Empire of the East (17 page)

‘People suffered from depression, loss of memory, inexplicable fear, failure of virility, even speech. No girl in these villages could marry while the family was in mourning, and mourning also lasts ten years. The families of those whose bodies were never found could not go to the temple until the ceremonies were performed. Some families threw themselves into the Batur volcano.’

‘So when did all this come to an end?’ I asked him.

‘On New Year’s Day nineteen seventy-six,’ he said. ‘On that day the Ngerupuk ceremony asking the ghosts to depart was performed by licence of the government. Next came the Nyepi, when all activity is stopped. Everyone must stay in the same place in his house without moving, speaking or eating, only meditating continually for one whole day. After that, when night comes, Ogoh-Ogoh, figure of the evil spirit, is carried round all the streets and presented to every house, and then burned. Next day of this year the greatest sacrifice of animals ever known took place on the island. They were buried by the thousand in the villages and thrown into Lake Batur and the sea. After that we made a feast of reconciliation. To pay for the animals and the ceremonies many families sold their lands, lost all their possessions and went bankrupt.’

‘And having done all this,’ I asked, ‘did you get rid of the ghosts?’

‘No,’ he said. ‘Now there are few left to trouble us, but some are still there whispering into the ears at night, “When will my ashes be in the cemetery of the Temple of the Dead?” ’

B
ACK IN SANUR WE
made final preparations for East Timor, having little idea of what awaited us on arrival. I knew that police scrutiny was likely to be intense, and a further complication was introduced by a strong and active military presence. A friend who had recently visited the island spoke of the near-impossibility of travel except by short-distance village bus, and then under surveillance. Accommodation outside the capital, Díli, was reported as virtually impossible to find.

Our journey aroused mixed feelings and some re-examination of its scope and aims. We had both been deeply concerned by accounts of the sufferings of the ordinary people of this ex-Portuguese colony. Their long-entertained hopes of self-determination when colonial rule came to an end were crushed by the Indonesian invasion of 1975. Was there any place among the pleasant commonplaces of travel for a description of what we could contrive to see of the state of an island and its people, one third of whom had been massacred during sixteen years of occupation? We believed that there was. Few acts in the violent history of recent years can have exceeded the ferocity of the Indonesian attack, launched two days after a meeting in Jakarta between Suharto and President Ford, in the company of Henry Kissinger — dubbed by the State Department at the time as ‘the big wink’. Earlier in the week the Australian Prime Minister Gough Whidam, also closely concerned in what was about to happen, was asked what he proposed to do should the invasion take place. To this his answer was ‘absolutely nothing’. An international coincidence of interests was thus proclaimed, and the stage set for the takeover whatever the costs might be.

The Indonesian invasion of East Timor had long been anticipated. In April 1975 an Australian friend, Jill Jolliffe, arrived in Díli as a freelance journalist to cover operations expected to be timed for the autumn of that year. The character of such an invasion was to be foreseen by the cynicism as well as brutality of some preliminary surprise attacks launched from across the frontier against villages in East Timor. Fortunately for her, Jill declined the invitation of a party of two British, two Australians and one New Zealand journalist to film the fighting in the vicinity of Balibo, where they took over an empty house, painted an Australian flag on the front and set up their cameras. Their murder by Indonesian parachutists an hour or two later was to inspire a ghoulish charade. The journalists were stripped, redressed in Portuguese uniforms and propped up behind machine guns with cartridge cases scattered all round. The first official account of the episode was that they had been combatants; this was followed by a version describing them as Australian communists impelled to join in the war. Later they were to become bona fide journalists once again, who had simply perished in the heavy crossfire. Inexplicably their bodies were thrown into a blazing building and in this burned to ashes which were duly handed over to their embassies in Jakarta. Neither the British nor Australian governments showed interest in pursuing investigations into these deaths.

With this curtain-raiser Indonesia left no doubt in any mind as to the character of the war about to be unleashed. In the first week in December warnings went out from Jakarta giving all foreigners notice to leave the country within five days. Compliance was immediate and complete, the only person refusing evacuation being Reuters’ correspondent, Roger East, who, shaking his colleagues by the hand, announced his intention of seeing the thing through.

On 8 December Indonesian paratroopers, trained in the ethics of total war, dropped from the skies in Díli. Roger East alone remained to tell the world of the carnage that followed. But nothing more was heard of him for several years until a refugee from East Timor who turned up in Lisbon reported having seen him dragged, spitting at his captors at the end of a rope, to the sea-front where the Indonesians were settling accounts with methodical efficiency with all those, including the whole of the town’s Chinese population, who had given cause for offence. Such public executions, which went on for a number of days, were formal in style and invested with a macabre theatricality.

At 2 p.m. 59 men, both Chinese and Timorese, were brought on to the wharf … These men were shot one by one, with the crowd, believed amounting to 500, being ordered to count. The victims were ordered to stand on the edge of the pier facing the sea, so that when they were shot their bodies fell into the water. Indonesian soldiers stood by and fired at the bodies in the water in the event that there was any sign of life.

Earlier in the day, at 9 a.m., a smaller group, many of them women with their children, had been executed in a similar way. An eye-witness testified: ‘The Indonesians tore the crying children from their mothers and passed them back to the crowd. The women were then shot one by one, with the onlookers being ordered by the Indonesians to count.’

This was the holocaust into which the imprudent Roger East disappeared. It was claimed that by the time the town’s occupation was complete, eighty per cent of its male population, along with many women and children, had met violent deaths.

The plane for East Timor was small and austere, and although this flight had been said to be constantly overbooked there were a number of vacant seats. There was something about the passengers that it was carrying, too, that struck us as different from the assortment of holiday makers and businessmen normally encountered on such internal flights. Indonesian travellers are notably sociable and show eagerness to engage the stranger in the next seat in politely trivial conversation. This time we found ourselves in a plane-load of loners. Where there were empty seats, papers were in some cases spread over them by a youngish, well-dressed man who worked on them assiduously through the flight. No foreigners had joined this trip. The only women passengers were three nuns, bent over what we supposed to be breviaries. There were no children. Already, with East Timor two hours away, something of its spirit, we felt, had touched us.

I had been given a copy of notes made by a friend who had undertaken this journey three months earlier in the year. He had stayed in the capital of Díli at the Hotel Turismo, to which all foreigners were directed, and it was an experience he had not particularly enjoyed.

For most of the time I was not aware of being under personal surveillance except when I was in the Hotel Turismo. I assumed that my possessions would be searched at some point. They were searched, in fact, on the third day, while I was travelling to Atambua. As far as I know only one document was taken … It was confirmed to me on my last morning that my room had been searched by the army … This was one of the occasions when the danger that accompanies any dissident activity became apparent … it was suggested that a film might have been taken.

I did not meet Carlos, who is reputed to be the hotel’s chief spy, until the night before I left. He looked the picture of a snout — dark glasses, very curious and accommodating — I wonder if there is not a more important and more subtle figure as well … It is possible that I was followed more effectively, taken in hand all day by a man who was on the same bus as I was to Ermera. I caused him to hitch through the rain and walk back … He never let me out of his sight.

By all accounts, few people would have wished to choose the Turismo for a holiday break. Francois Luizet of
Le Figaro
arrived at Díli in 1989, shortly after East Timor had been nominally re-opened to the outside world, and seems to have been startled by his welcome: ‘ “Bom dia.” My hello to the reception at the Hotel Turismo brings conversation to a halt. Silence. No sound except the whining of the air conditioner and the cries of caged parrots. A dwarf rushes towards me and says, “No one speaks Portuguese any more.” He’s trembling. They all seem terrorized, paralysed. “Listen,” the dwarf whispers, “there are spies everywhere. I can’t talk. I might get a bullet in the head.” The forces of occupation are explicit. “Don’t talk to foreigners, or expect trouble.” ’

The US Ambassador’s stay a year later was also less than a success. He was there to enquire about a number of arrests following the Pope’s visit a month or two before. Once again there was trouble with students. They were there to call for UN intervention in East Timor and occupied a balcony from which a number were thrown by the police onto the patio below, some being seriously injured with the possibility of two hushed-up deaths.

I handed the notes to Claudia. ‘There’s something for you here about the town,’ I told her. She settled to read the marked passages.

When I first walked round Díli I was struck by its dilapidated, untended appearance. I was a little shocked by my reaction. What had I expected? If I picture Díli now, I see images of neglect and poverty overlaid by rows of white government offices and barracks busy with young men in camouflage … It was Díli’s public spaces that are neglected. The pavements are full of holes. The draincovers have gone. The seafront is entirely undeveloped. Horses and goats browse the grass outside the Bishop’s residence up to the edge of the unswept beach littered with tin cans and garbage, where landing craft from the invasion still rust in the water. Pigs trot up and down the road in front of the new cathedral. Cows graze next to a barracks.

Claudia handed the paper back. ‘Good photography?’ she wanted to know.

‘Possibly. In a way. Of course they might object.’

Many months of travel in Indonesia had turned Claudia into a good mixer, and when I glanced up from my book shortly after this it came as no surprise to see her sitting with the nuns engaged in a spirited discussion. We were out of touch for the rest of the flight, and by the time we reached Díli it was quite clear that they were all bosom friends. It turned out that two of the nuns were among those running an orphanage in the mountains in the east of the island for children whose parents had been killed in the invasion and its aftermath. They had been to Bali to meet the third who had travelled from Rome to join the orphanage. Two of the nuns were Italian and the third was a Filipina, and two things struck me about this trio. One was how tiny they were and the other their incessant bubbling high spirits.

Landing at Díli Airport, we found that there were no taxis in sight. All the waiting cars were there to collect the serious men we had travelled with, and we had posted ourselves somewhat disconsolately by our baggage when our three nuns sprinted into sight. A truck carrying yet more Salesian sisters had arrived to pick them up and, putting aside all our protests, they pounced on our bags and hauled them off to be loaded up with their own. By chance they were bound for the intimidating Turismo, where a room had been booked for the nun from Rome. The others were to pass the night at the Bishop’s residence next door, and the following morning the party would leave for the orphanage in the mountains. They urged us to visit them there, and as much as we should have been glad to accept this offer on the spot, East Timor seemed hardly the place where such spontaneous visits were to be lightly contemplated.

The Turismo was yet another confirmation of my view that in travels of the more outlandish kind reality rarely corresponds to previous images formed in the mind. At first glance it could almost have been a somewhat run-down English country house in a large garden that had been kept under control but no more. A few wilted blooms showed on the bushes at the pathside leading to the door. The people at the reception seemed pleasantly ordinary. There was no sign of the probable spy with eye-shades encountered by my friend, nor did appearances suggest the hotel’s involvement in sinister events. Otherwise it was seedy in a way it was bound to be, located as it was in the midst of a warlike situation that had continued for so many years. The decorative local woods incorporated in much of its structure had seen no polish for a decade and a half, and the carpet covering the wide staircase had long since been ripped away to reveal cracks which harboured the occasional spider. The stairs led to our rooms on a gallery overlooking the patio in Portuguese style, onto which the students were reported to have been thrown. The rooms were clean but dark and the air-conditioning grumbling softly did little to influence the stuffiness. Crossing the floor provoked a crackling from the loose floor tiles underfoot. The nun from Rome, deposited here, had instantly vanished to be seen no more that day, and although one or two depressed-looking individuals mooched glumly about the place, there was nothing to suggest that any of these were hotel guests.