Will fear get everything?

Ah o medo vai ter tudo
tudo
(Penso no que o medo vai ter
e tenho medo
que é justamente
o que o medo quer)

- Alexandre O’Neill,
do “Poema Pouco Original do Medo”

Why is it that, according to Amnesty, there is only one person still in prison of the 84 convicted of crimes against humanity in 1999?

It has been called “forgetting from above” in other countries – but in the case of East Timor, it is also “forgiving from above.” Last year, the President released nine militiamen, whose crimes included: chopping people to pieces in front of their families, torture, the premeditated murder of priests and nuns, and mass execution.

(I wrote about the pardon of Joni Marques and Tim Alfa, but three members of Oecusse’s Sakunar militia and two members of Laksaur militia also walked free last year.)

They were tried at great financial expense, and psychological cost to witnesses and family members. (And they were released, because as the current Prime Minister says, we are all “saints and sinners”.)

Why is that the Parliament has yet to discuss the Truth Commission report, or the Truth and Friendship Commission report? Why is it the major figures of Timor’s political elite favor a blanket amnesty for EVERYTHING that happened since 1975?

What do they have to fear?

Will “fear get everything”?

Quoting Alexandre O’Neill: “I think of how much fear will get / and I am fearful / and that’s exactly / what fear wants.”

The scarlet letter(s)

On Monday, making my way to work at quarter past 8 the city struck me as quiet. At the City Courts of Dili, however, the GNR packed into its small parking lot, with two vans. At least three UNPOL cars as well. Soon the street was shut off, causing mass disturbance to the city’s traffic.

Not this much security or attention was paid to the trial of the Tim Alfa militia from Lospalos, whose members were accused of ambushing and killing nuns and priests.

This week the trial for the alleged conspiracy leading to the February attack on Ramos Horta began.

On TVTL Monday night Angela Pires appeared calm but focused, wearing a tais dress. Newspapers reported she was barefoot – which they interpreted to mean she had come ready to fight. (I do not know what to make of that.) The other defendants, dressed in what can only be described as Guantanamo Orange jumpsuits, looked more the part of people accused of plotting to kill the President.

This morning on the way to Cristo Rei, I biked over some fresh graffiti in large capital red letters “Viva Lia Los. Viva Justisa. Viva Alfredo no Angie.” This is the first graffiti I have ever seen with Angie included. The message was tailor-made for the trial, and cleverly painted in a place where the President would be forced to walk past to continue his morning exercise routine to the beach.

Later in the day, I tripped over some of the bigger conspiracy theories, which seem hyperbolic and indicative of a huge distrust for the two most powerful people in the country. I did not realize, for example, that a great number of people doubt that Ramos Horta was ever shot. They are actually waiting for him to show his wounds at the trial to prove that he was actually attacked! Moreover, some believe that Alfredo’s mate fatin was not on the pavement at Ramos Horta’s house. They believe his body was dumped there. I asked around, to know if these ideas are “regional” but the first person who told me this was indeed from Oecusse, which I imagine defies regionalism. All asked said these ideas are widespread and not limited to one group.

Dili, as in Portuguese colonial times, remains addicted to the whisper. The rumor. It does not help that the major sources of information, daily papers and TVTL are either at best too weak to cover events (let alone investigate), or at worst putty in the hands of a quite aggressive government.

This culture of rumor has serious consequences, one need only to look at 2002 and 2006. TVTL news coverage can be expanded, and from the sounds of it, people want to see Ramos Horta on the stand, and they want him to show his wounds. After all, haree hanesan fiar.

Let’s hope JSMP (whose website desperately needs updating) and some of the weekly papers can provide more information for the public.

Access to information aside, I have started to wonder whether these ema boot can ever regain the trust of a great number of people.

Gula

The victims of Tim Alfa did not know that the four remaining militia members would be released. We found only one person, a well-connected politician and veteran, who knew of their release. (And that was a story in and of itself.)

I felt that every time we spoke to families of victims, we were opening a throbbing wound, peeling back a flimsy bandage. They told us that they had gone through so many interviews by investigators. I could see in the tears, the sunken eyes, the shrunken postures that EVERY time that violent deaths are remembered, they hurt. They hurt in a way that is inexpressible.

I felt an intruder, a trespasser. And one that brought the worst kind of news.

On our way out of Lospalos, we went up to what we were told was Tim Alfa’s former headquarters, a failed Indonesian sugar enterprise known as Mesgula. Gula in Portuguese is one of the seven deadly sins: gluttony. This was the place that Tim Alfa gorged itself with death and destruction.

It immediately reminded me of an abandonned building in Maliana which was used for the same purpose.

The place was surprisingly free of graffiti.

There was a paltry ai-manas plant growing inside.

The mandi, where Tim Alfa members had washed, was now full of creeping vines.

Somebody had planted maize in one room, which sprouted up from the floor rather expectedly.

When will this place stop being “Mesgula”? When it crumbles away? When the generation of Tim Alfa dies out?

Joni Marques

Perhaps the fervor over the Rogerio pardon will obscure the fact that one of the most high-profile militia convicted by the UN in its Special Tribunal will have his sentence reduced by half with the Amnesty.

Joni Marques was the leader of the Tim Alfa militia, which among other things, viciously attacked a car full of nuns and priests in Lospalos. Marques terrorized the district with the help of the TNI. Geoffrey Robinson wrote in his authoritative report of the events on September 25, 1999:

Joni Marques then ordered his men to set up a roadblock by placing large stones on the road. Some militiamen were posted on a nearby hill as a lookout, and others took up positions in a ditch with their weapons aimed up the road. Some witnesses testified in court that they knew that there was a plan to ambush the clergy’s vehicle.

One witness recalled that after setting up the roadblock, Joni Marques had said: “Now we will wait for the Sisters who will be coming towards Baucau…and when they come we will kill them all.”

At about 2:30 p.m. the same day, a gray four-wheel drive vehicle came into sight from the direction of Lautem heading west toward Baucau. There were eight people in the vehicle, including two nuns, three Brothers/Priests, a journalist and two other lay persons. When the vehicle stopped at the roadblock, Joni Marques and two other militiamen opened fire on it with their automatic weapons, instantly killing the driver and some of the passengers.

As one of the surviving passengers tried to get out of the vehicle, a militiaman grabbed him and dragged him to the river where he was shot and killed. The same militiaman poured petrol over three other survivors and lit them on fire. One of the three ran from the car to the river, where Joni Marques and another man shot and killed him.

One of the nuns, Sister Erminia, got out of the vehicle and knelt down by the roadside to pray. As she prayed, a militiaman (Horacio) slashed her with a machete. Another militiamen (Pedro da Costa) testified that he had yelled “Don’t kill a Sister!” but that Joni Marques had replied “Kill them all! They are all CNRT!” A militiaman then picked up Sister Erminia and threw her in the river, before shooting her twice. At the trial, a witness testified:

“I noticed a nun sitting beside a [ditch]. There was a body beside the nun. I noticed the cap of the nun was on her shoulder. The nun talked to me in Tetum. I cannot remember all the words, but I remember she was saying ‘Oh! God!’”

At about this time, Joni Marques ordered his men to push the clergy’s vehicle into the river. Several witnesses testified that he shouted: “Come here and push the car, you mother fuckers!” The men did so, though one person was still inside the vehicle. When the person got out of the car, he was shot and killed.

I observed the trial for two weeks in 2001. It was the first crimes against humanity trial and did have obvious flaws from a legal and human rights perspective. But from a human perspective, I cannot forget witnesses, a number of them told of untold cruelty and inhumanity by Tim Alfa.

One of the most disturbing incidents was what happened after they pushed the car into the river, when they returned to a young man they had tied to a tree and mutilated his body.

Joni Marques and two co-defendants were handed 33 year and 4 month sentences in 2001 by the Special Tribunal, which were in effect life sentences. (Read JSMP’s report to understand the strange and perhaps illegal sentencing.)

JSMP argues that Marques could only legally serve a 20 year sentence under the penal code at the time he was convicted. Marques (and three co-defendants) were granted a reduction of their imprisonment to one-half by the Presidential Amnesty.

I will need help from a legal mind to conclude the full implications of this. But judging by the fact that he was imprisoned in 1999, it could suggest that he would be free after 10 years in prison, which would mean next year.

Dili day one

From the air, compared to its neighbors, Timor is hard to miss the island, because of its size and the costal highway clinging along the dry, barren coast line, small fishing villages along the Tasi Feto. I was checking to see how much car traffic there was in the West, the troubled loromonu. Not much.

The tide was way out and the mangroves of Tibar were extremely muddy and brown, the water coming in bright swaths of green and blue green. There were white jeeps at the shooting range past Taci Tolu, I guess Police training has already started, or the international police were bored. No smoke over Dili – thankfully — just people burning the fields in the hills around the city, cleaning in preparation for the rains next month.

Airport (President Nicolau Lobato Airport): Strange commercial jet on the tarmac, then tons of uniformed Australian soldiers marching towards it, I realize it’s a charter. I guess they are going home. Passport control, no smiles, but no hassles either. The UN folks (half the flight) cruise right through, showing only their card IDs. I notice the Timorese “VIPs” – a member of the opposition Democratic Party, and a former Commissioner of the Truth and Reconciliation Commission – appear to have their own exclusive entrance. Chinese Timorese, Indonesians, Timorese, Filippinos, Americans (North and South), Africans, all milling around the puny luggage carrosel that is so familiar to me. Now there is a Duty Free store, with red, yellow and black bags. Portuguese and Australian wines compete on the shelves. But mostly Chinese and Timorese were there loading up on whisky.

I begin to read as we wait for our bags. Finally we see an open topped truck drive up to the carrosel. Guys hanging off the sides like the streetcar in Alfama. Slowly we begin to recover our luggage.

The baggage carts are hand-me-downs from TAP Portugal, from the island of Madeira, with ads for the lovely Madeiran Coral Beer. How appropriate — from an island with really bad politics — I can’t help but see the sad humor.

I pass through the outer doors of the airport (the door jam is all cracked and broken and the trolley barely passes over). Docogirl and Professor are there hanging about, they barely recognized me with my tropical mullet. Professor is there for work, gives me his phone number. Docogirl helps me grab my stuff and we head towards the lovely Dili taxi waiting in the lot.

“Refugee” kids – technically IDP kids – who live a stone’s throw away in UNHCR tents swarm the vehicle, “helping” us put the bags in the trunk. None are over 8 years old. I’m in for a shock. Dili is living in camps, not the Dili I knew. Two GNR approach the poor taxi which is pulling out at the typical Dili rate about 5 miles per hour. “M BORA!!” they shout impatiently at our taxi driver, who probably speaks bad Tetum as a second language and definitely does not know what M BORA means. I laugh.

We had towards the first twee Indonesian-style roundabout outside the airport, and the UNHCR tent city comes up on the right side. Stylish, and ironically probably better than the shacks the IDPs lived in before, points out Docogirl, and the nicest of all of the camps in Dili. But it was the site of clashes and rubber bullets from the GNR only days ago. No wonder the GNR’s impatience. Docogirl says the refugee camp actually sprung up in the middle of the roundabout initially. They are all over town, close to the encampments of foreign soldiers.

To explain what has happened in Dili basically defies the imagination.

Locals spew a litany of dates, events, a kind of bizarre timeline of the conflict, which for outsiders seems to have sprung up out of nowhere. “They went to the camps, then we went to the camps, then they went to the camps. Now we occupy the neighborhood.” Nobody here can see middle ground. Nobody is impartial. You can tell immediately what “side” people are on. Interestingly, I’ve mostly run into Westerners today. I think people from the East are licking their wounds and keeping a low profile. Alfredo (he doesn’t go by Reinado here) is the defacto leader of the Westerners. Since he escaped a couple of weeks ago, the Westerners are feeling more and more confident in Dili. (The East/West line is subject to some discussion, as it used to be at about Manatuto, now it seems to be creeping west towards Dili.)

I told one Westerner today that I am a “mixed” person, half English, half American. I said what happens to people in Dili who are half Western and half Eastern? He made it sound like identity can be pretty plastic, but you’d better be saying the right thing at the right moment.

Dili seems empty during the day. First, I drop my stuff at my very generous digs in Lecidere, which is entirely peaceful, and seemingly the new commercial center of gravity of downtown. The man in charge is out to lunch. With Docogirl, I head to Audian, a formerly bustling neighborhood, seems dead in comparison. Have vegetarian fried rice at a Chinese Timorese café. Docogirl attempts to order banana fritters and ice cream at 2:40pm and there “are none.” We are the only people in the café. There are no bananas, we ask ourselves? Or is the deep fry chef out?

We walk towards Docogirl’s house in Caicoli, past the Central market. There is a crowd, mostly youngsters, and lots of little ones and girls, so not to be too scared of, at the top of the market. They are looking into the burned down neighborhood of Quintal Ki’ik. Docogirl explains that this was the site of the machete battle that led to the latest death reported in the international media, three days ago now. The body had just been taken to Santa Cruz cemetery up the road, reported an old Loromonu man. Nothing to see here, he said, in order to get us to move on.

Docogirl said there are a couple of Lorosa’e people huddled together staying in Quintal Ki’ik even after the neighborhood has been almost entirely torched. A very tense situation, although walking through, seems like nothing.

We have delicious coffee in the backyard of Docogirl’s landlady, friend and protagonist, a Member of Parliament who was complaining about the amount of dirty laundry she had to wash after a morning in Parliament. Her youngest daughter, in middle school, tells us that orientation begins tomorrow.

Walking in the late afternoon in Lecidere, I realize how much time has passed. Cafés and nightclubs have long come and gone. A restaurant I used to have “brunch” at with UN folks is now an ANZ Bank office. I approach the water front, to check out Xavier do Amaral’s compound.

Men are playing cards in the front yard. Back in the distance, on the front porch, I can make out Xavier’s small figure, in a white tank top. The few times I went by the house, he would receive guests on the porch. Often just like that, in white tank top.

I found it strangely soothing to see him there. I have compared him to Yoda in the past, and I’m standing by this analogy. (I imagine his position on all of this rancor and conflict is kind of passive, he doesn’t want to promote conflict, and yet his party stands to benefit as a decidedly “regional” loromonu alternative to Fretilin. His power base is in Mambai central mountain Timor, which is considered the heart of loromonu.)

After loading up on supplies at the Chinese grocery around the corner, I had beer and cereal for dinner. Couldn’t find matches to light the stove here, and I couldn’t be bothered on my first day to venture out in the dark. Watched RTTL news interview Ramos Horta with Gonçalo the security guard, who is for the record loromonu. RH is a good communicator, but he alone cannot be expected to bring Timor out of this mess.

Then RTP International came on, as it does from 8pm til morning, and the party ended. It was a show on organic agriculture in southern Portugal.

All night choppers were buzzing overhead. I asked Gonçalo about this, he said, naaawww, it’s normal. But they seemed to be really close by and circling. I figured, well, I’m safe here, there’s nothing to worry about.

Except ghosts of course. I’m staying in the house that was the site of the biggest single massacre in Dili in 1999. Docogirl had tried to reassure me, saying that the violence happened on the opposite side of the compound from my room.

Gonçalo asked me before dinner if I was scared to be here. Before I even brought the topic up. What do you mean? I asked. He said, you know… 1999. I said, well, what about you guys? Are you guys scared?

He said when they first started working in the compound they were frightened. After all, people were killed inside the house, the militia burst in and killed 13 people, including politician Manuel Carrascalão’s adopted son. The Timorese are scared of sites where people have died a “bad” death.

But when they inaugurated a memorial to 1999 on the site, priests came and brought peace to the place. I told him I thought a shaman (matan dook) might be a better solution. He said that is all hocus pocus.

Then he proceeded to tell me something that gave me the chills. A Portuguese lady who was staying here last year reported to have seen a ghost, a person in white floating above the ground. Its feet didn’t touch the ground. She had never been told about 1999 here, and I doubt she knew.

So I spent the night a little jittery, listening to the sounds made by the lizards, and the creaking of the windows and furniture, trying to focus on happier things.

Portuguese customs

Last week in Maliana I met quite a character. It’s rare that I meet a Portuguese person in Timor who I feel comfortable around, a person with all of their cards on the table, not holding back some kind of viper-like need to defend Portuguese colonialism. The guy in question was a spectacled, middle-aged chainsmoking official of the Alfândega, the customs service.

Alfândega, by the way, is one of those words that has been used for centuries to describe more or less the same thing. Receiving goods for trade and charging taxes on them. Often in old times, it also meant “warehouse” or transit point for goods headed to other places. I suppose the English language equivalent was the Customshouse, or tollhouse, (incubator for some of the world’s greatest writers, including Melville, Whitman, and Conrad)… But now we have shortened the word to “customs” and lost its sea-going connotation.

But our Customs official in question had a self-pronounced, life long obsession with Timor. Not that he wanted to come here and become a king of a faraway place and marry the locals, like many before him. He just had a burning curiosity to come here and get to know people.

So much so that he befriended Timorese in exile in Portugal, and even made steps in learning Tetum while in Portugal. This is rare, as most Portuguese believed (and still believe when they arrive!) that Timor is a ‘lusophone’ country. But, he says, his efforts were not that rewarding, as he learned an older, more ‘pure’ form of Tetum spoken in Central Timor, called Tetum Terik. In Dili and in most places now, one finds, Tetum “Praca” (which incorporates many Portuguese words) has turned Tetum into a sort of creole language.

I was so intrigued by this man. He declared that Timorese are not lazy or stupid, just that the foreigners that have come here to ‘teach’ them for so long are lazy and stupid – including the UN.

I had to ask him if he knew the works of Ruy Cinatti, an engineer and forestry man, but an all-around humanist and defender of Timorese culture and human rights in the 1950s and 1960s. An immediate Chesire-cat smile. Cinatti had also written on the issue of the alleged “laziness” of the Timorese, and spoken quite eloquently in the defense of Timorese people, to the clear detriment of his career.

<img src=”http://www.triplov.com/poesia/ruy_cinatti/ruy_cinatti.jpg”>

Our Customsman had some interesting theories about American involvement in tragic events of 1975, taking more of the conspiratorial stance, that America had pronounced interests in defending the Straights of Ombai and preventing an Asian Cuba. He claimed that American carriers in Dili Harbor “forced” the Portuguese leadership to leave after the Timorese coup of August 1975. I said that sounds strange. Why would America even care what the Portuguese did or didn’t do? There was utter disorder in the Portuguese government and armed forces at this time anyways.

It turns out the Americans were moving their ships out of Dili in August 1975 and merely offered the Portuguese a ride to the neighboring island. Pathetically, the Portuguese did not even possess proper naval facilities to evacuate their people from Timor.

According to Customsman, probably quite right of center, Portugal’s greatest mistake in 1975 was allowing the “communists” (Fretilin) to take the two main armories, which were recently stocked with the most modern arms from NATO. I also think this was one of the most decisive moments in 1975. But it was probably unavoidable, because Portugal was hardly willing to fight the Timorese after so many years of bloody war in Africa.

It was so refreshing to have a free exchange with a Portuguese person, who was so open to criticism and willing to engage in a nostalgia-free discussion of colonialism.

Eastern blur

My weekend was a blur seen out of a Landcruiser window. An ever-changing sweep of blue, purple water, shrubs, trees, cactuses, rainforest, vines, fields of grass, rusty corrugated metal, palm-thatch, dirt – red and brown both, goats, buffalo horns protruding from rice paddies… A near-flourescent green of the evenly spaced rice-grass peaking out of grey-brown pools. Terraces, curved, lined with mud or stones. Women and men planting together. Sand, swelling bruise colored sea, grey clouds, moving in dramatic gradients across the horizon. White and blue nets draping over shrubs by the seaside. Crumbling roads, brown river crossings, moss-covered stone walls from Portuguese times slowly being kicked apart by goat hooves.

Pounding, thumping, holding on to the seat in front of me, the CDs skipping, the rice and muesli in the back shaking. Stopping to pee in a bush only to be passed by hunters and their dogs. Driving through clouds, past all-palm-thatch villages. No zinc roofing. Smiling kids, old men with funny old hats. Neither understand Tetum or Indonesian.

We snorkeled at Kom, one of the best natural ports in Timor. Used by the Indonesian military to supply their campaigns in the fierce eastern end of the island. Then used by Korean peacekeepers to ship in their kim chi and Cass Beer. Now almost entirely unused, and being ripped apart by the ocean. We jumped off the pier with snorkels, and spent a couple of hours swimming circles, letting the more intrepid divers point out bizarre fish species. I saw cuttle fish for the first time, plus a scorpion fish, clinging to the wall of a beautiful coral formation. There was a wrecked old yacht in the harbor, we spent ten minutes in the water inventing great stories for its demise.

I couldn’t stop thinking about how Kom was the site of such chaos, fright and upheaval in 1999. Nearly the whole population of Lautem was loaded onto dump trucks, hauled to the port and deposited on boats heading for Timor. It was a military/militia play land, until Falintil guerillas arrived in late September and ambushed the last militia waiting for their boat to Kupang. I think 8 were killed and many injured. The Australian peacekeepers later took into custody the survivors of the militia Tim Alfa, and they were the first men tried for crimes against humanity by the ever-controversial UN Serious Crimes Tribunal.

Under water I kept looking for material evidence of this exodus, like things tossed over in haste, graffiti, anything. I guess the coral had been picked clean by scavengers, as there was very little waste there.

We drove up and over to Tutuala, the most praised beach in Timor, with two friends who had never been before. The anticipation grows driving towards the place, past the only large lake in Timor, around a beautifully shaped mountain range, up through the village to the overlook at the old Portuguese B&B, the pousada. Then the 8 km track down to the beach, bumpy, with intermittent views of blue ocean and the island Jaco through the jungle.

Tutuala was beautiful as ever, the fishermen greater in number and more prosperous than my last trip there. They had at least 4 yamaha engines, and had clearly built two or three new large outrigger canoes. There was a bit of failed negotiation over fish upon our arrival. In the end we encouraged them to catch new fish, and we ended up dining on spectacular tuna.

We spent the night in the car, as we were entirely unprepared for the fact that there are two rainy seasons on that end of the island. Arriving rather bedraggled and wet at the Don Bosco agricultural high school above, the Philipino priest chuckled, explaining that we should call him for a weather report before coming. He now received mobile network there in his isolated, well-manicured high school. I remember him saying, it is sad for a missionary to have to deal with the modern influence of communication. But as Father Jojo said, “The world is in Timor now.” He remembered a time that the world was decidedly NOT in East Timor. He had been at the place since the 1980s, bravely receiving foreign diplomats and their staff, as well as the entourage of accompanying Indonesian spies. In the 1980s, he said, there were battles in the land surrounding the high school, between Falintil and Indonesian soldiers.

I asked Father Jojo about 1999, and how close by militia Tim Alfa killed two young men in the coconut grove. When I first arrived in Timor, I listened to testimony translated two times over into English at the painfully slow and flawed first Serious Crimes trial. He said that the young victims were about to become priests. In fact the documentation had all been processed. It was a great loss for the high school. He also described the killing of the Indonesian journalist and the Italian nun in Lautem, perhaps the greatest atrocity in the eyes of the world. I was familiar with the details, as I had heard them over two weeks in October 2001.

Strange though, how in the end, it is the small things which one clings to and remembers about a trip out of Dili. Tasting fresh milk from Father Jojo’s dairy cows, crossing a new bridge built by Japanese peacekeepers in Lospalos, and noticing that the long grasses on the Lautem plain had finally consumed the Indonesian heroes cemetary. Not a single grave stone was visible, as if the site had been reclaimed by the earth.