JOURNEY TO EAST TIMOR
Land of the Dead
JOHN PILGER

Giant ghost gum trees rose out of tall grass; then without notice this changed into a forest of dead, petrified shapes and black needles through which skeins of fine white sand drifted like mist. Such an extraordinary landscape reminded me of parts of central Vietnam, where American aircraft dropped ladders of bombs and huge quantities of chemical defoliants, poisoning the soil and food chain and radically altering the environment. In East Timor this is known as the "dead earth."

It is an area whose former inhabitants are either dead or "relocated." You come upon these places on the plateaus and in the ravines of the Matabian Mountains, in the eastern part of the island, where the roads are perilous. It is not difficult to understand why an untried Indonesian army took years to get the better of the guerrillas of the East Timorese resistance, popularly known as Fretilin. Jakarta's troops never conquered these mountain passes; Indonesian pilots in their low-flying American aircraft did.

Following the Indonesian invasion in December 1975, American OV-10 Broncos and Skyhawks were used to devastating effect. Cannon fire, bombs and napalm saturated the valleys and hillsides where the civilian population had fled behind the guerrillas. "Ours was the last Fretilin village to fall," said a survivor, Abel. "They made the rocks turn white. The bombardment never stopped, day in, day out; I can still hear it." On the rim of these areas, which lie like patches of scar tissue all over the body of East Timor, are the crosses.

There are great black crosses etched against the sky--crosses on peaks, crosses in tiers on the hillsides, crosses beside the roads. In East Timor they litter the earth and crowd the eye. Walk into the scrub and they are there, always it seems, on the edges of riverbanks and escarpments, commanding all before them. 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, Crissmina, 7.6.77...Mendonca, Filismina, 7.6.77...Me- ndonca, Adalino, 7.6.77...Mendonca, Alisa, 7.6.77...Mendonca, Rosa, 7.6.77...Mendonca, Anita, 7.6.77...."

When I entered East Timor secretly last September, I had with me a hand-drawn map showing the site of a mass grave where some of those murdered in the 1991 massacre of at least 271 people in Dili, the capital, had been dumped; I had no idea that much of the country was a mass grave, marked by paths that end abruptly, fields inexplicably bulldozed, 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.

What has happened in East Timor is one of the world's great secrets. Alan Clark, the former British Defense Minister who licensed a $1 billion sale of British Hawk aircraft to Jakarta, once asked, "Does anyone know where East Timor is?" When I repeated this to him recently, he said, "I don't really fill my mind much with what one set of foreigners is doing to another." His riposte allowed a glimpse of how the unthinkable has been made acceptable; how decisions taken at great remove in distance and culture and time have had unseen and devastating effect on whole nations of people. East Timor is a horrific example.

Half of an island 300 miles north of Australia, East Timor was colonized by Portugal 450 years ago. The Portuguese partly Latinized the territory and insulated it from the upheavals of the western half of Timor, which was part of the Dutch East Indies that became Indonesia in 1949. In 1974, the old Salazarist order in Lisbon was swept aside by the "Carnation Revolution" and Europe's last great empire disintegrated virtually overnight. With the Portuguese preoccupied with events at home, the Indonesian military dictatorship of General Suharto invaded East Timor the next year, and has illegally and brutally occupied it ever since. The result: some 200,000 Timorese, or a third of the population, dead.

Western governments knew in advance the details of almost every move made by Indonesia. The C.I.A. and other American agencies intercepted Indonesia's military and intelligence communications at a top-secret base run by the Australian Defense Signals Directorate near Darwin. Moreover, leaked diplomatic cables from Jakarta, notably those sent in 1975 by the Australian Ambassador Richard Woolcott, showed the extent of Western complicity in the Suharto regime's plans to take over the Portuguese colony.

Four months before the invasion Ambassador Woolcott cabled his government that Gen. Benny Murdani, who led the invasion, had "assured" him that when Indonesia decided to launch a fullscale invasion, Australia would be told in advance. Woolcott reported that the British ambassador to Indonesia had advised London that it was in Britain's interests that Indonesia "absorb the territory as soon as and as unobtrusively as possible"; and that the U.S. ambassador had expressed the hope that the Indonesians would be "effective, quick and not use our equipment." On December 5, 1975, Henry Kissinger and President Gerald Ford arrived in Jakarta on a visit a State Department official described to reporters as "the big wink." Two days later, as Air Force One climbed out of Indonesian airspace, the bloodbath in East Timor began. On his return to Washington, Kissinger sought to justify continuing to supply the Indonesian dictatorship by making the victim the aggressor. At a meeting with senior State Department officials, he asked, "And we can't we construe [prevention of] a communist government in the middle of Indonesia as self-defense?" Told that this would not work, Kissinger gave orders that he wanted "to stop [arms shipments] quietly," but that they were secretly to "start again" the following month. In fact, as the genocide unfolded, U.S. arms shipments doubled. In 1975 C. Philip Liechty was a C.I.A. operations officer in the U.S. Embassy in Jakarta. We met in Washington last November. "Suharto was given the green light [by the U.S.] to do what he did," Liechty told me. "There was discussion in the embassy and in traffic with the State Department about the problems that would be created for us if the public and Congress became aware of the level and type of military assistance that was going to Indonesia at that time. It was covered under the justification that it was `for training purposes'; but there was concern that this might wear thin after a while, so the decision was taken to get the stuff flowing from San Francisco as fast as possible, to get it on the high seas before someone pulled the chain. As long as the Indonesians continued to certify that they were only using the equipment `for training,' then we could get it through the bureaucracy. ``Without continued heavy U.S. logistical military support the Indonesians might not have been able to pull it off. [Instead] they were able to stay there at no real cost to them; it didn't put any pressure on their economy and on their military forces because American taxpayers were footing the bill for the killing of all those people and for the acquisition of that territory, to which they had no right whatsoever.

``The only interest that I ever saw expressed, the only justification I ever heard for what we were doing there was concern that East Timor was on the verge of being accepted as a new member of the United Nations and that there was an excellent chance that the country was going to be either leftist or neutralist and not likely to vote [with the United States] at the United Nations. For extinguishing that one vote, maybe 200,000 people, almost all of them noncombatants, died." I asked him what would have happened if he or his colleagues had spoken out. "Your career would end," he replied.

I had entered East Timor pretending to be a businessman. Lying down in the back of a Land Rover, I crossed the border from
West Timor early one Sunday morning. I found a nation of unsmiling people; no one, it seemed, had been spared. "Of fifteen in my immediate family," said Abel, "only three are left. Up until 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. Indonesians use local people to spy on the others. 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. 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."

Today there are probably no more than 800 guerrillas under arms, yet they insure 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 "integration" with Indonesia. Domingos is 40 and has been in the jungle since 1983. "My wife was tortured and burned with cigarettes," he said. "She was also raped many times. In September [1993] the Indonesians sent the population of her 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."

Domingos and his wife came from Kraras, now known by the Timorese as the "village of the widows." During the summer of 1983, 287 people were massacred there. Their names appear on an extraordinary list compiled in Portuguese by the church. In a meticulous, handwritten script, everything is recorded: the name and age of each of the murdered, as well as the date and place of death and the Indonesian battalion responsible. Every time I pick up this list, a testimony of genocide, I find it strangely compelling and difficult to put down, as if each death is fresh on the page. Like the ubiquitous crosses, it records the slaughter of whole families, and bears witness to genocide: Feliciano Gomes, 50; Jacob Gomes, 50; Antonio Gomes, 37; Marcelino Gomes, 29; Joao Gomes, 33; Miguel Gomes, 51; Domingos Gomes, 30; Domingos Gomes, 2--"shot."

So far I have counted forty families, including many children: Kai and Olo Bosi, 6 and 4, "shot"; Marito Soares, 1, "shot"; Cacildo Dos Anjos, 2, "shot." There are babies as young as 3 months. At the end of each page, a priest has imprinted his name with a rubber stamp, which he asks "not to be used in the interests of personal security."

I drove into the capital, Dili, in the early afternoon. It was too quiet: not the quiet of a town asleep in the sun but of a place where something cataclysmic has happened that is not immediately evident. Fine white colonial buildings face a waterfront lined with trees and a promenade with ancient stone benches. The beauty of this seems uninterrupted. From the lighthouse, past Timor's oldest church, the Motael, to the long-arched facade of the governor's offices and the four ancient cannons with the Portuguese royal seal, the sea is polished all the way to Atauro island, where the Portuguese administration fled in 1975. Then, just beyond a marble statue of the Virgin Mary, the eye collides with rusting landing craft strewn along the beach. They have 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 tend to do. The November 12, 1991, massacre of unarmed young people in the Santa Cruz cemetery in Dili was different because foreigners were present, and it was videotaped. But after the foreigners were arrested and deported (one was killed), a second massacre took place, and it has never been reported.

"After the killings in the cemetery," said Mario, "I escaped being hit. So I pretended to be dead. The soldiers came and searched all the bodies and me, and hit me on the head so that I bled. They threw me with the other bodies onto a pickup truck. They took us to the mortuary, locked the door and went upstairs. Some of my friends were still alive, crying. They were calling out for water. I told them the only water was dirty, so we must pray together. I saw with my very own eyes that among the bodies were children and old people. Suddenly I heard steps approaching and I lay down again, pretending to be dead. Two soldiers came in. One of them picked up a big stone, and the other got a tablet from a jar. They then said out loud that if anyone was able to walk they had to stand up. When some of my friends got up, one of them was hit on the head by the soldiers with the stone; he died later. I heard the blows, and it sounded like coconuts cracking as they fall from trees. As they got close to me I stood up so suddenly that the soldiers were taken aback. I told them I was an informer, that I really worked for them. I didn't want to lie, but this saved my life."

Abilio, a Timorese orderly at the military hospital in Dili, took up the story. "I was at the hospital receiving the dead and wounded," he said. "Most of them were dead, but some were pretending to be. The soldiers didn't unload the bodies one by one; they just pushed them down on the ground. If they spotted one that was alive they killed him by running the van over him. Some of the soldiers were afraid of killing more. So they ordered the Timorese who were there to kill them. People said no, or they ran and hid in the toilets. The Indonesians then tried to inject them with sulfuric acid. But the soldiers stopped doing this as the people screamed too loudly."

Amnesty International has said of the Jakarta regime: "If those who violate human rights can do so with impunity, they come to believe they are beyond the reach of the law." The United States has, as usual, the power to stop this. The Clinton Administration has declared its concern about East Timor; this, together with a proposed Congressional ban on further arms sales to Indonesia, has worried the regime--although Jakarta also understands that in the American political system such statements are often just rhetoric. The crosses should not be allowed to multiply on the hillsides. The people of East Timor should be helped to get rid of their oppressors and to exercise their right of self-determination--albeit nineteen years late. Their great suffering, resistance and courage deserve nothing less.

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AVCAT: Thursday, 2 April 1998