Empire of the East (20 page)

An attack on the Bibileu, the second mountain sanctuary, followed, and here again the accounts are sketchy and the numbers of victims probably estimated. It is quite certain that panic in the neighbouring village of Kraras was so great that the sick and elderly were abandoned to their fate, and many died in the flames started by the planes. Most of those who reached the mountain were killed, too, on its slopes. The number given is five hundred. Perhaps it was less, but no doubt a large number of innocent people died. There are few signs of life in this countryside nowadays.

The Soul Mountain operation was seen by the Indonesian military as an almost complete success and the model for further undertakings of its kind on an amplified scale. The assault of Matebian fell short of the military ideal only through too few troops being available, as well as too few civilians to act as their shield.
Operasi Keamanan,
generally known as
nagar betis —
the ‘fence of legs’ — was to incorporate the experiences learned on the two mountains with a ten-fold increase in the numbers involved. It was an encirclement as before, but this time not of single mountains but vast areas of the country. Up to eighty thousand males between the ages of eight and fifty are believed to have been enlisted for the fence of legs, which after much secret planning went into action in early 1981.

No warnings were given before the round-ups of civilians, and the multitudes snatched up suddenly from their homes had no time to collect food or clothing. The conscripts formed up in lines stretching across much of the island, and the great marches began that were to go on for three months. Special army detachments went ahead burning villages and crops. Behind them came the civilian lines and then the main body of the troops. ‘The fence started in the extreme west of the country, went down south, then along the coast to the east, then up north and along the north coast to complete the circle.’ Christiano Costa, a conscript with the fence who escaped from East Timor in 1987, described the scene on the plain of Aitana when the marching was over, with the journey’s end not only for the quarry but for many of their pursuers, overtaken by famine and disease.

I was with the troops when they reached Aitana. When the attack was over and mopping-up operations were under way a week or two later, our team entered the area. It was a ghastly sight. There were a great many bodies, men, women, little children strewn everywhere, unburied, along the river banks, and on the mountain slopes. I would estimate about ten thousand people had been killed in the operation. There were so many decomposing bodies that the stench was unbearable and we couldn’t stay in the area. The Indonesian soldiers showed no mercy to anyone.

More effective from the invaders’ viewpoint than the casualties inflicted in the Soul Mountain and ‘fence of legs’ operations was the crop-burning that accompanied them. It was a strategy that brought the Fretilin close to the point of extinction, but it also imposed near-starvation conditions on the civilian population from which it has never wholly recovered.

In the presence of evidently sympathetic foreigners in Venilale, anguish sometimes burst through the seams. We had been taken to inspect the mass graves at the back of the cemetery. In these not only bodies but fragments of bodies of those killed in the forests of the Soul Mountain had been smuggled back at night for interment according to the practices of the Timorese people. Although not debarred by the authorities, visits to the cemetery were regarded as imprudent, and a woman who slipped quietly away into the shadows at our approach was called back by our guide.

‘Whom are you visiting?’

The woman was holding a small tin of the kind originally containing dried milk supplied by a relief organization. ‘One of my girls,’ the woman said in Tetum. ‘I was taking honey.’

‘Were you on Matebian?’

‘We were up there for a year. When the bombing started our men told us to go. The planes saw us — all of us women with the children running and trying to keep together — and a bomb landed in the middle of us. I had to climb over the bodies. Some of them were blown to pieces and they were all mixed up. I saved one girl and lost the other. I had to find some part of her to take back to bury, a hand or a bone, or even a piece of her dress with blood on it. There was nothing I could be sure of, so to be on the safe side I carried everything I could. Some of this might be her, I thought. It was all I could do. I come here whenever I can and leave honey for her and hope for the best. Sometimes people try to mark the place when they’ve lost somebody and they come back for weeks and months hoping to find something they can recognize and take home.’

Such scenes and such memories are the small wars of this century. The invasion of East Timor coincided with the United States’ withdrawal from Vietnam and may be seen as its signal to a Cold War ally for action counterbalancing the communists’ temporary success. By strengthening its ties with an ultra right-wing regime, the United States gained the right of free passage through the deep sea of Lombok and Ombai Wetar Straits for its SSBN nuclear submarines directed against Soviet targets. Such was its enthusiasm for Indonesia’s expansionist policy that at the time of the invasion ninety per cent of the weaponry used was supplied by American firms. Military aid peaked at the time of the Matebian and ‘fence of legs’ operations, which, if deprived of invaluable US counter-insurgency aircraft, might not have been carried through to success.

American interests in the seizure of East Timor were strategic. Australia, which chipped in with token arms deliveries and some loud-voiced support for Indonesia in the counsels of the nations, pursued wholly economic ends. Vast oil reserves were known to exist under the sea-bed of the straits between Australia and East Timor, and although the area remained under the legal administration of Portugal, a secret agreement was reached by which this should be shared out between the occupying power and Australia.

In the first decade alone of this conflict the UN General Assembly passed some ten motions deploring ‘Indonesia’s military aggression’ against East Timor, and called upon it to withdraw its armed forces. They had little hope indeed of provoking the energetic action unleashed recently in the case of Kuwait.

A
NYONE WHO HAS BEEN
subjected in childhood to the religious fundamentalism of an old-style Welsh farming community is likely to flinch secretly when the word religion is spoken in his hearing. My own family were a generation or so removed from the life of sheep farmers on bracken-infested mountain slopes, but their attitudes had remained unchanged, along with the conviction that no more than a strict mechanical adherence to the forms of their religion was required for them eventually to gain reasonable seating at the right hand of Christ in his glory. To the younger generation their religious opinions were of slight importance. What was supremely burdensome was that they kept holy the Sabbath day, a long and withering process in which all forms of pleasure were scrupulously eradicated. Games were debarred and, other than the tinkling of hymns on the piano, music — even whistling — was ruled out. When, in the case of the elder children, intellectual escapism came under suspicion, bookcases were locked on Sunday and only the
Christian Herald
made available in the long and inert pause between chapel visits. Services were a stern affair. When the Reverend Davies called upon his congregation to love their neighbours he made the word love sound like hate. He preached to heartless and unimaginative people, but even at the age of nine, after several years of force-feeding with this libel on Christianity, I was old enough to be amazed to be compelled to listen to a sermon, acclaimed in the Tabernacle by a standing ovation, on ‘the sin of forgiveness’.

It was a background that left me ill at ease with all the organized religions apart from Buddhism, which seemed to me to offer the mildest of the prescriptions for salvation, and to be certainly incapable of devising a system by which on one day a week it was difficult for a child to be happy. It was only many years later in South America that I encountered men of the cloth whom I was obliged to admire. I had gone to Brazil for a newspaper to investigate reports of genocide practised against the Indians of that country, who were disappearing at such a rate that it was confidently predicted that not a single one would be left by the year 2000. D’Arcy Ribeira, the great Brazilian sociologist, had calculated that one third of these catastrophic losses was attributable to the activities of fundamental American missionaries.

Much as I shied away from their theology, I found it impossible not to admire the self-sacrifice of the handful of Catholic fathers working in isolation among the impoverished and the dispossessed of such countries as Bolivia and Brazil. Indonesia was my second experience of Catholic missions in the field, but in this instance the magnitude and complexity of the problems they faced were much greater. There were mutterings in the high echelons of the faith demanding why the fortunes of the large Catholic minorities spread through the islands of Indonesia should be placed at risk over the defence of a handful in East Timor. The fundamentalists everywhere went along with governments, however abusive their form, and had even rewritten a biblical text in claim of God’s approval of such subservience. Indonesian Catholics saw this as going too far but applied pressure on the Timorese Church through Bishop Belo to accept the country’s de facto unification with Indonesia. This the Bishop resisted, but a score of priests and a half dozen nuns could do little more than refuse moral co-operation.

The nuns were too heavily occupied by their spiritual and mundane commitments to do anything but leave us to ourselves for most of the time. They were eager for us to stay, holding forth the promise of the interest and excitement of the forthcoming fiesta, to be celebrated in traditional Tetum style. We suspected that visitors from the West might have helped to alleviate feelings of isolation which they would certainly never have admitted to possessing. Their working day was a long one. Sister Marlene, wakened by her alarm clock at 4 a.m., was the first up and about, and shortly after this the emphatic sounds of prayer reached us through the wall from the next room where the twenty aspirants were already at their devotions. Four years were to pass, three to be spent in the Philippines, before they would become nuns — members of the Salesian order which largely concerns itself with the instruction of the young.

My only previous contact with women in holy orders had been in 1981 when I had met Sisters Joan and Maria from the American Mary Knoll order. They were doing what they could in the stricken Nicaraguan frontier town Ocotal, to alleviate suffering among the civilian population caused by incursions of the ‘Contras’, supported and armed by their own administration. I had arrived within days of the murder of two of their members from El Salvador who had been staying with them. They had been raped and killed, along with the two sisters who had gone to meet them, on their way back from the airport to the Salvadorian capital. To this tragic episode Joan and Maria made hardly more than passing reference. The Mary Knolls wore ordinary clothing, including in this case check blouses and baseball caps, and I remember thinking at this time that the absence of outward religious formality helped in so far as I was concerned in the establishment of a sympathetic understanding.

By contrast, in Indonesia, at the beginning of our friendship, there was something slightly daunting about the Salesian religious uniform, its archaic style hinting at a repudiation of the physical world. For the first moments in the striking presence of the thirty-two-year-old Sister Marlene in her immaculate habit, I was touched by the memory of medieval austerities, of the visions and voices of such as Teresa of Avila. Within minutes I was to see her demonstrating a vigorous Portuguese folk-dance to a class of orphan girls, and the original impression faded out with an article by a journalist who had smuggled himself into East Timor at the time of the worst trouble, and depicted her struggling through the thickets of the Soul Mountain to the assistance of children under attack by the planes. Thereafter I was reminded less of Teresa of Avila and more of Villon’s ‘bonne Jeanne’ (que les Anglais brûlèrent à Rouen).

The nuns and the aspirants worked endlessly at their allotted mundane and spiritual tasks. At their head Sister Paola Battagliola was a living miracle of efficiently applied effort in which every minute played its part. She had the tiny, triangular face of the witch-fairy known as
’a buffona
who is stuffed with sweets and hung from a tree for the Epiphany in villages south of Naples. All domestic tasks including those of the kitchen lay within her domain, where no idle moment was tolerated.

The aspirants completed the hours of prayer, praise and catechism, then settled, rapt-faced, to bake bread, sew garments and scrub floors. Twice a day they sat at an impeccably set table — at which the correct distances between spoons and forks, etc., might be checked with a ruler — for a demure but swift intake of Sister Paola’s excellent pasta, after which they scurried away to wash up. Excitement simmered constantly behind faces like pious little masks.

By the greatest of good luck we had arrived within a few days of the celebration of a great event in the lives of the Catholic community. This was the ceremonial unification of what had previously been the territory of seven petty rajahs, in the vicinity into one parish of the Church, a reform initiated by Bishop Carlos Belo. The Bishop had been the replacement sent by the Vatican in 1983 following its withdrawal of Monsignor Costa Lopes after pressure from Jakarta where he had been seen as too outspoken in his defence of human rights. Indonesian military circles spoke with satisfaction of his substitution by a young inexperienced Timorese, chosen largely for the same reason as Ivan the Terrible was crowned Czar, because he was believed to possess the most amenable personality among possible choices.

Just as Ivan had, Carlos Belo disappointed, causing initial alarm by a pastoral in which he denounced military abuses. This was followed by a bombshell in 1989 in the form of a letter to the Secretary-General of the UN in which he called for the question of East Timor’s independence to be dealt with by a referendum. This letter alone was enough to spark off a repression in which the Australian press spoke of mass arrests, tortures and the precautionary detention of up to one thousand five hundred persons in advance of the visit by Pope John Paul later that year. The Bishop himself received a number of letters threatening him with death.