East Timor
Gasping the Nettle
Military atrocities in East Timor led to Indonesia's disgraceful exit from East Timor. Many people forgot how it got into the mess 25 years ago. By Seah Chiang Nee.
Nov 12, 2000

From the air, the former Portuguese colony of East Timor resembled nothing a seasoned traveller in Southeast had not seen.

This was how I remembered it when I flew over it in 1978 with 10 ambassadors of 10 of the richest and most powerful countries in the world. The countryside was vast, rugged arid arid.

(Then) President Suharto took it as a civil war had raged hopelessly out of control and the Portuguese governor and his administration fled to an outlying island.

Few Singaporeans remember this vicious war today or how it started.

Today Indonesia is seen as the bad guy, its army mainly responsible for much of the killing there. But in 1975 things were very different.

What I'm writing here may throw a different light to the story. It will not absolve Indonesia's blame, but it will share it more equitably.

Leading the world delegation into Dili, the caital, was Dr Mochtar Kusumaadmatja, Jakarta's foreign minister then. I noticed there was little green in East Timor's landscape.

For Asia, green is the colour of life. If the land is flat and green, the soil is rich and allows food to grow and people can eat.

The East Timor that I saw from an Indonesian army transport plane was a large mass of grey, hard and bald. Very harsh land. I remember jotting this on my notebook.

I asked myself why the heck did Indonesia, which was already too big with 13,900 islands and 185 million (now over 220 million) people want with this piece of arid land, with few resources and plenty of poverty. It was like a Somalia or Ethiopia in Asia.

It was a vast spanse of endless, forbidding mountains, stretching to as far as the eye could see. Small clutches of thatch-roofed huts dotted around a few meandering rivers that had very little water in them.

Among the 10 were ambassadors from United States, Australia and several European countries, which had condemned the takeover in 1975 and eight foreign correspondents.

Half way to Dili, Dr Mochtar had a disturbing announcement to make.

He stood up to tell the ambassadors that the Resende Inn, the only habitable hotel in Dili where we were to stay had only five rooms with modern sitting toilets.

It was his unpleasant duty to decide which ambassadors were to occupy them and who would stay in other rooms with squatting toilets.

The fairest way, he said, was to draw lots. The journalists, he was sorry to say, had to squat.

That was my introduction to East Timor where I spent three days. As it happily turned out for everyone, nobody needed to squat. Unknown to the minister, Resende Inn had been hurriedly refurbished.There were enough rooms with modern toilets for all of us.

I had to struggle to keep an open mind. For someone who came from a small country, I had found it hard to support any forceful take-over of anyone by a big country for whatever reason.

Singapore had abstained at the United Nations when the East Timor vote was taken, much to Indonesia's annoyance.

My previous visit to anywhere near it was in November, 1976 when war was raging. That part of the story, a shameful chapter, was Portuguese.

At the time I landed at Atambua, a frontier town in Indonesian West Irian close to the border with East Timor. I visited stuffy refugee camps in Atambua and interviewed some of the 40,000 refugees who had fled the war's atrocities only a few kilometers away.

That story belonged to Portugal. It was not a pleasant one. The Portuguese Governor, his entire administration and all the doctors and nurses had fled their posts in Dili to watch events raging out of control from a ship anchored a safe distance away.

It was a humiliating exit after five centuries of Portuguese mismanaged rule. The East Timor I visited in 1978 was visibly under Indonesian control.

Two years earlier Indonesia troops were clearly East Timor; in Atambua I saw arms and supplies being loaded for their own and pro-Indonesian rightwing forces.

The Timorese who escaped the fighting had horrendous tales of torture, so vicious that I had first dismissed them as an exaggeration. Nobody, I told myself, could possibly do such things. Eventually I could not ignore them; they were very routine stories, too many of them.

Babies were held by the legs and smashed against a tree, pregnant women disemboweled, people beheaded and their sex organs mutilated, and so on.

Then one day some 200 of refugees camw down from Remexio, 100 km south of Dili, the likes of which I had not seen in the three years that I was covering the Vietnam war.

Scores of starving people, dressed in rags that covered only parts of their bony bodies. Their children had sunken eyes, bloated stomachs (serious malnutrition) and ugly leg sores.

The civil war fought between left and rightwing forces started as part of political changes (where a communist military grabbed power) in Lisbon.

In turn it supported a pro-communist group in East Timor called Fretilin (the forerunner of today's leadership in Dili).

But Indonesia was worried about a pro-Communist upheaval on its border and decided to support Fretilin's foes, several rightwing factions. It was fearful East Timor would fall under communism.

Recently I got part of the answer from a retired Malaysian minister who was kept informed by the Indonesians during the crisis.

He told me in KL that Suharto was worried that leaders of PKI, the pro-China Indonesian Communist Party, who were living in exile in China would use a Fretilin-controlled East Timor as a transit to return to start an insurgency in Indonesia.

A leftwing military government in Portugal, it was feared, would allow the PKI to return to Indonesia via Macao and East Timor and destabilise the republic, especially in West Timor, where an independence movement was (still is) very active.

The civil war intensified between a Portuguese-supported Fretilin and the rightwing PDI, backed by Indonesia.

The whole Portuguese administration had fled Dili with all the white doctors and nurses fled Dili to watch the war from a small island a safe distance away.

It was a humiliating exit for the Portuguese. The Indonesians did not drive them out. It left behind a vacuum. Nobody was in charge in Dili.

When Lisbon was the colonial master, its rule was one of criminal neglect. Why had the West not protested about human rights violation?

After half a century of colonialism, during which the US, Australia, Western Europe never complained, Lisbon had kept the territory backward, never prepared it for independence.

Ninety per cent of the people were illiterate; many of them could not even count. There was no local doctor, only a few teachers and a small number of low-level administrators.

The biggest landowners were Portuguese, who also owned two of the three hotels in Dili, only one of which was three and a half stars.

All the coffee plantations belonged to them. When fighting started, they all fled.

Dr Adam Malik was greeted by 10,000 Timorese who lined the streets of Dili. It was true some of them did not know who the visitor was (I asked) and several people were waving little Indonesian flags that were upside down.

But the feelings for Indonesia was spontaneous and for a good reason. Whatever the politics, the Indonesians went in, saved a lot of Timorese from death and starvation and stopped a civil war. The Portuguese failed miserably.

None of the Western powers did anything.

Indonesian rule, at least at the start, was a lot more benevolent than Lisbon's, but the West suddenly took an interest in the welfare of the Timorese.

Wars are wars, whether big or small, and I have covered a few of them. Most are vicious.

However, there has always been a certain logic in the way they are fought. And few combatants deliberately kill civilians. In East Timor, it was different.

I have seen evidence of some of the most gruesome killings, all too horrible to print.

The sad fact, unfortunately, is that after a quarter of a century, this killing culture is still very much alive. In the last few years, the culprits this time were the pro-Jakarta militias and rogue Indonesian troops.
Seah Chiang Nee