Her book is a vivid first-hand account of the lives of individual Timorese during the long decades of Indonesia 's repressive occupation, their often heroic struggle for freedom, and their efforts to cope with the dramatic historic shifts engulfing them and their endeavours to rebuild their homeland.
Based on years of research, and lengthy interviews with East Timor 's leaders, priests, nuns, students and guerrilla fighters, this moving and extremely readable book is at the same time also an exploration of the complexities of the country's internal politics.
Her book is a vivid first-hand account of the lives of individual Timorese during the long decades of Indonesia 's repressive occupation, their often heroic struggle for freedom, and their efforts to cope with the dramatic historic shifts engulfing them and their endeavours to rebuild their homeland.
Based on years of research, and lengthy interviews with East Timor 's leaders, priests, nuns, students and guerrilla fighters, this moving and extremely readable book is at the same time also an exploration of the complexities of the country's internal politics.
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Overview
Her book is a vivid first-hand account of the lives of individual Timorese during the long decades of Indonesia 's repressive occupation, their often heroic struggle for freedom, and their efforts to cope with the dramatic historic shifts engulfing them and their endeavours to rebuild their homeland.
Based on years of research, and lengthy interviews with East Timor 's leaders, priests, nuns, students and guerrilla fighters, this moving and extremely readable book is at the same time also an exploration of the complexities of the country's internal politics.
Product Details
| ISBN-13: | 9781848130135 |
|---|---|
| Publisher: | Bloomsbury Academic |
| Publication date: | 04/01/2009 |
| Edition description: | 2nd ed. |
| Pages: | 368 |
| Sales rank: | 825,941 |
| Product dimensions: | 5.40(w) x 8.40(h) x 0.90(d) |
About the Author
Irena Cristalis, who also writes and broadcasts under the byline, Irene Slegt, is a Dutch jourbanalist and photographer, who since 1990 has been based in Asia, including at various times Hong Kong, Beijing, Bangkok, New Delhi and East Timor. Her photos and reports on China, Indonesia and many other Asian countries have been used by newspapers, magazines and radio stations around the world, including the Guardian, the Independent, the New York Times, The Economist, and the BBC. Her second book on East Timor: Independent Women, The story of women's activism in East Timor, co-written with Catherine Scott, was published in 2004. Since 2007 she has been living in London with her husband and small son.
Read an Excerpt
East Timor
A Nation's Bitter Dawn
By Irena Cristalis
Zed Books Ltd
Copyright © 2009 Irena CristalisAll rights reserved.
ISBN: 978-1-84813-429-4
CHAPTER 1
A view from the ditch
1994 My view of the stars was framed by palm leaves, gently swaying in the wind. Lying on my back in the ditch I could see them progressing, ever so slowly, across the moonless sky. Hours after we dived into this drainage ditch to take refuge, a dog started barking at a distant farm. I knew that, soon, other dogs in the neighbourhood would join in. Then the search would be on again, and I would have to keep very still. I could not help but think of my Timorese travel companions. Had they managed to escape?
My thoughts wandered back over the journey that had brought me here, to this ditch along the road somewhere on the outskirts of Baucau.
It had begun three weeks earlier, in November 1994, in Jakarta. Jill Jolliffe, an Australian journalist, and a leading authority on East Timor, had hired me to do the camerawork for a documentary she was making about Falintil, the military wing of the Timorese resistance. The assignment had fired my imagination. Falintil's story had become a legendary tale of heroism. They had been fighting a David-and-Goliath battle against the Indonesian army for almost two decades. Falintil claimed to have inflicted more than 20,000 casualties among Indonesian soldiers. This amounted to a remarkable military success over one of the world's largest armies. But the war had cost Timor many more lives – tens of thousands of Timorese, almost a quarter of the population, are believed to have died as a consequence of it.
Very occasionally, a few photos or a videotape, smuggled out of the mountainous interior, gave a glimpse of what life was like for the guerrillas. Skinny men with emaciated faces, long frizzy hair and beards, dressed in threadbare uniforms, would stare with burning eyes into the camera while proudly brandishing M-16 semi-automatic rifles they had seized from the Indonesian army.
In 1992 the Indonesian army captured their leader, Falintil's commander, Kay Rala Xanana Gusmao. I still remembered the picture in the newspapers: a handsome, bearded man, greying at the temples, smiling self-confidently while being led into court, chained between two guards.
At first Xanana's capture came as a hard blow for the resistance. But soon they realized they now had a Nelson Mandela: a high-profile political prisoner who, it turned out, was able to work from his cell in the high-security Cipinang prison in Jakarta more effectively than he could from his remote hiding places. It led to a new era in Timor's fight for independence: the armed struggle in the jungle and the underground resistance in Timor's towns now had a link with the diplomatic struggle in the international arena. Xanana continued to direct Falintil, the clandestine movement in Timor and Indonesia, while also communicating on the diplomatic front. For example, from his cell in Jakarta, Xanana Gusmão had given his blessing to this film project.
It was also in Jakarta that I had my first contact with the Timorese resistance. They lived like hunted animals. Their features – frizzy hair, dark skin and prominent noses – made them stand out from the city's majority population of ethnic Malays and Chinese. We had to be very circumspect. Our first meeting with a leader of the resistance, Avelino de Coelho, code-name 'FF' (pronounced 'Effi Effi'), had taken place under cover of darkness, in an obscure guest house in Jalan Jaksa, the street to which Jakarta's budget travellers gravitate. FF's life in Jakarta was to be part of the film. But we also had to meet the estafetas, messengers of Falintil, to work out the details of our journey.
Jakarta was tense. A large group, twenty-nine Timorese students, had jumped the fence of the US embassy in Jakarta on 12 November 1994 and demanded to meet President Clinton, who was attending a summit of the Asia Pacific Economic Cooperation forum (APEC) in nearby Bogor. It was one of the most spectacular actions of what had become a tactic to keep the situation in East Timor in the media spotlight.
We had to engage in complex subterfuges – through central Jakarta's posh shopping malls. After exchanging code-words we followed our contacts to a small café. As we settled in the plastic seats, two more Timorese joined. They had staked out the route, making sure that we were not followed.
They all knew of Jill. She had already made the trip a few months earlier when she had sneaked into East Timor and met Nino Konis Santana, the resistance's most senior leader in East Timor.
The Timorese looked me over, gauging my strength, and trying to assess whether I was up to the task ahead. 'You'll have to climb a lot,' they said, 'and eat whatever is available, and that's often not much.' But after a few more questions I seemed to have passed their 'test', and they changed the subject. 'What is your objective?' one of them asked. Their concern, they explained, was that the international media adopt the line of Indonesian propaganda: that Falintil was no more than a group of fifty or so cranky, poorly armed old men. Indonesia had put up a blockade around the island. No journalists or independent foreign observers could enter without permission from Jakarta. Falintil was eager to show the world that it was still a force to be reckoned with.
§ Jill had worked out an intricate itinerary. She operated with extreme caution. To avoid passport checks at airports and the risk that the omnipresent Indonesian military intelligence – intel – might get on our trail, we had to make the long journey overland. It was a journey that would take us by bus, car and boat, covering a far greater distance than the 2,000-kilometre flight. One of the estafetas, who had introduced himself as Antonio, was to travel with us on a different bus, to prepare the route and take us, if all went well, to meet the Falintil commanders.
It took us two weeks to reach Kupang, the capital of West Timor. Historically it was a recruiting ground for soldiers and mercenaries to fight in East Timor, and the Indonesian army exploited this potential to the full. We had to be careful not to be spotted by one of the many intel officers who hung around in this nest of spies. The town was not one of Indonesia's tourist hot spots. It attracted a few Australians, mainly sex tourists from nearby Darwin, who would pop over for a dirty weekend not a crowd we could easily melt into.
Our escorts for the last leg of the journey had failed to turn up at the ferry port. The APEC summit had also triggered demonstrations in East Timor and, as a consequence, the Indonesians had blocked all the roads into Dili. We had to make our own way to the border. Hoping to shake off anybody who might be tailing us, we zigzagged slowly through the poor, dusty interior of West Timor, before reaching the frontier town of Atambua, another dingy trading and spying post. More days of waiting in a guest house followed, until, at last, in the middle of the siesta, they arrived: four youths in white vests driving a green army jeep. We tried to jump into the car unnoticed, but the noise of the engine had woken the owner of the guest house, a retired army officer. He staggered outside, eyes blinking against the fierce sunlight, to demand the hotel registration forms we were supposed to have given him when we checked in – a bureaucratic necessity I had kept putting off in the hope that he would forget. He looked suspiciously at the scene in front of him. Our hasty and supposedly inconspicuous departure had become very conspicuous indeed.
Our guides seemed not to worry. Their plan was to travel through the central highlands to skirt the military border checkpoint. The dirt track led us through fortified hilltop villages, which crawled with children and piglets, all coloured red-brown by the dust they played in. As we passed through one such village, a huge pile of branches blocked the track. The boys jumped out and managed to clear a path just before the villagers, their curiosity aroused, could reach us. I realized that we had crossed the border – a small stream of greenish water that runs in a wide stony river bed – when the sandy track gave way to a new asphalt road, one of many built by the Indonesians as part of their development strategy for East Timor. The roads also, of course, served the needs of the Indonesian army: not just to move soldiers to control the population, but also, in the case of this stretch, to log the last of East Timor's famous, and extremely valuable, sandalwood trees.
Jill, who had been silent during the journey, perked up as soon as we crossed the border. She pointed at a rock formation. That, she said, was where she had sheltered in 1975, when the Indonesians started to shell East Timor from the sea. What she experienced in those last months before Indonesia invaded East Timor, when she was working as a reporter, had changed her life. In October, five of her colleagues had been murdered by Indonesian troops in the town of Balibo. Later many Timorese friends died too. Just days before the Indonesians invaded she left Timor on the last flight. She followed the refugees to Portugal and settled there, remaining close to the Timorese community, while continuing to write about East Timor for anyone who would print her material.
Soon we left the road and followed a broad, rocky river bed that led us safely to the coastal road. Darkness had fallen. Near Dili the Indonesian army had set up a roadblock. Fully armed soldiers shone their torches into the car. My heart leapt into my throat. 'Don't worry,' Antonio, who was driving, tried to reassure me. He got out of the car and talked briefly to the soldiers and I saw him handing over an ID card. 'How did you manage to get us out of this?' I asked when we were driving again. 'They know this car, it's one of theirs.' Antonio grinned. 'And I left them my ID card and some money.'
§ The atmosphere was tense in the house. The curtains were drawn. When a car stopped Antonio jumped up and tiptoed to the window. He peered outside through a slit in the curtain. 'What's up?' I asked. He hissed: 'Keep your voice down: the neighbours are Indonesians.'
Even on a less secretive and risky visit it would have been hard not to see the signs of fear and repression in Timor. Hiding out with the resistance, it was unmissable. I had been in East Timor for less than twenty-four hours when I was confronted with its violent past. A friend of the family sheltering us popped in for a visit. He showed me the bullets under his skin. They were clearly visible, one near his shin bone and the other in the inside of his thigh. He said that they hurt but he was too afraid to go to a hospital. Bullet wounds made him a suspect. They dated from 1991. He had been at the Santa Cruz cemetery when the army opened fire. The wounded were pulled out of the hospitals and either thrown into prison or 'disappeared'.
For us, the worst that could happen, I thought, was expulsion. The people who helped us were risking their lives.
We waited for two days. Antonio had made a trip to Baucau on his motorbike and checked the road. He had returned with bad news. He and the others who had picked us up in Atambua talked for a long time. The police, they said, had arrested thirty students after the recent APEC-prompted demonstrations, and one person had died. The city was teeming with soldiers. They seemed anxious and couldn't agree on whether it was safe enough. Eventually, they reached a decision. We would wait until nightfall and then drive along the north coast to a priest near Baucau. From there we would go into the hills on foot.
§ All had gone according to plan until, not long after we left, the car broke down. I felt apprehensive. 'Keep thinking positive,' I told myself. But then the car broke down a second time and we were stranded on the edge of a high cliff. Our guides warned us to stay inside but I knew the handbrake didn't work and didn't want to risk ending up in the foaming sea below. Jill and I squatted behind the wheels when the third car that passed us stopped. I thought the driver had spotted us and I panicked. But our companions laughed my worries away. 'It's OK, he's a priest,' they said reassuringly.
Back in the jeep I kept glancing out of the rear window. 'Don't worry, everything is OK,' Antonio would repeat every time he saw a worried look on my face. 'Only when we worry, you have to worry.'
To calm my nerves I sucked a kopico coffee candy. And then it happened. A Kijang jeep parked at a dark Baucau roadside turned on its headlights as soon as we passed it. Now everybody was nervous. No one said 'Don't worry' any more. Antonio put his foot down and we raced round the bends. They exchanged agitated remarks. Just after one sharp bend one of them opened the back doors. 'Jump!' they shouted. But Antonio was driving much too fast. We screamed at him to slow down. He did so in front of a fully lit house. We had no choice but to jump out.
While the four of them sped off we ran as fast as we could away from the lights, into the fields. We kept running until we stumbled on to the courtyard of a small wooden hut. An old lady grabbed Jill's hand and pleaded with her in Portuguese: 'If you stay here, they'll kill us all.' We asked her to direct us to somewhere, anywhere – a tree, a big rock – where we could stay until sunrise. The woman called two children, a boy and a girl. They could not have been older than twelve. They took our hands and we ran again. It was pitch black and the fields were littered with razor-sharp stones. I tripped and fell several times. The girl helped me up and kept her hand in mine. She seemed unperturbed by her adventure. But to our disappointment we found ourselves back on the road again. This was the last place we wanted to be: it would be too dangerous to walk on the road by night. Jill worried that any Indonesian patrol could open fire and no one would have seen what had happened. She suggested hiding in the bushes near the side of the road until daybreak. Then we noticed the flood-channel hidden in the shadow of some trees.
§ So here I was. When we went into the ditch, dogs from the nearby farm had barked. After we had not moved for some time they fell silent, and only the sound of crickets filled the air. But now I heard them again. The barking started in the distance and moved closer, until I saw the light of torches. I covered my face with a thin scarf so that I could still see but my face would not reflect the light, and held my breath. The dogs on the nearest farm started to make a furious noise. I could hear the sound of footsteps and sharp, breathless barks coming from the side of the road. The beam of a torch, or perhaps car headlights, shone over the ditch, lighting up the bushes right above us and coming within centimetres of touching my face. I could hear a dog panting very near now and felt its damp breath on my face. It was just a few seconds, then the searchers had moved on.
We lay there for eight hours, until in the grey half-light I could make out the shapes of passers-by on the roadside. I pulled myself up and sat on the edge of the ditch. Amazingly, the first person I saw was one of our friends. 'Wait here,' he whispered as he walked past without stopping, 'we'll come back to get you.' Elated, I dived back into the ditch. Not much later a car stopped. 'We are friends,' called a voice in Portuguese, 'please come out!' I stuck my head out of the ditch, thinking for a moment that we might make it after all. It was all too good to be true.
And it was. The car was a blue bemo – a small bus. An old Timorese stood next to it. Where were our friends? Before I could think any more, the bemo's passengers jumped out: they wore camouflage trousers, T-shirts and the red berets of the elite, and feared, special forces, Kopassus. They pointed their automatic weapons at us, ordering us to get into the bemo. We refused. 'We are journalists and my name is Jill Jolliffe. Who are you?' Jill asked defiantly. Their commander pulled out his ID: Edy Matje, Kopassus. In the faint hope it might intimidate him I scribbled it in my notebook. 'We'll have to bring you to our headquarters,' he said in good English. But Jill was afraid that they could take us anywhere, where anything could happen to us. 'We will go to a hotel on foot,' she retorted. 'Your superiors can contact us there.' That way, we thought, we would at least have witnesses if anything happened to us. Reluctantly, they agreed. The people we passed on the road avoided our eyes. They were too afraid even to look at our strange procession. They made themselves as small as possible, trying to blend into the bushes at the side of the road.
I hauled myself up the hill, a few steps ahead of the soldiers with their guns burning in my back. With every step, hope evaporated further. This was it, the end of our journey. And what about our friends? What had happened to them?
(Continues...)
Excerpted from East Timor by Irena Cristalis. Copyright © 2009 Irena Cristalis. Excerpted by permission of Zed Books Ltd.
All rights reserved. No part of this excerpt may be reproduced or reprinted without permission in writing from the publisher.
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Table of Contents
Prologue 1. A View from the Ditch 2. Distant Glimmers 3. The Past Casts its Shadow 4. Requiems 5. The Bishop and the Mountain 6. Timor's Joan of Arc 7. The Crocodile Bares its Teeth 8. The Dam Breaks 9. Big Brother Xanana 10. A Difficult Time Never to be Forgotten 11. No Sanctuary 12. 'Fear is the parent of cruelty' 13. 'Asking the fox to look after the chickens' 14. Dancing with Falintil 15. Life in Uaimori 16. 'The Mouth of the Tiger' 17. The Price of Freedom 18. 'A Sea of Flames' 19. Under Siege 20. Counting Bodies 21. Healing the Wounds 22. Reconciliation 23. Independência! 24. Broken Dreams 25. Moving Mountains