Distant Voices (39 page)

When an old man approached me in the hotel courtyard, asking me in a whisper to contact his family in exile in Australia, I walked away at first, then turned back and drew him into a passageway. ‘All my children are in Darwin,' he said, ‘I sent them out. It cost a lot in bribes. Now I long to see them.' I asked him if he had ever tried to leave. He shook his head and ran a finger across his throat. ‘Will you take a letter for me?' he asked. ‘Post it anywhere but here. They
open everything. I have not had a letter for eight years.' I agreed to collect the letter that evening.

Across the road from the Roman Catholic cathedral three security policemen stopped a woman as she opened the gate, and demanded her name. She kept going to the bishop's door. Brave woman. The church in East Timor is, to the generals, a greater enemy than Fretilin, in spite of the Pope's apparent silence on the genocide during his visit to East Timor in 1989. According to members of the East Timorese church, the Pope was ‘poorly briefed' prior to his visit. Once there, they said, he spoke generally about human rights and has since maintained the independence of the East Timorese church by not recognising it as part of the Indonesian Bishops' Conference. Yet he also gave public communion to General Murdani, who led the invasion and whose troops did much of the killing.

The massacre of hundreds of young people who marched peacefully to the Santa Cruz cemetery on November 12, 1991, remains like a presence in Dili. They had set out to place flowers on the grave of a student, Sebastiao Gomes, who had been shot dead at the church two weeks earlier. When they reached the cemetery, they were shot down by waiting troops, or they were stabbed or battered to death. There was no provocation. What was different about this massacre was that foreigners were present, including one with a video camera. However, it was after the foreigners had been arrested and expelled from East Timor (one, a New Zealander, was murdered; several others were badly beaten) that a more typical, unreported massacre took place.

‘After the killings in the cemetery,' said Mário, ‘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 on to a pick-up 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 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 soldier with the stone; he died later. I heard the blows, and it sounded like coconuts cracking as they fall from a tree on the ground. 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. The soldier with the jar of tablets was making the injured take them, and he gave me one; I think it was yellow; it made me vomit.' (We passed several of these tablets to Scotland Yard's forensic laboratories in London, which found them to be paraformaldehyde. When vaporised this is a powerful disinfectant and must not, under any circumstances, be ingested.)

José, 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 sulphuric acid. But the soldiers stopped doing this as the people screamed too loudly. Instead they gave each of them two pills and they got very ill.'

The hospital orderly described how Indonesian military doctors took part in killing the wounded. ‘The doctors themselves went to get poison liquid', he said, ‘and they gave it to people to drink. I don't know if the higher ranks in Indonesia knew about this; anyway, they would deny it. This information is not hearsay; it was given to me by someone who was actually told to kill some survivors. We were forced by
the Indonesians to do this job. If people didn't take the poison, they were stoned or beaten with sticks. One effect of the poison was that people started passing out one by one. You could see them struggling with their breathing. There was one soldier, a corporal; he was the most ferocious. He gave poison to people. Then he stoned them till they died. Up until now I have not told this to any foreigner. I am worried about my safety. The Indonesian intelligence follows everyone. That is why I have had to keep it secret.'
^fn2

While Indonesian officers and spooks sang maudlin songs backed by the Karaoke in the hotel dining-room downstairs, I attempted to shred my notes and stuff them down the lavatory. This succeeded in blocking it, and it then had to be unblocked; the rest David and I burned, almost setting the bathroom curtain on fire. An element of black farce, which had underpinned ‘Adventure Tours', was now reasserting itself. With the small videotape cassettes strapped to our legs, bellies and crotches, we said farewell to Gerry, our driver, and set out to leave the country from Dili airport. Swathed in Timorese cloth and nursing a large wooden statue sold to me by a village
liurai
(king), we hoped we looked as ‘travel consultants' might, although I doubt if this made as much difference to our fortunes as the wonderfully chaotic distractions at the airport caused by the mêlée of Indonesians desperate to escape from a posting most had come to dread.

I had met the old man who wanted to give me a letter to post. After all the years of separation, he said, with tears in his eyes, he had not been able to compose his thoughts and put them on paper in time for my departure. Instead he gave me a telephone number in Darwin for Isabella, his eldest
daughter. I telephoned the number when I got to Bangkok. A recorded voice said it had been disconnected.

^fn1
The identities of most Timorese interviewed inside and outside East Timor are disguised, including those who insisted they could be identified, saying they had ‘nothing to lose'. The interviews were conducted by myself, and by Max Stahl and Ben Richards.

^fn2
This man and the other witnesses to the ‘second massacre' in November 1991 are now safely out of East Timor. In February 1994 they gave testimony to the United Nations Human Rights Commission sitting in Geneva.

ON OUR RETURN
to London I tried to make an appointment to see Ali Alatas, the Indonesian foreign minister of whom former Ambassador Woolcott had spoken admiringly and who has a reputation as a ‘diplomatic intellectual' willing to discuss the ‘human rights issue' in East Timor. At the World Conference on Human Rights in Vienna in June 1993, Alatas's ‘collected speeches on human rights' were distributed in a glossy white folder, including four pages of ‘principles of human rights in Indonesian law'. He quoted Hobbes, Locke, Montesquieu, Rousseau and Mill to show that human rights were largely of Western origin and that the West should understand the ‘cultural differences' and seek ‘balance' and ‘co-operation'. He got away with this; no delegate confronted him with evidence of his regime's well-documented genocide.

It is on this theme that Alatas's skill as a propagandist is amply demonstrated. He constantly implies that Suharto's Indonesia, like the rest of the developing world, is a victim of the Western media's colonial mentality and that any criticism of Jakarta's brutality in East Timor is ‘condescending'. For this he is often rewarded, not with derision or even scepticism, but with legitimising headlines such as: ‘East Timor groups cause image problem, says Alatas' and ‘Alatas scorns Timor death toll claim'.
¹²⁰

For years the Suharto regime paid America's largest public relations firm, Hill and Knowlton, to promote a respectable image in economic and trade matters, especially on Capitol Hill. This was a Hill and Knowlton speciality, having turned out expensive propaganda for the governments of Kuwait,
China, Turkey, Peru and Israel. However, in the aftermath of the 1991 Dili massacre, the Indonesian regime turned to Burson-Marsteller, which had overtaken Hill and Knowlton as the giant of American public relations. According to officials in Jakarta, Indonesia would now take ‘a more aggressive line in defending its East Timor policies' and there would be ‘a change from a passive posture to a more forceful, sophisticated approach'.
¹²¹
The
Far Eastern Economic Review
reported that the Burson-Marsteller contract was worth $5 million.
¹²²

I telephoned the executive vice-president of Burson-Marsteller, Michael Claes, whose signature appears on the contract with Indonesia. He denied all knowledge of an East Timor account. I asked if he was being secretive because the government retaining his firm's services was responsible for genocide. He laughed. ‘Look,' he said, ‘if you're going to ask me a serious question . . . then why don't we just keep it at that level, okay? I mean, those amateur techniques are not going to work with me, okay?' He asked me for my sources for the genocide. I said, ‘The President of Portugal, the Roman Catholic Church . . .' He interrupted. ‘The Roman Catholic Church, eh? You mean, you talked to a building?'
¹²³

If this was an example of its new ‘sophisticated approach', the Suharto regime was in difficulty. Of course, my conversation with Claes merely reflected the nervousness of those who pick up Jakarta's chalice. Under the Foreign Agents Registration Act, Burson-Marsteller must lodge all documents relating to a foreign client with the Justice Department. Copies of these documents show intense lobbying by the public relations firm on behalf of the Suharto regime. In one letter to Congress, Burson-Marsteller's ‘vice president, government relations' described the Indonesian response to the Dili massacre, in which more than 400 people were murdered or wounded, as ‘that unfortunate incident'.
¹²⁴

Foreign Minister Alatas had left the United Nations in New York by the time I arrived. However, Indonesia's Ambassador to the UN, Nugroho Wisnumurti, agreed to see me. In the mould of Alatas and other senior Jakarta
diplomats who can claim much success in explaining away the bloody record of the regime, Wisnumurti is an urbane man whose unctuous fluency reminded me, for a brief moment, of Douglas Hurd. Indeed, I began by asking him if the regime valued the support of those like Hurd who had praised Indonesia for its ‘recognition of basic freedom' and said that Western countries could not ‘export Western values [on human rights] to developing nations'.
¹²⁵

‘We welcome that kind of approach on human rights,' said the ambassador. ‘Britain's position towards Indonesia has been quite consistent . . . Of course, Indonesia does not claim to be the angel of the international community. We have made some mistakes . . .'

I asked what these mistakes were. ‘Oh, it happens everywhere, including Western countries,' he replied. ‘You know what I am referring to. There are sometimes abuses of military authority . . . some personalities use firearms without authority . . .'

I said the President of Portugal and numerous others had accused his government of genocide.
¹²⁶
He denied this, saying that Indonesia had promoted only ‘development and human rights'. To prove his point, he said, the East Timorese had actually voted in a referendum to join Indonesia. Moreover it was ‘completely untrue' that the survivors of the Santa Cruz cemetery ‘incident' had been murdered.

‘Why are you asking these questions?' he admonished me. ‘I only appreciate those who really want to get some information in order to promote a better understanding of the situation . . .'

It seemed that the ambassador had never been really challenged about East Timor. As I left he handed me a dossier of papers entitled
East Timor: Building for the Future.
These claimed that ‘the East Timorese people had rightly assumed their inherent right to decolonise themselves . . . by choosing independence through integration with Indonesia', and that this had been achieved within ‘the letter and spirit of the United Nations'.
¹²⁷
I showed the documents to Professor Roger Clark, a world authority in international law at
Rutgers University in New Jersey. ‘A total distortion,' he said. ‘The Indonesian invasion and occupation were and are illegal, brutal and can be compared to Iraq's invasion of Kuwait. Only the world's reaction was different.'

However, in the United States, where East Timor is little known, Indonesian propaganda has entered the canon of mainstream reporting. The
New York Times
has referred to ‘the former Portuguese colony' that is ‘now Indonesia's 27th province'. It has used the dateline, ‘Dili, Indonesia' – which is comparable to ‘Kuwait City, Iraq'. In 1988 the long
New York Times
report, headlined ‘Jakarta's Human Rights Record Is Said to Improve', made no mention of the genocide in East Timor.
¹²⁸
However, these distortions are in contrast with
New York Times
editorials on East Timor that have appeared since 1979, many of them reasonably good responses to Indonesian propaganda.

In January 1992 the
Washington Post
published an article by C. Philip Liechty, a former senior CIA operations officer based in Jakarta at the time of the invasion. Liechty accused the Indonesians of lying to the world and getting away with it. ‘There is not a shred of truth in the Indonesian version of events,' he wrote. ‘East Timor was an undefended sitting duck for the expansionist Indonesian generals. A slaughter of tens of thousands followed, but little factual reporting on the bloodiest atrocities left the island; the Indonesians made sure of that, effectively blockading East Timor, cutting off communications, turning back journalists and Western observers, terrorising the population and lying to the world about it, as now.'
¹²⁹