Part 1
Womens 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
43
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.