Northern Territory (Australia) News Human face of brutal memories ALYSSA BETTS December 4th, 2008 - MARIA da Silva Benfica's face is thinner and lined, but it has the same air of quietness that was captured in a black-and-white photo 31 years ago.
She was 23 then, sitting outside the Belide prison, one of the first to be imprisoned after the Indonesian invasion of East Timor, and on the receiving end of brutal treatment.
The photo is part of an exhibition for the Living Memory Video Archive project, which is on show at the Northern Territory Supreme Court.
Faces in black and white, slightly sepia-tinged or bold colour stare down the lens and come with short captions.
"Filomeno Ferreira at his trial in a Dili court, 1992," reads one.
The photo shows a thin man, standing rod-straight with jaw tight, dressed well and staring at something or someone outside of the camera's range - he was locked away for seven years for his role in organising a peaceful protest.
Maria and Filomeno are founding members of the project that is committing personal stories to public memory - for the East Timorese people and the world.
The project began when Darwin-based journalist Jill Jolliffe met up with survivors that she had reported on during their imprisonment.
The exhibition was launched on Monday and is showing until tomorrow at the Supreme Court, 9.30am-4pm daily.
MEMORIES: Former East Timorese political prisoner Maria da Silva Benfica with a photo of herself outside Belide Prison in 1997. Picture: CHLOE ERLICH
Submitted by Jesse Wright on Mon, 11/17/2008 - 05:15 Ossu Rua, East Timor - Jose da Silva thinks he's 70 years old, though he isn't sure. His hair is white and his eyes are cloudy and his teeth just aren't what they used to be.
He smiles, showing off gaps where teeth are missing and those that remain are wiggly and red from chewing betel nut. He says his teeth have failed him. He tells of a time, not so long ago, when he could still chew on the still-attached testicles of baby goats and sheep, once or twice a year. He did it for decades.
"It makes their horns longer and larger," da Silva said of the strange castration process called kapa in the local language. "If you don't do it, the goat won't get any bigger." The kapa process could involve snipping off the testicles of an animal with a sharp blade, but folks here say it's just as easy and less bloody to crush them between two flat boards or to give the testicles a good chew. These days da Silva said he's only got a few goats, none of which need to be castrated. If they did though, he'd make his son do it.
Da Silva sits on a bamboo platform over the dirt floor of his bamboo hut. His family surrounds him and everyone laughs. Kapa, far from an embarrassment, is hilarious. There's nothing secret or shameful about it. "You have to do it a week, maybe up to a month after they're born," he said. "If you just chew on the testicles, there's no blood." "They scream though," his daughter adds. "The goats and the sheep, they scream." His daughter's never done it; kapa is a man's job. Whenever male goats or sheep are born, the head of the household will decide whether to perform the kapa ritual. It must be done in the morning hours or in the afternoon or, they say, the animal will die. Prior to performing kapa, the goat or sheep's genitalia will be washed and then afterward, whether performed via the blade the board or tooth, the wounded animal's nether regions will be swabbed with a concoction of kerosene and coffee grounds.
Everyone swears the goats and sheep grow bigger. There are no known statistics which might indicate the prevalence of the kapa ritual, but those interviewed said it happens all over the country. Yet chewing testicles is limited to goats and sheep. Pigs are dirty and anything else is just too big. Joao da Silva (no immediate relation) lives down the road from the old man. He is 25, still too young to perform a kapa, though he has seen his own father chew on testicles and slice them off. One day he will do it, too.
"Both ways have advantages," he said. "If you use a blade you can wait until the goat or sheep is bigger, but biting is the best way. With biting you're not so put out. It's less work." (dpa)
The Jakarta Post 26October 2008 Prodita Sabarini, The Jakarta Post, Jakarta - Naldo Rei, 32, was a baby when he and his family fled to the jungles as Indonesian troops invaded East Timor in 1975, starting a 24-year period of brutal oppression.
His formative years were spent in the jungles, where he used to ask his parents why they were living in the jungle like wild animals. His questions would bring tears to his parents' eyes, causing him to stop asking.
He grew up fighting for East Timor's independence from Indonesia, joining the clandestine resistance movement at the age of nine after the Indonesian military killed his father, who was a resistance fighter.
Constantly hiding, facing intimidation and torture, he was uncertain of whether he would survive the struggle. But he was sure of two things: One, that East Timor would gain independence; and two, if he did survive, he would write his story.
Almost a decade after East Timor's independence he published his heart-rending memoir Resistance: A Childhood Fighting for East Timor.
"I fought without thinking that I would live to see victory. However, my conscience said that the trees and the land belonged to East Timorese. I believed that my ancestors would protect me and the whole struggle for independence," he said.
"I've written since I was little. I wrote down every tragedy, every event, the things that happened to my friends and my family. I hid the documents and I told myself *I believe that one day I will write a book'," he said.
In his book he names himself kaer fatuk, a story teller for his people. "I carry their stories like heavy stones, forgetting nothing," he wrote in his book.
He survived despite being captured and imprisoned 15 times by the Indonesian military. He began working as a courier for the resistance movement when he was just nine years old.
"I had no choice. My father and his friends were murdered. If I didn't fight the killings would go on," he said.
"I wasn't afraid. I was captured when I was nine years old. I was electrocuted and slashed with razor blades. Overcoming that made me strong and I overcome fear," he said.
"Every morning I woke up, I faced life crueler than a nightmare. But I started to build courage. It's better to die than live like a dead person, that's why I fought," he said.
He left East Timor for Jakarta in 1995 to continue his struggle, and two years later he left Jakarta for Sydney to study international communications. He watched from Australia as East Timor gained independence and returned home in 2000.
He finished the book in 2005 after five years of writing and eventually published it this year."I wanted to be sure of every fact in my book," he said.
He was in Bali last week for the Ubud Writers and Readers Festival. On the sidelines of the festival, Naldo shared with The Jakarta Post his experience growing up as a resistance fighter, the unfinished grim chapter of relations between Indonesia and East Timor and his hopes for his country, while sitting on a couch in an open-air restaurant overlooking the valley and the hills in Ubud.
He wore a black shirt emblazoned with the symbol of East Timor with Timor Loro Sae written upon it. His long curly hair, a symbol of the resistance movement, was tied behind his back.
His tall and burly features were softened by his smile and warm eyes. He spoke calmly, without anger. He recounted the harrowing stories of the death of his father, of witnessing the human rights abuses committed by the Indonesian military against East Timorese, and of the torture he endured.
His book is a rare firsthand documentation of what happened during the occupation. "I want to tell the story so that people know what happened," he said.
Not many Indonesians know of the brutality with which their government occupied East Timor for 24 years.
In 1975, with the backing of the U.S. and the encouragement of Australia, Indonesia annexed East Timor and turned it into the (then) youngest -- the 27th province of Indonesia -- after 450 years of Portuguese colonization. According to a Security Council report, international and Timorese sources estimate that, of a population of less than 1 million, between 100,000 and 180,000 individuals died from conflict-related causes between 1974 and 1999.
These included the bloody Santa Cruz massacre in 1991, which Naldo recounts in his book. In this incident, the military fired on civilians attending a memorial service of a resistance fighter, killing 270 people.
The lack of knowledge about the incidence at the time may have been a result of the effectiveness of Suharto's regime at suppressing information and generating propaganda. These days, many are unaware purely through ignorance.
Indonesia seems to have closed the dark chapter of its relationship with East Timor with the release of a report this year from a bilateral truth commission.
The report concluded, without naming individuals, that Indonesia had carried out gross human rights abuses during East Timor's 1999 break for independence. President Soesilo Bambang Yudhoyono acknowledged this, but stopped short of offering a full apology for murders, torture and other crimes.
Yudhoyono said the intention of the report was only to uncover the truth so that the two sides could move forward in promoting friendship and reconciliation.
"It's a twisted way of thinking. How can we have reconciliation without justice being upheld? What about justice for the victims?" Naldo said.
For Naldo there will be no closing chapter until there is justice.
The future of his young independent country, which is marred by political unrest and infighting, lies in the hands of its leaders, who must "sit down together and solve the problems," he said.
Canberra Times (Australia) 15 October 2008
The village of Tai Tete is a 40-minute climb from the town of Maliana, in the west of East Timor.
The rangy figure of Joana Fatima leads us along a small track to her village. We walk past groves of lontar palm, clamber over black volcanic rocks and skirt around the grounds of a crumbling, Portuguese-era boarding school. As we get higher, the air thins and cools and we walk through shady stands of pine and pass small clusters of traditional thatched houses. Women pound rice and corn in waist-high wooden pestles; toothless dogs howl at us; children stare. Life up here is a marginal, hand-to-mouth existence. Most villagers live almost entirely outside the cash economy, surviving on whatever they can grow or the livestock they keep.
In such straitened circumstances, the generosity of Joana Fatima is all the more remarkable.
Throughout the 1990s, during the last decade of Timor's war of independence against Indonesia, Fatima played a crucial role as cook, comforter and way station for Timorese freedom fighters.
This humble, matter-of-fact woman fed and sheltered dozens of guerrillas in her one-room, thatched hut. The guerrillas would come down to Tai Tete under cover of darkness, looking for a feed, a place to rest or somewhere to recuperate if they were sick.
Some would eat, stay a few hours and go back to their hideouts; others would stay a night or two, lying low inside the hut during daylight hours.
No guerrilla was ever turned away, in spite of the enormous risks for Fatima and her family.
Had they been discovered, they would almost certainly have been interrogated and tortured.
"I could have been arrested, my husband could have been arrested or they could have come and taken my daughters," says Fatima.
"But we believed in the struggle for our homeland, that's why we did it."
The Timorese tradition of always serving guests the best food the host has placed an added burden on Fatima. She and her family ate meat once a month if they were lucky, but she says she would always try and rustle up a chicken or the choicest vegetables for her guests.
While Fatima was the first point of call for the guerrillas, she didn't operate alone. She was at the apex of a well-organised network of fellow villagers other families would contribute food when they could and local boys would act as security, on the look-out for Indonesian patrols. Even those families who didn't actively support the guerrilla effort were bound by an unspoken code of silence had any of them hinted to Indonesian informers, soldiers or intelligence about the night- time comings and goings, retribution would have been swift and unmerciful.
She still remembers most of the men she helped over the years, reeling off the names of well- known former freedom fighters such as Gilberto Brito, Lian Ba Oin, Rodak and Semo Sai.
And while she's proud of helping the guerrillas and the larger resistance effort, it's a pride tinged these days with disappointment.
While many of the former soldiers she fed are now on government pensions or have landed plum civil service jobs, she has received nothing for her troubles no recognition and no pension. Only one former guerrilla ever came back to thank her, bringing her a goat and a sack of rice.
Like most of her fellow villagers, Fatima still lives from the small crops she grows and the livestock she raises. She has little money.
Her youngest girl, a bright 14-year-old named Nanda, wants to board at an agricultural high school in a neighbouring town, but Fatima can't pay for books, transport or for the student hostel where Nanda would stay.
"We were happy to support the resistance and [the guerrillas who were] our children and our brothers," she says. "But they have a different life to us now, some of them are big guys. We don't know whether they remember us or not.
"It doesn't matter," she says matter-of-factly. "God is great.
The land here, the rocks, the fires that we used to cook on, they are our witnesses, they saw what we sacrificed."
The only other proof she has of dedication to the resistance effort is a receipt which she keeps carefully tucked away inside a plastic ID envelope she wears around her neck. She takes out the receipt, issued by the Council of National Resistance in April 1999, which calls on "patriots" from across Timor to give to the war effort. She and her husband each donated about $10, a considerable sum at the time. Not being able to sign, they put their thumbprints on the receipts and someone else has carefully printed their clandestine names Moving On (Lao Ona) and Our Struggle (Ita Nian) under their thumbprints. The former guerrilla who countersigned the receipt is now an MP in the coalition Government in Dili.
But the only link Fatima has with him nowadays is his signature on a carefully preserved receipt, testimony to her support for Timor's hard-won independence.
By Simon Roughneen in Dili for ISN Security Watch (03/09/08)
East Timor's capital now seems serene and lively, and a version of normality looms - but the country has confounded observers before.
The first thing a returnee to Dili notices upon emerging from the airport is nothing: Empty fields behind the fence across from the parking lot, where until recently hundreds of tents sheltering some of Timor's thousands of conflict-displaced once stood.
The camp was dangerous, inside and out, with political instability prompting riots, and the occasional projectile aimed at passing vehicles - the ubiquitous gleaming white UN SUVs a favorite target. Now only trees are left, a welcome sign that East Timor may be veering toward a long-awaited normality, even stability.
Six kilometers across the city, Marcelo has spent most of the past two years living in a tent just off Avenida Nicolau Lobato, close to restaurants and hotels used by Dili's plentiful expat aidworker and consultant contingent.
The government has allocated over US$4,000 to enable him to take his family home, with more promised, and replace the house burned down by gangs from the west of the country. A mid-2006 split in the army caused riots in Dili, and over 100,000 East Timorese, or over 10 percent of the population, were unable or afraid to return to the homes they had been driven from.
"My family is from the east, we were attacked by lorumonu," Marcelo told ISN Security Watch, referring to East Timorese from the western part of the country. The 2006 chaos was marked by a hitherto-unknown, for the most part, east-west divide that permeated the army and later polarized the country on regional lines.
Westerners in the army saw themselves as second-class cadres, with top positions going to easterners, who saw themselves as the revolutionary vanguard that did most to force an end to Indonesian rule. When hundreds of westerners were later dismissed from the army, violence ensued, leading to the resignation of prime minister Mari Alkatiri under intense international pressure, and saw police control revert to the UN Mission in East Timor.
The new house is in another district, close to Dili's international airport, and Marcelo admits "there's a lot to do to get that place fixed up." But he has time on his hands. With thousands of youth coming onto the job market each year, competition for the meager 400 openings that come up each year across the whole country (according to World Bank statistics) means that he is unlikely to find work soon.
"I'll drive a taxi," he predicts, joining the legions of cars on Dili's streets, where the meager fees charged barely cover the rising fuel costs that high oil prices bring. High oil prices, however, have funded Marcelo's homecoming.
"It is about time we received some help to go home. The government has plenty of money, but we don't see any of it," referring to Timor's over US$3 million in oil revenues accrued since 2005. The windfall is long-overdue to a population that endured one of the world's harshest military occupations since World War II. Some estimates putting the death toll from fighting, displacement, disease and malnutrition - caused by Indonesian brutality between 1975-99 - at around 200,000. Out of a 1975 population of around 750,000, the casualty count per capita possibly exceeds any conflict anywhere in the post-war era.
How that money is used, even if it can be used in the near future, remains to be seen. The socialist-lite FRETILIN government lost elections held in 2007, partly as its final year in power saw only 3 percent of projected budgetary outlay actually get spent, and partly due to recriminations left hanging from the 2006 violence.
The current government is an unwieldy four-party coalition under independence hero Xanana Gusmao, who led fighting against Indonesia from Timor's jungle-laden mountains, and later spent seven Mandela-like years in a Jakarta prison. However, Gusmao's halo has slipped of late, and his party only garnered 22 percent of votes in 2007, perhaps down to a controversial speech made during the 2006 crisis, when he appeared to legitimize the east-west divide.
Those elections passed off without real incident, though FRETILIN sought to undermine the government from the outset, invoking what it perceived as a disputed clause in the Timorese Constitution that it believed mandated FRETILIN to form a government, despite getting less than 30 percent of the vote. Pro-FRETILIN elements took to the streets, but the violence soon abated.
By early 2008, Dili's people began to relax once more, after the spate of curfews and ongoing tension prevalent since 2006. What might seem a reversion to type was sparked by an 11 February 2008 shoot-out at President Jose Ramos-Horta's house just outside the capital. Western rebel leader Alfredo Reinado led a group of his men to Dili in what was deemed a coup attempt. Ramos-Horta was shot and seriously wounded, while Gusmao's car was fired upon separately.
Dili went into lockdown once more, and people wondered exactly what took place that morning. No official verdict on events has been published, contradictory accounts have proliferated. Australian media published material from a report by Timor's main forensic scientist, which pointed, potentially, to a different version of events than that propounded by Ramos-Horta.
However, Dili seems serene, and potentially lively, with new eateries and watering-holes opening along its mountain-backdropped, white sand beaches. The town stays awake later at night, and with IDPs going home, a version of normality looms, not least as Reinado's death did not spark any political discord.
Still, East Timor has confounded observers before, lapsing into violence when this seemed unfeasible, and then running peaceful and valid elections when fears abounded that violence- or graft-ridden polls loomed.
Conspiracy theories and a welter of unexplained, incongruous links surrounding an alleged coup attempt and hit on the country's leading politicians may yet undermine the latest placid veneer.
It has taken Marcelo two years to escape from his IDP camp, a long wait on a short road home. Apropos, there may be more twists on the byway to peace yet for East Timor.
Northern Territory (Australia) News Human face of brutal memories ALYSSA BETTS December 4th, 2008 - MARIA da Silva Benfica's face is thinner and lined, but it has the same air of quietness that was captured in a black-and-white photo 31 years ago.