Part 1 — Women’s Stories

 

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East Timor

 

Timor: genocide, cultural destruction and the anguish of seeing children starve

Emilia Pires

 

Emilia Pires, now an Australian resident, presented a longer version of this paper to the Australian-Pacific women's peace conference, in Sydney in 1985. The conference was sponsored by Women's International League for Peace and Freedom.

 

I came to Melbourne in 1975 from East Timor with 1200 other Timorese, mostly women and children. We left during a small civil war, certain that we would be going back home after a few weeks. The following invasion of our country by Indonesia came as a shock to us. Ten years later, the situation in East Timor has worsened.

The struggle of East Timorese women today cannot be separated from the broad struggle for independence of all Timorese as a people. Women have been imprisoned, displaced, raped and made to suffer in countless ways, but the restoration of our dignity and freedom will only begin when East Timor itself is free and independent.

We are a small people, with few resources to match the powerful public relations machine of Indonesia, which has 100 embassies throughout the world. We get very little media exposure because Indonesia has sealed off East Timor to independent observers, and because countries like Australia place more emphasis on good trade relations with the Suharto government than on issues of human rights and natural justice.

After the Portuguese decision to grant independence to East Timor in 1974, Indonesian foreign minister Adam Malik repeated previous assurances of Indonesian respect for East Timorese independence, and pledged support for any future government in the country. Two majority parties which emerged in 1974-75, UDT and Fretilin, favoured independence. The small Apodeti party advocated integration with Indonesia l. Resistance to integration with Indonesia is not just a recent development brought on by suffering since the invasion. Timorese resistance will thus not be overcome by the present crude showering of material gifts — roads and public buildings — on the part of the Indonesian government.

In 1975, internal divisions and Indonesian pressure led to the collapse of a coalition between UDT and Fretilin, civil war, the death of 3000 Timorese

 

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and the abrupt withdrawal of the Portuguese administrators. Indonesia used this upheaval as a pretext for its invasion late in 1975, when Timor was at peace and capably administered by Fretilin.

The Suharto government now claims that the East Timorese exercised their right to self-determination in mid-1976, when a group of actively-selected Timorese petitioned Jakarta to incorporate my country as Indonesia's twenty-seventh province. This process has been rejected by the United Nations as a political joke.

Indonesia's so-called "liberation" of East Timor (from warring factions, future economic non-viability or political insignificance) was in fact naked aggression, resulting in wholesale bloodshed and suffering. Since 1975, between 100000 and 200 0002 — between one-sixth and one-third of the population — have died as a result of Indonesian military activity and associated factors, such as famine. According to the Washington-based centre for Defence Information's 1983 survey of forty current world conflicts, only those in Kampuchea and possibly Afghanistan had involved more deaths.

Indonesia maintains about 10000 troops in East Timor, backed by helicopters, tanks and OV 10 counter-insurgency jet aircraft — all a campaign to eliminate guerilla resistance. Fretilin guerilla activity has intensified this year, and they have re-commenced radio broadcasts to the outside world, according to church sources. Indonesia has also continually tried to stamp out resistance by intimidating the people with physical violence. As the head of the Catholic church, Monsignor Belo, said in 1984, "in many places there are violations of human rights, assassinations and . . . arrest and imprison- ment without trial of anyone suspected of having links with Fretilin. The families of the prisoners are in bad conditions". Amnesty International believes "torture, disappearances and extrajudicial killings" continue in 1985.

You will not be surprised to learn that women have suffered terribly under the occupation. Violence against women has included rape (which is commonplace), widowing, prolonged separation from husbands and families, the orphaning of thousands of children, severe hunger (even to the point of death) and the unspeakable anguish of seeing their children starving, torture, execution and imprisonment. A recent development has been the intensification of a birth control programme by the central government. Incredibly, the programme is designed to control what Jakarta regards as overpopulation, when thirty per cent of the population has died since 19753.

Since 1979, Indonesia has resettled the bulk of the tribal people from the Timor interior in about 400 resettlement centres — usually referred to by the East Timorese as concentration camps. The purpose of this measure is to control movement and isolate guerilla resistance from the people (the Americans employed a similar strategy in Vietnam). Traditionally, the Timorese have lived in scattered, extended family units, and have a close spiritual bond with the land. So concentration in centres away from their land and lifestyle has a shattering psychological, cultural and economic impact.

Apart from spending large sums of money on public works in an attempt to consolidate integration and win both international approval and the hearts and minds of the Timorese, the Suharto government has also instituted a

 

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programme of "Indonesianisation" in Timor. Indonesian transmigrants, business people and civil servants have arrived, Bahasa Indonesia is taught in schools, and the young are de-culturated in Javanese universities. A strong church statement of January this year called this process "a slow assassination of Timorese culture. To kill their culture is to kill the people themselves".

Jakarta campaigns energetically to convince the world that the East Timorese are happy. Occasionally, carefully-selected delegations of parliamentarians from countries friendly with Indonesia are permitted to enter. Their visits typically last three days and are accompanied by heavy ceremonial and security measures. The kind of access which is permitted in, for example. El Salvador or South Africa, is denied. Independent observers, such as Amnesty International or the International Council of Voluntary Aid Agencies are kept out, and access by the International Committee of the Red Cross is restricted.

The Catholic church, to which about eighty per cent of the population say they belong4 is "walking with the people" in East Timor. Its network of missions keeps it well informed about events and attitudes. What the Timorese want, according to Monsignor Belo, is: an end to hostilities; withdrawal of Indonesian troops; respect for the culture, religion and identity of the East Timorese people; a non-violent, diplomatic solution, based on the right of the people to self-determination; and involvement of the Timorese people in any negotiations.

This last point is crucial: the Timorese, who stand to gain or lose by the outcome of negotiations, have not been included in UN-sponsored talks aimed at achieving a comprehensive settlement. We are obliged to sit outside in the waiting room while others talk for us and about us. The Timorese will not accept a solution reached behind our backs by the colonial powers: Portugal and Indonesia. Such a solution may conveniently remove the issue from the international agenda, but it will not bring lasting peace to East Timor, any more than a similar arrangement made almost twenty years ago achieved lasting peace in West Papua5.

 

Notes

1.   Even impartial observers, like Amnesty International, admit that Apodeti was a Jakarta front — ed.

2.   The official figure given by Indonesia is 50 000.

3.   The transmigrasi programme to East Timor has also been quite intensive. Under this programme, the Indonesian regime relocates people from overpopulated islands like Java and Bali to the less populated outer islands of the archipelago. Transmigration has been used as a measure of control in trouble spots like East Timor and West Papua. The number of transmigrants to the western half of Timor, by comparison, has been negligible. — ed.

4.   Indonesian census, 1980.

 

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5.   The UN-sponsored "referendum" in West Papua (Irian Jaya) allowed for the annexation of the territory by Indonesia on the basis that the West Papuans decided to be part of Indonesia as an "act of free choice". Military atrocities and cultural genocide in West Papua are also well documented; the Papua New Guinea government collaborates with Jakarta to keep journalists and foreigners away from Operasi Papua Merdeka (Free Papua Movement) strongholds. Countries like Australia, in contravention of their UN obligations, refuse to accept refugees who have escaped over the border into PNG. — ed.