Distant Voices (38 page)

Roger East was caught in the street by Indonesian troops, bound with wire and dragged to the pier where he could hear the executions taking place. According to two eye-witnesses, he kept up a stream of rich, Australian abuse until the point of his death. He was told to face the sea; he refused and was shot in the face. His body fell, with all the others, into the ‘sea of blood'. An Indonesian report later claimed East was an armed revolutionary. After that, all knowledge of him was denied. Like the aftermath of the Balibo murders, an enquiry by the Australian Department of Foreign Affairs came to nothing, and not a word of protest was lodged publicly with Jakarta.

Staying at the Hotel Turismo, I could not get Roger East out of my mind. My room was a haven for cockroaches and spiders, and clearing a path through them was a prerequisite for a trip to the cesspit of a bathroom. I thought about him in this squalid and menacing place as he weighed up whether to stay or go. What would I have done? I would have got out. Roger East's memory deserves more than his government's wretched obsequiousness to his killers.

Today, the Turismo is where Indonesian officers, their hangers-on and local informers can be found. ‘Who are you?' we were asked at the reception. ‘I see you are a company director. What is your company?'

‘Adventure Tours,' I replied.

When I recorded a ‘camera piece' that morning on the beach near the pier, under the noses of a group of Indonesian soldiers and with the camera only partly concealed, I could hear an echo of my words and felt deep inside me a cold fear I had not previously known.

We were now being watched constantly and decided to drive back into the mountains. Climbing the steep road out of Dili, we passed a war memorial built by the Australian veterans of the Timor campaign against the Japanese. Its dedication read, ‘To the Portuguese from Minho [a northern Portuguese province] to Timor'. The memorial was intended
for native Timorese who gave their lives for the Australians, but the inscription does not mention the word ‘Timorese', because all Timorese were supposed to be Portuguese citizens.

Low cloud engulfed us, with crosses marking every bend, it seemed, all the way to Aileu. ‘When they finally forced Fretilin to withdraw from Aileu in 1975', wrote James Dunn, ‘Indonesian troops, in a brutal public spectacle, machine-gunned the remaining population of the town, except for children under the age of four, who were sent back to Dili in trucks. These infant survivors were ultimately to be placed in an orphanage near Jakarta, where the “poor victims of the Fretilin terror” were to become the subject of the charitable indulgence of Tien Harto (Suharto's wife) and her coterie of bored wives of the affluent and powerful in the Indonesian capital.'
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In the centre of Aileu is the mass grave of victims of the Japanese in 1942. On the hill above are statues depicting God and Jesus, smiling and surreal, and more crosses leading to yet another Calvary. There is no sign of the Indonesian massacre. From behind the tombs of the 1942 memorial, we attempted to evade local spies while filming marching students; once again, a whole town seemed to be marching and honouring the flag of its executioners. I had yet to become accustomed to this irony; it was as if prisoners were taking their exercise in a prison yard hung with bunting and accompanied by a brass band. ‘Welcome to Timor,' said an old Timorese man in English sitting on the steps of a café. He stood and lunged for my hand. ‘Welcome to the land of
free
people!' At this, he gave out a fine, false laugh, like a cackle. The Javanese owner of the café tapped his finger to his head and said, ‘He's okay, just a little mad.'

None of the shops in Aileu is owned by a Timorese; all seemed to be Javanese. As one of the principal sponsors of the ‘transmigration programme', the World Bank should be pleased with its success in transforming towns like Aileu. The World Bank is also the main backer of Indonesia's ‘family planning programme' in East Timor. According to a senior bank official, ‘There is no inherent contradiction between
the Indonesian government's population and transmigration programme. We believe that family planning is capable of providing important economic and social benefits to all concerned.'
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When the World Bank opened its ‘family planning' headquarters in Dili in 1980 the puppet governor of East Timor, Mario Carrascalao, was more to the point. The aim of the programme, he said, was ‘to prevent an increase in the population of the province'.
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For the regime, there is, of course, no ‘inherent contradiction' in reducing the East Timorese population while increasing the immigrant population. A senior Indonesian officer told Bishop Belo, ‘We only need your land. We don't need people like you Timorese.'
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‘In the village clinics,' said Christina, ‘anything is possible. You have to do what the Indonesian doctors say. Many of the women are injected with
Depo Provera
without knowing what it is. Women have been sterilised when they come to the clinic for something else, even for medicine for their babies. They don't know what is happening, or they are told that it's okay by the
babinses
[the ‘guidance officials', or brainwashers, in the resettlement camps]. We have lost so many people killed by the Indonesians, we must give birth in order to compensate or our population will fade away. We are not like any developing country. It's a mistake to think of us that way. We need to
increase
our population, just to survive . . . Yes, we know what they are doing to us; we can't fight this kind of attack on us with guns.'

In 1989, General Suharto received the United Nations Fund for Population Activities Prize, which praised his ‘support for family planning'.

We drove east, towards Baucau. It was here in 1981 that
Operasi Keamanan
(‘Operation Security') had its most devastating effects. Timorese between the ages of eight and fifty were recruited to form human chains across the island, known as the ‘fence of legs'. The object was to flush out Fretilin guerrillas, with Indonesian troops following on behind and pursuing them into ‘human corrals' where they could be captured or killed. A man who survived one of
these ‘corrals' reported, ‘It was a ghastly sight. There were a great many bodies, men, women, little children strewn everywhere, unburied, along the river banks, on the mountain slopes. I would estimate that about 10,000 people were killed in that operation.'
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Two years later a ‘scorched earth' policy brought repeated bombing raids. This was known as
Operasi Persatuan
, or ‘Operation Unity'.

I was struck by the similarity of the landscape to parts of central Vietnam, between Quang Ngai and Song Tra, where the Americans dropped huge quantities of chemical defoliants, poisoning the soil and food chain and radically altering the environment. Indonesians also used chemical defoliants, most of which they made themselves. Today, as in Vietnam, the trees are twisted into grotesque shapes and there is no cultivation. This is known in East Timor as the ‘dead earth', a place whose former inhabitants are either dead or ‘relocated'.

We reached Baucau in darkness. Baucau is a former Portuguese resort that once proclaimed a certain melancholy style and where holiday flights used to arrive from Australia. (‘Come and get a whiff of the Mediterranean!' invited a 1960 Trans Australia Airways brochure.) Today the airport is an Indonesian airforce base and Baucau a military ‘company town', surrounded by barracks. In the town square are two enormous statues of Timorese in ‘native costume', their hands raised towards an Indonesian flag. The statues, made from reinforced concrete, are crumbling in the tropical climate, their expressions unsmiling and wan.

Behind them stands the Hotel Flamboyant. We climbed the long staircase in darkness and called out. A Timorese man emerged from the shadows, limping and coughing terribly. ‘What do you want?' he asked. ‘A room?' we said. He turned and struggled along a deserted colonnade, and flung open two doors. There was no water, a fan that turned now and then, a mattress coated with fungus and a window without glass. ‘There are no mosquitoes in Baucau,' he said mysteriously. He left us with our echoes. The Hotel Flamboyant was, until recently, a torture centre.

‘I was arrested by the military command in Baucau,
KODIM 1628,' said Julio. ‘They used electric shocks on me. They attached a wire at the top of my feet, toes, fingers and ears, then started operating the current. I passed out. Then they attached negative and positive wires at the top of my toe, finger and actually inside my ear. I passed out again.'

‘My father was arrested several times,' said Alberto. ‘He refused to join the new administration. They took him to the police headquarters, then sent for me and my sisters and brothers to see him being tortured. They said to us that if we followed our father's example, this is what would happen to us. They beat him with iron bars at first, then they did something to him that you learn in karate. They put their hands on his stomach and manipulated his organs and intestines. Indonesian soldiers are trained in these methods. They did this to him in four sessions. Then he got a disease in his stomach and vomited a lot of blood. I saw all this happen. He died when he lost all the blood. That was 1983.'

‘When I was young', said Agio, ‘the military came to my house, and killed my two brothers in front of my eyes. Before they killed them, they prepared a hole and persecuted them. When they did it, they pulled out a heart from one of them and showed it to us. “That's a guilty, dirty, filthy heart”, they said to us. “You cannot be like this because this is the heart of a communist . . .”'

Torture appears to have been systematic throughout East Timor. The Indonesian military publishes an erudite manual on the subject, entitled ‘Established Procedure for the Interrogation of Prisoners'. Section 13 reads, ‘Hopefully, interrogation will not take place except in certain circumstances when the person being interrogated is having difficulty telling the truth . . . If it proves necessary to use violence, make sure that there are no people around . . . to see what is happening . . . Avoid taking photographs showing torture in progress [such as when] people are being subjected to electric current, when they have been stripped naked etc. Remember do not
have such photographic documentation developed outside East Timor which could then be made available to the public by irresponsible elements. It is better to make attractive photographs, such as shots taken while eating together with the prisoner, or shaking hands with those who have just come down from the bush, showing them in front of a home, and so on . . . If necessary, the interrogation should be repeated over and over again using a variety of questions, so that, eventually, the correct conclusion can be drawn from all these different replies.'
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As John Taylor has pointed out, the torture manual's definition of interrogation, of drawing a ‘correct conclusion' from replies which constantly denied this conclusion's inversion of reality, could also have been taken as a guide for the Indonesian military's relations with its Western backers.
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Foreign ‘fact finding' delegations have occasionally visited East Timor under military sponsorship and have been accommodated in the Hotel Flamboyant, presumably in a wing undisturbed by the activities of its torturers. One such delegation was led by Bill Morrison, former defence minister in the Whitlam Government and later Australian Ambassador to Indonesia. The Indonesians allowed the Morrison visit mostly on their terms, including the use of military interpreters. ‘The delegation', wrote John Taylor, ‘duly recorded that the military had invaded East Timor to quell chaos, that Suharto was reluctant to intervene, that the vast majority of people voted for the military in the elections, that food shortages were due to the long dry seasons and even that malnutrition was due to “a lack of variety in diet”.'
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Morrison arrived during the ceasefire in 1983, which allowed him to meet a group of Fretilin representatives who had flagged down his convoy. The Indonesian interpreters so distorted his conversation with the guerrillas that all references to atrocities and a nearby concentration camp were omitted. That night the delegation stayed at the Hotel Flamboyant and recorded in their report: ‘Back in Baucau the delegation leader informed other members of the delegation
of the meeting [with Fretilin] before settling down to a night of bridge.'
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Morrison had promised the Fretilin group, ‘Somehow we will get a message to you . . .'
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No message was ever sent; Morrison's report claimed that ‘the [Indonesian] administration in East Timor appears to be in effective control of all settled areas';
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yet his own encounter with Fretilin had contradicted that. On his return to Australia, Morrison was asked to comment on a report from Fretilin that the Indonesians were about to break the ceasefire and attack the population. ‘We have just been there', he said, ‘and seen with our own eyes, and we have discussed with the military commander . . . Certainly nothing we saw, nothing we were told there, gives any credence to that report.'
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A few days later, the Indonesian chief-of-staff, Benny Murdani, launched a new terror campaign, using American and British aircraft. ‘This time no fooling around,' he said, ‘we're going to hit them without mercy.'
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When David and I returned to Dili it was evident that our cover was wearing thin. At the New Resende Inn the same spook was waiting for us as we came and left. Perhaps it was David's highly convincing public conversation with a Javanese travel agent about the ‘tourist potential of East Timor' that bought us extra time. Talking to any Timorese was extremely risky. A group of American Congressional aides had been and gone, aware that the streets had been ‘cleaned' for their visit, as the Timorese say, with some 3,000 arrests and expulsions from Dili. The nights now belonged to truck-loads of black-helmeted troops.