Diary, Day Eight: A Single Match
The little old lady is implacable. She has pushed her way through a crowd of youngsters and demands to be heard. We’re in what’s left of Aliembata, a village in the Viqueque district that survived the Japanese and the Indonesians only to fall victim to the East Timorese themselves. She has listened to the young men of the community telling us their versions of events – one shyly, the other shaking with intensity. But she clearly will not endorse them. She gestures around at all the destruction and says this is the worst in her long memory. She dismisses the Portuguese era and hardly wastes time on the Japanese. The Indonesians? How they behaved was predictable. But the torching of this entire community, this arson, was too much for her. She makes it clear that what happened here, just a few months ago, was the worst experience of her life. We’ve driven for several hours along roads lined with villages that had been put to the torch by the Indonesians. We’re told that the military would commandeer a fire brigade truck, fill the water tank with petrol, and spray it out on both sides of the road, - so that a single match could begin the devastation. But in her village the catastrophe was the work of her fellow countrymen.
This seems, to me, the greatest tragedy of East Timor – the one that imperils its future. The victims of the arson – and “victim” is their own word - have widely varying interpretations of what happened and why. For some, hostility focuses on Fretilin, suggesting they responded to their election defeat with this atrocity. Others hint at ancient resentments that have been building between ethnic groups for generations. Whatever the truth, there is another truth. The relationships between the East Timor people are now fragile and fractured, and the greatest task facing Xanana Gusmão and Jose Ramos Horta is not the rebuilding of infrastructure but the rebuilding of what made independence possible – a sense of national identity.
Tonight we rest in East Timor’s ’second city’ Bacau.
Phillip Adams