Fatima Gusmao, Ines Almeida, José Amorin Dias, Agio Pereira, George Aditjondro, Carmel Budiardjo, Arnold Kohen, Shirley Shackleton, Gil Scrine, Noam Chomsky, Jim Dunn, John Taylor, Pat Walsh, Peter Carey, Michele Turner, Jill Jolliffe, Max Lane, Robert Domm, Mark Aarons, Steve Cox, Margherita Tracanelli, Mark Curtis, Steve Alton, Will McMahon, Jonathan Humphreys and Tom Hyland.

José Ramos Horta's personal struggle stands out. Sometimes without the money to pay his telephone bill in New York, he has helped keep the name of his people alive in the corridors of the United Nations, and of governments in Washington, Brussels, London, Tokyo and Canberra. ‘I am their biggest embarrassment,' he told me. ‘They are often patronising to me, sometimes hostile; but they are never allowed to forget.' His two brothers and sister were killed by the Indonesians; he is often desperately homesick for a country he has not seen since he escaped in 1975. He once put to me a plan to hire a small aircraft and fly home. I helped to talk him out of it, as ‘home' would have been an Indonesian cell.

I asked José if he ever felt defeated. ‘Yes,' he replied, ‘but then I think about those in the mountains, the women, the
old people, the kids as young as seven years old, who have the courage to smuggle information out, to travel from one resistance group to another, to monitor the international radio, to pass on hope and encouragement to the villages. My mother kept going this way; I remember receiving a message from her asking
me
not to give up. “Your comrades”, she wrote, “are still fighting.” My mother's name is Natalina.'

José Ramos Horta has met the Indonesians abroad and put forward, with Xanana Gusmao, a three-phased peace plan. In phase one, lasting about two years, the Timorese, Portuguese and Indonesians would work under the auspices of the United Nations to implement a range of ‘confidence building measures' that would include ‘a drastic reduction in Indonesian troops and weaponry in East Timor and a significant UN presence'. Phase two would last five to ten years, with political autonomy and a democratically elected People's Assembly. Finally, a referendum would determine the sovereign status of the territory. ‘Indonesia should seize the olive branch we are now offering,' said José. ‘Only withdrawal from East Timor will help it regain its international reputation.'

Perhaps East Timor's greatest hope lies in public opinion around the world. When
Death of a Nation
went to air in Britain, British Telecom registered 4,000 calls a minute to the number displayed at the end. When I showed the film in the Palais des Nations in Geneva, where the UN Human Rights Commission was sitting, the positive response, I was told by several members of the Commission, was unprecedented and led directly to a majority vote by the Commission authorising a Special Rapporteur on Extrajudicial Executions to go to East Timor to investigate the Santa Cruz massacre and others.

There is also hope in the waning power of Suharto and his generals. For all the West's promotion of Indonesia as the ‘next Tiger' about to emulate the ‘market take-off' of Singapore and Taiwan, Suharto's dictatorship is stagnant. Like Marcos and Somoza, the tentacles of his family, cronies and loyalists reach into almost every corner of economic life.
In a list compiled by an Indonesian business magazine, the richest man in Indonesia is named as the former head of the state oil monopoly. Three of Suharto's six offspring are among the ten wealthiest, including a son with a fortune of more than $220 million; and most of them control monopolies.
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For Indonesia, the result is a sapped, indebted economy and disparities of wealth that are quite unacceptable to a society once proud of its political energy and vision. Discontent is growing. ‘Since the beginning of the twentieth century', wrote the Indonesia specialist Max Lane, ‘a fundamental aspect of Indonesian history has been the struggle for freedom and human rights. At first the struggle was against colonial oppression . . . Thousands of Indonesians, especially workers, entered colonial prisons as payment for the assertion of their rights. Their movements had visions of what Indonesia might be like after independence, none of which accord with the political system that prevails in Indonesia today.'
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The Indonesian mass movements fought for and expected political democracy and social justice, regardless of whether they were Islamic or communist. Between 1945 and 1959 Indonesia had one of the freest parliamentary democracies in the world. In 1955 there were general elections with more than thirty parties competing. The oppression at home and in East Timor is unworthy of such a nation; and a great many Indonesians understand this. They are silent out of necessity; but for how long? Who would have imagined, a few years ago, that Eritrea and Namibia would be independent, and that South Africa would have majority rule?

The enduring heroism of the people of East Timor, who continue to resist the invaders even as the crosses multiply on the hillsides, is a reminder of the fallibility of brute power and of the cynicism of others.

THIS WEEK HAS
been the anniversary of Elsie's death. Such has been my distraction lately that it has arrived and almost taken me unawares. The living make their demands, but the dead have rights too, especially those whose memory remains a source of strength in difficult times; in that way, they live on. ‘How'sitgoingluv?' her telephone voice would say in the days when voices from afar sounded far away; when an imperious official would interrupt to say, ‘Nine minutes up. Are you extending?'

The last time I saw her in her natural habitat was that last day on the beach before Claude's funeral. It was late autumn in the southern hemisphere. We sat in the place where we usually sat whenever I came home: in a saddle of sand against the promenade wall touched by the first spokes of early morning sun. ‘Now listen,' I said to her almost as a ritual, ‘you may wear that hat [it was a wonderful straw sombrero] but you still have a lot of freckles.' To which she gave her standard reply, ‘Do me a favour, love. Swim behind the shark net, will you?'

We had sat in that place for a few days during almost every one of the twenty-seven years since I had left Australia. My return meant much to her. For the first day, she would speak non-stop about Claude and the past, without ever saying his name. Then she would listen, her sunglasses on her nose. I would talk about perhaps coming back to Australia to live, to which she would say with due solemnity, ‘I think it's too late, John.' Year after year I would fly down from South-east Asia and tell her what I had seen and what had moved
and shaken me. Her listening, during my divorce, saw me through it.

One of our rituals, on the beach, was to stare at those great gateposts to the South Pacific, Sydney Heads, and try to imagine the thoughts and fears of our Irish great-grandparents, Francis McCarthy and Mary Palmer, who arrived in leg-irons in the 1820s. Francis had been sentenced to fourteen years' ‘penal servitude' in New South Wales for ‘uttering unlawful oaths' and ‘making political agitation'. Mary was an Irish scullery maid who was sentenced to death for stealing. This was commuted to ‘transportation for life'. They both belonged to what Queen Victoria called ‘the inflammable matter of Ireland':
animae viles
, as Robert Hughes wrote, that had to be disposed of along with the ‘swinish multitude' of the English lower orders.
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