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Hugging a Dead Man A US citizen who was in East Timor as an election observer writes from exile in Australia of what he remembers, and what he can't forget. by Michael Rhoades
I am writing from Australia where I've been for a few weeks courtesy of an Australian Air Force evacuation flight from Dili, East Timor. Two weeks ago I flew from Darwin (our evac destination) to Sydney; now I sit frustrated and sad as I wait to fly back to Timor. It is difficult to write this because there is so much to say, and because these have been some of the most heartbreaking weeks of my life. I feel absolutely powerless as politicians bow and curtsy through shallow condemnations of the Indonesian massacre in East Timor. I was in East Timor as an election/human rights observer with the International Federation for East Timor's observer project (IFET-OP). We were the largest observer group in Timor, at one time numbering almost 150 participants, with small teams dispersed in villages and cities throughout the country. Our mandate was to document human rights abuses and election-rule violations during the Aug. 30 popular consultation, as well as the periods immediately preceding and following it. During my stay in Timor I saw time and again the blurring between ranks of the Indonesian military, police, and militia personnel. I heard stories from refugees sheltering in churches who had been told that, if the vote was for independence, everyone in their villages would be slaughtered. I heard soldiers scream to a family cowering behind the front wall of their home that they'd be back to kill them in the night. I helped try to save a young man (younger than I) who was dying from machete wounds, ghost-walking and bleeding from his shoulder, arms, and gut; bone and intestines pressing through split flesh. I saw this man wrapped in soaked-through bloody sheets as we helped him into our truck. He remained absolutely silent while his sister and father screamed his pain and part of our team sped him off to the only medical clinic still functioning in Dili. I held the image of him in my mind as we dodged military and militia patrols. I see him as I write this; I see him as I remember hearing the news of his death. I see this man as Indonesia stalls for time and our leaders huff and sigh for the cameras and their respective constituencies. I see this dead boy, and my friends left behind in East Timor. I fear -- no, I am terrified -- for the life of Gaspar da Costa, whose house we rented in the mountain village of Maubisse, and who went behind that house to quietly cry while we went inside to hurridly pack after telling him we were evacuating, leaving his town for the "safety" of Dili. "And what happens to my family?" he asked, as we swapped our integrity for our skins. I snapped pictures of Gaspar and his brothers and wife and daughters to document in advance the barbarism of the Indonesian government, preferring to photograph the da Costas while still alive, hugging Gaspar with everything in me when we left, feeling that I was hugging a dead man. And through the cacophony of UN sabre-rattling I hear Father Mateus, the priest of Maubisse, who assured me that he was not a hero but who absolutely was. And though the East Timorese soil is wet with the blood of thousands far braver than me, I am particularly in awe of Father Mateus who sheltered refugees in his church and who stood up to the local police and militia heads, saying boldly that he did not trust them. The last I heard of Father Mateus, his name was at the top of the local militia death-list. Selfless to the point of bull-headedness, Father Mateus declared that there had not yet been a priest martyred for East Timor (at the time there had not been) and that he was prepared to be the first. I remember the horror in the Maubisse polling center the afternoon of the vote, when militia members and military officers had whispered to the local Timorese polling staff that they'd kill them all in their homes that night. I remember that they slept in the polling center (Maubisse's schoolhouse) on the floor with no blankets, using deconstructed cardboard voting booths as mats. I remember leaving them there when we went home to dinner and a bed at Gaspar's because we were forbidden by our mandate to stay with them through the night. I remember walking up to the school at sunrise the next morning as we had promised, to see if all was OK, and finding that everyone had gone across the road to the church for morning mass. I remember the terror still sharp in their faces as mass finished and they dragged along on tired feet back to their refuge in the school. Some wound their way round to us between the mass and their refuge and shook our hands because they mistakenly thought that we had made the vote possible when it was them -- the East Timorese -- coming out to vote in mind-blowing numbers who truly made the vote happen. There was the old woman who came up to us and shook our hands and kissed them and said, "friend." I remember my East Timorese friend Meta, who shouted my name and came up to hug me when our team walked through the gates of IFET's Dili headquarters after we'd evacuated Maubisse. Meta, who was so proud to introduce me to his father. Meta, my friend who is on the run, who went to hide in the hills. Who I hope with every part of me is still alive, as I do Gaspar and his family and Father Mateus and the brothers and refugees in his church, and all the East Timorese. Estimates put the death toll in the high thousands or tens of thousands, and the longer that UN member states continue to stall, the greater the number of East Timorese being massacred or forcibly "relocated" and the greater our collective shame. Much of the UN peacekeeping force is in the region now, working with an Indonesian military which continues to be uncooperative and brutal. Airdropped food is providing a minimum of sustenance for hundreds of thousands of refugees slowly starving in the hills. But the Jakarta-driven massacre continues, as stories of mass killings during the past few weeks come to light through eyewitness testimonials, and refugees forced into West Timorese camps are terrorized and murdered, and as the militia masses its forces along the western border East Timor border. The United States government carries much of the blame for this slaughter in East Timor, as it has have by for 24 years while Indonesia -- the third-largest global market for US weapons and consumer goods; home to a bargain-priced, exploitable labor force; and our rabidly anti-Communist Cold War ally -- carried out its sadistic policies against the East Timorese population, as the US government gave an approving nod to the invasion and turned a blind eye to the brutal occupation. I write this as a plea, an agonized cry from across the Pacific, to ask that you pressure your representatives in Washington to act. Congressional Switchboard: (202) 224-3121 To locate your representatives and senators on the Web: For more info contact: Photo courtesy of ETAN | |||
