East Timor: A Nations Bitter Dawn

East Timor: A Nation's Bitter Dawn, Second Edition

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In the faint hope it might intimidate him I scribbled it in my notebook. But Jill was afraid that they could take us anywhere, where anything could happen to us. The people we passed on the road avoided our eyes. They were too afraid even to look at our strange procession. They made themselves as small as possible, trying to blend into the bushes at the side of the road. I hauled myself up the hill, a few steps ahead of the soldiers with their guns burning in my back. With every step, hope evaporated further. This was it, the end of our journey.

And what about our friends? What had happened to them? We stopped at a police station near the old market in Baucau. Better to hand ourselves over to the police than to stay in the hands of the Kopassus, we agreed. Most of the policemen were Timorese. One of them politely gestured us to sit on a long wooden bench while another hurried to bring us coffee and fresh bread rolls. I wondered if our four guides were there, behind some of the many doors that opened on to the long corridor.

The commander had not arrived yet and we were led into a waiting area: I worried about a couple of telephone numbers that I had in my notebook, and asked permission to go to the toilet. Suddenly, I felt sick with worry about our helpers. I knew of course the stories of torture, rape and murder, and had seen the gruesome pictures Indonesian soldiers had taken of the mutilated bodies of their victims.

But they do, all around the world, perhaps for different reasons: There was an additional reason to take pictures: Indonesian soldiers sold the photographs to the resistance movement, which in turn used them as evidence of the human rights violations that went on in Timor. Back in the waiting room the silence was suddenly broken by a loud thump, as if a heavy object had fallen against one of the wooden doors. I opened the door and looked down the corridor. The noise, I feared, had something to do with our Timorese companions.

Were they being beaten and tortured in the room across the corridor? What if we burst in there — would it shame the torturers into stopping? Or would it make them even more cruel? Jill and I concentrated on what else we could do to avoid worsening their plight. We decided that the best tactic would be not to give them any evidence that our presence in Baucau had anything to do with the guys in the car. So we resolved not to speak and to refuse to be separated.

We would give our passport details, but after that we would insist on seeking assistance from our embassies. I understood some of the questions but thought it best not to show this. He eyed me suspiciously, pointing out that as a Dutch person I was likely to speak Indonesian. He called his superior. The quality of the telephone connection from Baucau was so bad that he had to spell every letter of my name several times, and the versions that appeared later in the press reports were still inaccurate.

When his boss left the room the Timorese policeman apologized, saying what was happening to us made him very ashamed of his job. The only work available was for the government. No cries, no voices, a sound of water sluicing. Perhaps he had to steel himself against these sounds every day. I noticed that Jill was about to explode in anger and gave her a warning look. The commander returned and ordered his subordinates to get us out of there.

Not much later we were on the road again, this time in a police car. We raced round the hairpin bends. Far below us glittered the sea. He offered us some bananas. He ate several and within half an hour he had to hang his head out of the window to vomit. Served him right, I thought, with childish spite. One In the police barracks in Dili the interrogation continued in a similar vein, this time to a bizarre background chorus of Brimob riot troops training in the yard. A group of them posed as rioters shouting abuse and pretending to throw stones; the others were kitted out in full battle gear.

I heard them discussing our itinerary. This added to my suspicion that we had walked into a trap set by the intel. It looked as if they had known about our plans even before we had arrived. Who had given them this information? The deafening noise made it impossible to understand a word. One of them disappeared and came back with nasi-bungkus, a takeaway meal of fried rice, wrapped up in brown paper. Unable to torture or rape us, they seemed to have decided to feed us instead. Our passports had protected us against the fate that Timorese women would have met.

The head of immigration was a Javanese from Yogyakarta. He opened his questioning by asking us our religion. I decided that probably the best thing was to say Christian. He smiled pleasantly when I repeated our request to contact our embassies. I hesitated with the phone in my hand, feeling slightly awkward. What was I supposed to say? That I had been captured in East Timor? Everyone knew journalists were not allowed to enter without a permit. They would probably think I was a troublemaker and treat me like a naughty schoolgirl. Soon things changed again.

His boss in Jakarta had called, to tell him to treat us well. But while Johannes was busy making a hotel reservation, Jill said she thought it would be safer to stay in the office. She saw herself as enemy number one for the Indonesian army, and was afraid that the hawks among them would be able to enter the hotel and take revenge on her. Johannes seemed pleased at our decision, and promised he would get us some bedding.

The Indonesians, as the new rulers, took over the houses left by the Portuguese and built new neighbourhoods.

After our baths Johannes invited us to eat with his family in a Chinese restaurant, one of the few proper restaurants in town. It was all rather bewildering. Why was he treating us so well? It was as pleasant an evening as it could be in the circumstances. Just after we switched off the light and slid between the clean sheets, there was a knock at the door. I crept over and anxiously asked who it was. I told him to come back tomorrow: The route to the airport was dotted with agents with earpieces. I watched the town glide past the window. Only a bit of glass separated me from the world outside but it felt like a steel plate.

I felt exhausted and deeply affected by the unhappiness around us. But then I saw a small miracle: They saluted us with V-signs and by blowing kisses. At the next side road they disappeared again. A mirage in the streets of Dili: I had to swallow back my tears and hoped that our guards had not noticed. For four years tears would well in my eyes again every time I told the story. This sight of the determination of the Timorese against all odds not to submit but to stand up, to keep up a struggle that looked, at that time, to be hopeless, was an image that never left me.

I lived at that time in South-East Asia and kept a close eye on the developments in Indonesia. The story of our arrest had made the front pages. One of the banner headlines read: How did you end up in a ditch? He made me realize that our conviction that deportation was the worst that was likely to happen to us was based on a misunderstanding of just how grim things were in East Timor.

We had tried to do what we could for our Timorese helpers, through our embassies and the International Committee of the Red Cross. In some respects, they were lucky: Antonio later managed to escape to Australia on a leaky boat. From him we learnt that they had been interrogated and tortured for four days. One effect is that the victim loses control of his muscles. The thumping noises we had heard were made by their bodies, slumping against the door. None of the Timorese has ever blamed us for what they suffered, or accused us of being responsible for the failure of the mission.

It may be that we had not been careful enough during the preparations and intel had been on our tail from the start. This had angered some within the resistance — and it might have been at least part of the reason for our trouble. Disunity within the resistance was the other part. Jill had been involved so long that she had become part of it. I tried my best to stay aloof from all this, and to trust my own instincts about whom to deal with and whom to avoid. But I would still get bitten several times. Even disregarding the divisions among the Timorese, it was hard to be optimistic about their chances of freedom.

His pictures showed guerrilla commander David Alex leading a small platoon of enormous courage and resourcefulness, holding out in the hills and having some successes against Indonesian army patrols. But to the dispassionate observer they appeared not all that different from the ragged, ill-equipped and desperate army of Indonesian propaganda. This was a phenomenon seen across Indonesia: It seemed reasonable to guess that Johannes — at least as he presented himself to us — was typical of many in not having the heart for this venture in neocolonialism. But nor was the occupation backed by great popular enthusiasm.

Foreign interest waxed and waned with the level of media attention, which was curtailed partly by the lack of access, but occasionally surged, as after the Santa Cruz massacre in Rather, it lay in younger Indonesians, a generation that had grown up under nearly thirty years of the Suharto dictatorship, and had outgrown it. Only when their aspirations for change in Indonesia were realized might change also follow in East Timor. Of course, its fate had always been bound up with that of its colonizers.

At the time of our trip in , change in Indonesia seemed a remote prospect. Since by this time Suharto was already seventy-six, the succession was the burning issue of Indonesian politics. It reached its nadir in January , when news that Habibie was to be the vice-president pushed the currency, the rupiah, down to below 15, against the dollar, from a rate a few months earlier of around 2, This disaster in turn fuelled the second unexpected source of turbulence: After days of riots, arson, bloodshed and chaos, which saw more than a thousand deaths in Jakarta, Suharto stepped down and was replaced by Habibie.

This had particular resonance in East Timor: Prabowo ran the Kopassus special forces, which held such sway there. The new Habibie government was greeted by waves of demonstrations that submerged most of the archipelago. Years of bottled-up frustration and anger spilled out from the campuses and workplaces into the streets. And the spirit of the time took hold in Dili as well.

He also ordered the release of a number of political prisoners, but not all of them: The changes were startling. But there was still huge uncertainty about whether the process of reform was genuine and would last. That, many Indonesians recalled, was how the Suharto era had begun, more than thirty years earlier. For the time being, nobody seemed too sure about which of the old rules and laws should be enforced any more. So there was a window of opportunity to test the restrictions on visiting East Timor. I used this to return there in June The East Timorese, however, saw it as evidence that at long last the international community was interesting itself in their plight.

We want something more concrete. For this second visit I took a more conventional route to East Timor, by air from Bali. But that morning their little checkpoint was unmanned, and there was none of the usual inspection of visitors. I took a taxi into the city, past a roundabout with a huge fountain surrounded by angels, which looked as if it had been abandoned as soon as it was built, on to the wide quiet streets.

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Dili lies wedged between the sea to the north and mountains to the south, their peaks today hidden by grey clouds. We passed the new neighbourhoods that had sprung up to house Indonesian migrants and civil servants: Here and there a church spire poked out between the roofs. The town had grown during the Indonesian occupation. The Mahkota Hotel, where the ambassadors were staying, had been cordoned off by a platoon of Brimob, the special riot police whose training had provided a soundtrack to our interrogation four years earlier.

Herman dos Reis Soares, a young Timorese, had been killed the night before by soldiers in Manatutu, where he and other youths had tried to stop a convoy of soldiers and Timorese supporters of integration with Indonesia from reaching Dili. The convoy had come from Los Palos, organized by its bupati district administrator , an ex-soldier, who was like many bupatis a supporter of integration. The next day a group of demonstrators at the airport had greeted the ambassadors with pro-integration banners.

But who were these pro-Indonesia demonstrators? Rosa Garcia, a young reporter from the local newspaper Suara Timor Timur, had asked a few demonstrators what it said on their banners. They had to turn them around to have a look before they could answer.

Rent-a-crowds come more or less literally a dime a dozen in Indonesia. They had, however, clearly failed to intimidate independence supporters. I looked around the animated crowd in front of the Mahkota: Today they ruled the streets. Among these demonstrators might be people from my previous visit. I did not recognize any but when I walked away a bit from the crowd, a Timorese with an enormous head of black-brown curls came up to me. Before I could say anything, he vanished into the crowd. I searched my memory for clues.

I wanted to ask him more but to follow him might be dangerous for him. The envelope turned out to be a rather obscure document dating back to Thousands of demonstrators had followed the delegation there. Inside, the discussion was in full swing. Without exception, all the Timorese gathered there were in favour of an act of self-determination. They did not want Portugal and Indonesia to decide their future without consulting them. To the EU diplomats, this must have sounded like a naive fantasy.

He made it clear where Dutch — and by extension European — diplomatic priorities lay: East Timor can wait. When the ambassadors emerged from the house, Robin Christopher, the British leader of the mission, spoke to the crowd through a megaphone. He told them that their message, along with all the other views put forward, had been heard, and appealed to them to disperse.

But the Two demonstrators had other plans. They ran to their vehicles and escorted the delegation back to the hotel. As I followed them back, a young man jumped out of nearby bushes.

At the Mahkota Hotel the crowd had swollen. It now numbered more than ten thousand. Indefatigably, they kept up their impassioned speeches, and sang their beautiful, sad songs. Again, Robin Christopher took up the megaphone to appeal to them to go home. But this time, the streets in front of the hotel soon emptied. I wandered over to the Lifau Hotel in the evening, wondering about what the young man wanted to show me. When I arrived, he was already waiting in the courtyard.

From under his T-shirt he pulled a pile of pictures, and picked out one of a tall Westerner and some heavily armed Timorese guerrillas. He made it sound like a jolly adventure. I listened politely, made my excuses and left.

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This was not the time to risk deportation again through another trip to Falintil. I needed to get to know East Timor better before I set out for the hills again, and anyway I would not have entrusted my fate to a rather unhinged-seeming stranger. On the walk back to the Mahkota, the streets were pitch black.

On a few corners groups of young men were playing guitars and singing songs that throbbed with a deep longing. They reminded me of the melancholy songs of immigrants yearning for their homeland, and the Portuguese fado in which some of these Timorese songs probably had their origins. But it did not make Dili peaceful or pleasant. On the contrary, it seemed strangely ominous.

It was busy in the streets around Untim, as the university was known. Thousands of students mingled on the campus and outside dozens of buses and trucks were lining up. He was tall and lean, with short-cropped frizzy hair. What struck me most about his appearance were his big, long-lashed eyes. They seemed full of sorrow, as if he carried a world of worry and pain, but they also sparkled with wit and 22 23 Distant glimmers intelligence.

Antero himself had not been at the meeting. At thirty, Antero was older than most students and, in his own laid-back way, he exuded an incredible natural authority — perhaps because of his family background; or, just as likely, because he had been groomed to become a priest. And many of the students I got to know — perhaps because it produced good English-speakers — had studied there. Antero had gone farther down the path to priesthood than most. It was not until he went to pursue his studies in the Philippines that he changed his mind about the Church, and became sharply critical of it.

He started to look to the traditional religions that had survived in the mountains of Timor to satisfy his need for spirituality and moral values. He wanted it to be an umbrella organization for the various student groups. Timorese young people, he explained, wanted to distance themselves from the historic rivalries and bitterness of the old parties.

Because exiles had taken this legacy with them overseas, it still poisoned efforts at forging unity. The student and youth movement in East Timor was similarly politicized and, historically, split into competing factions. But for now there was a short-lived bout of student unity.

The council had succeeded in bringing various groups under a single banner: After so many years of repression the people needed to vent their frustrations and to discuss politics openly. In a few weeks he expected to take these open forums to other parts of East Timor. He recalled how as a young boy he would see the datos and lia nain, elders, of his village sitting together discussing the issues of the day.

Often this went on deep into the night, fuelled by local palm wine. After an hour, we heard the sound of the rally coming past. Antero glanced out of the window. I wondered whether he was keen to take part. Persistent rumours that he would be arrested had caused panic among his friends and resistance groups, and over the past few days the rumours had become more threatening. He had received warnings from several quarters that his life was in danger. Falintil had sent thirty-four men to keep an eye on security in town. Assassinations would often take place at night, carried out by ninjas, death squads, masked men dressed in black.

But Antero could not suppress his curiosity about the rally. A little later he sat, wedged between me and a colleague, on the back seat of a taxi, using us as buffers. We caught up with the vanguard of the rally — thousands of noisy motorbikes revving their engines, their exhausts belching thick clouds of blue fumes.

People were clinging to the lorries like limpets to a rock. They were hanging from the sides, balancing on the bumpers, jumping up and down on the roofs. Hundreds of big lorries, buses, pickups, bicycles and motorbikes had joined in the largest demonstration East Timor had ever seen. I climbed on to the bumper of one of the last group of lorries.

The bonnet was covered by young people singing patriotic songs, leaving the driver only a very small gap through which to see the road. Everywhere people cheered the convoy on. Some onlookers had buckets and cups to give drinks to thirsty demonstrators. Others doused them with sprays of refreshing water from hoses. Everyone took part in his own way. The town was in a delirium. After twenty-three years of pent-up emotions and pain the population screamed it out. Even toddlers took up the refrain: She knew a little English: It is hard to know how many took part in the demonstration.

The students were probably closer to the truth. At that moment it became very clear to me that the days of Indonesian rule in East Timor were numbered. It seemed certain that if there were ever to be a referendum on its future, most of its people would choose independence. The ambassadors missed this demonstration, and drew a different lesson from what they experienced. It was hard not to remember the warning I had heard from the clandestine leader in central Java, about the bloodshed that might follow if the EU delegation came empty-handed.

The ambassadors made a hasty, premature and unannounced departure early the next morning on a military aircraft. The implication — that he believed the demonstrations and even the shooting in Baucau were caused by nothing more than East Timorese playing up to impress a handful of foreign journalists — was alarming. Foreign governments seemed not to grasp how fast pressure for change was mounting. I found Antero with a few other students outside the Caritas offices. So Antero stayed in Dili and I looked for someone else to join me.

Fernau, in contrast, had no Malay or even Asian features. The ethnic diversity in East Timor is startling. Look at the faces at the market in Dili and you might just as well be in Africa or the Caribbean as in Asia. Through the ages, Timor has been a melting pot of different tribes and races. Around two millennia ago, the time of the great migrations, the Indo-Malays, who now dominate the island, came ashore. And in the fourteenth century, more newcomers arrived. A tribe called the Belum landed their boats on the north coast.

They spoke Tetum, which is now the lingua franca in East Timor. Felis and Fernau were keen to come to Baucau. We sat squeezed in the back of a small green taxi. The last time I had travelled this road, nearly four years earlier, I had been sandwiched between military and policemen; this time I was between student activists. Someone handed out kopicos, the coffee candy I had in my mouth when we were followed in I had never touched the sweets again, associating their taste with defeat.

But back in Timor I thought it was time to exorcize these demons. Felis had a loud, piercing voice, and used it non-stop. His father, he said, worked as a nurse, but for the last four years had been in jail on Atauro, a small rocky island opposite Dili, used since the Portuguese time as a penal colony. He had been active in the underground, organizing medical help for Falintil. He was arrested after photos of a meeting held in his house between Xanana and a Portuguese journalist had fallen into the hands of an Indonesian spy.

Felis hated Indonesians, and the more he talked, the more vociferous he became. It was hard to know how seriously he meant it all, or whether he was just trying to impress. Fart was apparently not one of the words they taught at the seminary. While Felis chattered away, Fernau hardly uttered a word. His family also worked for the resistance, he said.

We passed several checkpoints on the way but were stopped only just before we reached Baucau by a man in plain clothes, a big gun slung over his shoulder. He gestured us to get out of the car. I had no intention of giving him these, and asked him politely who he was and what authority he had to ask for my passport. He abruptly changed and said apologetically: He was a policeman from Bali. He had enjoyed his job as a waiter in the busy beach resort of Kuta, he said, but his father pressed him to think about his career.

Now he worked as a policeman. He earned less, he said, and he had to work in a place where nobody liked him. I rather pitied him. When I asked him about it he replied: On the main road the crowd of mourners swelled to several hundred. We reached a small, open graveyard. Around the freshly dug grave stood three priests. He said he wanted to show me something, and took me to a lonely part of the cemetery. In the darkness, I could just see a heap of stones. Padre Rui explained this was another victim of the Indonesian army. And he is not the only one. It is a bit out of the centre of town, facing a dirty beach.

As I was given the room key, I could not know that this was to become my second home for the next two years. The hotel was notorious for crawling with cockroaches, and, worse, with intel. He would make sure that the boy who cleaned my room could be trusted. When I called him softly and told him Jill had given me his name, he pulled me close, and gave me a hug. A little later he sat down and talked. With his spindly frame and furrowed face, melancholy eyes and thin, blue-veined hands spread in front of him on the table, he had the hangdog look of an animal that has been mistreated for a long time.

This hotel, I began to realize, was haunted by the ghosts of old memories and associations. And he served the last meal to Roger East, an Australian journalist who stayed behind when all the other foreign journalists left. He was executed by Indonesian soldiers on the jetty, together with hundreds of Timorese, while they had to count out loud every time a victim toppled into the sea. His remains have never been found. His eyes would light up when he started to talk about the grand opening reception. The restaurant had been full of people in evening dress.

Once, he said, this place had had style, but it had gone downhill since. He wrinkled his nose and lifted his chin in the direction of the kitchen. Almost every day, he would have screaming rows with the woman in charge. One morning, hostilities were engaged after she proposed charging guests extra if they wanted their eggs fried rather than boiled. Alex spent most of his time commuting between his family in California and Surabaya — where he ran some businesses — and the Turismo.

As elsewhere in Asia, virtually all business in Timor was in Chinese hands. They had the network and the know-how. Traditionally, most Chinese steered clear of politics, but in East Timor neutrality was almost unattainable.

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Later he helped guide Indonesian soldiers back across that border. But there were other stories too: About seven hundred of them were ethnic Chinese. Alex, like other Chinese businessmen, tried to stay on good terms with both sides. He paid protection money both to the Indonesian army and to Falintil. Over the next few days, the undercurrent of fear and apprehension I had felt since arriving seemed to intensify. Felis visited every day with snippets of worrying information and rumour: Then one day, Felis knocked on my door at seven in the morning. Breathless with excitement, he almost shrieked why he had come: He shoved two pages of A4 paper into my hands.

They were covered in the erratic characters of the old typewriter Felis used, and were hard to decipher. But it looked like the minutes of a meeting between military and civilian authorities in which a plan was outlined to expand the paramilitary forces in Timor. Three of Timorese who had struggled for independence a quarter of a century earlier: In , East Timor, cast aside by its colonial ruler, had been left with a group of home-grown leaders with an enormous range of differing political and ideological convictions; but in most of their upbringings was the shared experience of the strict discipline of Jesuit priests, and an education at the Catholic school in Soibada followed by the seminary at Dare.

It had produced many of the older generation of Timorese priests and politicians. The seminary up the hill was still educating a small group of students. But most of them now went to the new seminary in Dili, built with money Bishop Belo had won with his Nobel Peace Prize. Among the young priests teaching there was Padre Jovito, whom I was keen to meet, after hearing that he had strong views about what was happening in East Timor, and about the role of the Church.

So early one afternoon I walked into the imposing building. It looked cool and comfortable. Behind the clean, whitewashed walls and spotless windows a new generation of seminarians was blossoming. They were taught not by the old Portuguese priests, who had all been sent home soon after Bishop Belo was ordained, but mainly by Indonesian priests, who taught in Bahasa Indonesia, their national language.

The seminary in Dili gave the boys only their early theological grounding and selected those who seemed suitable for the priesthood. They had to complete their studies elsewhere, usually in Java. Many young boys felt the calling to become priests. Also, in occupied Timor, the priesthood was not only about serving God; it was about serving the people, in a way only priests could, by defying the Indonesian army.

It was a permanent reminder that war, albeit at a low level, still went on. I had woken him from his siesta. Padre Jovito appeared, blinking against the white light. He was a youthful, sprightly man with twinkling eyes and a smile that seemed to reach his ears. Besides teaching at the seminary he was also a parish priest, and every week held a special mass in his church for young people. The idea that reformasi had come to Timor was misleading. There were too many competing groups hoping to do well out of the changes.

The occupation had fuelled their self-interest. How can we give a referendum to these people? Like so many others, Padre Jovito did not think the Timorese could solve their problems by themselves. The ordinary people had become the victims, crushed between two forces. Some people who had collaborated with the Indonesians had grown very rich. They had a personal interest in maintaining the status quo. If the Indonesians left, they and their families would lose their lucrative jobs, their privileges and their power. He had written a thesis on the role of the Church in the reconciliation process, which, he said, had to be strictly Three apolitical.

Talking to Padre Jovito was like consulting an oracle. It made my own sense of foreboding even worse. He was certainly right that the civil war had left a deep wound and the scars had never healed, partly because the Indonesians made sure the sores festered. The Indonesian invasion and the war that followed it had taken many more lives than the civil war. But that had all to do with an external enemy. What worried people were the enemies within: As Padre Jovito put it: The changes that were to lead to the Indonesian invasion in had begun in Portugal. They had become an expensive embarrassment, to be jettisoned as soon as possible.

Its founders tended to be politically conservative and many had links to the Portuguese colonial administration. The UDT became the party of the establishment: Its platform committed it to the development of democracy, respect for human rights, redistribution of wealth and, above all, the right to self-determination of the Timorese, rejecting integration with Indonesia. So slight were the differences in those days that the two parties 34 35 The past casts its shadow formed a coalition. Older thirty-seven than the youthful founders, Francisco Xavier do Amaral was made president.

The ASDT also had a social democratic platform with the stress on democracy and the right to independence. To make this latter goal more explicit, it changed its name in September to Fretilin, Revolutionary Front for an Independent East Timor. Of the other political parties, Apodeti, the Timorese Popular Democratic Association, was the most important.

Their vibrations would still be felt at the elections more than a quarter of a century later. Jakarta was keeping a wary eye on developments in East Timor. But behind the scenes the Indonesian military was playing a different game. A secret operation, code-named Operasi Komodo, was already in full swing. With the help of BAKIN, Indonesia manipulated the political situation through its well-tested divide-and-rule tactics and it armed and trained Apodeti militias.

This quickly descended into verbal and sometimes physical attacks. The coalition between the two parties fell apart in May , enabling Indonesia to go a step farther. To understand the period better, I wanted to talk with some of the people who had played an important and controversial role at the time: When I reached his house, I found the iron gate closed with two large padlocks.

It was furnished with two three-piece suites of dark imitation leather, covered with white crochet antimacassars, a large standing fan and, in the corner, an almost life-size ceramic statue of the Virgin Mary, her hands folded in devotion. He shrugged his shoulders and said the television did not distract him at all. Then, somewhere in the house, a telephone rang. Manuel got up to answer it, and I heard him talking in Portuguese. We would be interrupted almost every ten minutes. His weather-beaten face had strong Portuguese features.

Perhaps the self-assurance was not so surprising: This had not always been so. The father, Manuel senior, had been shipped to Timor as a deportado, exiled by the Salazar regime to its most distant colony for his role in anti-government demonstrations. He married a woman from a liurai family and prospered as a coffee-grower — the family is still among the biggest fazendeiros, plantation-owners, in Timor.

After his rehabilitation, Manuel senior quickly rose in local society, becoming president of the town council of Dili. After the Second World War, Manuel obtained ownership. Three sons studied abroad and became involved in politics soon after they came home. Their solution was drastic: More than two-thirds of the estimated 1, to 3, people who were killed lived in the mountains, especially in the area around Maubisse and Manufahi.

The UDT had miscalculated it strength. Any hopes it may have had that Three moderates within Fretilin would disavow the radicals within the party and unite with the UDT to jointly pursue independence quickly evaporated. On 15 August they formed Falintil and launched their counter-attack five days later. So Falintil did not start as a liberation army but as a party to the civil war. The UDT had sullied its name by starting the killings but the majority of the killings were perpetrated by Fretilin. These massacres were repeated elsewhere, albeit on a smaller scale.

But it was only at a party congress in that Fretilin formally sought forgiveness for such atrocities. Manuel had good connections in West Timor. He had married a girl from Kupang and had grown fond of the place. So Fretilin now found itself, against its wishes, on its own — forced by circumstances to take over the day-to-day administration of the territory while waiting for the Portuguese to return. This, they thought, would later make it easier to justify an invasion. But 38 39 The past casts its shadow an inquest into the deaths in by an Australian coroner concluded what many had suspected,16 that the five were, after they surrendered, deliberately killed by special forces commander Captain Mohammad Yunus Yosfiah.

It was a decision taken more out of desperation than conviction that it was the right course of action. The hastily organized ceremony to swear in the new government was solemn rather than triumphant. Fretilin believed Indonesia could invade any day and hoped that independence might afford East Timor more protection from the international community. In practice, even countries that had promised support, such as China, did not immediately recognize the new state.

East Timor: A Nation's Bitter Dawn by Irena Cristalis (Paperback, 2009)

The solution for the East Timorese problem is now the front line of the battle. Nor did the Soviet Union, China or Vietnam rush to extend the hand of friendship to the new state. But this hardly amounted to evidence that Fretilin was planning to set up a communist state. The Portuguese used it as a derogatory term to describe the backward people in the interior and Fretilin adopted it to symbolize the common people they claimed to represent. It would continue to divide Fretilin and the UDT for years to come.

It might have been embarrassing for Washington if Indonesia launched an invasion while they were there. I thought it would be like Kupang, which I thought was governed well. I liked the people, they were well meaning and polite. They begged him to help them. And what shocked him most and opened his eyes was something he witnessed in Baucau. The woman had done them no harm; they killed her just so they could take her necklace. She lay there in her own blood. There were virtually no disciplinary consequences for Indonesian forces responsible for such actions.

Tragically, this set the tone for the absolute impunity for violence against civilians that was the hallmark of the conflict for years to come. As he recounted his story, Manuel got increasingly worked up. He talked more loudly and gesticulated more emphatically with his hands.

I asked whether, looking back, he now had any regrets for the part he had played. He looked at me, and then averted his eyes to some distant point in the room. After a short silence he spoke again. We could do nothing but look for help from them and to obtain this help we had to sign papers in which we declared ourselves to be pro-integration.

The hard-line communists within Fretilin, they had started the war; we as the UDT only wanted to stop it. Manuel thought that autonomy within Indonesia would bring the people peace. But despite this realization he and his family had done well under Indonesian rule. He quickly rose to become the local chairman of Golkar, in effect the Indonesian ruling party used by ex-President Suharto to bolster his hold on power. On a large round table stood two huge steaming pans full of rice, vegetables and a plate of sardines.

Around Three the table I saw many faces I had not seen before in the house: The house had the feeling of a hideaway for many. People kept wandering in and out of the kitchen, filling their plates and disappearing again. Manuela explained that the family was looking after some thirty people, villagers from the fazenda, now camped out in the backyard. But they also had many enemies: Manuela did not dare leave the house. She shivered when she talked about the threats, which were an almost daily occurrence. It was a brave initiative considering that the Indonesians did not welcome such pressure.

The movement never grew into a very strong voice inside Timor, but it was a reminder to the Indonesians that they could not even rely on many of their old cronies within the UDT and Apodeti. So it is my task to create a climate of peace. It was hard to be optimistic that this time, any more than in , he would get it right. It was also hard to know how to take Manuel — or indeed his brothers. Unless, of course, to pursue self-serving interests. Manuel was to pay a high price for jumping ship and trying to tread the path of accommodation and compromise. The marchers had their own security guards — hundreds of boys and girls wearing white T-shirts emblazoned with a map of East Timor, a cross rising from the middle.

Arm in arm, they formed a mile-long human chain. The procession had to pass the cemetery for fallen Indonesian soldiers and a number of military barracks. Everyone was feeling nervous. He said the fear was that the army would try to incite a confrontation, perhaps through agents provocateurs. But apart from a few soldiers on guard, watching the procession with hatred in their eyes, no security forces were to be seen.

The worries were understandable. He had been killed two weeks earlier by Indonesian soldiers hunting down a group of young activists. They and others had been working for nearly a year on an elaborate programme of activities to coincide with the expected visit of a Portuguese parliamentary delegation. Indonesia had invited the Portuguese as early as , after twelve years of occupation, to come and see for themselves how the East Timorese were doing.

After protracted and tortuous negotiations, the visit was scheduled for the autumn of Many East Timorese had pinned all their hopes for independence on this visit. They saw the Portuguese as the returning saviours who were at last coming to their rescue. Even at UN headquarters in New York there was some tentative optimism that the visit might bring a breakthrough in talks, which for years had failed to yield any tangible results.

He wanted to arrange a 45 Requiems meeting with the delegation, and to propose that he be included as the representative of the East Timorese people in the UN-sponsored talks between Indonesia and Portugal. They brought in new troops and sent soldiers village to village and house to house to warn people that anyone caught organizing or taking part in a demonstration against Indonesian rule would risk not only his own life but also the lives of everyone in his community.

But the Timorese believed that protest was a risk worth taking. As one of the protest leaders later said: It fell through because the Indonesians refused a visa to one of the journalists in the Portuguese party — none other, in fact, than Jill Jolliffe. The news was a serious blow for the Timorese resistance.

The Indonesians knew exactly who was involved in planning the protests, and almost as soon as the cancellation was announced, their crackdown began. The attack on the church left two Timorese dead. A man working for intel died of stab wounds. After this, Xanana was under great pressure to do something. Young activists wanted to take to the streets and probably would have done so even without his consent. This, he thought, should give some kind of guarantee that the army would show some restraint. Afterwards the mourners left the church and marched in the direction of Santa Cruz.

Of the thousand or so people who followed, perhaps only a few thought it was a purely religious procession. If he had been, he would have tried to stop it. Nobody knew that the young demonstrators were walking straight into a trap. Like him, he turned eighteen in He and his friends had got up early that morning to join the mass. We had hoped that they would help us. Now we had missed a big chance and we felt very alone again.

On the road in front a row of plastic chairs stood ready for the VIPs: Some were marked by elaborate crypts and gravestones, adorned with black-and-white portraits of the deceased. They stared solemnly from the stones, their eyes full of sad stories nobody will ever hear. But many of the graves were no more than piles of rubble with a simple stone or wooden cross, a name and a date. Dozens of boys were standing on the thicker branches. So many people in the trees and on the walls. When I heard the shots I saw the people falling like leaves.

They kept falling and falling, just like leaves. I saw them shooting the young kids, in their school uniforms, hurdling the graves. Behind the chapel I saw a friend who was shot. I panicked, and ran. We kept running until we reached the back wall. Her eyes; I never forget the look in her eyes. I tried to help her but failed. Perhaps because he was the eldest of a large family, he had an authoritative way of treating his fellow students. He gave the impression of observing and judging everyone. That day, however, he had been confronted with his own fear, his instinct for self-preservation. He survived Santa Cruz not as a manly hero who had rescued all his friends but as a boy who had run for his life.

Quite soon after the Santa Cruz massacre he had to stop his studies at the seminary. The men, the women, the children were all weeping. Some howled deep and long, others silently, with a single tear trickling down their cheeks. They wept over their private grief; their lost loved ones. Her book is a vivid first-hand account of the lives of individual Timorese during the long decades of Indonesia 's repressive occupation, their often heroic struggle for freedom, and their efforts to cope with the dramatic historic shifts engulfing them and their endeavours to rebuild their homeland.

Based on years of research, and lengthy interviews with East Timor 's leaders, priests, nuns, students and guerrilla fighters, this moving and extremely readable book is at the same time also an exploration of the complexities of the country's internal politics. How to write a great review. The review must be at least 50 characters long. The title should be at least 4 characters long.

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