From: Kerry Miller <ASTINGSH%KSUVM.bitnet@UMCVMB.missouri.edu>
Subject:      WBAI: Goodman/Nairn witness Dili massacre  <1/2: 12K>
Followup-To: alt.activism.d
Originator: daemon@pencil.cs.missouri.edu
Organization: University of Missouri
Resent-From: "Rich Winkel" <MATHRICH@UMCVMB.missouri.edu>
Date: Thu, 16 Apr 1992 16:54:10 GMT

A
THE DILI MASSACRE, Part 1
   The following transcript is from a broadcast by Pacifica Radio
station
                WBAI-FM Radio (99.5)
                505 Eighth Ave., 19th Fl.
                New York, NY 10018
                (212) 279-0707

This is Undercurrents for Thursday, November 21, 1991. I'm Robert
Knight. It's a very special day because our guests today are Amy
Goodman, and Allan Nairn, just returned from the massacre in East Timor.
[AG is WBAI News Editor. AN is a journalist who writes for the New
Yorker.]

On Nov 12, they were eyewitnesses, and indeed, fateful participants, in
a demonstration taking place in the city of Dili, in E Timor, under
Indonesian control following its Portuguese colonial status.

At that event, soldiers came and fired into the protest, and these two
reporters responded, both as journalists and as human beings. The
reaction to those shots continues to reverberate around the world:
there's discussion in the government of the Netherlands about reducing
relations with Jakarta; the government of Portuguese, the former
colonial power, is getting very strong statements being made by the
Prime Minister, who charges the U S with complicity in this event in
regard to the training of the troops.

The situation inside E Timor remains muddy, as human rights
investigators and others attempt to detail the extent of the massacre
that has been described as "as many as 80 people, in which the
government says it's no more than a dozen or two," The International
Committee of the Red Cross is being denied access to victims of that Nov
12 shooting.  The Bishop, [Carlos] Ximenes Belo, says he has spoken with a
nurse at the hospital who says that she herself treated 72 corpses.
There is a Member of Parliament who says there are 80 dead.

We'll examine all of that, while in the meantime, the position of the
government of Indonesia remains unclear. We do know this, that President
Suharto is embarking on a world tour, that will take him to Africa and S
America, including the nations of Tanzania, Zimbabwe, and Senegal, as
part of his preparation for taking on the leadership of the Non-Aligned
Movement.

That's the state of events right now. But, if this reporter can be
forgiven a moment of personal reflection, it is very joyous to see you
both here, alive and well.

How did you come to be in E Timor?

AN: We went there a little more than two weeks before the massacre. A
Portuguese UN delegation was due to visit E Timor; this would have been
the occasion, it was hoped, for the UN finally taking action on the
issue. In 1975-76, the UN Task Force on Indonesia called for Indonesia
to withdraw "without delay," but they've never done anything to enforce
those resolutions, mainly because the US lobby has stopped it.
   This November, this delegation was due to arrive to assess the
situation, and it was hoped this would finally lead to action. So we
went there in advance of the delegation, which was due to arrive Nov 4,
to see how the Indonesians were preparing. As it turned out, the
delegation never arrived. There was a political impasse, and the
delegation was called off.
   But we found that Indonesia had been preparing for weeks, by issuing
what was in effect a death threat to the Timorese, saying that "you talk
to the Portuguese, we'll kill you." They had systematic village
meetings, village by village, where people would be called in and they
would get a speech from the local _bupadi_, which is the Indo
administrator, and the local army commander. They would say, "As soon as
the Portuguese and the UN leave, we'll hunt you down and kill you, if
you talk to them." The Indonesians claimed they had already prepared the
mass graves, in which people would be buried after the delegation left.
   So that was the reason we went there; that was the situation. A few
hours before we arrived in Timor, the Army attacked a catholic church.
They killed one young man who was hiding there, in sanctuary. They had
been hunting him and a number of other young men. We attended the
funeral of this young man, a couple days after we got there, and the
funeral was a political breakthrough in Timorese history, because
several thousand people turned up. They walked through the streets to
the cemetery where they buried the man, Sebastio Gomez, and as they
walked, they said things. They chanted out loud, "Viva E Timor! Viva
Independence!" By Timorese standards, this is an amazingly bold
statement, because the army was watching all along the parade route.
   Speech, meetings, any kind of political organization is strictly
prohibited in Timor. You can be executed for it -- yet here were
thousands of people walking and saying these things.
   That funeral really had a tremendous impact on the political climate.
It molded people. Two weeks later, when they had the commemoration --
this was on Nov 12 -- they started with the morning mass; they walked
the route of the funeral, and thousands more people were there: as
people left the church, it was a large crowd, but along the way, people
would come out of offices, kids would come out of schools, people would
come out of huts, and by the time it [the procession] got to the
cemetery, it was several thousand people. They were even more bold in
their statements and their chanting.

RK: Amy, Allan, you've both travelled to parts of the world where there
is a strong military, as in Central America, and many of the nations
there, and elsewhere. Is there a sense of an intrusive and aggressive
military presence on the streets, or other forms of intimidation?

AG: Absolutely, all over the country. We had been there before, a year
before, in August. There is a massive military presence, tens of
thousands of troops everywhere. They are divided into two categories:
there are uniformed troops, Indonesian soldiers, and the police; and
then there are the Intel, the military intelligence, who are not
necessarily in uniform.
   The Indonesians, [after] closing the country for more than a decade
to the outside world, while they massacred up to a third of the
population - somewhere around 200,000 people -- after "opening" the
country and some tourists were allowed, they made a bit of a switch,
which was not reducing the military forces, but changing their uniforms.
So a lot of the soldiers are wearing LaCoste type shirts, and jeans. But
we are very, very aware of their presence. They live in the hotel where
we are staying; they follow people everywhere.
   There is an enormous fear: people came up to us everywhere we were.
When they understood...  Allan speaks Spanish and could communicate with
people the two languages there are Portuguese -- Portugal ruled the
country until 1974-756 --  and Tetum, a local language...  when they
understood that a person could understand their language, they
immediately would start to speak... we would get in taxicabs, we would
walk into public offices... someone would come up, invariably, and say,
"They killed my mother." "They killed my father." "They killed my
sister." [whispers] "But I cannot speak: Intel is everywhere."
   All over the country. People who had never been to Dili, the capital,
people who had never communicated with each other, would tell the same
story: the military presence is pervasive.

AN: Even in El Salvador and Guatemala, we've never seen a place where
the authorities have quite so many people quite so terrified. because in
Salvador or Guatemala, there's a small national elite who sees the army
as their friend and their ally, and they don't live in fear. But in
Timor, even the Timorese elite fears the army. Even the Bishop, even the
Governor, who's a puppet of the Indonesians -- they will say they fear
for their lives from the army, because it's a national conflict. Timor
is an occupied country, occupied by the Indonesians, and any Timorese
can be tortured and killed at any time. That's what happened outside the
cemetery.
   That morning, after the march had concluded, people were simply
standing there, and there was no military in sight. Suddenly, from two
directions, we saw the troops approaching.

RK: The people themselves of East Timor are part of a Pacific colonial
residual of Portugal. Can you take a moment to describe the cultural
heritage -- the salient points about that -- vis-a-vis Indonesian
control of the Timorese and the indigenous people?

AN: Even before colonial days, the island of Timor -- which is about
twice the size of Connecticut -- was divided into two principal
indigenous kingdoms. The Dutch and the Portuguese, when they came in as
colonialists, fought over control of Timor, and split the island in
half, the Dutch taking the western half, and the Portuguese taking the
eastern half. So the two halves have been separate for many centuries.
   Even under Portuguese rule, though, where the Portuguese ran a slave
trade, and stripped the island of its sandalwood, which is a very
valuable export commodity, the Timorese were able to maintain a very
strong indigenous culture. The Portuguese were not as totalitarian in
their control as the Indonesians are, but they were often brutal. The
Timorese were able to maintain a very strong sense of identity:
language, and cultural institutions.
   After the Indonesian invasion, in 75, where they just swept through
the country, slaughtering people, and completely disrupting agriculture
-- people were not allowed to go out to their fields and freely farm;
they were resettled in concentration camps or resettlement villages
alongside the road where soldiers could keep their eye on them -- even
today, people will say in some villages, "You're not allowed to go more
than five kilometers outside of the village to work your fields,"
because the soldiers are afraid that they might meet with each other,
and meet with the guerrillas if they get too far outside the army's
view. So the Indonesian occupation has been very harsh and brutal,
really comparable to what was done in Cambodia, and yet the Timorese
have managed, just working strictly underground, to keep up resistance
and a sense of national unity and opposition to the Indonesians. It's
really remarkable, because there's almost no space for people to meet or
talk, or think, there. It's about as controlled as a society can be.

AG: The one area that isn't entirely controlled by the Indonesians now,
is the catholic church. Under the Portuguese, the Timorese practiced
animist religions, different religions and maybe a third of the people
had become catholic. But once the Indonesians invaded, the church became
a center of Timorese culture. I'd say most everyone, more than 90% of
the people, became catholic, devoutly catholic. It's the one national
institution which has Timorese leaders, where the bishop himself is T.
So the fact that, on this day, Nov 12, when the massacre took place,
they were walking in a catholic commemoration of a funeral, is very
significant.
             <to be continued>
                    -=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-

   Once you are able to visualize women and children being
gutted or decapitated by gunfire -- babies being strangled
and crushed to death -- you may feel just a twinge of the
justified terror and fury that these victims felt. But then
you find yourself asking, if it was my wife, my brother, my
baby who was being so heinously murdered, would I lift a
finger to protect them?  And if you answer honestly, then
conscience dictates that you work to protect these suffering
people.
   It's that simple: we must work FOR government FOR the
people, and AGAINST government AGAINST people -- whether it
is by direct repression of news such as this, or by complicity
inthe events themselves. Only thus may we avoid the day when
it is, in fact, your own family's blood to be sacrificed.
   You have what you need: your sovereign individual
political power, endowed to you at birth by the Constitution.
Use it. Depend on it. Act on it.
   Then focus that political power upon the scoundrels who
occupy the People's Congress of the United States. Let the
battered and abused peoples of the world know that, at last,
the USA is abandoning its policies of imperialism and exploitation.

   Numerous organizational channels can be found; one is the
Christic Institute. Contact: Daniel Sheehan, Lead Attorney,
The Christic Institute, 1324 North Capitol St. N.W.,
Washington, D.C. 20002.


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Newsgroups: misc.activism.progressive