Men of Timor

High-ranking Portuguese politician Miguel Relvas visited Dili last week. Relvas’ grandfather José Miranda Relvas was held in Timor as a prisoner during World War II, and his father was apparently born there.

The Portuguese narrative of the War apparently continues to be one of heroic victimization. Relvas was quoted as saying  “Our territorial sovereignty was violated and Portuguese there heroically maintained their position, preserving our values and defending our flag.” Sounds like the colonial koolaid has still not run out!

A quiet feeling

Ten years ago at this time, I was going to the expanse outside Dili called Tasi Tolu, to see East Timor’s flag raised publicly for the first time on the territory since 1975.

May 21, 2002, the next day, I wrote

I just wanted to share this moment of joy. Today I woke up in an Independent East Timor. Four years ago, East Timor’s plight represented for me the plainest example of the callousness, cynicism and injustice of the media, of politicians, of the mystical “international community”… it was a source of a sort of bitter personal awakening for me at age 18.

Now I can say, that while living in East Timor for 9 months has only deepened for me the complexity of the words “justice” and “independence,” I can see today as the truly emotional and unforgettable day that it is. […]

And no matter how bogged down any independent country becomes in irritating and mundane politics, I can verify that this moment of Independence: to believe and know in your heart that you are no longer subject to an aggressive foreign occupier, is too profound to describe.

Lords of the land, lords of the sea

I really do not want to have to write about politics and conflict. Certain things must be said about these elections, just that I am not going to be the one to say them.

So instead, how about the amazing and FREE work of Swedish scholar Hans Hagerdal? He just published his new massive book “Lords of the land, lords of the sea” as an open access work. This is VERY exciting. (Thanks to one of my 11 readers for the tip-off.)

Fatin Histórico

More history developments!

A friend on Facebook drew my attention to this exciting site/project to help Timorese people document the history in and around them. “Fatin Historico” (Or “Historical Place”) is a blog in English and Indonesian (with Tetum language videos) where editors hope people will contribute photos, video and text. I can’t endorse the idea enough.

They write

This project is a labor of love of several youths who want to document the sites that made Timor Leste. We are interested in buildings from the ancient, Portugese, Chinese, Japanese and Indonesian era, urban (and village) planning, hideouts, old conversations and the soil and sea of Timor Leste.

Take a look at the post about the Japanese caves in Venilale, a place that you may have noticed from the car and been curious about.

The editors are Kamil Muhammad of the University of Melbourne’s Architecture program, and Pedro Ximenes, a Baucau based journalist. They will be partnering with Architects for Peace.

I hope to contribute material when I get a chance. I think it would also be great for them to include an interactive map of the posts they publish.

The little prince

Here I hope to bring to a wider audience the tragic and compelling story of a Topass “prince” from the island of Timor who was essentially kidnapped by a Dominican priest and abandoned in France in 1750.

Pascale Balthazar, the 12 year old son Topasse ruler Gaspar da Costa was taken with a couple of dozen slaves to Macau. There his charlatan “protector” Dominican Father Ignácio sold most of his slaves in Macau and his nice clothes in Canton, after which time they continued on to France, in a journey which took about nine months. During the journey, the priest convinced the boy not to reveal his status or walk around freely on the ship, as the French sailors were monsters and would eat him.

Arbiru

Arbiru. It’s an adjective and adverb in Tetum. Quite useful and on a list of words that are important and tough to translate. Interesting that I grasp for other Asian words in the English language to translate its meaning. Somewhere between kamikaze bravery, running amok, randomness. As a memory aid, I would think “arbitrary” in English.

Arbiru can go right and it can go wrong. It is somewhere on the edge of chaos, and something essential to the war machine.

Looking through Luis Costa’s Tetum-Portuguese dictionary, I notice that there are few words in Tetum that have ar- as a prefix. The only other words from Tetum (Terik) are aruma (meaning whichever, whatever) and aran (meaning to hate, synonym with hirus).

But the word’s second and third syllables are more potent. A biru is a totem, or an amulet, possessing power to turn its holder invincible in war. Falintil guerrillas used these.

Fake plastic flowers

I have never seen so many fake plastic flowers for sale in Dili. A week away from Loron Matebian – or All Souls Day, probably East Timor’s most important holiday – the streets near the Stadium, in Bairro Pite and other strategic parts of town are lined with lurid plastic flowers. “Loose” ones, fake bouquets, strings of flowers. They are bright purples, pinks, oranges, explosions of color.

The production of fruits and vegetables has caught up with demand in Dili over the past couple of years to an impressive degree. It seems a shame that the shame work to jumpstart these markets could not be done with cut flowers.

The fake flowers are probably an indication of the unparalleled disposable income of Dili residents – of the money splashed around with various cash transfer schemes and compensation schemes.

Pilgrimage

I am not going to lie. I found Pedro Rosa Mendes’ book Peregrinação de Enmanuel Jhesus extremely challenging. Starting of course with the variation and density of language, which some Portuguese critics have compared with Faulkner.

I know what kind of reading experience I had, as a person who has spent a long time in archives, and time crisscrossing the east of Timor talking with people.

The novel is presented as a number of interweaving narratives by different characters – none of them Portuguese! – Rosa Mendes is very much at home playing with identity, perspective and the kind of (post)-colonial house of mirrors. At first I found none of his characters remotely sympathetic. But the book is not sentimental and it is certainly not about sympathy. A kind of self-destructive empathy perhaps. These are the kinds of relations, and the kinds of characters, that come from occupation(s).

Ruben “Aru” Barros Soares

For the past couple of days, I have been noticing a haunting Google search leading a reader to my blog.

“ruben barros soares staf unamet”

Towards the end of August, every Timorese family who lost loved ones before or after the Referendum must start to remember.

Barros Soares, known as “Aru”, was one of 14 UNAMET staff violently killed by Timorese militia and/or Indonesian military for helping to set up the UN-sanctioned vote on the “special autonomy” offer.

The son of the head of his village, he was working as a language assistant in Bobanaro district. For this, he was brutally murdered.

Prison island and boat people

On the issue of a detention center in East Timor for those seeking asylum in Australia: continued insensitivity by both sides, especially in what relates to the eventual location. One Timorese minister has suggested what he deems to be a “win-win” idea to resolve the impasse – put them on the Island of the Island.

What follows is some historical perspective on the island that is the namesake of this blog, prisons and boat people.

Wherein I make a crude, uninformed comparison

Arriving for my first time in Banda Aceh, after having only superficially followed developments over the past couple of years, I was rather in for a shock. The place is bigger, more prosperous and seemingly, well, “autonomous” from outside (read: international) influence than is East Timor.

Although Aceh is not independent from Indonesia (or free from its military), there are many potential comparisons to be made.

To start with more obvious contrasts.

In Timor the destruction was 100% work of man. The Timorese voted for independence in 1999 knowing full well what was waiting for them – scorched earth. People even knew who their butchers and torturers would be.

Timor’s population had been reduced over decades of violence, forced displacement, and hunger. Banda Aceh’s population was reduced by a third from one census to the next. (There was never even a proper death toll from the tsunami apparently.)

From slave to “beneficiary”

Imagine, for a moment, the German government “helping” Poland re-create a network of railways. Imagine that these train lines went to Auschwitz and various other prison camps. Imagine that these railways would be built by German engineers, contractors, and were supported by German army logisticians. Imagine that these railways would periodically have German emblems and flags commemorating the “gesture”, and that there would be ceremonies to inaugurate the lines with Polish head of state.

Inappropriate?

Well, imagine that the German government had never actually said “sorry” in the past 60 odd years. For anything.

Inappropriate?

The Ala Mutu

Talking to a friend who grew up on the slopes of Matebian a couple of days ago, hearing stories about his childhood, I was struck by one thing in particular – his memories of the ala mutu, which translates from Makassae as “the jungle people”.

A mere change of timing and change of point of view, and everything changes.

Lauf Neno, a woman living by herself

I am writing a paper in which I attempt to make sense of some of the (colonial) anthropology that has come before me. Schulte Nordholt is a fascinating figure because among other things he was an administrator in West Timor before and after World War Two. His interest in history, but inability to grapple with “Timorese” perspectives on history, is particularly compelling and troubling at the same time.

I came across this quote, from a rather dry (literally) section of “The Political System of the Atoni” on agriculture, which I found so incredibly haunting and sad.

During the famine of 1930 the people of Amfoan sought help from Lauf Neno (Van Alphen, 1933), a woman living by herself in a shack in a river valley. Her only clothing consisted of a loin-cloth, and she had no other belongings than a cooking-pot and a sirih purse. She had been discovered in 1927, when there was also a food shortage, and was reputed to have descended from heaven on to the Mutis, so that she was a neno aman, or celestial child. Others said she came from Kauniki where Sonba’i, the great son of heaven, once lived. She was said to have attended school and speak many languages. People brought her quantities of sacrificial gifts, such as hens, pigs, cloths, beads and sirih pinang, in order to bring on rain. Her fingers were deformed, except for the index fingers and thumbs. She had the appearance of an old woman, although she was probably not much older than 30. It was believed that if she opened her right hand the drought would continue for a very long time to come, and if she opened her left hand many people would die. The fetor (district head) decided to send her to Kupang, but when she became aware of his intentions she was literally struck dumb and wept so much, for days on end, that the fetor, prompted by apprehension, released her. But a few months later she was conveyed to Kupang after all, on the orders of the Netherlands East Indies Government. Here people continued to bring her sirih pinang to her in jail. She was charged with fraud and died a month later. She had opened the fingers of her left hand before her death, and was buried with her hand in that position. And many people died, for the drought continued. (75-76)

Part of what I find disturbing about this tale is the voice of the narrator(s). Strange, to start, that he does not seem extremely up front about the source(s) of all of the information. Schulte Nordholt has a borderline empathetic voice, and yet by telling the story the way he did, he seems to somehow endorse the colonial version. She was “discovered”? By colonial authority I am assuming.

He concludes “popular imagination places a lonely and disfigured person in the sphere of the hidden world […] The woman herself probably had no part in this at all.” (Highly speculative, isn’t it?)

Anthropology still often seems to operate on this level – make sense of, even empathize with but, when push comes to shove, the analysing seems to somehow explain away very personal struggles and hidden histories. As an object of study she has meaning. As a woman who died in prison she is either absurd or tragic.

The UN dead

One thing I feel has been sorely overlooked since about late 1999 is the number of Timorese staff who worked for UNAMET who were killed.

UNTAET claimed in 2000 that only 6 UNAMET workers were killed.

Geoffrey Robinson’s definitive report names 14 killed.

I found this slide show commemorating the 60th anniversary of peacekeeping in Timor, by UNMIT (caution: large PDF file) and they mix the deaths of the butchered UNAMET staff, some of whom were tortured, raped and killed before their families, with those who died in car accidents in subsequent UN missions.

For the record, I’ve tried to create a list of those killed before, during and after the referendum, most of whom were targeted because they worked for the UN. If you have more information about any of the people listed here and/or convictions for their murders, please comment or send to my email.

I hope the UN is planning on finally commemorating them 10 years on.

And I am curious: what kind of compensation have their families received?

1. Abreu DA COSTA, (Shot attempting to flee in Bulle in Laga subdistrict by Battalion 745?)

2. Mariano DA COSTA (tortured and killed by militia in Liquiça before the Referendum)

3. Hilario Boavida DA SILVA (Last seen out front Dili Diocese)

4. Silva Leonel DE OLIVEIRA (Last seen out front Dili Diocese)

5. Manuel DE OLIVEIRA (beaten and stabbed to death in Atsabe – conviction)

6. Orlando GOMES (beaten and stabbed to death on day of the ballot in Atsabe)

7. Paulos KELO (executed by Sakunar militia in Oecusse)

8. Ana da Conceição LEMOS (raped, tortured and murdered in Gleno)

9. João LOPES (stabbed to death while carrying a ballot box in Atsabe)

10. Carlos MAIA (Maliana, killed in Police Station massacre)

11. José Ernesto de Jesus MAIA (AKA José Ernesto Mariano? – no specific info available on the internet)

12. Domingos PEREIRA (shot in Bobanaro by TNI – [correction: partial] conviction)

13. Ruben Barros SOARES (beaten, stabbed and attacked with rocks in Bobanaro by militia – conviction)

14. Francisco TAEK (executed by Sakunar militia in Oecusse)

Life under the flip-flop

The night before I left, grass fires lined the hills, like bleeding gums.

I had been asking myself over and over again, toying with in my head, how Dili could be this calm, this “ok” only three years after the violence. The calm, at times almost giddy, sense of prosperity.

In 2006, people were pulled out of mikrolets and forced to prove they could count to ten without the wrong accent. Those who failed to effortlessly say “h-at” for four were beaten, or worse dragged away. People lived wracked with fear of their neighbors. Of strangers. They lived in fear of themselves. There was no longer a jackboot, it was a terrifying Timorese shinelo.

All that remains on the city landscape of 2006 is the memorial for the police killed in Caicoli.

But what happened to the dead civilians?

More importantly, the roadblockers? The mask-wearing rock throwers? The rama-ambon makers? The house burners? The civilians who FDTL distributed arms to?

During tours of the city limits of Dili — through Becora, down through Bidau Santana, then out to Cristo Rei, and back out up the back of Delta Comoro, back down through Fatumeta, then up Taibesse’s up and around China Rate and back down Lahane – I wonder how much is stored up there — how is stress and anger contained. Where does it go? Is it swallowed? Is it buried? Is it literally stored away like an unused rama ambon?

I met some young people who have made a conscious decision to leave Dili, to go to Indonesia, to go to England. Dili is too small to contain all of their stress and anger.

It is hard to transmit how it felt in 2006, so it is hard to capture the strange dissonance with today’s Dili.

The mad construction keeps the city busy, and Prime Minister’s spokesman gloats over 12% growth in GDP.

Heaps of carpenters buzzing away making window and door frames with deslokadu money; the massive $400,000+ Civil Society Fund renovation of Motael Church, and the bigger and more expensive work on the Cathedral; the new wooden crocodile heads around the Monument to the Discoveries in front of the Palace of Government (a symbolic encircling of the colonial object); the traditional houses going up like lightening around the new Presidential palace, and in time for the big party in August.

While most people display a dangerous level of distrust in their political leaders, Dili seems perfectly lanu and mosu at the moment.

Have people begun to tell 2006? How can it ever be told?

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.

In memory

The above photo, care of La’o Hamutuk Nug Katjasungkana, is from the former residence of Manuel Carrascalão in the Lecidere neighborhood of Dili, where families of the victims of the April 17, 1999 massacre gathered yesterday to pay respects and demand justice.

The massacre was perpetrated by pro-Indonesia militias with encouragement and support from the Indonesian military. The survivor’s statement boldly says the following

We, survivors and victims families lament yet understand the lack of initiatives of our own leaders in demanding justice and fair trial. As many have forgotten and find it easier to move on choosing to remain silent. Our plea is to not disregard the need for justice.

I stayed there as a researcher, as it is now home to the Fundação Oriente, and I was truly haunted by what happened there in 1999 and Irene Cristalis’ account of the massacre, to be republished next week.

It is simply impossible to forget.

Some say the victims are delusional to continue to ask for justice. But there are more than enough examples to show that it is never too late.

The pool of blood

After much delaying and paralysis, I was able to defend my MA thesis last year on the memory of collective violence from colonial East Timor. I remember trying to think of a way to make sense of the subject matter at hand to my kind friends and colleagues in the room. Most were Portuguese, knew Timor growing up, unlike me. For many, the images of the Santa Cruz massacre were indelibly imprinted on their young consciousness in 1991, so I evoked them:

Hundreds of Timorese, running to the camera, kicking up dust, with looks of absolute panic. In a cemetery, young people fallen, hit by bullets from the rifles of the invisible Indonesian army. One young man in particular bleeding in the arms of another… If you like, I “heard” this image before I saw it.

I remember Amy Goodman, present in Santa Cruz, eyewitness and survivor, telling a spellbound room of young Amnesty International activists about this in 1996. I’m not sure I actually ever watched the footage of Santa Cruz except small clips in John Pilger’s Death of a Nation.

In 1999, I followed the horrifying build-up to the referendum, the last months in Brazil, where one was lucky to find even a printed image of Timor. In 2000, eyewitnesses both foreigners and Timorese shared their experiences with me of Dili and of flight. (I never saw footage of 1999 until much later, when I watched Scenes from Occupation, by Carmela Baranowska.)

The pool of blood grew, but it was still not something visible to me. The years I lived there it grew. In 2006 it grew in new and strange directions.

Now they are digging up bones in Hera, from what appears to be unmarked graves from Santa Cruz. Bones with traces of violence. Silent. Alarmingly white and solid. Alone.

In Liquiça the grave sites have yet to be found.

The pool of blood remains invisible to many but that does not mean we cannot still feel it seeping between our toes.

One reaction is silence, a trembling chin — an inability to speak or to write. Another reaction is a loud and truly righteous pursuit of Justice. Yet another reaction is to attend to the senses. To compensate. Stuff the hungry belly — to seek feeling.

Sometimes these reactions come all in short order, or intermingle and seem paradoxical and hypocritical.

Is it right for me to speak of “us” — of ita?

Return

Upon my return to America, Josephine:
the iced drinks and paper umbrellas, clean
toilets and Los Angeles palm trees moving
like lean women, I was afraid more than
I had been, even of motels so much so
that for months every tire blow-out
was final, every strange car near the house
kept watch and I strained even to remember
things impossible to forget.
— Carolyn Forché, “Return”

This time ten years ago, I was in my second year at university. Designing the weekly paper, enrolled in intensive Portuguese, and living next to this guy (who is now some famous actor).

I was also raising the rabble (well the little rabble possible at an actually quite apathetic institution) with the East Timor Action Network.

Monitoring the situation in Timor over my amazing ethernet connection, from about November 1998, it became clear something sinister was happening in Timor. By February 1999, we were hearing reports of mass displacement in Suai. Then April: Liquiça. Dili. Unspeakable horrors.

By this time I knew in my heart of hearts what was going to happen… Even prior to the May 5th agreement, it seemed from afar that Timor was headed for catastrophe. I spent June in DC working ETAN: lobby days, events on Capitol Hill.

It crossed my mind to put my name down to monitor the referendum. But I knew at age 20 that I was simply not ready for what was going to happen.

Casus Belo

Odd times. The past is ever present in Timor.

Abílio Araújo suggests the Petroleum Fund is no more than a neocolonial imposition on Timor, based on the assumption that the Timorese are corruptable children who do not know how to take care of themselves. He writes, “the current justification for the creation of the Fund is based on the genetic-cultural propension of oil-producing peoples and countries to generate corrupt leaders that delapitdate the riches of their peoples.” A (dated) colonial critique which is applied with no subtly. His idea: spend Timor out of oil dependency, and fast.

José Belo is on the dock with criminal charges for what must be said is bizarre reportage on corruption by the Minister of Justice herself. The real story is that the project Timorese criminal legal code, where Article 175 will determine defamation, has conveniently not been passed in Parliament. So Belo can be tried with the outdated, repressive Indonesian version. Another relic from past vested with a great deal of power.

And Agiu Pereira published an opinion piece called “The Dreams of Kay Rala Xanana Gusmão“, quoting Portuguese poet Fernando Pessoa in the second paragraph. I can’t help but quote this extensively

Two contradictions are hovering in the conscience of Xanana Gusmão. One of them relates to the fact that he breached the promise made to his guerrillas that, after the liberation, he would not hold any position; the other is the conscience of the duty, the duty to serve, the duty not to let go what his guerrilla men achieved, for he saw many of them being killed and giving their lives so as to make their dream come true, a dream that is the dream of an entire people.

His desire to be a mere spectator of a new stage in the struggle for the sovereignty of his people, a stage of building a democratic State based on the rule of law, has not materialised because the national political reality dictates that Xanana must continue to row in this cyclopean boat that carries the hopes of the Timorese children so that they may one day be able to have more adequate living conditions, a happier life than that of their ancestors, a life proper of a modern people and country, in a globalised world.

His promise not to hold a political position was transformed by contemporary reality and converted into “Having Freed the Motherland, Let Us Free the People”.

Xanana continues to be a prisoner, but today he is a prisoner of freedom. The new prison cells are not made of walls and metal, but of his own conscience. The dream is, after all, a train that travels in a political process of the national liberation itself!

This train has neither stations nor does it stop to enable Xanana to step down.

How relevant are trains in Timor? (Maybe Timor Cartoon could do something with this image!)

I’m going to hop on my trusty kuda to take me to Central London.

Meter-long coffin

It is sometimes easy to let the sea of headlines about underdevelopment and poverty wash over you. Just like it is easy to stop seeing the upper respiratory infections and signs of malnutrition in children, as callous and awful as that may sound. These things become almost routine.

This UNICEF data from 2007, about child mortality in Timor brought with it mixed emotions: while progress has been made, still 55 of 1,000 children born in Timor will die before the age of 5. [Correction: 55/1000 is the figure from 2006. In 2007 the latest figure is 97/1000 — child mortality nearly DOUBLED]

One of the saddest things I ever saw in Timor: a meter-long coffin, maybe 130cm. Covered in a canopy of tais. Candle burning on a table next to it, with five packets of lilin, a crucifix, and two glasses holding bougainvillea flowers.

The deceased was eight years old, died of fever and diarrhea. This child is not even included in child mortality statistics because she is simply not supposed to die — she passed the five years threshold.

I wrote at the time

I could tell from the eyes of one woman, who looked very old for her years, that she was the mother. It is a strange situation to be asked to photograph a child’s wake. I had to ask the assembled crowd to move out of the doorway to allow more daylight to pass in. There was one candle burning and a couple of weavings set up to make a sort of cubicle for the child. I set the shutterspeed to 1/60 second, held my breathed and clicked the shutter. It’s amazing how not awkward this felt. The family wanted a way to remember this child. They had no photo of her alive. I felt as though I should say something, and it came naturally. I am so sad for this child. Simple.

The girl died of a sick stomach and high fever. I asked if there was a health post near, and everybody pointed down the road. Then the fever came fast? I asked. Ambiguous answer. The answer really is, this is just a place where 8 year old children die. Simple.

This is a classic example of how money cannot solve problems. It can help, but it does not solve them.

One wonders sometimes how the same old characters in Timorese politics can be busy writing treatises on the Net, in the daily papers, to blame each other for things that happened even 35 years ago.

What did this eight year old girl know about any of that? What did it matter to whether she lived or died?

I read that staff from the President’s office went to deliver blankets in Letefoho to a grateful population. (This while the President was being feted in Thailand, after spending days in the Philippines talking about brokering peace for Mindanao.)

Perhaps on his return, he, and others, should start attending the funerals of eight year-olds.

Of Nonas, or “Lovers”

Why is it that Angie Pires, still the only person being held in house arrest in relation to the attack on Ramos Horta in February 2008, is a “lover” in the Australian media?

It is not as if they are assigning her some kind of Bonnie-and-Clyde agency. The word is always used to stigmatize, or debase. Think of how gay partners are so often by default “lovers”. How often does the media refer to men as “lovers” of women?

I have already made my opinion of her fate clear.

One could argue that Angie is a post-colonial reincarnation of the figure of the nona. This word came to describe the concubines of European males stationed in Timor and other parts of the Portuguese empire. (In his latest book, Luis Cardoso artfully renders the character of a nona — highly recommend it.)

Osório de Castro pointed out that the use of the word in Timor came from Macau, where nonha was used. Luis Costa in his Portuguese-Tetum dictionary wrote that the word nona was used “only to designate the amante (lover) of the European or Chinese”.

Those who became nonas in Timor were sometimes mestiça, or women who were spurned by husbands or widowed, or simply women who had a curiosity and a knack for picking up European habits. Some colonial memoirs, like Paulo Braga’s (1933) Nos Antípodas, contain rather disturbing racist praises of Timorese nonas over Asian and African ones. He wrote that Timorese nonas were distinguished by their “correct facial features, without the facial excesses of the Asian and African races.”

What is clear, and what Cardoso captures so well, is that nonas were not trusted by either side, the ruling colonial elite nor the Timorese communities in which they lived. They constantly begged clearer defintion of us vs. them.

Taussig argues that in the colonial context, “Identity acquires its satisfying solidity because of the effervesence of the continuously sexualized border, because of the turbulent forces, sexual and spiritual, that the border not so much contains as emits.”

In my research of colonial violence, it is quite revealing the number of major events in Timorese history that when recounted orally seem to have transgressions of (or by) women as the spark. Take for example the story of the assassination of Governor Lacerda, which involved the illegitimate mestiça daughter of a Governor. Or Boaventura’s 1911-12 Rebellion, which is believed to have been caused by the inappropriate interest of a Portuguese military commander in Dom Boaventura’s “lighter skinned” wife (see Luis Cardoso’s The Crossing for the oral history version.) In my interviews on 1959, abuses of power in relation to Timorese women (“the voluptuousness of power”) were repeatedly raised.

When judging the Angie situation, let’s not deny the presence of ghosts of nonas past.

Nine

Nine years ago. On the eighth and ninth days of the ninth month. 1999.

The police station massacre in Maliana, East Timor. Please take a moment to remember those who courageously risked their lives to vote, were deceived, corralled in the police station and ruthlessly butchered to death. Those who escaped were hunted down and eliminated and disposed of by Timorese militia, Indonesian police and military.

The photo above by Rusty Stewart is from a ceremony conducted in 2001 at the beach in Batugade, where the bodies were disposed of. The lack of burial for those killed continues as an open wound for Maliana.

One of the Indonesian military officials indicted by the Serious Crimes Tribunal in relation to the Maliana massacre, then Lt Col. Siagian, was recently relieved of duty in West Papua. But as ETAN says, “Indonesia should take the next steps and suspend him from any command and then hand him over for trial for the crimes he committed in East Timor.”

From Geoffrey Robinson’s definitive report

In the hours before the attack, on September 8, dozens of militiamen gathered at the Koramil. There they were divided into four groups and briefed on their mission by TNI and SGI officers. Two of the groups were tasked with forming a security perimeter around the Police station. The other two were assigned to seek out and kill the pro-independence leaders sheltering in the Police station compound. Before departing for the Police station, some of the militias had their faces painted black by SGI soldiers.

The attack began at about 5:30 p.m. Two trucks pulled up in front of the Police station, and three others stopped on a road running along side the compound. The vehicles were filled with soldiers and militiamen, armed with machetes, knives, and swords.

Many of the militiamen were dressed in black and wearing ‘Ninja’ type hoods or Indonesian flags to cover their faces. The TNI soldiers, most of them wearing combat trousers and black t-shirts, were carrying automatic weapons and side arms. When the vehicles stopped, the soldiers and militiamen jumped down, and took up positions in and around the compound. Some TNI soldiers sealed off the main road running in front of the Police station, while others formed a perimeter around the compound.

Meanwhile, dozens of militiamen and TNI soldiers entered the compound from the side entrance and ran into the area where the refugees were gathered. One witness described the initial moments of the attack:

“I saw the militias running in all directions, chasing men and boys to kill them …The refugees were screaming in fear but they could not escape as militias and TNI were all around guarding the place.”

In panic, many refugees ran to the security post at the front entrance of the compound, but Brimob soldiers there told them to return to their tents. Not all did so, but those who did then witnessed the attack unfold.

Among the first victims was a 13-year-old boy, José Barros Soares, who was hacked to death by militiamen while his younger sister looked on. But the violence was not as random as that scene suggested. The attackers were clearly singling out well-known pro-independence figures for execution. The victims included a number of CNRT leaders, as well as a Sub-District Head, two Village Heads, and several civil servants with pro-independence sympathies.

The militias also targeted the families of such figures. According to one report, for example, the militias who killed the young boy, José Barros Soares, told his sister that they were killing him because they could not find his father, a known independence figure. Also singled out were members of the TNI and Police who were considered to be independence sympathizers.

In some instances, the attackers asked for their intended victims by name. In other cases, they appear to have known exactly where in the compound to find them. One witness said that the attackers had a list of names to which they referred as they made their way through the compound.

“I was cooking and suddenly the militias came in cars and people started running from one side to the other. Then when people calmed down they divided into sections and entered the tents seeking people on lists to kill

Among those targeted in this way was the prominent Maliana pro-independence figure Manuel Barros, who had taken refuge at the Police station with his family on September 2. At least four people witnessed his killing, including one man who was just a few feet away when it happened.

According to the testimony of that man, shortly after the attack on the compound began, three militiamen walked straight up to Manuel Barros and began to speak to him in an aggressive manner. First they ordered him to stand, then to sit, and then to extend his hand. As he extended his hand, one of the three militiamen lunged forward and stabbed him in the chest with a knife. Manuel Barros immediately fell to the ground and died soon thereafter. His body was then dragged away by the three militiamen.

Many witnesses have said that they saw the Police Chief, Major Budi Susilo, inside the compound as the killings took place, and several witnesses have testified that they saw Lt. Sutrisno on a motorbike near the Koramil on the evening of September 8. At least one witness claims to have seen both Lt. Col. Siagian and Lt. Sutrisno in the immediate vicinity of the Police station: “When I walked out of the compound” the witness told a journalist “I saw the chief of the Kodim [Siagian] there, with the Intel chief, Lt. Sutrisno. They were waiting for something near the Kijang pick-ups.”

The attack continued until about 9:00 p.m. and the disposal of the bodies began shortly thereafter. As in other cases of mass killing in 1999, the process of disposal was methodical, and supervised by TNI officers, indicating that it had been planned in advance by the authorities. It was also clearly intended to conceal the evidence of a crime.

The electricity to the area was cut, and the corpses were loaded onto two or more trucks under the cover of darkness. According to a man who was ordered to assist in loading the bodies onto the trucks, a TNI officer kept track of the identities and the number of dead.

The trucks were then driven out of town to Batugade, a pro-autonomy stronghold near the Indonesian border. The TNI had made arrangements with local militia leaders Ruben Tavares (João Tavares’ nephew) and Ruben Gonçalves to receive the corpses and dispose of them. According to prosecutors, the militiamen filled large rice sacks with sand and attached them to the bodies. Weighted down by the sand-filled sacks, the bodies were then taken out to sea on fishing boats, and dumped overboard.

The systematic and planned character of the crime at the Maliana Police station is also suggested by further killings of a similar nature that took place in the two days immediately afterward. At least 13 people who managed to flee the attack on the Police station were hunted down and killed with knives and machetes on September 9, at the Mulau lagoon outside Maliana town. One day later, on September 10, two Timorese policemen were killed in a similar fashion, for their suspected pro-independence leanings.

Like the victims at the Maliana Police station, those killed on September 9 and 10 included prominent leaders and alleged supporters of independence. And like them, their bodies were disposed of in an apparent attempt to hide the crime. The remains of two of those killed at Mulau were later found on the beach at Batugade, some 50 kilometers from the scene of their murder.

Lampião

Alfredo. He has been gone for 6 months now.

There is something so powerful about a folk hero killed in his prime.

I was reminded yesterday of the story of Lampião, who was a hero/outlaw character in Ceará, northeastern Brazil, in the 1920s and 1930s.

Killed and beheaded by police seventy years ago this year, after a long run of banditry (and interviews with the media!), he still remains today an important figure in Brazilian culture.

He was the subject of a feature film, novela(s), an untold number of songs including Nação Zumbi and Chico Science’s “Sangue de Bairro”, poems, and now of course internet tributes.

On Youtube, we can “meet” Lampião, who seemed to understand the importance of film just like Alfredo.

Is Alfredo as great an icon as Lampião? What will remain of Alfredo in 2078?