COURIER-MAIL: State of
freedom [Independence breaks out in East Timor]
Saturday, March 11, 2000
Courier Mail journalist Michael Ware and
photographer Rob Maccoll returned from assignment in
East Timor this week where they witnessed the birth
of new hope in a country ravaged by more than two
decades of Indonesian occupation
AGAINST the teak of her skin, her white dress is
luminous. She's been alive with delight all night,
her pleated skirt frilling out in a blurring
whirlwind. She whisks about the party: it's the first
she has hosted, the first she's been to in a free
East Timor.
It's Valentine's Day and simply everyone from the
village in their late teens is here. The square yard
in Becora, in the capital Dili, is ringed by rows of
plastic chairs, gaggles of girls and broods of boys
sit timidly facing each other: all smirks and giggles
and blushes. Their formality and grace has a
lost-world charm.
The hostess matches her dress with sheer white shoes,
her hair is pulled back off her face and when she
sits, only for a moment at a time, it's stiff-backed,
sipping tinto wine.
"Excuse me," she says taking her leave. "I must see
that all is well."
The music drifting out of crackling speakers doesn't
prompt anyone to dance. So a young man bursts
balloons with his cigarette and scraps of paper with
dance partners' names flutter out of the rubbery
debris. As the names are announced pockets of excited
applause go up in the darkness beyond the yard,
betraying the presence of the village families
sitting outside, chattering and laughing, sounding
support when their child's paired off.
It's a fantastic night. And it's special, not just
for the young love that dances in self-conscious
shuffles with straight arms and sweaty,
handkerchief-filled hands, but because months earlier
it could not have happened.
"The Indonesians wouldn't have let us do this," one
young man says. A virtual curfew had applied during
the 24 years of Indonesian occupation, with army
patrols and hit squads roaming night and day.
"They wouldn't have liked us to get together like
this. They would be worried. It could cause trouble.
But now we can do it, we're free," he says proudly,
waving his hand past the crowd, encompassing his
friends in the expanse of his declaration. "Here,
have some more wine, please. I'll have some too. You
know, now we can do what we like. We are not afraid."
All at the party are too young to know anything other
than Indonesian rule. For them, fear and a
clandestine mood has always been a part of life.
Their friends from school, their cousins, their
brothers, their sisters, the kids next door, have
always been disappearing. Students were shot in
demonstrations or at funerals, people were arrested
walking on footpaths and taken to army barracks,
returning months or years later after being beaten
and tortured in some East Javanese prison hell. Some
never returned. Others spent their youth in the
mountains, a captured Indonesian army rifle in their
hands, fighting with the ragtag guerrilla army,
Falantil. Many of those never returned, either:
martyrs of the motherland.
Scores of others joined the diaspora, as entire
lifelines of family history were cast around the
world, refugee flotsam and jetsam, marooned in
Australia, the United States, Portugal: dislocated
and yearning for identity.
But that's all changing now in East Timor. The
country these teenagers are going to inherit is
beginning to unravel, stand up and look at itself, as
if for the first time. No one can predict how the
new, or ultimately true, face of Timor will look. Not
even the Timorese.
WHEN the former Indonesian government approved an
independence vote for East Timor in January last
year, and, later, on May 5, when the period of
"popular consultation" took shape, violence enveloped
the whole country. First as a brutal means of
intimidation, to frighten independence votes away,
and then, with the publication of the ballot results
on September 4, in vicious retribution.
The world's disgust fuelled the establishment of the
Interfet multinational force, led by Australia, which
landed in East Timor on September 20. It took another
six weeks before the killing and destruction stopped
and Interfet could claim full control.
Since then, and the creation of the UN administration
on October 25, the task has been one of rebuilding an
entire country from the vacuum the Indonesians
ensured they left behind.
But the sense of liberation in the half-island nation
is overwhelming. Graffiti screaming "Welcome
Interfet" still adorns scorched walls in Suai and
Dili, and the adoption of, in particular, Australian
soldiers as some kind of out-of-town cousin remains
undiluted, despite Major-General Peter Cosgrove
pulling out on February 23.
For hours on end recently adolescent Australian
soldiers stand at sentry posts, their hat brims the
only shelter, their weapons slung off their
shoulders, and with them, under their feet, in the
dust, are always groups of children. Sometimes a tiny
horde will stand adoring and conferring, offering
child-prizes, such as a stick with a wheel nailed to
one end, or other things of interest for inspection,
cracking jokes and smiling as they surround the one
on guard. Or perhaps it will be just one little boy,
with the classic dirt-smeared face, standing silently
and intently, next to the camouflaged pants leg of
the Digger, staring off to some unexplained distant
place.
IN THE first weeks of the operation it comes as no
surprise to approach a heavily-sandbagged gun
emplacement, the barrel of a Minimi machine gun
nosing the ground, ripples of ammunition slung about,
and encounter heat-bothered soldiers bristling with
menace, scanning every movement, only to have a
ragged little boy suddenly crawl out of the makeshift
bunker from where he's been playing as comfortably as
if it were home. The soldiers don't twitch, he's an
integral part of their watch.
At Cosgrove's final parade, where the Interfet flag
is lowered for the last time at 7.04 on the morning
of his departure, a soldier waits for the official
party to safely retreat into the headquarters
building before whistling over the fence, with an
"Oi" thrown in for good measure, to grab the
attention of a couple of kids playing in the dirt.
Quickly looking behind to see who is watching, he
lobs two bottles of clean water over the barbed wire
barrier and the children tackle the rolling treasures
with the zest of an under-7 footy team.
Similarly, someone has been looking after the Runner
of Timor. In a Forrest Gump-like athletic epic, a
Timorese, somewhere in his 30s, with an awkward gait
and an ever-smiling disposition, runs. Constantly.
He's always out there pounding the roads. He's not
quick but he can go and go and go. When first seen he
was wearing an old T-shirt and a pair of filthy
shorts but now he's decked out in a brand new
athletic singlet and shiny black tracksuit pants.
Others haven't fared so well. Like the crippled
midget in Dili who once worked for the Indonesian
military intelligence apparatus and now is not even
allowed to beg in the city's foreign workers' pubs,
chased out by Timorese. "He did all right once,
taking the Indonesian's money, let him do all right
now," they say.
In Indonesia itself refugee camps still hold up to
100,000 desperate people, many of whom will never be
able to return home, not after the horrors they've
committed in the name of pro-Indonesian "integrasi".
In one of the camps, in December, a wisp of a boy, no
more than six years old, tags along behind a visiting
group of aid workers. He mutters to himself
constantly in Indonesian, speaking up only
occasionally to tug at a loose hand or pocket and
stammer: "Lapar, lapar." Afterwards, leaving the
camp, an interpreter is asked what the boy had been
saying. "Oh," he says with a dejected look. "He was
telling you he's starving."