Travels in East Timor
Peter Williamson visited East Timor last year, around the time of the installation of the first bishop of Baucau. Here he describes what he saw.
Arriving in Dili on a domestic flight from Bali, I am called aside to go through immigration. This does little to enhance the argument that East Timor is fully integrated as the 27th province of Indonesia. So begin a few weeks of continual questioning by the authorities â often I was not sure which authority â on my reasons for being in East Timor.
Does anyone really visit East Timor simply to see the sights? Clearly, the Indonesian government does not think so, but it goes through the charade of producing travel brochures. My request for these at the tourist office in Dili, a few hours later, causes some consternation.
The office is unsignposted and all but deserted. A hello at the door eventually produces someone who produces someone else who shows me to an empty office and tells me to wait. Nothing suggests tourism promotion or information â bare walls and empty desks, a locked cupboard.
Within hours of arriving, I am filled with a sense of the oppression, of the quiet desperation, of the people. As I walk down the street, a voice calls out the freedom slogan, Viva Timor L'este!, just loud enough for me to hear. People insist that I photograph them â even demand it. At the moment of exposure, they flash two fingers in the victory sign.
These small acts of
defiance ensure that the tourist takes home some evidence, however intangible,
of the ongoing resistance.
There seem to be some unwritten rules about travel in East Timor:
- You may not show an interest in politics.
- You may not photograph military installations or personnel (which includes police and police stations), cemeteries and demonstrations).
- You must report to the police upon arrival in every town you visit.
One man present is
later introduced as a captain in the intelligence. On learning I am from
Sydney, they ask me if I know Jose Ramos Horta.
No.
Do you know who he is?
Yes.
How do you know?
Well, he has just won the Nobel Peace Prize; he's in the news a fair bit.
Oh. Do you know ..., and so on.
Knowledge arouses suspicion. So does any interest in local economic or social conditions. Implicit in the rules, and the general attitude of the Indonesian authorities, is an idea that tourists are not interested in politics, human rights or the single most important issue in any place they visit.
I had noticed on the flight from Dili a group of nuns, priests and bishops. Later I find out that they are visiting East Timor for the investiture of the first bishop in the new diocese of Baucau. Two days after arriving, I find myself accepting a ride from Dili to Baucau in the back of a truck with about 50 students.
The road winds along the coast, around verdant hills dotted with trees somewhat reminiscent of eucalypts. The slopes rise into misty heights and drop, at times precipitously, into a deep blue sea. The island of Wetar looms on the horizon. Packed like upright sardines, we lurch and crumple into a crush of bodies with each bend in the road.
A young man leads the rosary, and others follow solemnly as the kilometres roll by. After the rosary, 50 young voices break into songs of haunting and passion and melancholy.
The occasion is as much political as religious. The Catholic Church is protector, refuge, hope and a home for the dream of liberation from Indonesian occupation.
In every town children rush to the roadside and wave at the truck. Military
checkpoints are frequent, but they are unstaffed, and today celebration
is in the air. 
The students drop me outside the town's only hotel, the Flamboyant, most definitely misnamed and, in any case, full. The manager agrees to let me sleep on a stretcher in an adjacent hall.
The ceremony takes place the following day. I am told not to worry â the military have been ordered to stay out of town for the day, because this is one of the rare occasions that the foreign media are allowed into East Timor.
Thousands of people line the streets, and the bishops solemnly walk down an avenue to the new, but simple, cathedral. Young men in black T-shirts act as the bishop's security guards, older men with banners and drums as a more formal guard of honour. The singing moves me to tears.
As the activities draw to a close, a mounting tension seems to break. I see a scuffle and dozens of young guards chasing a few men. A young man is seized â accused of being an informer â and I suspect he is to be beaten. His face is filled with fear, but today is one of peace, and he is warned and released.
Others raise a few banners in an attempted demonstration, but the banners are downed by the bishop's security men. Today, the tables are turned: the Timorese want no trouble, while the Indonesians seem to feel that a political demonstration on a day such as this will discredit their opposition in the eyes of the world media.
Everywhere I go, I am told of demonstrations that may or may not happen. On the streets of Dili, I am approached several times by young men asking if I am interested in witnessing a demo. It will be tomorrow at 10 o'clock. Just follow the people and you will find it.
Sometimes the demonstration is said to have been arranged by the Indonesians. The Timorese say it is a strategy to confuse them. The military are able to see who attends and then arrest them or simply record the information for their files.
The use of informers and stooges causes great resentment. People who have or want government jobs are under particular pressure. The cost of a job can be betrayal of your people.
On the return to Dili, I manage to get a ride with some foreign journalists
in a taxi. We are stopped en route by another truck full of students. They
hang a banner over the back of the truck â it bears images of jailed guerilla
leader Xanana Gusmao and Bishop Belo and demands independence. But in their
fear of being seen, they have hung the banner out back to front. 
Then they try to stuff it through our window. We refuse it â to be found with such an item would invite great trouble.
In Dili I meet people said to be from the resistance. I am shown photographs of young Timorese who have been tortured and murdered by the military. Their bodies are beaten and bloody, and the Timorese flag has been draped over them for pictures.
I ask in amazement how they were able to get such pictures, and I am told that the torturers, who made the photos and also appear in the pictures, sold the pictures to them.
As I leave, I am urged to take photos of military cemeteries.
Why?, I ask.
Because we want the world to see that the fight is still going on, and that Indonesian soldiers are still being killed.
I am amazed that the students will risk so much for the sake of a few photographs reaching the outside world. People beg me, implore me, even demand that I make defiant photographs of them to show the world that the resistance is still alive and strong.
The message wells at a Palm Sunday service in Dili, where I am the only foreigner amongst hundreds gathered in the church grounds, for the church cannot contain such a crowd. After it is over, some young men ask me to follow them.
I sense that something has happened; there is fear on people's faces and an urgency. I am hurried behind an outbuilding where a makeshift clinic has been established and the nuns are tending to four injured young men. They have been beaten by the military in an early morning demonstration to mark the arrival of Jamsheed Marker, UN special envoy to East Timor.
One man has been shot, but it seems he will survive. They cannot seek treatment at a hospital because they will be arrested there. I am told to take photographs, and then a four page manifesto is thrust into my hands as I hurriedly leave.
I hear that 40 people were arrested at that demonstration; another rumour says that four people died â later I hear six.
I travel to regional towns â Ermera, Venilale, Viqueque, Maubisse, Los Palos, Suai. Not much of the Portuguese architecture remains â a few churches, houses and schools. But the language is still widely spoken by people of about 40 and older. My rusty Portuguese is called into urgent service and I manage, at least, to forge some kind of communication.
People love to talk, but any kind of politics provokes a barrier which may terminate the encounter. The fear is always apparent.
In every town, the police call me to answer questions. In some, the military do so too. It is tedious and time-consuming. Sometimes my arrival and lack of Indonesian language causes great concern. Soldiers radio to headquarters awaiting instructions for dealing with the tourist. They seem to fear making any decision.
I try to be friendly; a soldier talks of East Timor as a hardship posting. A policeman from Kalimantan wants to go home, but transfers are not easily arranged. In Los Palos, an officer named Gun follows me all over town â talking and asking questions.
I travel on minibuses known as microlets. They are brightly coloured and have names such as Phoebe, Adelaide, Travolta, Gloria, Traque de Victoria, Quo Vadis, Shirley and Amanda. They travel slowly on the winding roads, as overworked tape players pump out Timorese pop music.
They stop every few minutes to pick up or drop off passengers, and I am crushed into the back with the friendly Timorese. Mostly we just manage to exchange pleasantries, but occasionally someone speaks some English or we battle on in Portuguese. My dictionary is always close at hand.
Accommodation is poor and expensive for what it is. In one town there is none. We are high in the hills, and mist is wafting through the town. The police interview me for an hour, and then say that I can sleep on the concrete floor of the station. This option does not appeal and I say that I will try the church.
I go looking for the priest, and am directed to the nuns' house.
Good afternoon, Madre ...
I am interrupted with I can't speak to you about the situation. If you are looking for the women, they are not here.
Which women?
They are not here.
I'm actually looking for the priest.
Oh, you'll find him in that house over there.
The priest feeds me well and puts me up in a room kept for seminarians. I ask about the women and what is going on. In a hushed voice, he tells me that there has been an incident in which two young women were arrested by soldiers who claimed that the women were trying to make contact with guerillas. They were detained without charges for some weeks, repeatedly raped and beaten.
A church delegation from Dili has secured their release, and they are now being cared for by the nuns. No charges have been laid against the soldiers, but the church is trying to work with the military to ensure that this kind of atrocity does not happen again.
Next day I travel on. Whole hillsides are eroding, denuded of trees. Large rivers have silted up, their beds littered with trunks of washed away trees. The once plentiful sandalwood is all but gone â exploited by the Portuguese and finished off by the new colonists in Jakarta.
It is one of the poorest places I have seen, the poorest province of Indonesia by any measure. There is little evidence of industry. The markets are sparse, and people sit all day with a few vegetables before them on a mat. There are few private cars.
Almost all shops appear to be owned and run by Indonesian immigrants, gradually moving in from Java, Bali, Flores, Sumatra. The Timorese are subsistence farmers, increasingly marginalised in their own land. I am told that many of the educated elite fled to Portugal and Australia in the years following the Indonesian invasion.
Those who remained suffered years of brutality and hardship. A nun tells me that at the age of one she fled to the mountains with her family to escape the war in the towns. At the age of two she learned how to keep quiet and still, knowing her life depended on it. She survived bombing raids and once was separated from her parents for three weeks, surviving on roots and berries.
Incredibly, all her immediate family survived the three years in the mountains, but she saw her pregnant aunt die when the baby â the child of a resistance leader â was cut from her belly by an Indonesian soldier.
Such stories are common. Well over a hundred thousand Timorese died in the few years following the invasion, many of starvation.
In Maubisse I get stuck, having missed the last bus of the day on to Ainaro. A man approaches me in the market and says Come with me. At the police station we go through the usual questions and filling in of forms.
Some police are playing soccer on a lawn, and I ask if I can take a photograph. They are happy, but the commander shouts, No, no!. Across the road is a cemetery, and I am not to photograph that. In fact, I am not even to visit the cemetery.
Later, I discover that the cemetery contains mass graves â entire families who all died on the same day. It is telling evidence.
The policeman annoys me, and I walk back along the road to the guest house which sits atop a small hill. In a black mood I wander outside, and meet a group of students from Dili. They have spent the Easter weekend in Maubisse; a microlet is waiting to take them home. They ask me many questions, and then we joke about trivialities.
They speak English and are very friendly, and I want to ask them about their lives, but they dance around my questions, almost teasing me, as if to say, We'll never talk about that. Of course they won't: not with me, anyway â a total stranger.
We drive down the hill and back to the church, taking our leave in a strangely poignant goodbye. Everything seems left unsaid.
In my room the lights do not work, so I lie in my sleeping bag, thinking that travels in East Timor cannot leave a thinking person unchanged. There are so few tourists (I have seen only two in as many weeks), every tourist must get some sense of the people's reaching out to them, at the same time noticing their deep fear of saying the wrong thing to the wrong person.
The Timorese are sick of fighting and oppression; nearly every family must have been deeply affected and lost loved ones in the struggle. Of course, some East Timorese have mixed feelings about the Indonesian presence and some even support integration. In every nation there are a wide range of political views.
If ever there was an argument for Indonesia's annexation of East Timor, the atrocities of the last 22 years must surely have nullified it by now. Only a free and open referendum can resolve the question of what the East Timorese people want.
Two days later in Suai, sweating again at sea level, I am shown an oil well, the only hint I ever get of the wealth beneath the land and sea. While the East Timorese economy is very weak, and there needs to be an enormous effort in areas such as education, health, and industrial development, East Timor has potential in its oil reserves. Australia and Indonesia have made deals to divide these between them.
I am taken to transmigration camps where Indonesian migrants have been given land that some Timorese claim was once their own. There is a dispute over a cow that has entered a field and eaten hectares of rice. I am told that the president's daughter has been given land against the mountainside, which is to be planted for timber, and I am shown a nursery which is growing the trees.
In an abandoned hut we find a woman lying on a mat, hiding from her husband who has beaten her. In a few days her relatives will fetch her and take her home. The violence done to the people emerges in such ways.
Recently, it has also been taken out on outsiders in Ocussi, an East Timorese enclave in West Timor. From the bus I see burned-out houses where Timorese rioters turned against wealthy migrants.
The priests greet me warmly and we chat for a while, but suddenly they speak no English when I ask about the riots.
After 18 days in East Timor I am tired. I go for a walk along the beach and look up at the mountains forming a great barrier to the inland. I pass rows and rows of houses under construction â precise rows of identical dwellings awaiting the arrival of new migrants and government officials.