Eyewitness (46 page)

‘They are basically cowards,’ said Irish journalist Robert Carroll, who has spent the past nine days hiding in Dili and the town’s surrounding mountains. ‘They ran away when real soldiers arrived.’

The night before, the militia had emptied their rifles into the air as they had every night since the United Nations announced that 78.5 per cent of eligible East Timorese rejected Indonesia’s rule and voted to become the world’s newest independent state. They set alight or trashed the few buildings still habitable in the town, from which 70,000 people have fled. But as hundreds of foreign troops arrived, tense and ready for action, the bullies disappeared and the fires were burning themselves out.

Major Chip Henriss-Anderssen, of Townsville’s Third Brigade, said when he arrived this morning on Dili’s wharf that genuine refugees appeared frightened and remained in small groups. ‘But after a while they came up, one or two at a time, and shook our hands,’ he said. ‘The little kids were saying, “Hey mister!” Perhaps after a while we will be able to teach them to say “G’day.”’

The scene at Dili’s airport today was surreal. Shortly after dawn, crack Special Air Service troops based in Perth were among the first Australians to arrive in screaming Hercules planes. They ran across the dusty tarmac, securing the perimeter. But waiting and watching were a few dozen Indonesian soldiers, representatives of a humiliated, embittered force that is leaving East Timor in disgrace.

Indonesia has never in its history suffered so great a humiliation: the world’s fourth most populous nation, rejected by people who had suffered 24 years of repression, most of whom are now homeless and still living in terror. The few dozen Indonesian soldiers who stayed around to watch wave after wave of soldiers arrive didn’t seem too fussed. Asked about the destruction and looting, one said: ‘This incident happened before we arrived.’ He declined further comment.

Major-General Peter Cosgrove, the Australian commander of the multinational peacekeeping force, described the reception his soldiers received as ‘benign’. ‘We have had a cordial reception from the TNI (Indonesian armed forces),’ he said. Nobody mentioned the fact that it was the Indonesian armed forces who through their proxy militias have destroyed most of what Indonesia claimed was its 27th province, and stood by and watched mass killings and almost unbelievable atrocities. General Cosgrove was not underestimating the risks as more than 1000 of his troops sat under the few trees with shade at the airport. ‘It is still, from my point of view, a very risky environment beyond the sight of the nearest Australian soldier,’ he said.

I was among a group of 40 journalists who were ordered not to leave the airport after we arrived from Darwin in a crammed Hercules. The first soldiers who went into the now wrecked departure lounge found the place smeared with excrement. Red and white banners, the colours of Indonesia’s flag, still hang outside the airport’s VIP lounge, one of the few buildings in Dili not wrecked.

Tonight we will be escorted under armed guard to the Turismo, the waterfront hotel from which many of us fled in fear of our lives. The place is trashed but we will set up a makeshift camp in the mosquito- infested garden where only a couple of weeks ago Australia’s former deputy prime minister, Tim Fischer, and an Australian delegation of ballot observers sat and enjoyed cold beers and talked confi- dently of the birth of a new nation.

There is some good news, though. The UN compound where we spent six long and scared days before being evacuated has not been burnt and much of the UN’s equipment is untouched. But a UN official who has been staying at the fortified Australian consulate, not far from the airport, said: ‘It’s a pretty horrific picture, overall. There are thousands of people dying up in the hills without food or water. They need urgent help. There is nothing left in the town for people to return to.’

Robert Carroll, the Irish journalist, said he has seen young children with bloated stomachs and families with nothing to eat but small portions of rice. ‘People have been told the peacekeepers are coming but they don’t believe anything any more,’ he said.

*

Dili, September 25th.
Television footage beamed via satellite out of Dili shows starving children, hundreds of thousands of people forced from their homes, rampaging thugs, destroyed towns. You have heard the clichés: war-zone, ghost town, haunted streets, genocide. But the enormity of it hits when people you know are dead or missing. Every foreigner who has lived or worked in East Timor knows somebody who has gone.

I am typing this report in the burnt-out shell of the waterfront Hotel Turismo, with Australian soldiers sitting behind machine-guns and sand-bags on the balcony of my old room. Old John, the hotel waiter, has risked death to come back and see if he can help those of us who have returned. The last he heard, his family had been forced to one of the West Timor camps. John was here in 1975, when Indonesian troops invaded the former Portuguese territory, but he says this is worse.

Even in those dark days the Indonesians never attacked the home of the Catholic bishop just along the road. This morning John arrives with the news that Indonesian soldiers, having burnt and trashed the home of Bishop Carlos Belo two weeks ago, are stealing rice from an 84-year-old nun, Sister Margarita, who has defied Indonesian military orders to leave and is trying to keep alive a small group of children separated from their parents.

Armoured vehicles and tanks rumble frequently past our fortified hotel. Australian soldiers in full combat gear, their Steyr rifles at the ready, patrol the waterfront day and night where thousands of refugees have been living without shelter, food or water. The men of the militia have blended into the groups of refugees, who are too terrified to point them out. The mood of the Australian troops is tense, their behaviour business-like and disciplined. At the time of writing they have not yet fired a shot back in anger, even when three truckloads of Indonesian troops drove around firing into the air and once again terrorising Dili’s residents.

I cried when I returned to Dili this week. Many reporters did, not just because of the slaughter of the East Timorese but because of the shame the behaviour of Indonesia’s soldiers and police have brought on our giant neighbour whose people are mostly kind and gentle and have long suffered from state brutality themselves.

The other day in Melbourne, after I had spent a week inside the besieged United Nations compound in Dili, an editor asked me to write a personal account of how we coped or didn’t cope with the pressure. But in Dili now that drama seems irrelevant.

Try to picture this: every man, women or child forced from the city or town where you live, often at gunpoint. Entire towns and villages turned into wastelands. Everything of value stolen and loaded onto trucks by the military, police or the militias. Maybe tens of thousands of people slaughtered because 78.5 per cent of East Timorese voters dared reject Indonesia’s rule, after an annexation in 1975 that was never recognised by most of the world. The horror of seeing, on top of an untold number of other bodies, the beheaded body of a woman stuffed down a well.

On Thursday I flew in an Australian army helicopter over the coastal town of Manatuto, east of Dili. It is totally destroyed, its people gone. Because it is too dangerous for anybody other than Indonesian soldiers, police or militia to travel outside Dili, we know little about towns such as Liquica, just one hour’s drive west of Dili, Maliana, the government and administrative and market centre for Bobonaro district, the port town of Suai or Lospalos, Viqueque, Same, Maubessi, Ainaro or even the second-largest town, Baucau, a picturesque place atop a cliff 400 metres above the sea.

We know that most of the people are gone from there, too, because we see them on Dili’s waterfront – mothers trying to keep their children alive, ordered by the Indonesian military to climb aboard one of the ships sailing to Kupang or some other Indonesian port where they don’t want to go. The peacekeepers’ task is to disarm the militias. They have not yet been able to stop the depopulation of East Timor.

We hear horror stories of concentration camps on the border with the Indonesian province of West Timor. We hear threats by the militia leader Eurico Guterres and others to kill the multinational forces, most of them Australians. We see Dili residents returning in trickles from the waterfront, where they fled, or were herded, when the killing began. A flicker of hope, perhaps, returns with them.

Those of us who have followed the story closely cannot understand why the Indonesian armed forces and their proxy militia forces have depopulated East Timor. No doubt they wanted to warn secessionist movements in Irian Jaya or the north Sumatran province of Aceh: look what we did to East Timor. Perhaps the generals think they are stopping the disintegration of the country. But why remove the people against their will? Why create unrest in Indonesia’s adjoining province?

We flew into Dili’s airport on crammed R.A.A.F. Hercules planes on Monday thinking we would witness the liberation of East Timor. Five days later the territory is an even more dangerous place than the days immediately after the announcement of the vote, when the militia, military and police started their violence. As up to 20,000 humiliated Indonesian soldiers and police leave East Timor, the military’s command structure is collapsing, creating a situation of near-anarchy. Whereas before the violence and intimidation was carefully targeted, including by the military-run militia, it is now random and appears to be motivated by anger and revenge.

Before, the order was to scare UN personnel, aid workers, journalists and other foreigners into leaving the territory so the killers could do their work away from prying eyes. But the order was not to kill them.

Now Indonesia’s armed forces don’t seem to care who gets killed. They are leaving and washing their hands of security. There are grave concerns that the 7500 multinational troops coming into the territory will be too thinly stretched to handle possible threats from thousands of militia massing at the border with West Timor and in towns such as Liquica, Maliana and Suai that they have long dominated. There are also concerns about clashes between pro-independence supporters and the militia, many of whom have taken their families across the border but have returned, apparently ready to make a stand and fight.

Greatly outnumbered by the Indonesian forces and the militia and under orders not to attack from their commander, Jose ‘Xanana’ Gusmao, the pro-independence guerrillas have until now kept in the mountains. But after 24 years of Indonesian brutality they are consumed with hate. When the Indonesian forces have left, it will be difficult to restrain them.

What has happened to the world’s newest independent state? Remember the 30th of August when the people of East Timor put on their Sunday clothes and defied threats of intimidation and violence to vote in the UN-supervised ballot? Most Timorese I have spoken with are deeply traumatised and don’t know who to believe or trust any more. They had faith in the UN, which promised not to abandon East Timor after the ballot. They’ve had their hopes falsely raised too many times to think the arrival of the Australians will end their nightmare.

Soon the dark clouds of the monsoon season will gather over the mountainous island and most East Timorese will have no shelter and little food. We all should be crying for East Timor.

Irris Makler

Irris Makler is a freelance broadcaster working in the Middle East. After a career at the BBC, including time with the major current affairs program
Panorama
, she joined the ABC for nine years, including, as Moscow correspondent, covering the sinking of the submarine
Kursk
and the war in Chechnya. Her book
Our Woman
in Kabul
was published in 2003.

Makler went to northern Afghanistan a week after the September 11th, 2001 attacks, and reported what she saw and whom she met in the next few frightening months. She witnessed the liberation of Kabul and the end of the Taliban. Makler writes of the exhilarating fellowship experienced by war correspondents. She saw the dead bodies of a number of her colleagues brought back from the Taliban trenches. She acknowledges the volatile mix: ‘danger is an aphrodisiac … When your colleagues are dying around you, it makes life – and love – more precious.’ Her story is partly from the other ‘other side’ of that fluid and still unfinalised conflict – the women of Afghanistan. It is also the story of the effects of war on the remarkably resilient people of that warexhausted country. She quotes a UN official who investigated Taliban killings: ‘Many bodies were also tossed down deep wells, then hand grenades were thrown in, and the wells were bulldozed over. In a desert land, who would poison a well?’

*

Journalists ‘adopt’ different generals, forging relationships so they can learn about the progress of preparations for war and so that the generals will let them accompany their troops once the fighting starts. My favourite is General Attiqilah Bariolai, the Northern Alliance’s Deputy Defence Minister. He is one of the new breed of Afghan military leaders. Young, charming and clever, the softly spoken general has done some training in the West. He is a snappy dresser, with mod suits in both local and Western styles. I have seen him wearing corduroy, but never a turban. When he invites journalists to dinner, there is a table, unusual enough here, set with crystal bowls.

General Bariolai reiterates the complaint we have heard in Dushanbe: the Northern Alliance wants America’s respect as much as its weaponry. ‘We want to be treated as equals. If Americans want to deal with us, they have to speak with us as a government with another government.’

He tells reporters the Northern Alliance, which has been fighting the Taliban for almost seven years, is the only force capable of defeating the Taliban on the ground. ‘The bombing alone will never win this war. You have to follow up with ground forces and we are the ground force.’

Some journalists even go to live as guests of another general, Mamur Hassan. His compound is 15 kilometres from Khoja Bahauddin, at Dashti Qala. It is a short distance, but significant here, where there are no proper roads. Depending on the weather, it can take more than two hours to reach Dashti Qala.

The Foreign Ministry is not pleased because it has no control over journalists living there. General Hassan collects an unusual group around him. There is the unforgettable Volker Handloik, a tall German with blond curly hair reaching past his shoulders, which he sometimes puts up in a bun. He wears blue glasses and a long quilted coat, a local
chapan
, but a multicoloured version no-one else seems to have found. I never see anything like it in the market. He rides the General’s horses, with his long blond hair flying behind him. Combat cameraman Andy Driver also lives here. He is a cockney, ex-S.A.S., and like so many of the real tough guys, a darling. Andy obtains the first footage of American Special Forces in the region, at a time when the Northern Alliance is denying they are present.

Northern Alliance officials order Andy Driver to move out of General Hassan’s compound because his visa is not in order, but Andy hunkers down and General Hassan lets him stay on, prepared to defy the Alliance officials because he likes him. Andy is an Afghan man’s kind of man. He’s a good shot and, most importantly, a good rider. He and General Hassan sit poring over maps and discussing strategy till the early hours of the morning.

Mamur Hassan’s compound is green and fertile and pleasantly relaxed, especially after the Foreign Ministry office. It’s built around a garden and, while it has necessities like a radio room and an anti-aircraft battery, there are also orchards that geese wander through, and a large plane tree under which Mamur Hassan sits for interviews. With articles in international newspapers, and a long profile in the
New Yorker
, Hassan is becoming a celebrity warlord. He seems to me to be enjoying it.

General Hassan is charming, and we take tea. He has a round Uzbek face and wears an embroidered cap, which sets off his white whiskers and warm smile. I can’t help thinking in other circumstances he would make a natural Santa Claus. But every time I interview him, he gives me a different assessment – of the war aims, of the timetable, of the number of his troops, of their readiness. Often he flatly contradicts what he said last time, only days before. It is hard to rely on his dates, figures or predictions. A three-year-old child who I presume is his grandson climbs up onto his lap, and Hassan seems more interested in playing with him than speaking to us. Afterwards I learn little Babur Shah is his son. He looks up from the boy and says he can call on more than 5000 soldiers. One thousand men live here with him in Dashti Qala. ‘They are ready to fight for me whenever I order them to.’

It is very difficult to verify these numbers. I have not seen 1000 men here – though there could be 5000 men on call in the region for all I know. He says that the Northern Alliance feeds 600 of his soldiers, but that he makes up the shortfall out of his own pocket, providing everything else they need, such as clothing and medicine.

The Taliban say they have 20,000 to 30,000 men in this region. Northern Alliance intelligence supports this, but it is another unverifiable figure. However, it appears certain the Taliban forces do far outnumber those of the Northern Alliance. In the circumstances, how sure is Mamur Hassan of victory?

‘We want to win more strongly. Victory is about will and our spirit is indomitable,’ he says.

On another day, Hassan says that if the American air strikes are successful and Russia supplies the weapons it has promised, then it will be possible to defeat the Taliban – but it will take two months. This contradicts what he tells Jon Lee Anderson from the
New Yorker
. He complains to him that General Fahim has told him to collect all his soldiers and be at the ready, but he doesn’t have sufficient resources. He only has food for 600 men and he has 1000 to feed. He argues that the conditions are not right for a sustained attack – in fact, in these conditions it’s impossible.

In the first week of October we are frequently asking each other, will this offensive ever begin? What can we reliably report about it?

*

Thirty men from Dashti Qala set out to fight the Russians in 1979. Mamur Hassan says he is one of only two still alive.

They started out fighting locally, on their own, but once the US, Pakistan and Saudi Arabia began covertly funding various Afghan factions, Hassan threw in his lot with the powerful Pashtun leader Gulbuddin Hekmatyar.

Hekmatyar is a notorious figure, reviled for his ferocious cruelty, particularly among the Tajiks. In the 1970s, while at university, he and his supporters are alleged to have thrown acid in the faces of women who refused to wear the veil, and to have shot at the legs of women who wore no stockings. Though Hekmatyar later denied this, it has become part of Afghan political folklore.

Hekmatyar was also virulently anti-American, but in the 1980s when the US was supporting seven main factions in the Afghan war against the Soviets, Hekmatyar’s received the largest amount of weapons and training. It was funnelled via Pakistan, and many said his greatest talent was that he knew how to schmooze the Pakistanis, positioning himself as their major ally inside Afghanistan.

Hekmatyar was Ahmed Shah Massoud’s rival, and his Northern Alliance critics say that he killed more Mujaheddin than Russians, undermining the unity of the anti-Soviet forces. They argue that Hekmatyar spent the decade of the Soviet war safely in Pakistan stockpiling C.I.A.-supplied weapons and money, while Massoud was fighting in the mountains with weapons stolen from dead Russian soldiers. Hekmatyar once boasted that he could keep fighting for 25 years without ever needing supplies.

In the 1990s Hekmatyar used his American-funded weaponry to lay waste to Kabul in one of the bloodiest sieges in modern warfare. Unwilling to share power with the other Mujaheddin factions, Hekmatyar pounded Kabul with hundreds of heavy rockets and mortars on a daily basis. He kept this up for three years, killing some 20,000 civilians, and wounding many more.

Unless he can make a dramatic comeback, this is what he will most likely be remembered for. He became prime minister in 1993 and then again in 1996 for a short period until the Taliban took over. Very much the forerunner of the Taliban, Hekmatyar envisaged an Islamic state where women would be banned from work and education, and a puritanical brand of extremist Islam would be enforced. ‘If you liked Khomeini,’ the Russians said as they were pulling out of Kabul in 1989, ‘you’ll love Hekmatyar.’

Hekmatyar’s supporters included many of Osama bin Laden’s foreign volunteers who later found their way into the Taliban. The creation of the Taliban weakened the cunning, erratic Hekmatyar as Pakistan shifted its support to the new group of Pashtun warriors.

When the Taliban took over they condemned Hekmatyar to death and he fled to Iran. I am told by drivers, translators and aid workers that if he returned to Afghanistan, he would be torn limb from limb.

‘At first I was a member of Hekmatyar’s party, and I fought against the Soviets but also against other Afghans,’ says Mamur Hassan. ‘We killed a lot of people and destroyed many places, and I regret this. I tell my sons not to have anything to do with political parties.’ So Mamur Hassan tells the
New Yorker
, when the Northern Alliance is cosying up to the United States. Who knows what he really thinks?

In classic Afghan fashion, in the mid-1980s Hassan switched sides, breaking with Hekmatyar and joining Massoud until the defeat of the Soviets in 1989. After the Russians left, Hassan rejected any further political involvement and returned to Dashti Qala. He works with the Northern Alliance but maintains his independence. His men, he says, owe their allegiance to him. Personally.

This is a plausible claim. Mamur Hassan is a clan leader in Dashti Qala, as was his father before him. This society is essentially feudal. Poor men owe their loyalty to the local leader who pays their way. They will follow him when he changes sides for whatever reasons he deems compelling, such as a change in the overall temperature of a war, or the offer of a large amount of cash. They will do this even midbattle. If Mamur Hassan decides to switch sides and join the Taliban tomorrow, all his men will unquestioningly fight with him, for the Taliban, and against their present allies in the Northern Alliance. This is part of the mystery of Afghanistan.

While it is not an outcome I think likely, it is by no means impossible, and it is something I always bear in mind when coming to Hassan’s leafy complex at Dashti Qala. The loyalties are old and complex, and pre-date Western involvement in this conflict. You never know when an Afghan warlord will turn or, as the British observed during their abortive campaigns here during the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, you may be able to rent an Afghan, but you can never buy one.

*

If you follow the money, you see that plenty of people on both sides have tried to buy the Afghans over the past 25 years. During the decade of the Soviet war, it’s estimated Russia spent more than US$40 billion fighting here, losing 15,000 of its own troops in a war that cost more than one million Afghan lives.

America also spent huge amounts here over the same period, in its largest covert action since World War II, funnelling more than US$3.2 billion in guns and money to the Mujaheddin, and co-ordinating an equivalent amount from other countries, including Saudi Arabia.

It started in the summer of 1979, when Washington signed a secret directive to support the fledgling Mujaheddin movement, to the tune of US$30 million. That was six months before Soviet tanks rolled into Kabul.

This was the initiative of President Jimmy Carter’s national security advisor, Zbigniew Brzezinski, whose aim – and he was quite open about this – was to destabilise the Soviet Union by fostering the spread of Islamic militancy in Central Asia. In 1980, Brzezinski was filmed standing on the Pakistani side of the Afghan border, wearing the wrong type of turban and rallying the Mujaheddin to ‘wage a jihad!’ against the Communists.

American journalist Bob Fitrakis wrote bitterly about this after September 11: ‘The Mujaheddin took the message to heart. They’re now waging a jihad against us.’ Brzezinski played a critical role in shaping Washington’s policy in Afghanistan, which was continued by successive Republican administrations. In 2001, as the US returns here to the last great battlefield of the Cold War, dragging the world’s press behind it, this issue underpins our reporting.

We discuss whether September 11 is in any way ‘payback’ for America’s policies in Central Asia, and specifically for the conduct of its foreign policy in Afghanistan in the 1980s. Is it simply bad luck or coincidence that Osama bin Laden based his al-Qaeda network here? Is America now ‘reaping the whirlwind’, or as some US officials put it bluntly – has America helped create its own Frankenstein’s monster?

We learn the term ‘blowback’ – security service talk for supporting an unsavoury local leader because it suits your short-term ends, only to have him turn around and bite you later. Saddam Hussein is one striking example of blowback. Is Osama bin Laden another?

Three years ago, as the nature of the Taliban regime was becoming apparent, Zbigniew Brzezinski stood firm, denying to a French newspaper that he had any regrets. ‘Regret what? That secret operation was an excellent idea. It had the effect of drawing the Russians into the Afghan trap and you want me to regret it?’