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East Timor faces historic
wrongs
By Jill Jolliffe
DILI
- Interior Minister Rogerio Lobato is known as the
strongman in East Timor's government. Yet he wept like a
child as he confessed publicly to beating a prisoner
during the 1975 civil war. "I knew it was wrong, but he
had killed my younger brother," Lobato said. "I lost
control. I didn't kill him, but I beat him up twice,
badly," he continued, asking the community and the man's
family for forgiveness.
In admitting frankly to
violating human rights, Lobato was in a minority among
the 13 politicians who testified before the Reception,
Truth and Reconciliation Commission here in the capital
last week. The commission was formed in 2001 to
reconcile communities divided by the militia violence
that occurred in East Timor in 1999, but it also has a
mandate to examine human-rights violations committed
between 1974 and 1999.
The commission's latest
public hearing was on the most sensitive of topics - the
events leading to the six-week civil war, which gave
Indonesia the excuse it was seeking to invade and occupy
the then-Portuguese colony. The brief but bloody
conflict between the nationalist Fretilin and Timorese
Democratic Union (UDT) parties in August and September
1975 cost about 1,200 lives.
Events leading to
the civil war began in 1974 when a left-wing revolution
in Portugal offered freedom to the country's African
colonies as well as to East Timor. The immediate
trigger, however, was the UDT's seizure of power from
the Portuguese administration, which later withdrew to a
neighboring island, ending almost 500 years of colonial
rule. The Indonesian government then used the resulting
power vacuum to annex East Timor - later evidence shows
that its intelligence agents had subverted the UDT coup
leader - leading to a breakout in violence.
Now
the truth commission, which consists of seven
commissioners, has invited political leaders to accept
responsibility for the violence and seek forgiveness
from their people, while also warning them of the
dangers of self-incrimination. Last week, most witnesses
defended their party's version of civil-war history, and
all formally requested forgiveness. But with a few
exceptions, the errors they admitted - such as promoting
intolerance and losing self-control - were so
generalized as to be meaningless.
One of the
first to testify was Prime Minister Mari Alkatiri. When
he concluded his testimony with the phrase, "I can state
that I didn't do anything. I wasn't even [Fretilin]
president or secretary," he was cross-questioned
impatiently by commissioner Jose Estevao, who pointed
out that the commission deals with human-rights abuses,
yet witnesses were engaging in politics. He accused them
of lacking courage. "Nobody is accepting blame," Estevao
asserted. "I would like you, as a leader of Fretilin, to
say whether Fretilin violated human rights."
Former militia hard-man Tomas Goncalves, who
served as a "partisan" with Indonesia's 1975 invasion
force but defected to the independence cause in 1999,
raised skepticism with his solemn declaration that "God
shone on the partisans, deciding that none of us had to
fire a single bullet".
Echoes from the midst
of war
The Timorese public followed the hearings
avidly, and with keen interest in the explanations for
the killing of scores of prisoners that Fretilin held in
Dili when Indonesia invaded. Despite protests from the
International Red Cross, Fretilin leaders took these
prisoners to the mountains with them. Their bodies, and
those of others held in local prisons, were found in
mass graves in the Aileu and Same areas in early 1976.
They included senior leaders of the UDT party as well as
the founder of the pro-Indonesian Apodeti party.
In addition to these killings, the truth
commission produced witnesses backing claims that both
sides in the civil war had carried out summary
executions. Fretilin supporter Manuel Duarte told of
surviving the UDT's execution of about 76 of his party's
members in Ermera district in August 1975. While Monis
da Maia survived an execution of UDT prisoners by the
Fretilin near the south-coast town of Same on January
28, 1976, six weeks after Indonesia's full-scale
invasion of East Timor. The prisoners had been moved
from prison to prison as the advance began. Da Maia was
one of eight men blindfolded and shot by Fretilin
soldiers, whose identities he knows but did not reveal.
He lived to tell the tale because the bullet only grazed
his head.
When Fretilin exiles returned to Dili
after 1999, Prime Minister Alkatiri apologized publicly
for past human-rights abuses by his party, including
these killings, but the issue was relegated to an
internal party inquiry, which has said nothing in the
years since, and no independent inquiry has been held.
The Fretilin leader had himself left the country weeks
before the killings, so no one has questioned his
personal involvement. However, many Timorese believe the
present leadership is aware of the executioners'
identities. In response to commissioner Estevao's query,
the prime minister asserted: "I'm not saying the people
killed ... themselves. But I don't know who did. Because
of the context, Fretilin accepts responsibility."
His view, however, was bluntly contradicted by
the aging former president of Fretilin, Xavier do
Amaral, whose frankness echoed that of Lobato. In
testimony translated from Tetum, the lingua franca of
East Timor, he claimed: "We were in the midst of war, we
had no transport, medicines or food. Some of the
prisoners were very ill. If we let them survive, they
could have fallen into enemy hands, to be used against
us. So we took a decision to kill them. That was a
common decision, taken by every level of the
leadership."
Portugal's disastrous
decolonization
Portugal's role in East Timor's
disastrous decolonization was one that divided
politicians, with government members generally denying
that its policies caused the turmoil. The present
Timorese government has received generous financial aid
from Lisbon since 1999, and accepts growing Portuguese
influence in its affairs. Its choice of Portuguese as an
official language is hotly contested by the younger
generation, which has doubts about this pro-Portuguese
version of history.
Former Portuguese governor
Mario Lemos Pires was among several international
witnesses, giving video testimony from Lisbon at the
truth commission. He previously published a book on the
ill-fated decolonization, so his statement contained no
major revelations. However, it did emphasize that
although he personally tried his best for the East
Timorese, he had little backing from his leftist
government. It also gave priority to decolonizing
oil-rich Angola in a manner that would preserve
Portuguese influence there.
Pires justified his
withdrawal of troops from mainland Timor at the height
of the civil war on the grounds that the new regime was
opposed to any post-colonial involvement. "I had to ...
prevent a guerrilla war against the Portuguese
government in East Timor," he said. "The African wars
had just finished because Portugal could not cope any
more with this situation."
East Timorese Foreign
Minister Ramos Horta praised Pires' role, saying he had
been made a scapegoat, "a victim of the process", adding
that Portugal had no blame in the outcome. By contrast,
Lobato argued that the ex-governor could have restored
order instead of retreating with his commandos to the
offshore island of Atauro. Lobato was a junior officer
in 1975 and most of the Portuguese garrison was made up
of Timorese conscripts. "The Portuguese command could
have used its paratroopers to restore order," he argued.
"We told the governor that if he did so, the Timorese
soldiers would support him."
Australia's former
consul in Dili, James Dunn, a long-standing champion of
Timorese rights, agreed with Pires that external
interests had fanned divisions and limited the choices
of Timor's immature politicians 30 years ago. Both men
cited the Suharto dictatorship's virulent
anti-communism, the Australian government's refusal to
assist Portugal in decolonization and the communist
victory in Vietnam, which had hardened US attitudes to
leftist governments in the region but inspired the
impressionable young Timorese.
There was
agreement among experts that Indonesia's long-standing
plan to annex East Timor ultimately rendered the
behavior of the territory's inexperienced politicians
irrelevant. Nevertheless, the calling of ex-leaders to
account by the truth commission was popular in Timor.
And if the politicians effectively evaded
responsibility, they also used the occasion for a token
display of forgiveness.
Prime Minister Alkatiri
and most of his cabinet appeared at the closing session
featuring former arch-enemy Joao Carrascalao, the UDT
leader accused of starting the coup. Instead of
confrontation, the politicians staged an unexpected
hug-fest of mutual forgiveness, embracing and weeping on
each others' shoulders in the hope of wiping away the
memory of fratricidal violence once and for all.
(Copyright 2003 Asia Times Online Co, Ltd. All
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