East Timor: Testimony
Elaine Briere
Between the Lines Books
128 pages, 64 photographs, $56.95
REVIEW BY STEPHEN LANGFORD
For people involved in East Timor's struggle, this book is a must-read. I have Elaine Briere to thank for my start in East Timor solidarity, and I am an admirer of her photography, and of her documentary on East Timor, Bitter Paradise.
Many of you will know Briere's 1974 photos of East Timor, even if her name is unfamiliar. In her work, the sense of trust between the photographer and the subject is strong. Her work is full of humanity and beauty.
Briere was devastated to hear of the bloody invasion of the place where she had made so many friends, and was involved in the solidarity movement in Canada. She went back to Timor in 2000.
A few years ago, Briere made Bitter Paradise, a film that is part autobiography, using her backpacking visit in 1974 as a starting point for a heartfelt analysis of the occupation. In the film, she goes into Jakarta offices of Canadian mining companies to interview men in suits making a mint out of the rape of Suharto's Indonesia. They tell her that East Timor should be glad to be part of such an up-and-coming country. When submitted to the Sydney Film Festival, Bitter Medicine was ignored. There have been a whole bunch of great, brave documentaries made on East Timor that have been, to use the title of one of the best of them, buried alive.
The book is only partly Briere's superb black-and-white photos of East Timor's beauty, struggle, hardship and solidarity movement. They are interspersed with marvellous essays from Noam Chomsky, TAPOL's Carmel Budiardjo, Adriano de Nascimento and Charlie Scheiner and others. For people like me who like books with pictures, this is fantastic. A welcoming book, you can dive in anywhere.
In Timor, the struggle continues, as Mericio Juvinal dos Reis and Endah Pakaryaningsih write in the first essay, now for a people-centred government. The real problem is not only far away in East Timor, or in Indonesia. It is here and now in our "First World liberal democracies" that can easily be complicit in mass murder, that will support and even organise the ruthless exploitation of Indonesia, and make sure "moderate", West-approved regimes like Suharto's, with their "nation-building" murderous armies, like the TNI, stay in power until they stop following orders.
[Stephen Langford is secretary of the Australia East Timor Association (NSW).]
From Green Left Weekly, December 15, 2004.
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