House of murders: East Timor in transition

Radical Society, Jul 2002 by Rauch, Molly

IN DILI, THE CAPITAL OF EAST TIMOR, I SLEPT IN A house of murders. The night guard asked me if I wasn't scared. Two people, he said, had been killed there, and sometimes he could see their ghosts.

I didn't have to ask who the killers were. Indonesia had invaded and then occupied the tiny half-island nation months after it slipped from the colonial grip of Portugal in 1974. For over two decades Indonesia had murdered indiscriminately. Survivors fled to the forests and mountains. Massacres escalated with the help of militias and army-supported thugs through the 1999 referendum, when the East Timorese, supervised by an unarmed UN mission, voted overwhelmingly for independence. The savage destruction that followed razed, by some estimates, 80 percent of all houses, schools, clinics, and businesses in the country, forcing hundreds of thousands of people - the bulk of the population - from their homes.

I went to East Timor in June 2001 to do public health research for a humanitarian aid organization. During my nine-week stay, I learned that "houses of murders" were ubiquitous. When Indonesia first occupied East Timor, it had a population of 700,000. Over the next twenty-four years, it has been estimated that 200,000 East Timorese were killed or died as a result of Indonesian brutality - brutality that was sustained diplomatically and militarily by the U.S. government. A year and a half after the referendum, while I couldn't see the ghosts that the night guard saw, I could see plenty of other evidence of this bitter legacy.

One afternoon in Dili, on a nondescript side street, I stopped to look at a rubble-filled lot. Tropical weeds reached up through what had once been a storefront. The broken facade was streaked with black soot, remnants of the fire that had burned from within. Behind me, across the road, was another smashed building, what had once been a living room now only a pile of broken concrete. Up the road I could see more burned houses, and down the road, too, and I realized that here, in the middle of the capital city, in every direction was a building that had been burned or smashed.

Not all streets were like this, and there were certainly signs of a massive influx of aid money - and foreign aid workers: the refurbished coffee-growers' cooperative, for example, as well as a new bank where I could withdraw U.S. dollars on my Visa card, and a travel agency stocked with glossy fliers of South Pacific vacation packages. The white pickups of humanitarian organizations and UN workers wove through streets without traffic signals or street signs. Occasionally an armed humvee with a gun-toting, sunglasses-wearing soldier peering out of the top rolled by, "UN" emblazoned on its sides, scouting out the cabdrivers and motorbikes. As night fell, the lights of the city flickered on, and then off, as the public electricity supply wavered. Single candles appeared in makeshift street stalls that offered gasoline, biscuits, and cigarettes. UN workers left their air-conditioned offices in the center of town for cafes and watering holes. In the garden of the Hotel Turismo, there were tank tops and sunburned noses and bowls of pasta and cell phones ringing, cigarettes and bottles of Australian wine, and an occasional gun slung over the shoulder. One of the most romantic and expensive restaurants in Dili was rumored to be difficult to find, near a canal, behind a gate, and open only some days. It was called Burned Out House.

The International Force for East Timor (InterFET) arrived three weeks after the 1999 referendum, when Indonesia finally agreed to a UN peacekeeping force. Until that point, the United States did not wish to offend its regional ally of 200 million people over a microcolony with no strategic importance. And because this was the stance of the United States, it became as well the functional necessity of the United Nations. Although East Timorese, foreign journalists, and even UN officials had been painfully aware of the likelihood that intimidation and massacres would only escalate after the referendum, the United Nations let the Indonesian Army retain responsibility for what Indonesia insisted was an internal security issue. The voting process, coordinated by an unarmed UN mission, was surprisingly successful, registering hundreds of thousands of people, almost all of whom actually cast a ballot on election day. Its very success virtually guaranteed East Timor's destruction. It was only after the destruction had started, and the evidence of Indonesia's involvement was impossible to deny, that the United Nations mobilized an armed force.

At its peak, the Australia-led InterFET involved more than 11,000 soldiers from over twenty nations. About half of those soldiers came from Australia, a mere four hundred miles southeast of East Timor. Later, under the command of the UN Transitional Administration for East Timor (UNTAET), the number of soldiers was reduced. But in 2001, thousands of soldiers remained, along with a UN civil servant corps one thousand strong. What had been the poorest province in Indonesia, with the highest infant mortality rates and the worst literacy rates, became home to a large group of people who earned hefty, tax-free salaries often supplemented by a per diem of $100.