Fretilin forces were pushed deep into the countryside, and Indonesian president
Suharto declared East Timor's annexation by Indonesia in July 1976. By November of that year, relief agencies in East Timor estimated that an extraordinary
100,000 Timorese had been killed since the Indonesian invasion less than a year earlier. What followed was a protracted guerrilla war by Fretilin forces, who eventually succeeded in establishing control over about half the remaining Timorese population. Indonesian "counterinsurgen cy" strategies reached a genocidal scale, causing widespread starvation. Indeed, Noam Chomsky and Edward S. Herman argued in their 1980 book,
The Washington Connection and Third World Fascism, that the
Indonesian assault had taken a greater per-capita toll -- killing about a third of the Timorese population -- than any genocide since the Jewish holocaust. But the slaughter took place at a time when western governments and media were resolutely focused on the atrocities committed by the communist Khmer Rouge in Cambodia/Kampuchea, and attracted barely a whisper of notice or official condemnation.
Despite repeated calls from the United Nations, Indonesia refused to withdraw from East Timor or allow a plebiscite on the territory's future. But the credibility of Indonesia's claim to the territory began to weaken noticeably with the November 12, 1991 mass killing of some 270 civilians at the Santa Cruz cemetery in Dili, the East Timorese capital. As part of a new crackdown, Indonesia began to rely more and more on locally-raised paramilitary forces (ninjas) to terrorize the population. These were supplied and overseen by Kopassus, the elite Indonesian army force that would play a critical role in the atrocities of September 1999.
In 1996, the Nobel Peace Prize was awarded to the leader of the East Timor Catholic Church, Bishop Belo, and Fretilin's leader-in-exile, José Ramos-Horta.
...
Entire families of "Fretilin suspects" were often annihilated together with the suspects themselves, or out of frustration at the Indonesian soldiers' inability to locate them. In many cases,
whole village populations were targeted for savage atrocities -- most massively, in the region of Aitana in July 1981, where "a ghastly massacre occurred ...
They murdered everyone, from tiny babies to the elderly, unarmed people who were not involved in the fighting but were there simply because they had stayed with Fretilin and wanted to live freely in the mountains."
...
East Timorese voted almost en bloc, with more than 98 percent of those eligible casting a ballot, and
78.5 percent voting for independence. When the results of the plebiscite were made public, the
Indonesian military and its allies implemented a well-prepared and systematic policy of murder and destruction ("Operation Global Clean-Sweep") aimed at preserving Indonesian control over the territory, or at least a substantial portion of it.
...
One of the most detailed and powerful reports of gendercidal atrocities was published in The Washington Post on September 14, 1999:
Jani thought he was safe on the ferry. After three days of terror in East Timor, the boat would take him and two college friends to safety, he thought. Then the militiamen boarded. No young men may leave East Timor, they announced as the boat prepared to depart. Jani, 27, tried to hide; the militiamen caught his friends. "Are there any others?" they demanded, Jani recalls. "No, no other young men," his friends replied in a last gift of kindness. They marched Armando Gomez, 29, and Armando DiSilva, 30, to the front of the boat and killed them as 200 refugees watched. Gomez's body was dumped into the sea, DiSilva's on the ground by the dock. Jani raced through the boat. "Please help me," he whispered to the other refugees. A woman motioned to him to hide between her and her children. The searching militiamen walked by.
The account of Jani, now a fearful refugee in western Timor, adds to the mounting evidence that victims of the murderous rampage by militia gangs in East Timor following the territory's overwhelming vote for independence from Indonesia were systematically culled from the population at large. Young men, political opponents of the Jakarta government, Roman Catholic clergy and anyone else suspected of favoring the independence opposed by the militias were targeted, in a chilling echo of the techniques of systematic killing seen in Kosovo. (Doug Struck and Keith B. Richburg, "Refugees Describe Method to Murderous Rampage in E. Timor," The Washington Post, September 14, 1999.)
The evidence is threefold that
killings occurred on a much larger scale than has been generally recognized. First, independent investigators, operating with very few resources, have
uncovered subsantially greater evidence of mass killings than has the tiny group of investigators dispatched by the United Nations -- but most death-count estimates have been based on the U.N. efforts. Second, there is
strong physical, eyewitness, and circumstantial evidence of bodies being disposed of in large numbers at sea, or otherwise destroyed and hidden by Indonesian forces and Timorese militia-members. Last, and most significant,
tens of thousands of Timorese remain "missing" and "unaccounted for" a year after the horror -- though this subject has attracted no attention in international media for many months.
...
The
major share of responsibility for the genocide in East Timor since 1975 rests with the Indonesian military, which has long been the dominant force in national politics and, over the long years of occupation, amassed a wide range of lucrative economic interests in East Timor.
...
The
killings, property destruction, and forced translocations of September 1999 were carried out at ground level by Indonesian army and police forces in coordination with the Timorese militias described earlier. At all levels, those who commanded and conducted the killing were men; Timorese males, mostly youths, were recruited for militia service with promises of good pay and other "benefits" (including a
free rein when it came to raping and sexually abusing Timorese women). A number were also former detainees who had been released from brutal treatment in Indonesian custody after pledging to collaborate with the occupying forces
...
The
Indonesian killing campaign was accompanied by property destruction on an almost inconceivable scale, apparently aimed at "the virtual demolition of the physical basis for survival in the territory," according to Noam Chomsky. ("East Timor Is Not Yesterday's Story", ZNet, October 23, 1999.) In a lengthy feature article published in The New York Times in April 2000, Seth Mydans described the state of the territory in the post-plebiscite period:
DILI, East Timor -- People here have gotten used to the scene: a mob of unemployed young men shoving, shouting and weeping in anger outside the headquarters of the United Nations, held back by an impassive multinational police contingent. "Nothing has changed!" they shouted the other day, and their complaint has become a theme for critics -- both foreign and Timorese -- as the United Nations passes the six-month mark in its first experiment in building a new nation. As monsoon rains bring added misery, whole towns and villages still stand burned, roofless and silent, devastated by the rampage of destruction that followed East Timor's vote last August to end 24 years of Indonesian occupation. As many as 80 percent of the territory's 700,000 people still have no jobs. Another 100,000 or more remain in camps across the border in Indonesian West Timor, still afraid to return. ... Aid workers and diplomats say they fear that this discontent could lead to lawlessness and political disarray and could open the door to trouble from the Indonesian-backed militias that crossed the border to Indonesian West Timor after laying waste to the territory last September. (Mydans, "Ruined East Timor Awaits A Miracle," The New York Times, April 22, 2000. For a more optimistic assessment of the prospects an independent East Timor will face, see Lindsay Murdoch, "Peace Stirs a New Nation to Work towards a Prosperous Future", The Sydney Morning Herald, August 26, 2000.)
Indeed, at the time of writing (August 2000), renewed militia violence was reported in the regions along the West Timorese border, and was feared to be rapidly spreading east towards Dili. There were indications that the militias were
seeking to destabilize East Timor ahead of the country's formal attainment of independence in 2001
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